We expected this, of course, because Colbert is a damn hard act to follow. Abd being a replacement is even worse. He left some high standards behind, for the people who didn’t get fired, that is. But oh, mercy, it tanked. It flopped. It failed. Thanks to Raw Story:
Stephen Colbert’s replacement was hit by a withering review comparing his late-night comedy program to an infomercial on 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.
Ok, your writer doesn’t watch TV at all, except for open-wheel racing and Formula Drift, so there are no ideas on this. But Mr. Lawrence had plenty to say. None of us needs to put a word in because he’s quite descriptive enough on his own. Yes, this is a little wimping out. There’s only so much you can say before he needs to take over. Oh, my goodness, this is marvelous!
“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.”
I laughed for a good 5 minutes just on this one paragraph. Just this. And as I read through the article, more followed that was absolutely as good as this. I’m supposed to be a writer (ha), but this guy leaves me blinking at the starting line and wondering what happened. Now, I know we aren’t supposed to put personal stuff (like this) into our writing, but what can you say when someone has already done so, and better than you could? I figure one column every so often is ok. Here it is.
“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.”
There is a LOT more in the RS article I used. Please feel free to go read it. I hope you laugh as hard as my household did! Extra thanks for putting up with my personality. I’ll be back to being restrained tomorrow. It’s getting late. Goodnight.
See you tomorrow!
Friends, I know everybody begs you for money. I promise you that, of all the outlets bugging you for spare change, we are the smallest and the hardest-working. We’re a bunch of old, disabled people, except one writer in his mid-50s. But the rest of us are in our sixties and seventies, and this is a labor of love. All we’re asking for is the ability to continue our quest to tell the truth about Trump and help ensure democracy survives. If you can help, please do. Thank you. Ursula
