Stephen Colbert’s replacement was hit by a withering review comparing his late-night comedy program to an informercial Friday.
CBS canceled “The Late Show,” that had been long hosted by Colbert, and turned over the 11:30 p.m. slot to Byron Allen’s “Comics Unleashed” — who is paying CBS $15 million a year for the half-hour segment. The Guardian’s Andrew Lawrence dragged the poorly rated replacement program from start to finish.
“The applause, dear God, the applause,” Lawrence began. “It has you bracing against the headboard and groping for the remote when Comics Unleashed detonates onto the screen just before midnight. A soulless barrage of whoops, cheers and apparatchik-grade terror clapping, it hits like a jet engine at takeoff, swallowing the show’s disembodied announcer in a silo of his own manufactured zaniness.”
“The applause snuffs out introductions to the guests, all stand-up comics — a who’s who of who’s that — and upstages a modest studio audience that appears to have been rounded up from pamphlet-clutching LA tourists,” he added.
Lawrence faulted the program for having no writers or discernible point of view, which he said was intentional as the network’s new owner Larry Ellison “bent the knee to Donald Trump,” and he said the results are appallingly bland and uninspired.
“Viewers conditioned to expect sharp monologues, celebrity interviews and some kind of live-wire unpredictability at bedtime should try [Jimmy] Kimmel instead — or, better yet, wait for John Oliver,” he wrote. “Comics Unleashed is not a show you tweet about in the moment, discuss the next morning or DVR with anticipation. It exists one evolutionary rung above a looped fireplace video, the sort of thing Walmart might run silently on a showroom TV wall.”
Allen will keep most of the show’s advertising revenue under his agreement with CBS, and Lawrence said the “hack comic” had repurposed his venerable syndicated program in a prominent slot in a way that felt unstuck from time.
“Watching the show’s first week on CBS was not nostalgic in any comforting sense,” Lawrence wrote. “It felt more like stumbling across an old ice machine in a dark hotel hallway, still running somehow despite the fatal-sounding clatters and groans. There’s an unmistakable superficiality to Comics Unleashed. The generic prefab set is lit like a furniture showroom. The canned video filling the B-roll intros looks scraped from Shutterstock, and the framed photos of Jon Lovitz and Sinbad feel ripped from a Comedy Cellar wall.”
The guests don’t touch on current events – not even the NBA playoffs – at all but instead are prompted by Allen to riff on their tried-and-true standup material.
“A typical exchange begins with Allen offering something like, ‘I heard you just got engaged,’ before the comic launches into a tightly packaged minute of relationship material,” Lawrence wrote. “It is chatbot conversation performed by humans, only less human now.”
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