CHATTY KATHY

In Late Night, Emma Thompson stars as a talk show host teetering towards irrelevance.

Late Night, Mindy Kaling’s debut feature film, centres around the sharp-tongued Katherine Newbury (Emma Thompson): a female talk show host in a man’s world. That’s a powerful position: one you could use to push for more equality in an unequal industry. But rather than using her position to promote inclusion and diversity, Katherine prides herself on being the exception to the rule, the one woman who’s managed to succeed.

Until she’s no longer successful, that is. Faced with plummeting ratings and an uncertain future, the host is forced to take drastic steps. In a bid to recapture relevance, she hires Molly (Kaling), a woman of colour with no writing experience, to join her all-white, allmale staff.

You’d assume a film about comedians written by one of their own would capitalise on humour. And Late Night is funny, but not in the way you might expect. The jokes that land best are the ones that centre around frustratingly real scenarios.

Katherine breathes fear and loathing into the writer’s room, dismissing any and all dissenting opinions. She replaces writers’ names with numbers, in one of many attempts to demoralise her team. While her methods may stray from convention, she represents an all-toocommon toxic workplace. Then there’s the constant stream of hostility Molly has to deal with in the workplace, particularly the narrow-minded cracks about diversity hiring.

But Molly is able to use this to her advantage, drawing on her experiences as stand-up material. And Katherine, inevitably, becomes a better comedian when she allows other viewpoints to be heard.

The romantic lives of both leading ladies – Katherine’s relationship with her ailing husband and Molly’s budding office romance – are refreshingly relegated to the sidelines in Late Night. The relationship audiences find themselves investing in is the one that develops between the two women, as they grow closer and prove that there’s room above the glass ceiling for more than just one.