To "KeepIt100" about The Nightly Show with Larry Wilmore, I have to say that I like but do not love The Nightly Show with Larry Wilmore. I think he's terrific and I'm optimistic the show will get better…but there are some aspects of it that haven't started working for me.
One is the whole idea of doing one topic per show. First off, if you're not interested in the topic, the episode's kind of a waste. You might not give a hoot about what Jon Stewart discusses in his first segment but there's something different coming along after the commercial. Also, there's the same problem I had with Penn & Teller's Bullshit! series tackling one topic per episode…
The show was a half-hour. If they had a topic and they only had about ten minutes of interesting things to say about it, it got thirty. And if the topic was an important one worthy of hours of discussion, it also got thirty. So you either got a show with very little to say and a lot of padding…or you got a very cursory, insufficient look at an important topic. Mr. Wilmore's show also suffers from the problem that no one on the panel may have anything of interest to say about that day's topic…or, conversely, the time to say what they do have to say. Both have occasionally seemed to be the case.
But my larger problem with the group discussion is that I usually don't know who most of those panel people are…and by the time each of them has spoken twice and I'm starting to get to know them, the conversation is over.
Which brings us to the "KeepIt100" segment in which tough questions are put to those panelists who (again) I've often never heard of before. Absolute honesty is a good thing but the way to "win" that game is just to give the answer that's most uncomfortable for you to say. Let me give you an example.
Matt Taibbi is one of my favorite journalists (i.e., someone I've heard of) and he was on as part of a discussion of the movie American Sniper, which Taibbi trashed. Here's the question that was put to him by Mr. Wilmore, followed by the answer he gave…
Q: Which is more irresponsible? Clint Eastwood's approach to American Sniper or Rolling Stone's approach to the U.V.A. rape story?
A: It's us. I mean, we got that story wrong.
The audience cheered because Taibbi, who's a pretty bright guy, played the game correctly…and that may have been the extent of his feelings on the question. But this game is about giving honest responses…so what if his honest answer was more like this?
Yeah, we got that story wrong. However, when our irresponsibility was brought to light, we responded to the charges and the publisher has asked the Columbia School of Journalism to do an independent review of the story and we're going to publish whatever they say about us. We screwed up but we're determined to correct the record and to properly retract and apologize. What people in our profession will learn from our irresponsibility is that you have to be more scrupulous in fact-checking stories. What's being learned from Clint Eastwood's irresponsibility is that there's zillions of dollars to be made from fairy tales about the Iraq War that depict it the way the right-wing wishes it had been.
Now, I don't know for a fact that that's Mr. Taibbi's honest view…but if it was, he was smart enough not to say it on the show. Saying anything but what he did say would have gotten him booed for not swallowing sufficient fecal matter. Which is what bugs me about "KeepIt100." The short, uncomfortable answer may not really be the honest one.
I am not going to un-Season Pass The Nightly Show on my TiVo. I'm just going to keep watching and enjoying what's there and waiting for the show to find its way because I have a feeling it will. And yeah, maybe I'm just grousing because it isn't as wonderful as what it replaced.