‘I do this for the expression’
Back when Larry Wilmore was about to introduce “The Nightly Show,” his short-lived late-night series on Comedy Central, he saw a tweet from an angry prospective viewer who wished failure on the host and his lousy show, which at that point had not yet aired a single episode.
Recalling his own reaction at the time, Wilmore said he thought to himself that he would at least like the chance to be terrible before being dismissed as terrible.
“It’s not even on yet, so how do you know?” he said. “You might be right, but let me do it first.”
That crabby electronic dispatch was prophetic, though: “The Nightly Show,” which was intended as a companion program for Jon Stewart’s “Daily Show” and a replacement for Stephen Colbert’s “Colbert Report,” lasted less than two years before its cancellation in August 2016.
For Wilmore, 58, a prolific producer, host and commentator, it remains one of the less successful entries on his lengthy resume, which includes writing credits on comedies like “In Living Color” and “Sister, Sister,” as well as “The Bernie Mac Show,” which he created.
He has become a mentor of other emerging talents and helped shows like “black-ish” and “Insecure” find their footing, though he has yet to prove that he can be the center of his own TV program.
Four years after the “The Nightly Show,” Wilmore shrugged off its demise with the nonchalance of a veteran who knows not to get too attached to any particular opportunity. Comparing himself to a basketball player, he said, “That missed shot is forgotten, and
I’m shooting again.”
Now, without really having to campaign for it, Wilmore finds himself returning to the arena of topical TV comedy. He is once again hosting his own late-night series, called “Wilmore,” which debuted
Sept. 11 on NBC’s Peacock streaming service.
It is a weekly program with a mission as simple as its title: to allow Wilmore to riff on the coming presidential election, other news events and whatever else he is panicking about in the moment, and to interview guests he finds funny or interesting.
“Wilmore” is not necessarily his attempt to find closure after
“The Nightly Show,” to prove that he can do the job or to see himself on television again. What it represents to him, Wilmore said, is the latest step in a journey to figure out what he wants to say and to find the best place for him to say it.
“Being on camera isn’t that important,” Wilmore said. “It’s fun, but when it went away, I didn’t miss it.”
“I don’t do this for the attention,” he added. “I do this for the expression.”
The new show grew out of an overall deal that Wilmore made last year with Universal Television and his ongoing conversations with executives there, during which he would drop hints that he wanted to oversee a comedic election town-hall special, similar to one he did for Showtime in 2012.
This past spring, Wilmore appeared on Peacock in a celebrity fundraising program, anchoring remote segments in which he debated Sean Hayes on whether almond milk should be considered milk and learned some potentially offensive Mandarin Chinese slang from his daughter, Lauren.
Dan Shear, who is Peacock’s executive vice president of comedy development, said those segments had been persuasive indicators that Wilmore “needed to have a place in the cultural conversation — with everything that was going on in the world, it just felt really important to have him on the air right now.”
Shear said that Wilmore’s inauspicious history at “The
Nightly Show” was by no means a strike against the host and had actually made viewers more eager to see him again.
“It’s a well-known fact that he hadn’t been on the air during the 2016 election,” Shear said. “That felt like such a loss for the audience that he wasn’t there through that.”
Wilmore’s instincts have generally served him well since the start of his writing career in the early 1990s, when he took inspiration from Black creators who were producing their own shows, like Keenen Ivory Wayans (“In Living Color”) and Yvette Lee Bowser (“Living Single”).
Though Hollywood offered creative heroes to admire, Wilmore said that opportunities for writers of color were limited by prevailing attitudes in the industry.
“If you were Black, you couldn’t work on a white show, but if you were white, you could definitely work on a Black show,” he said. “It was so condescending.”
At “The Nightly Show,” Wilmore said, he knew he would be fighting to overcome the lofty expectations set by Colbert, his predecessor in the time slot, who had created a seminal work of political and media satire with “The Colbert Report” before he left to host “The Late Show” on CBS.
Wilmore said that he had sensed Comedy Central wanted a similar show from him, with repeatable franchise elements, “something that had more form to it, that seemed formulaic.”
But he wanted to make something more malleable. “I’m interested in keeping it 100% real, and whatever comes out of that expression can be on the show,” he said. “I’d rather keep a conversation going that might not be as funny, but if I’m just doing some silly bit, that doesn’t make sense.”
But ratings for “The Nightly Show” declined — particularly after Stewart left “The Daily Show” in August 2015.
At its cancellation, “The Nightly Show” was drawing about 776,000 viewers a night, far below the average audience of 1.7 million viewers that “The Colbert Report” attracted in its final year.
But Wilmore does not necessarily see “The Nightly Show” as a lesson to be learned from or a skid to steer out of as he figures out “Wilmore.”
“As a producer,” he said, “I can only make a show what it has to be. It’s this conversation you’re having with your audience that tells you what a show has to be.”
Unlike with his “Nightly Show” tenure, Wilmore is proclaiming at the outset of his Peacock show that it is a limited-run series, planned for 11 episodes that will continue through the end of November.
“Is it going to get picked up? No,” he said. “This is going to be done, and then we’ll sit down at the right time and say, ‘Is this something we want to do as a permanent thing?’ ”