Can Hasan Minhaj defy the odds with Netflix talk show?
Daily Show alumnus has been developing the series Patriot Act for more than two years
Standing on the set of his new Netflix series, Patriot Act, one evening earlier this month, Hasan Minhaj asked his studio audience if they had any questions about what they were about to see. He knew that his stage, an immense digital screen encircling the diamond-shape platform he was standing on, was a bit of a technological monstrosity — “it’s like if Michael Bay directed a PowerPoint presentation,” he joked to the crowd — and so some clarification might be required.
Sure enough, someone asked: “What is this?”
Minhaj, 33, a lean, energetic stand-up and a recent alumnus of The Daily Show, explained that Patriot Act ( whose first two episodes will be released on Oct. 28) was a project he had been developing for more than two years.
Before the success of his stand-up special Homecoming
King and his incisive turn as host of the 2017 White House Correspondents Dinner, he said he’d already been thinking about applying his comedic style to news stories that weren’t necessarily at the centre of everyone’s attention, in a format that didn’t look like another cookie-cutter late-night comedy.
The test show that Minhaj was about to perform — a 24-minute monologue about the role of Asian-Americans in reshaping affirmative action, and a 10minute piece about digital security in Estonia — could very well end up looking like a “woke TED Talk,” he said.
Good or bad, it was the show he always wanted to make and “I’m going to give you everything I have,” Minhaj said.
He added, “Culturally, for us, I think we need something like this.”
“We” here could mean the racially diverse group that had come to see Minhaj, who often talks in his act about his identity as a Muslim and a child of Indian immigrant parents. It could refer to the demographic of viewers in their 20s and 30s that Netflix would love to see him bring to the streaming service. Or it might be anyone who has tired of Daily Show clones and is eager for anything even slightly different.
But even if Minhaj and his colleagues have cracked the code and created a genuinely new kind of topical comedy, is there an audience for it? And is Netflix the place where it belongs?
If the post-Jon Stewart era of television once looked like a potential paradise for any host with a political perspective and a few zingers about the Trump administration, it is now a battlefield littered with casualties.
While hosts with established identities — sharp wits like Stephen Colbert and Samantha Bee, or John Oliver and Seth Meyers, known for their long, researched takedowns — have become increasingly entrenched, newer entrants have stumbled. In two years, Comedy Central has cancelled two 11:30 p.m. programs intended as companions for The Daily Show: The Nightly Show With Larry Wilmore and The Opposition With Jordan Klepper. BET gave only one season to its latenight series The Rundown With Robin Thede.
Netflix, despite its rapid expansion in other traditional TV categories, has struggled to create this kind of appointment viewing. Last year it cancelled its first high-profile attempt at a topical talk show, Chelsea, hosted by Chelsea Handler, and this past August, it lowered the boom on two weekly programs, The Joel McHale Show With Joel McHale, which debuted in February, and The Break With Michelle Wolf, which started in May. On an earlier morning in Sep- tember, Minhaj and about 20 of his Patriot Act colleagues were in the bowels of their midtown Manhattan office, gathered around an enormous TV (and a basket of croissants) for what they called a “pre-viz” meeting. The monitor showed a computer rendering of the Patriot
Act stage, on which stood a small digital silhouette of Minhaj. The flesh-and-blood comedian was sitting on a couch, dressed in athleisure clothes and a pair of Air Jordans as he read from the script for his affirmative action monologue.
At a breakneck clip, he narrated the story of Edward Blum, the conservative activist and president of Students for Fair Admissions, which is suing Harvard University for allegedly discriminating against AsianAmerican applicants.
On screen, bar graphs rose and fell like roller coasters and pie charts exploded into exis- tence while Minhaj recited admissions figures for elite colleges. (Noting that Caltech had nine black students in 2012, he quipped, “There are more black people in the Wu-Tang Clan.”)
Amid the deluge of data and punch lines, Minhaj was also weaving a personal story: one of growing up a proud first-generation American in Davis, Calif., while navigating a murky ecosystem of race and class.
In his college-prep classes, Minhaj said, he was told not to declare himself an Asian on his application forms or he’d risk the penalty of a possible racial quota.
“I thought I wasn’t going to get into Stanford because some black kid was going to take my spot,” he said in the monologue. “But I didn’t get into Stanford because I was dumb.” (This is his modest way of saying he cracked 1300 on his SAT exam.) In late 2014, he was hired as a
Daily Show correspondent. “He was just undeniable,” Jon Stewart said of him. “I can teach the false-news correspondent mechanics, but not the singularity of someone’s talent. When you get somebody like that, who’s a great storyteller, introspective and humble, you just go: ‘OK. We’re done. He’s good.'”
Minhaj’s comedy peers believe that he has as good a shot as anyone at finding a new approach to this well-worn genre. But no one is in denial about the challenges he faces, either.
“You never know what’s going to hit and what’s not going to,” Jon Stewart said, but when it came to Minhaj, “I’d buy that raffle ticket any day of the week.”
Though other recent shows with promising hosts had been short-lived, Stewart said, “I don’t think it says anything about the talent of the individuals. If you told me, ‘I’m going to let Jordan Klepper or Robin Thede or Michelle Wolf do what they do,’ I’d be like, ‘Yeah, that’s a smart choice.’ ”