In a special mini-episode of Slate’s Represent podcast, Aisha Harris chatted with comedian and writer Larry Wilmore about the sudden cancellation of his Comedy Central late night series, The Nightly Show, which aired its last episode on Thursday night. What follows is the full transcript for Episode 4.
Aisha Harris: Surprise! Hey y’all. I’m Aisha Harris, and welcome to a special mini-episode of Represent. As many of you are probably aware, last week Comedy Central canceled The Nightly Show With Larry Wilmore after more than a year and a half on air, with the network president stating that the show failed to connect with, and gain traction with, audiences. This leaves a gaping hole in the realm of late-night television, especially in terms of inclusion. Aside from Wilmore, the only other non-white guys holding down the fort on major TV shows are Trevor Noah on the Daily Show and Samantha Bee’s Full Frontal, and I’m very sad to see it go.
The final episode aired last Thursday evening with a bittersweet farewell, with his former Daily Show boss, Jon Stewart, stopping by to wish him well and celebrate all the show was able to accomplish in such a short time.
I spoke with Wilmore by phone to talk about the end of the show.
I’m happy to be here with Larry Wilmore—under not-so-happy circumstances, but it’s great to have you on the show. Welcome, Larry.
Larry Wilmore: Thank you, nice to be here.
Harris: I’ve noticed you’ve been getting sent a lot of farewell booze these days, from Samantha Bee, Stephen Colbert. So I have to ask, exactly: How drunk are you right now, at this very moment?
Wilmore: I am not drunk right now, despite how I may sound to you. When Sam Bee and them sent that wine, I drank that wine during the show. I was a little toasty during that show—that was fun. But I didn’t drink last night. We had a party afterwards, and I had a few beers—but, you know, it was nothing too bad.
Harris: Good, good.
Wilmore: So, it’s okay. I’m not hurting, you guys. It wasn’t too bad. But there is still time—I may do some drinking this weekend.
Harris: Yeah, you’ve got the whole weekend to live it up.
Wilmore: Exactly. Brother doesn’t have a job to go to. Brother’s got a lot of time to drink right now.
Harris: I’m curious as to whether you had any hints beforehand that this might be the end, or did it sort of creep up on you. Was there any talk behind the scenes?
Wilmore: Really good question. I guess the only hint that I had was that we had not really been in communication with them at work for a long time. So we’d go, like, “Well, we don’t know what’s going on.” You know—”Anything could happen.” We didn’t know if that was a good sign or a bad sign. We knew they were putting a lot of attention on The Daily Show. They just started last year, and it was a big transition and that type of thing. But we just didn’t know. The expectation that we all had was, even if they didn’t pick up our show, we felt we would be around for the election. So the big surprise for me and for everyone was when we were told we only had four shows left. That was like whiplash, right then.
Harris: How do you feel about not being around for the election? Were you already thinking about the different takes you would have if Hillary won, or if Trump won?
Wilmore: Well we hadn’t gone that far yet because we always try to react in the moment to things. There’s something that we start thinking about as we get closer, like we were just about to start talking about the debates and what we were going to do, but we hadn’t had big conversations about that yet. And how we might maybe have some fun with “The Unblackening” getting closer and closer. Those types of things. So we were just starting to have those conversations; I mean it was such an interesting summer. Those two conventions were so crazy. I’ve never seen an election season like this, so I was very excited. And I’m still very much looking forward to these debates. I think they’re going to be crazy, and I just couldn’t wait to cover them. So I’m very disappointed about that.
Harris: Comedy Central’s president Kent Alterman stated when talking about the cancellation that the show “hasn’t connected with our audience in ways that we need it to.” Do you think that’s the case—and if so, why do you think that is?
