LATE-NIGHT
Tonight,” which is shown Sundays through Wednesdays on E!, and “Patriot Act With Hasan Minhaj,” Sundays on Netflix.
Each is adapting an appointmentTV staple to a phone-scrolling, bingewatching era.
“Busy Tonight,” with actress and author Busy Philipps, is essentially an answer to the question “What if Instagram were a TV show?” Philipps was awarded the show partly on the strength of her popular Instagram feed, clips from which appear in the credits, festooned with emojis and a cloud of hearts that connote “Like, Like, Like.”
If you like Busy Philipps, that’s pretty much the price of admission to “Busy Tonight,” where Philipps curls up on the couch, a fellow popculture junkie sitting down for a night’s television with you.
The show is a quick half-hour: a round of chat (Philipps uses a trio of her writers as a Greek-chorus collective sidekick), a field piece and a celebrity interview. Philipps acts as an audience surrogate, a fellow fan. She isn’t there to pry into her guests’ lives but to hang with them.
Each segment speaks the Instagrammar of enthusiasm. Philipps, using one of her favorite words, is “obsessed” with a lot of things: Steven Tyler, babies, her aunt, the way Vanessa Hudgens tosses her neck in SoulCycle class.
Philipps mainly steered clear of politics her first week, something that used to be standard in late night. But there was some Hasan Minhaj
personal-as-political when she used a graphically funny ramble about menstruation to speak out on a Nevada ballot initiative to repeal the “tampon tax” on feminine hygiene products: “Poverty is sexist.”
The early question for “Busy Tonight” is whether television — a stage in your living room — can reproduce the intimacy of a medium you hold in your hand. Philipps’ Instagram stands out partly for its approachable ordinariness, an effect that dissipates when you’re spending half a show talking with celebrities.
“Patriot Act” has a different challenge: to make the talk show work on Netflix, despite a dearth of evidence that binge-watchers want it. The streaming outlet has canceled attempts by Chelsea Handler, Joel McHale and Michelle Wolf, while Norm Macdonald and even David Letterman made scarcely a ripple.
Minhaj’s show is modeled less on classical late-night than the think-piece-with-jokes format of his fellow “Daily Show” alumnus, John Oliver.
Like Oliver’s “Last Week Tonight,” Minhaj’s show is “talk” only in the sense that, yes, someone is talking the whole time.
The first thing you notice on “Patriot Act” is the stage, an alien mother ship of blazing light and geometry that looks, Minhaj pre-emptively
jokes, “like Michael Bay directed a PowerPoint presentation.”
The second is Minhaj himself, jittery and pacing.
There is no shortage of news-junkie comics cracking wise from the left these days. Minhaj’s first two episodes leaned into one thing that sets him apart: his background as a Muslim Indian-American and the child of immigrants.
His first topic was a recent lawsuit against Harvard’s affirmativeaction policy, which seeks to advance a longtime complaint of white activists by leveraging complaints that Asian-Americans have been discriminated against. Minhaj was able to approach the issue as an insider, playing on stereotypes that would be radioactive coming from an outsider.
Citing statistics showing that AsianAmericans make up 5.8 percent of the population but more than 22 percent of Harvard’s class of 2021, he added: “But in classic Asianparent fashion, we’re like, ‘Twenty-two percent? Why not a hundred percent?”’
Minhaj’s early topic selection is similar to Oliver’s: drawn from the news but not too perishable.
If “Patriot Act” can find this sweet spot — urgent but not immediate — it might be a better fit for streaming television, where you can talk as much as you want but people don’t listen until they’re ready.