The Nightly Show!

I wanted it to be good.  I wanted it to succeed.  So I tried.  For two months I was a regular listener.  But it didn’t work.  The show never got better.  A format that depended on strong guests – who rarely showed up.  Silly, insipid diversions that didn’t help.  And a nice guy host, Larry Wilmore, who wasn’t strong enough to overcome the other deficiencies.

Going in I thought that black-focused subjects might not be enough to work for a diversified audience.  But that wasn’t the problem.  Whatever the night’s focus, the writing and the format fell flat.

So I gave up.  For years I recorded Jon Stewart and Steven Colbert for an hour and watched the next day.  When Colbert left I kept the DVR set to record the full hour.  But no more.  Now it is 8 to 8:30 for the Daily Show and that’s it for Comedy Central on a daily basis.  I didn’t expect the Nightly Show to be as good as Colbert, which was brilliant, but I did expect more than I got.  So I gave up.

I’m happy that John Oliver’s show, Last Week Tonight, has turned out so well.  As with the Nightly Show, I was skeptical that he could pull it off.  But in this case I was pleasantly surprised to find that I was dead wrong.  What Oliver has done is perceptive, thoughtful and entertaining.  Brilliantly done.

So win some, lose some.  Such is life on the small screen.