W. Kamau Bell has caused enough attention to his comedy talk show “Totally Biased” on FX that it expands to five nights a week when it moves to the new youth-oriented FXX network next month.
As terrifying as that prospect is, Bell told a session at the TV critics summer press tour Friday, “fear is the engine that keeps me going forward.”
Work begins Monday on pre-production for the nightly late night show that premieres Sept. 4 at 11 p.m.
“We hired three more writers, he says. “I think we, like, tripled our staff of production people just because the machine has to be a lot bigger to pull that off. And a lot of the writers on the show who have been on the show doing correspondence pieces will now be doing a lot of the man on the street pieces and other pieces that I’ve done in addition to me doing them.”
Also, he says, “The segment we did where it was Lindy West and Jim Norton, Comic vs. Feminist, we were getting a lot of attention for, and I was excited about that because that was my idea,” Bell says. “We are going to be doing a lot more explosive issues being debated by two people on sort of different sides of it, in a funny way, you know.”
Taping nightly at 5 p.m. will allow them to respond quickly to news events that might have faded if they had to wait seven days. “Also, the thing about a weekly show is that sometimes you have too much time to think, and you talk yourself out of a dangerous idea that you would have just done if you had to do it that night,” Bells says. “So the daily show gives us less sort of more chance to plan but less time to think, which, for comics, less time to think is generally a good thing.”
Also, the additional material will help crystallize what he’s trying to do with show quicker. “I’m excited about that because I feel like what ‘Totally Biased’ can be, I’ve only sort of seen hints of in the first 26 episodes. I feel like, if we are on a daily show, we will really get there a lot faster.”