The Daily Late Nightly Show (The Last Nightly)

Frankly it’s likely to be a kind of quiet affair. Larry’s plan is to do a quick interview and then let the cast say their fairwells. We’ve already said goodbye to Mike Yard and Ricky Velez. Finally he’ll roll some clips and have the behind the scenes crew out for their curtain call. The only drama is whether John Oliver comes through with alcoholic libations the way Sam Bee and Colbert did.

I must say Larry is taking it rather better than I am. In interviews he points out that it was difficult to replace Stephen’s brilliance, but Comedy Central missed some promotional opportunities too like not developing the relationship between him and Trevor Noah. I make no secret of my opinion that Trevor is a spotty performer at best, last night is typical. After an inspired rant about Police murders of Blacks (undoubtedly written by someone else because it was actually good) it was a 15 minutes of LeBron James who happens to be Black and discussed his personal efforts to improve race relations (which are pitfully inadiquate and desultory as befits an NBA star who abandoned his home community for a fat contract and bling just as soon as he could manage it). Mercifully it was about a mere 30 seconds before we got to the immensely more comfortable subjects (for both Trevor AND LeBron) of being a Basketball player, being a celebrity, and being a celebrity Basketball player.

All this compounds my feeling of depression about what Atrios calls “crapification”. You know, I’m not just some old fart making up stories about how back in the day everything was much, much better and we walked 10 miles to school in the snow every day, uphill BOTH ways, before working 2 shifts in the mines, grabbing a handful of cold gravel for breakfast, and waking up 2 hours before we went to bed to do it all again the next day.

And we were thankful for it.

There was a time, not so very long ago, when we had an hour of news each night that pointed out the absurdity of the Corporatist Neoliberal Propaganda Machine and the Bootlicking Beltway Billionaire Lackies that infests our politics. It wasn’t much, but it was something.

Then Stephen left and who can blame him? It’s his dream job and as Larry points out 95% of television is being in the right place at the right time. Larry was a worthy replacement, not better or even as good, but totally worthy.

Then Jon quit and the wheels have come off. All the truly talented people left The Daily Show and he was replaced with an unfunny but compliant goon who has absolutely no insight at all into United States politics or culture.

Now Larry is gone and Comedy Central is, get this, marketing @midnight, a perfectly good pseudo-game show along the model of Who’s Line Is It Anyway? that revolves around Internet tropes and cliches and Twitter trends, as a hard hitting comedic news show that unlike Larry really speaks to young people because Twitter and Celebrities!

Well, that’s crap.

I’ve always been very supportive of Larry, despite my disagreements with him about format. Even when Stephen made his debut I snooted his opening to watch The Nightly Show. This Friday I will watch Colbert with attention but not publish. Monday we’ll look at Sam Bee and what she’s doing now. After that who knows?

Trevor has about run out of patience from me and I’ll have to decide if I’ll continue my coverage with as little disruption as possible or find something else to write about. It’s been a long time (11 years give or take) and I must admit the prospect leaves me quite sad.