‘After Midnight’ is an OK time filler
What’s worth staying up after midnight? CBS hopes that comedian Taylor Tomlinson can convince you to try out some revenge bedtime procrastination. And she’s armed only with hashtags, little-known comedians and a very purple game-show set.
After the departure of James Corden from “The Late Late Show” last year, CBS decided not to put another white man behind a desk with celebrity guests at 12:37 a.m. EST/PST. Instead, the network tapped young (and female!) comedian Tomlinson, 30, to head panel show “After Midnight,” a version of the Comedy Central show “@midnight,” which was hosted by Chris Hardwick and aired form 201317 at the aforementioned stroke of 12:00 a.m.
With a slightly altered name and a network TV glow up, “After Midnight” still looks like a half-baked cable timeslot filler. The series is fine, occasionally chuckle-worthy and entirely inoffensive. But greatness never came from anything labeled “fine.”
The panel show’s format mirrors the Comedy Central original. Tomlinson leads a panel of comedians – in Tuesday night’s premiere, Kurt Braunohler, Aparna Nancherla and Whitney Cummings – through arbitrary games and quizzes for points that lead to no real prize. (In the first episode, Tomlinson joked they were playing for her “father’s approval.”) The games were sometimes funny but mostly inane, including using Gen Z slang and deciding whether to “smash” cartoon characters. The best moments were the least scripted, when the comedians and Tomlinson were talking and cracking jokes with each other.
Tomlinson displayed few first-show jitters, easily hitting her jokes both prewritten and improvised. It’s easy to see why CBS picked her from among the multitude of comedians of mid-level fame with a Netflix special or two under their belts. She has the sparkle and magnetism that says, “I could make all four quadrants laugh if I tried hard enough.” “After Midnight” doesn’t seem to be going after CBS’ older-skewing demographic. It also doesn’t seem to be hip enough to draw a younger crowd. It’s trying to be cool but landing, as the kids say, “mid.”
It’s a crime that CBS took its first female late-night host and gave her a crummy, cheap format. On the outside, it seems forward-thinking, breaking free of the desk-and-couch format. But what it does is restrict Tomlinson. If CBS had let her brush shoulders with the Tom Cruises of the world and leave her mark on the genre, that would have been far more than “fine.” Corden had Carpool Karaoke, so what could Tomlinson, who clearly is smart, appealing and naturally funny, have done?
We’ll have to wait much later than after midnight to find out.