With a presidential election three months away, Comedy Central would presumably want one of its late-night political commentary shows on the air. Yet the network announced on Monday that it is canceling The Nightly Show with Larry Wilmore approximately 18 months after its debut.
The Nightly Show‘s last show will be this coming Thursday, Aug. 18. Wilmore and his staff received the news Monday morning. While Comedy Central attempts to develop a replacement for the 11:30 p.m. slot following The Daily Show with Trevor Noah, the network will run @Midnight, Chris Hardwick’s pop culture quiz show, during that time period.
Though the timing is surprising, Comedy Central president Kent Alterman told reporters that the show was having difficulty finding an audience and the ratings were simply too low to ignore any longer.
“Even though we’ve given it a year and a half, we’ve been hoping against hope that it would start to click with our audience,” Alterman said (via The Wrap). “But it hasn’t happened and we’ve haven’t seen evidence of it happening.”
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“I’m really grateful to Comedy Central, Jon Stewart, and our fans to have had this opportunity,” Wilmore said in a statement. “But I’m also saddened and surprised we won’t be covering this crazy election or ‘The Unblackening’ as we’ve coined it. And keeping it 100, I guess I hadn’t counted on ‘The Unblackening’ happening to my time slot as well.”
“The Unblackening” was Wilmore’s recurring joke referring to the effort to get President Barack Obama out of the White House and elect a white replacement. Wilmore often tried to discuss racial issues on the show, or at least view current events and news of the day through the prism of race.
The numbers certainly support the network’s stance. According to the New York Times‘ John Koblin, The Nightly Show has lost more than half the audience that Comedy Central was drawing during the 11:30 p.m. time slot with The Colbert Report. Colbert’s averaged 1.7 million viewers during his final year before he left for CBS and The Late Show. During Wilmore’s first year, his show drew an average 922,000 viewers per night. This year, that numbers has dropped to 776,000 per night.
But Comedy Central might be willing to tolerate lower ratings (OK, maybe not this low) if there was any sort of buzz for the show generated among young viewers and social media. (Trevor Noah’s show is No. 2 in the ratings among adults 18-34 and continue to grow.) As entertaining and thought-provoking as some of The Nightly Show‘s content might be, it never consistently created clips that could be passed along on Twitter or Facebook, or posted on websites for quick response and commentary.
A show like The Late Late Show with James Corden might finish below his broadcast network late-night competition, but one of his “Carpool Karaoke” bits typically find a huge audience on social media and create buzz for the show. Jimmy Fallon and Jimmy Kimmel have been creating viral content to their respective shows’ benefit for years. Incidentally, Stephen Colbert hasn’t produced much of that sort of content, which may be among many reasons why his show has struggled in the ratings.
The Nightly Show‘s highlight was often its daily panel discussion, typically comprised of comedians, pundits, media and actors. But even if the panel had a compelling conversation about Donald Trump’s battle with the media, that’s not the sort of content that’s easily passed around or distilled into a few quick sound bites. The consistency of the panels could suffer from night to night as well, with some excellent guests sitting in on certain night, while others were populated with B- and C-list celebrities trying to make jokes instead of having something interesting to say.
Perhaps the show’s nightly format made it more difficult to attract quality guests. If Wilmore wanted to respond to the day’s news, the ideal guest might not be available on such short notice. And sometimes, such topics aren’t as compelling to discuss a day or two later. Wilmore often tried to keep things lively with the “Keep it 100” segment with the panel in which guests would be challenged to offer real answers that weren’t sugar-coated or politically correct. Though it was sometimes fun to see panelists squirm for fear of offending anyone or saying something controversial, the success level of that gimmick was also hit-or-miss.
No word yet as to whether Wilmore will stay on with Comedy Central in some capacity, or if he’ll move on to other projects now. Most recently, Wilmore developed black-ish for ABC, and was to be that series’ showrunner until he got the Nightly Show gig.
