Return to late night write on the money

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 06/10/2023 (1078 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

When the Writers Guild of America and Screen Actors Guild strikes began, I was concerned for the people on strike, many making a precarious living in a difficult industry and now facing a prolonged labour action.

The fact that production shutdowns meant many big Hollywood films and fall television series had been delayed didn’t bother me much. Yes, I love film and TV, but I also have a backlog of great things to catch up on. (There must be a long German compound word for prestige TV series you feel guilty about not having watched yet.) Where I really felt the entertainment gap was with the late-night TV shows.

With the writers’ strike now settled after five months out but the actors’ union still in negotiation, the late-night guys have been the first to come back. These shows need writers — lots of them — but they don’t need actors, so they’re currently good to go.

The Late Show with Stephen Colbert and Late Night with Seth Meyers are part of my daily routine again, though the term “late night” is a misnomer for me. Mostly, I watch Seth and Stephen through YouTube clips in the morning while I’m drinking coffee, which I’ve found is the best way to consume American political news.

When I really need to dive into the world as it is, I read newspapers and magazines and books. But when it comes to the last eight years of U.S. politics, with its grotesque mixture of the highly ridiculous, the deeply depressing and the completely unprecedented, late-night comedy has been my first line of defence.

Falling smack into the if-you-don’t-laugh-you’ll-cry news category, the Trump era is made for snarky monologues. Whether it’s Republicans getting into Twitter beefs like junior high kids or Kevin McCarthy being ousted as Speaker of the House on National Kevin Day (yes, Stephen tells me, that’s a thing) or the whole sad, pathetic Rudy Giuliani saga levelling up from lawyers-getting-lawyers to lawyers-getting-sued-by-lawyers, it helps to start by looking at the funny side.

Seth Meyers marked his return with his show segment A Closer Look “to the Max.” In a couple of super-compressed minutes, he attempted to catch up on the last five months of dumb and dumber political shenanigans by reeling off stories and scandals like a comedy-minded auctioneer, from classified documents in a Mar-a-Lago bathroom to “Lauren Boebert getting to second base at a Beetlejuice musical.”

Colbert, who started by saying his writers had spent a record amount of time in the fresh air and sun but were now “back in their joke holes,” announced that “we looked at the calendar today and — check my math on this — I believe we have been off the air for 154 indictments.”

And Jimmy Kimmel conceded that his weakest moment during the strike came when Trump was booked on RICO charges in Georgia and self-reported his weight at 215 pounds. “I almost crossed the picket line for that,” he admits.

They’re glad to be back, and I’m glad they’re back, once again part of my morning routine. Now I can enjoy some breakfast monologues before I brace myself to follow up with actual news-news.

And while I prefer to watch when the sun is rising, one person who watches in real time — as a recent 1:05 a.m. posting on Truth Social suggests — is Donald Trump.

“Now that the ‘strike’ is over, the talentless, low rated CREEPS of Late Night Television are back. I knew there was a reason I didn’t want to see it settled — True LOSERS!!!” he raged. This is just the most recent renewal of a long-running feud. In 2021, The Daily Beast reported that Trump had wanted the U.S. Justice Department to investigate late-night comics who made fun of him, asking advisers if the courts could be used to somehow stop the jokes.

So maybe Colbert and Kimmel and Meyers monologues can’t fill in all the crucial, complex shades of the American political picture, but clearly these late-night hosts and their writers are doing something right.

alison.gillmor@freepress.mb.ca