Comedy Central���s Hard-Left ���Nightly Show��� Abruptly Canceled Due to Low Ratings
The Nightly Show with Larry Wilmore is now a thing of the past, and host Wilmore seems to be of the opinion that the show should have remained on in perpetuity, without regard to its abysmal ratings.
The program, which had seen ratings drop 55 percent (as of February of this year) from those enjoyed by The Colbert Report, the show it replaced, will have its final broadcast this Thursday.
The Nightly Show was a more racially-centered, more left-wing ���companion��� to the super-popular Daily Show with Jon Stewart, and found its way to that role when Stephen Colbert left The Colbert Report in December 2014 to become the host of The Late Show over on CBS. The Nightly Show first aired about a month later.
Wilmore himself had previously written that he didn���t want his program to be overly similar to either Stewart���s Daily Show or The Colbert Report, and, instead, wanted it to explicitly ���focus on race, class and gender.���
Well, that it did, to a nauseating degree. The broadcasts not infrequently devolved into rants���from Wilmore and guests���of a kind like those you could count on from your annoyingly-opinionated and largely-inarticulate uncle during Thanksgiving dinner.
While I will never be accused of having sympathy for the dominant political ideologies of any of the aforementioned shows, I am objective enough to have noticed some real wisdom and intelligence in the Stewart and Colbert programs, characteristics noticeably absent from Wilmore���s show. It���s too bad, in one sense, because Wilmore seems as bright a guy as he is (or ���can be���) an effective comedian, but he didn���t seem to care that the program became so unrestrained in its base politicization that it just wasn���t funny or clever. It was too important to him to be pissed off, and, as a result, he was unable to get out of his own way.
The Nightly Show had been referring to this year���s election as ���The Unblackening,��� because, of course, the two major parties had the gall to nominate white standard-bearers this time around; in the wake of his cancellation, Wilmore decided that Comedy Central���s decision to boot his program was an example of racial whitewashing, also. As he put it, ������I guess I hadn���t counted on ���The Unblackening��� happening to my time slot as well.���
I guess he doesn���t think that a 50-plus percent drop in viewership should matter. Well, it does, and it always will, even to a network that itself puts so much importance on serving as an organ for liberal talking points.
By Robert G. Yetman, Jr. Editor At Large
