On TV, take the unconventional route
A week of politics gives late-night hosts a golden opportunity
In TV and politics, the rule’s the same: If you’re lucky enough to get a second chance, you’d better grab it.
There’s little doubt that Stephen Colbert and Trevor Noah — the new-ish hosts of CBS’s Late Show and Comedy Central’s The
Daily Show — are in need of a reset. Anyone looking for further proof that the hosts have yet to make a TV impact can find it in the failure of their shows to garner an Emmy nomination, the first time The Daily Show has missed the cut in 15 years under Jon Stewart. Colbert and Noah were given two of TV’s biggest platforms, and they’ve made less of a mark with them than the redhot Samantha Bee has with Full
Frontal on TBS and the Emmynominated James Corden has with his Carpool Karaoke-fueled
Late Late Show on CBS. Fortunately for Colbert and Noah, the Republican National Convention — and the muchpublicized promises that the shows would offer special cover- age of the Cleveland event — gave both the second chance they needed. Colbert made the most of it; Noah, not so much.
One reason the shows got vastly different results is that they chose different approaches. The
Late Show elected to stay in New York but air live, rather than taping earlier in the day as it usually does. The Daily Show sent Noah to Cleveland but stuck with its custom of taping in late afternoons, though it added a live Thursday show. That’s far too close to business as usual for a show, and a host, that badly needed to do something unusual.
Given a better choice and a better chance, a seemingly re- energized Colbert rose to the occasion. He kicked off with two of the week’s most talked-about bits: Monday’s cameo by Jon Stewart heralding the reappearance of his old Colbert Report’s “Word” (“Trumpiness”) and persona; and Tuesday’s scathingly funny impersonation of Melania Trump by Broadway star Laura Benanti.
Every bit may not have been hilarious or noteworthy; Wednesday’s opening segment with Mark Cuban, for example, was overshadowed by Corden’s Carpool Karoke stint with first lady Michelle Obama. But the live shows gave The Late Show an urgency it has sometimes lacked until now, and gave Colbert a chance to re- spond immediately to events — a huge advantage in an age where Twitter has shortened the comedy cycle to near instantaneous. And that’s the advantage The
Daily Show foolishly threw away by relying on old patterns and waiting until Thursday to go live. Worse still, Monday’s special wasn’t even really new — it was, in effect, a repeat, a clip-show tour of the primary process.
Not that live doesn’t have its problems. Wednesday’s convention delays forced HBO’s special episode of Real Time With Bill
Maher to vamp with a repeat of an interview with Libertarian nominee Gary Johnson — which it cut off midsentence to switch back to live. Still, the deeper problem for
The Daily Show is that, rather than fix Noah’s problems, these convention shows have served only to highlight them. He remains a personable performer, with a mischievous grin and a decent delivery. But there’s no sense of weight behind the words, in part because there’s not enough perspective or experience with the American political process to back them up. Time may fix that, but only if he’s given the chance.
And only if he stops squandering the ones he’s given.