It seems a little too perfect that “The Nightly Show with Larry Wilmore” (Comedy Central, 11:30 p.m.), once named “The Minority Report” by the former “senior black correspondent” at “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart” (Comedy Central, 11 p.m.) gets its start tonight, on Martin Luther King Jr. Day.
“I had a dream,” Wilmore said, “that a brother needed to work on that day.”
Actually, he told reporters at the TV Critics Association winter press tour this month, “I was given the option of starting on Monday or Tuesday when they were making the schedule, and I said, ‘Well, is ‘The Daily Show” open on Monday?’ I said, ‘Well, then, I think we need to be open Monday. Let’s just start the week off.’ I mean, there’s no symbolic importance to it or anything like that.”
Wilmore has his work cut out for him. He’s filling the old time slot of the beloved “Colbert Report” and plenty of other shows have died in the “Daily Show” shadow, from a sports show by Norm MacDonald to an entertainment gossip one by David Spade. But Wilmore has a little bit of a boost since it has the full support and some of the staff of Jon Stewart.
For his own part, Wilmore describes the show as “a kind of a hybrid, if you will, of, let’s say, ‘The Daily Show’ and maybe ‘Politically Incorrect.’
Accordingly, he’ll start the show, “weighing in, giving my take on the events or event of the day that we’re going to be talking about. The second part of the show is more of a panel discussion where we’ll deconstruct that event or events a little bit more and get more into it. That will have a lot of surprising elements. It may be comic. It may be provocative. Who knows? It’ll go wherever it goes.
“So it will have a nice balance of both of those types of things, the scripted element and unscripted element. We’ll have contributors on the show, not really correspondents. And they’ll do a variety of things. They’ll do comic pieces. They’ll report from places. And we’ll throw them on a panel now and then too, and we’ll have some fun with that.”
Sen. Cory Booker and rapper Talib Kweli are his first guests tonight.
However much Stewart helps him on the show, he will have already done the job by his example when he worked at “The Daily Show,” Wilmore said.
“Jon always raises the bar on that show,” he said. “He pushes you in directions that sometimes you’re uncomfortable with. We never go with whatever our first take is on ‘The Daily Show.’ Whenever I wrote those Senior Black Correspondent pieces, whatever our first joke was was just our starting point to write maybe our first draft or to start talking about it. Jon always encouraged us to go deeper. ‘There’s something else under there. What do we really want to talk about?’
“It’s also the way I like to approach things too. I like to unearth something. ‘What’s really under there? What is this thing? How does it really make me feel? How do I really feel about something?’ was what we’d always go into that with. Biggest thing I learned from Jon is to keep attacking it, keep going at it. He’s really good at it.”