Wilmore: It has been a struggle in the ratings, no doubt. There’s nothing we can argue about those numbers. But there’s a difference between “we haven’t quite gotten the numbers,” and “the show isn’t connecting and starting to gel” and those types of things. Rory Albanese is our executive producer—also worked on The Daily Show from the beginning—and he remembers before The Daily Show clicked that they felt the show was really great at a time when nobody was really watching or paying attention to it. And he would look around and go, “Man, does anybody know we’re making this great show?” And then the election of 2000 and 9/11 happens, and suddenly a lot of attention goes to the show, and it really takes off. It found its wind, so to speak. And he felt like our show was in that same position, like we were just about to turn that corner of getting more of that audience. And we all felt that, too. We all felt that we were in a groove, we were really hitting our stride. Our attacks on things were really sharp, and our contributors were doing good work. We really felt like a nice, well-oiled machine. We just felt like we weren’t getting all of the viewers that we would like. So that could be very frustrating.
You know, it’s part of television. We’re not the only show that has had that happen. That type of thing can happen. Let me put it this way: It’s a completely different feeling when you’re on a show, and you know you’re not doing it. Where you’re going, “Ah, this show is just not working. I don’t know what it is.” That’s a different feeling. For us, it felt the opposite: It felt like “Nobody’s seeing what we’re doing!” That’s what it felt like to us.
Harris: Do you feel as if they didn’t give you enough time? Especially since the elections are coming up? Because it would have been nice to see what you guys would do, plus it’s just like, that’s the time when—no matter what show it is, whether it’s The Daily Show—I imagine all of those shows, they get a boost when the elections happen.
Wilmore: I personally felt that way. I’m actually a big fan of having all the different types of voices on television. I think it gives people a nice little buffet that they can just pick and choose, how they want to get their news and entertainment, I guess. But I felt that there was a big—and I expressed this to Kent Alterman, we talked after the last show. I expressed to him that I was very disappointed that they didn’t try to promote our shows together. We were two black men in late night doing smart comedy shows. That hasn’t happened before. I was really upset that we never did any neutral promotion, and really tied the shows together. You know, the way Jon and Stephen—when Stephen was doing Colbert, they did a lot of cross-promotion. You saw the relationship between the two people, which was so much fun. I thought we could’ve gotten so much mileage out of Trevor and I having that type of relationship on the air. I’m an African-American, he’s an African-African—you know, I could tease him about that. I don’t know, but at least people would know that there’s a distinction between us as personalities and then they’d see the distinction between the shows.
Harris: Was that anything you had talked about before that conversation you had with him after the show? Or had you discussed that with Trevor himself?
Wilmore: Yeah, but those can only go so far. I don’t work for the network, I just do my show. They don’t want to hear you giving them advice all the time about how to do their jobs.
Harris: Do you have any feeling that, maybe part of the issue was—and you’ve spoken a bit about this before, and you’ve joked about it—the fact that on your show, you center race and especially blackness within your comedy? It makes people uncomfortable. Do you think maybe the idea of having two black guys, even though you guys have a totally different way of doing humor and comedy, do you think that the idea of putting you two together maybe scared off the network, and they were afraid that people wouldn’t buy that?
Wilmore: I don’t know if they were afraid. I don’t know if that’s the case. I think that, unconsciously, the audience could have felt they might have been getting the same thing, and could say, “Well, why do I need to stick around for this?” That’s a possibility, you never know, right? I feel like it’s tough. We premiered let’s say a year and a half ago, right, in February? So we were the new kid on the block. But by the spring, three other new shows had come on in our wake, and so there were a lot of new places for people to go in that amount of time. It is easy to forget about The Nightly Show: Sometimes you need time for everybody to settle down and figure out where they’re going to be, I think, too. There’s a lot of different factors that you can point to. It’s hard to point to one thing, but I don’t know if that’s particularly one, from the network’s point of view. But you never know. I never put anything past any of this.
Harris: Yeah. You’ve been in the business for a long time. You’ve worked on so many different shows, now. You were around for a lot of the classic ’90s sitcoms and you were also on The Bernie Mac Show. Now you’re an executive producer on Black-ish and also the upcoming Issa Rae HBO comedy Insecure, correct?
Wilmore: I’m not involved with Black-ish anymore. I left the show to do—
Harris: Or you were; you started the show?
Wilmore: Correct. And I co-created Insecure with Issa.
