Late-night shows go new direction

BY LYNN ELBERT Comments 0
Published: November 11, 2009

LOS ANGELES — In the blink of an eye, late-night TV has shifted from a white men’s club to the start of a rainbow coalition.

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Wanda Sykes’ weekly Fox comedy show debuted at 10 p.m. Saturday. George Lopez’s four-night-a-week talk show has started airing at 10 p.m. on TBS. They join "The Mo’Nique Show” on BET.

Lopez is counting on an audience hungry for something different — as in the first Hispanic to host a nighttime talk show on a major network, cable or broadcast.

Sykes is the first black late-night host since the late 1990s, when celebrities Earvin "Magic” Johnson and Keenan Ivory Wayans tried and failed to follow in Arsenio Hall’s successful 1989-94 footsteps.

For people of color, Lopez said, "I don’t think a lot of their needs are met with the current talk shows. I would pull a different audience.”

Shari Anne Brill, an analyst with media-buyer Carat USA in New York, echoes Lopez’s assertion.

"There is a huge, growing multicultural population in this country, and the current late-night fare doesn’t really take them into account,” she said.

But neither Lopez nor Sykes are talking about practicing exclusionary TV. Lopez’s ABC sitcom drew a cross-section of viewers, and Sykes said she expects her show to attract the same mixed crowd she gets at her stand-up appearances.

"Young, old, male, female, all races, gay, straight. I love the audience that I draw,” Sykes said.

She rebuts the idea she got the job because of her gender, ethnicity or sexual orientation (the actress-comedian, who appears on CBS’ "The New Adventures of Old Christine,” came out as gay in 2008).

"I do understand the importance of being on a late-night talk show as a black, gay woman,” Sykes said. "But I’ve been at this for 20 years. I don’t think they (networks) were saying, ‘Hey, it would be fun to get a black woman on late-night. Who fits that role?’”

The two shows are taking different approaches. Lopez promises to bring "the party back to late-night,” signaling a looser, hipper hour in the tradition of "The Arsenio Hall Show,” said analyst Bill Carroll. Sykes is planning Bill Maher-type panels with both lighthearted and serious discussion of politics and culture as part of her mix.