It's not like Larry Wilmore needed the work. With an accomplished CV as the writer and producer of ground-breaking comedy hits such as In Living Color, The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, The Jamie Foxx Show, The PJs, The Bernie Mac Show, Whoopi and The Office, you can bet he wouldn't even bother trying to fill Stephen Colbert's pointy shoes unless he knew he could bring something sharp to the late-night slot.
The Nightly Show with Larry Wilmore promises to poke grand fun at the Washington-centric punditry shows – as a not-so-polite cousin to the likes of Face the Nation or Meet the Press. It debuts on Comedy Central tomorrow night, and will be broadcast in the UAE on OSN soon.
Kent Alterman, the president of original programming at Comedy Central, says he hopes to build on the network's tradition of reinventing political satire for the talk-show genre that dates back to Politically Incorrect with Bill Maher (1993), The Daily Show with Jon Stewart (1996) and The Colbert Report (2005).
Created by Stewart and produced by his Busboy Productions, Wilmore's show aims to start out a parody of ratings-juggernaut, right-wing opinion news shows such as The O'Reilly Factor (with Bill O'Reilly) – then evolve from there.
“The first part of the show is the scripted part where I’m weighing in, giving my take on the events or event of the day that we’re going to be talking about,” says Wilmore. “The second part of the show is more of a panel discussion where we’ll deconstruct events a little bit more and get more into it. That will have a lot of surprising elements. It may be comic. It may be provocative. Who knows? It’ll go wherever it goes.”
Expect success for this talented 53-year-old, who has also made his mark as an American political satirist, television host, actor, media critic and comedian – and as The Daily Show's formidable "Senior Black Correspondent". Wilmore says he learnt a lot from Stewart during those segments.
“Whenever I wrote those Senior Black Correspondent pieces, whatever our first joke was, was just our starting point to write maybe our first draft or to start talking about it. Jon always encouraged us to go deeper,” says Wilmore.
“It’s also the way I like to approach things, too. I like to unearth something. ‘What’s really under there? What is this thing? How does it really make me feel?’
“The biggest thing I learnt from Jon is to keep attacking it, keep going at it. He’s really good at it.”
Wilmore’s ascension to Colbert’s red-hot time slot also reflects a growing black presence and better ratings for shows featuring African-Americans and other minorities.
“Today we’re seeing juicy roles [for black performers] getting really high ratings in Top-10 sorts of shows,” says Robert J Thompson, a Syracuse University professor and the founding director of the Bleier Center for Television and Popular Culture.
"I don't think we've reached a utopia, by any means, but there are some important shows. Black-ish is doing very well. We've got Larry Wilmore coming on. As well, for the showrunner Shonda Rhimes, her empire [Scandal; How to Get Away With Murder] is doing very, very well.
"However, the other thing that is making those shows work is that they're really good shows," adds Thompson. "I've watched every episode of Black-ish and I think it's one of the funniest shows on television."
In what could be termed a breakthrough, American television appears to be taking what some critics are calling a "post-racial" approach to depicting minorities, playing up the more casual and entertaining aspects of a family's story – for example, a focus on the issues of class and wealth in Black-ish –rather than dwelling on the characters' racial burden or cultural baggage.
"The show has so much less to do with race than it does culture and identity and family," says Black-ish co-creator and writer Kenya Barris.
The "-ish" factor also comes into play with The Goldbergs, a ratings hit for ABC about a Jewish family who have yet to utter a single reference to their religion.
The Nightly Show's working title was The Minority Report – but a name change was needed when the Fox network ordered a pilot for a new series inspired by the similarly named 2002 sci-fi movie that starred Tom Cruise.
As producers pondered a new title, Wilmore’s wily humour in matters of race came into play.
"Nightly, to me, is kind of a slyer joke, but I'm just using my joke brain," says Wilmore. "It's like, 'Well, what's The Nightly Show, Larry?' Well, if you're watching The Daily Show and it feels like it's getting a little 'darker', you're probably watching The Nightly Show."
Larry Wilmore’s debating squad, perhaps the stars of tomorrow, are a diverse bunch:
Shenaz Treasury (pictured)is a Bollywood actress (Ishq Vishk) who got her start on MTV Asia and hosted Culture Shock on Travel Channel.
Ricky Velez, a New York City-based stand-up comedian, was recently voted New York's Funniest by the New York Comedy Festival.
Mike Yard, also a comic, hails from the US Virgin islands. He won Comedy Central's Get Up Stand Up competition and appeared on HBO's Def Comedy Jam.
artslife@thenational.ae