Harris: For both of those shows, those are both sitcoms—they’re not late night. But they are both unapologetically black. Or I imagine Insecure will be—I haven’t seen it.
Wilmore: Absolutely, yep.
Harris: And they talk very frankly about race. Why do you think, currently, there’s such a disparity between—now we have this flourish of different black scripted comedy and TV and drama. And late night has not gotten there yet. Why is it taking so long for late night to get there?
Wilmore: That’s a great question. I have no idea. It could be one of those things that, it just takes a while for that to happen. Who knows. I haven’t really investigated it that much to know the answer to it. But it is a really interesting observation. I hadn’t really even thought about it in that way, to be honest with you. You remember when Arsenio was on—what, 20, 25 years ago, when he was first on?—and he was wildly successful. His show, you could call unapologetically black at the time. But it was the only thing like it on television. There was nothing else quite like it. Hip-hop had not really invaded television yet. Almost in any way. Remember, MTV would only show white videos for a long time. Can you imagine that? That was the ’80s when that happened. It’s hard to even think of that now, you know?
Harris: Especially with Michael Jackson and all that. It’s like …
Wilmore: Can you imagine? It was a big deal to put Michael Jackson on. I was like, “Are you kidding me, MTV? Come on, get over yourselves.” And Arsenio—and In Living Color, which I worked on—those shows, we were doing something brand new to people. And we never apologized for blackness or hip-hop or any of those things back then. It felt like it kind of went away for a while, but would pop up here and there.
Harris: That’s another thing. We have these sort of waves, in general, and even though you’re not on The Nightly Show anymore—I don’t know if you plan to dive back into more sitcom or more scripted work in that sense, but it does seem like we are sort of in this very great wave of getting all of these different sorts of black TV now. It’s not all just created, written by, and starring Tyler Perry sort of stuff. We have all of the other things that have changed.
Wilmore: Yeah. You have Shonda Rhimes, who’s creating a lot of content. You have a lot of young people whose names we do not know, we’re not even familiar with, that are creating things. You even have people like Aziz Ansari, whose bringing a new voice into television, and shows like Transparent are bringing something even completely new to television, that’s never been there before. All of these different types of voices just really makes it so fun to tell stories and to mine all of these new areas.
Harris: Especially when you were doing The Bernie Mac Show at that point, it was like, “The Bernie Mac Show and Everybody Hates Chris.” And that was pretty much all we had back then.
Wilmore: Well, no. At that time, that was before Everybody Hates Chris. It was The Bernie Mac Show and Damon Wayans—it was My Wife and Kids.
Harris: Oh, you’re right. I always forget about My Wife and Kids.
Wilmore: And then Fox decided to program us directly opposite My Wife and Kids, I remember—to give black people a choice. Like black people had a Sophie’s Choice of which black show they were going to watch.
Harris: That’s annoying.
Wilmore: It’s like, “I dare you, black people, pick one. Pick one.”
Harris: Do you think, though, that we’ve reached a turning point? Or do you feel as though there’s always a chance we might recede back into that sort of drought that has happened after these waves?
Wilmore: I think we are at a turning point now, because there’s so many outlets. It’s not just controlled by three networks. You have all the networks, you have all of cable, you have premium cable plus basic cable, but now you have things like Hulu and Amazon and Netflix. There’s so many ways for people to distribute content. People are distributing their own content, now. So there’s a lot more opportunities for voices to be heard out there, and there’s a big need of companies to want content. And that content has to be created. So that’s a good thing.
Harris: Aside from the dearth of the racial and gender inclusion that is happening within late night—
Wilmore: I love the word dearth, by the way. It’s one of my favorite words.
Harris: That’s one of my favorite words too! I use it a lot. But aside from the fact that there are very few nonwhite guys in late-night TV, is there any other area within late night where you feel there’s overall need for improvement, whether it’s the way we attack these sorts of politics or subject matters?
