Larry Wilmore’s Comedy Central show won’t be titled The Minority Report, instead it will take a cue from one of the channel’s flagship shows.
The new series was retitled “The Nightly Show” and will premiere on January 19, according to The New York Times.
Wilmore, a former correspondent on The Daily Show, was named in May the host of the forthcoming 11:30 pm show, which will take the place of The Colbert Report. When the comedian’s show was first announced, the original title was The Minority Report With Larry Wilmore.
In an interview with the Times, Wilmore said that name change was to avoid “brand confusion.”
“It was never intended to be a show only about minorities,” Wilmore told the newspaper. “It’s a show about underdogs, and that happens in a lot of different forms, whether it’s race, gender, or whatever.”
Source: The Hollywood Reporter.
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He said he was also not thrown by the pressure of limited time to get the show up and running, nor a last-minute wrinkle in its official identity. When the series was announced last May by Jon Stewart, the “Daily Show” host and Mr. Wilmore’s mentor (as well as an executive producer on the new show), the title was to be “The Minority Report With Larry Wilmore.”
That sounded both clever and original to everyone involved, and, of course, it had the ring of familiarity from the 2002 Steven Spielberg-Tom Cruise film. But the ring got a bit too loud in August when the studio that owns the film, Fox, announced it was making a television pilot based on the movie.
“It became complicated,” Mr. Wilmore explained, because the only way to retain the original title would have been to always use it in the complete form. It would get a bit unwieldy, he said, when discussing the show in interviews or on social media repeatedly to say “The Minority Report With Larry Wilmore.”
“The last thing you want is brand confusion,” he said. So on Thursday, he and Comedy Central are unveiling the new title: “The Nightly Show With Larry Wilmore.” That was the simplest choice, Mr. Wilmore said. It also fits nicely, temporally, between the shows that will bracket it four evenings a week: “The Daily Show” and “At Midnight.”
The main thrust will be to examine issues from the point of view of the underdog. In that way, the title change is probably a good one, he said.
“It was never intended to be a show only about minorities,” Mr. Wilmore said. “It’s a show about underdogs, and that happens in a lot of different forms, whether it’s race, gender, or whatever.”
Not that he didn’t muse about other possible titles. “I thought we could make it ‘The Wilmore-T Report,’ with an invisible T,” he said. “ ‘Colbert’ has had the silent T; we could have had an invisible one.”
Even without the T, connections to the departing “Colbert Report” will be extensive for the new effort. He is not only inheriting Mr. Colbert’s position on the Comedy Central schedule, he is also moving into the studio and offices that production is vacating when Mr. Colbert ends his run Dec 18.
“I’m also moving into Stephen’s house and driving his old car,” Mr. Wilmore said.
He did seriously consider the title “Meet the Rest,” because his new show is intended to be, as he put it, “a cousin of ‘Meet the Press.’ ” Though the show is still very much a work in progress, Mr. Wilmore said “The Nightly Show” would regularly feature a panel discussion: a scripted comedy version of what is seen on Sunday-morning talk. He said he would probably start each show with a comedy take on something in the news, delivered in all likelihood from a seat at a desk, the way Mr. Stewart and Mr. Colbert have long opened their shows.
Full Article: The New York Times.
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