Late-night television has eight white, male hosts. Larry Wilmore’s new series “The Minority Report” will help to tip the scales slightly.
“The audience is looking for different voices and wants to hear something different, and they get tired of hearing the same thing. I think there is a huge opportunity to make a dent in that, and I am really looking forward to that,” Wilmore told the New York Daily News.
“The Daily Show” correspondent will replace Stephen Colbert on Comedy Central when the “The Colbert Report” host takes over for David Letterman on CBS’s “The Late Show.” Wilmore thinks audiences are ready to have a black late-night host back on their television screens.
“I like my fish blackened, steak blackened and I don’t see why late-night shouldn’t be blackened as well – it’s just tastier,” he said.
Wilmore will become the only minority host in all of late-night TV when his show premieres in January. Fox canceled Arsenio Hall’s talk show (again) after one season this past May and Chelsea Handler left her E! show for Netflix in August.
Black comedian W. Kamau Bell, whose FXX late-night show was cancelled last year, also addressed the whiteness issue of late night in a recent Buzzfeed essay entitled “The Unbearable Whiteness of Late Night.” He warned that given the young age of the late-night hosts, another non-white or female host breaking in to the landscape probably wouldn’t happen soon.
“Late-night TV is big business and wants the biggest audience possible. And the people who run it believe they have evidence the biggest audience comes with a white guy. And it will probably remain that way… at least until 2042,” Bell wrote (2042 refers to when white Americans will become the minority).
Wilmore will broadcast his show from New York, although he has ties to Los Angeles, according to the Daily News. The East Coast location makes it easier to attract political guests living in Washington D.C. The host wants to keep it more political than celebrity-driven.
“The Daily Show” host Jon Stewart will produce the new series (as he does with “The Colbert Report”) and the two men have just started talking about the show’s formula.
“The show is really about having a conversation, and we will start with a simple idea and we will grow from that. I feel the pressure the night before the first show and I will feel my performer’s jitters,” Wilmore told the Daily News. “At this stage it is very exciting to think about the things we are going to do.”