Wilmore: Sure, I would say it’s in the writer’s room and in the producer ranks, definitely. We’re very proud to have Robin Thede as our head writer—a black woman as a head writer in late night has never been done before. I just feel it’s important to make sure that behind the scenes is as filled with diverse voices as in front of the scene is. And those types of things, I believe, are done consciously, and they’re done on purpose. You have to pull people into the system. There are many talented people out there who just need that opportunity.
Harris: Yeah. Do you feel like The Nightly Show has, in a way—especially with having someone like Robin Thede on the show—do you feel like, even though it’s gone now, it’s sort of helped move the needle a little bit? I know it’s a little early to tell. But do you feel as though in that timespan, you were helping to do something different, hopefully push it forward?
Wilmore: Oh, absolutely. I have been very fortunate that I have had the chance to do that many times. Because I’ve been able to have many writer’s rooms, and I’ve always done that. So it wasn’t my first time doing it, you know. I remember being in panels back in the ’90s when I was doing The PJs. And they would say, “Larry, how many writers of color do you have in your room?” And I’d say, “Hold on. Go ask Friends and Frasier. I mean, why are you asking me? I’m the one that has the diverse writer’s room! Those are the places you need to ask because that’s where it’s needed the most. In those types of shows.” And so I always made it a point to say that. Yeah, see, I’ve been fighting for a long time!
Harris: You have! I remember The PJs, though, and I remember it being very controversial. There were—especially black people, they felt it was very stereotypical. Do you think that might have been one reason why they asked you whether there were people of color in the room?
Wilmore: Oh no, they asked me no matter what show. Same thing with Bernie Mac Show. Didn’t matter. They would just ask us those questions when you’re doing a black show, you know? “How many black writers do you have?”
Harris: That’s such a weird question to ask!
Wilmore: I know, it’s so bizarre.
Harris: It’s funny, because it feels like black people—and people of color in general—are having to answer these questions, and no one’s ever asking them.
Wilmore: And I would say, “Look, me, alone, is more than all of those shows combined!”
Harris: It’s very true.
Wilmore: No, it was true. It was very true.
Harris: Two more questions I’d like to ask. The first question: What do you hope the legacy of the show will be?
Wilmore: Those kinds of questions are really tough, because when you’re in the eye of the hurricane, you’re making the show—you just want the show to be good, you want it to be appreciated and those types of things. I always say, “I’ll leave it to other people to write those things on the show.” I’m very happy that we set out to represent voices that didn’t get a chance to be heard all the time in late night, and the same with content and the type of material we’re doing, is material that aren’t the easiest subjects to talk about. I feel like, as Jon [Stewart] pointed out, we had that conversation, we started that conversation, and I’m very proud that we were able to do that.
Harris: Yeah. And the question that I ask all of my guests is: If you can tell me about the last time you felt as if you saw yourself on screen—that something else that you were watching accurately spoke to something within your life.
Wilmore: That’s an interesting question.
Harris: You can also tell me the first time you might have felt that way.
Wilmore: Well the first time, certainly, when I was a kid and I watched Flip Wilson for the first time on television. That’s when black people never had their own show, and here was a guy leading up his own variety show and was funny and engaging and everything. For me, it was huge. It was the thing that, I think, first motivated me to go into this business. So that definitely was the first person.
Harris: I used to love that show.
Wilmore: You’re too young to know that show!
Harris: I did not watch it in the first incarnation, but I definitely watched it on TV Land when they would air the episodes when I was a kid.
Wilmore: He was very funny.
Harris: Yeah, he was great.
Wilmore: So yeah, that’s the first that I remember. Is that wrong? Is that horrible that I can’t think of anything?
Harris: No! Not everyone can remember. Sometimes it’s because, “Oh, I’ve never felt represented.” And I’m like, “Oh, I’m sorry.” But yeah, that’s okay. That’s not a problem at all.
Well I just want to thank you so much, Larry, for coming on the show and talking with me.
Wilmore: Oh, it’s my pleasure. Thank you for having me.
Harris: And I look forward to seeing where you go next—and maybe we’ll see you in late night again soon? I hope.
Wilmore: Yeah.
Harris: And that is all. It was really fun talking with Larry and I hope you guys enjoyed the conversation as much as I did.
