Comedy Central has decided to pull the plug on “The Nightly Show with Larry Wilmore.” According to Variety, Thursday, Aug. 18, will be the comedian’s last show and the network will instead air Chris Hardwick’s pop culture quiz show “@Midnight” in the 11:30 p.m. time slot.
Network president Kent Alterman said the cancellation was a “business decision” explaining that the show hadn’t “resonated” with their audience.
“Even though we’ve given it a year and a half, we’ve been hoping against hope that it would start to click with our audience, but it hasn’t happened and we’ve haven’t seen evidence of it happening,” he said in a statement.
Wilmore also addressed the show’s cancellation in a statement, saying that he was “grateful” to the network, Jon Stewart and the fans for the opportunity.
He added, “But I’m also saddened and surprised we won’t be covering this crazy election, or ‘The Unblackening,’ as we’ve coined it. And keeping it 100, I guess I hadn’t counted on ‘The Unblackening’ happening to my time slot as well.”
Wilmore regularly appeared on “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart” years before he nabbed his own show on Comedy Central. “The Nightly Show” was tapped to fill the void when Stephen Colbert left for CBS in December 2014. The cancellation, however, doesn’t come as much of a surprise when “Nightly Show” ratings are compared to that of “The Colbert Report.” According to the New York Times, “The Nightly Show” saw an average of 776,000 viewers per night in 2016, while “The Colbert Report” was seeing an average 1.7 million viewers in its last year on air.
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