A dude and a desk: Why women really don’t get to host late-night TV

Salon talks to comedians, producers and execs about how women-helmed shows have been passed over and left out

By  Melanie McFarland

TV Critic

Published June 9, 2023 6:00AM (EDT)

 

A monologue that alchemizes headlines into punchlines. A desk, because that's friendlier than a throne. Recurring bits and sketches that lead into cheerful interviews with celebrities. Evoking the term "late-night" brings to mind these images, along with anodyne jokes meant to send us to bed with a smile. The specifics change with each network, but only slightly, along with the figure around which everything revolves: the man hosting the show.

And for nearly 70 years, it's been assumed that the audience takes that as a given. Late-night means hanging out with a funny man, as opposed to an equally capable woman.

There's no debating whether a woman can do the job. Many women have proven that they can. So why haven't they been publicly considered for any of the prominent network late-night flagship shows until recently? Closely considering the answer to that question reveals more than the obvious conclusion. It's not merely that women have been shut out of these influential positions both casually and intentionally, but that this has been their space from the beginning of the genre.




Occasionally, albeit only within the last few years, we've seen signs of change. When NBC announced in March 2019 that Canadian YouTube star Lilly Singh would inherit the late-night slot left open by Carson Daly's departure, the news produced lots of fanfare.

Every few years, networks green-light late-night talk variety shows created for female hosts, only to yank them—either just as they're finding their audience or before that can happen. 

NBC's publicity team touted Singh's status as "first" – as in, the first South Asian woman to host a modern late-night show on the network, and the only female host on a major broadcast network among the current generation of personalities.




Headlines also trumpeted her sexual identity. "I remember all the articles because it looks practically identical: bisexual woman of color gets late night show! I almost legally changed my name to Bisexual Woman of Color because that's what people called me so often," she jokes in a 2022 TED Talk where she recalled her adventures in late-night. "And you know, as strange as that sentiment was I thought, 'Okay, the silver lining is that we'll finally get a different perspective in late night.' A little bit of melanin, a dash of queer, a different take on things — let's do this." 



Two years after she recorded the final episode of "A Little Late With Lilly Singh," she told Salon that she remains grateful for the experience. But she's also a realist in terms of what she could have achieved, given the scarce resources apportioned to her short-lived show. That was a real obstacle, along with its 1:37 a.m. slot and a production schedule that sounds punishing even by the notoriously hard-driving standards of late-night.




"When you have that time slot and you're trying to introduce an audience to someone new, that takes time, and it takes money…You can't just be like, 'I'm going to kind of test this out at this hour,'" she said. "You're trying to introduce a massive audience to someone new? That takes an investment. And so I really encourage people that if you can't make that investment, you've got to rethink that."

Singh's show aired from 2019 until June 2021, which approximates the lifespan of talk-variety shows helmed by women. Of the latest batch, a BET late-night series hosted by "A Black Lady Sketch Show" creator Robin Thede, "The Rundown," debuted in 2017 and lasted for two seasons, as did Chelsea Handler's Netflix talk show, which bowed in 2016. Sarah Silverman's "I Love You, America," launched in 2017 and got a single 21-episode season on Hulu. Netflix streamed 10 episodes of "The Break with Michelle Wolf" in 2018 before pulling the plug.

Around the same time that Singh's show ceased production, YouTube and Instagram Live star Ziwe Fumudoh made her Showtime debut. "Ziwe," a blend of skits and hilariously uncomfortable interviews, also ended in 2022.




Placing their common experience into a larger view of late-night exposes a pattern the TV industry has been stubbornly reluctant to break. When a legacy late-night show's chair comes open and is inevitably filled by a man, that newcomer is typically given the time to find his audience and mold the show to his vision. (Conan O'Brien's months-long residency with "The Tonight Show" in 2009 is a memorable exception.)

We don't know — yet — whether a woman would receive the same level of grace. What we've seen is that every few years, networks green-light late-night talk variety shows created for female hosts, only to yank them—either just as they're finding their audience or before that can happen. The seven-season lifespan of "Full Frontal with Samantha Bee," which TBS canceled in 2022, is an outlier in terms of its longevity. But that's a quarter of the time "The Late Late Show" franchise existed, cycling through four male hosts over 28 years before wrapping in April with James Corden's exit. Its ending is an industry bellwether.

When asked to explain that pattern, former top Viacom executive Doug Herzog, who was the president of Comedy Central in 1995 and launched "The Daily Show," spoke plainly. "It's just legacy bulls**t. It's one of those things," he told Salon. "I think, just the public, to a certain degree, and the people who were making decisions, like me, sort of thought, 'We need a guy to sit there. This needs a dude.' I think it was sort of subconscious discrimination, for lack of a better word."




But how much is that bias, conscious or otherwise, rooted in gendered assumptions at the executive level extending back to the mid-20th century, and how much do personal histories play a role? How much do other factors, societal or material, impact the success or failure of talk-variety shows hosted by women relative to their male counterparts?

Moreover, is a hosting gig at a legacy late-night show in 2023 the plum post it used to be? This is somewhat of a rhetorical question. "The Daily Show" job remains unfilled after Trevor Noah's farewell in December 2022. Since January 2023, the production has cycled celebrity guest hosts through the chair he formerly occupied.

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Even in a broader field of opportunities for talented, funny women, including movie roles, series production and Netflix specials, the job's value shouldn't be entirely underestimated. "I think anytime you get an opportunity to reinvent something, you have to say yes to that opportunity," Bee told Salon in a phone interview, adding, "and it is going to take a reinvention for sure. People are just not watching these shows in the same way. "




Silverman, who did a stint as a celebrity guest host on "The Daily Show," agrees with that second observation. Silverman finds it odd that a woman has yet to be tapped for a legacy hosting job like this one, she told Salon earlier this week in a Zoom conversation. "But also, as someone who loves, who grew up on late night TV and late night talk shows, and also really came into existence in comedy through being a guest on there, I'm really appreciative. But as just, objectively, it's beyond a dying form. I mean, is that OK to say?" 



As late-night talk lays fallow, with all the major shows having gone dark on May 2 in solidarity with the Writers' Guild of America's strike, it's worth examining these questions — especially since "The Daily Show" may become the first series to break late-night's proverbial glass ceiling. (Salon's unionized employees are represented by the WGA East).

Among the 10 stars who have taken part in the show's rotation of celebrity guest hosts, four are women. Three of them – Handler, Silverman and Wanda Sykes – have experience helming talk shows. Handler has hosted two. Wolf was set to participate in the second round before the strike was declared. Also in the running are "Daily Show" correspondents Desi Lydic, who hosted the show during the week of April 24, 2023, and Dulce Sloan, who spent one night in the chair before the WGA strike began.




If one of these women or another candidate who has yet to take her turn is chosen, it will have taken Comedy Central only 27 years to break that barrier. 

Yes, we're being sarcastic. Somewhat. It's not as if these jobs come open often. Historically, legacy late-night shows have changed hosts once every few decades. That made the multi-show, multi-network turnover that occurred between February 2014 and September 2015 extraordinary.

All the major legacy late-night network shows underwent a changing of the guard precipitated by the retirement of three legends: Jon Stewart, whose 16-year tenure on "The Daily Show" shaped what much of the genre looks like now, David Letterman, who launched the "Late Show" franchise on CBS and "Late Night" on NBC, and "Tonight Show" host Jay Leno, each of whom spent 22 years as the face of their shows. Before Leno, Johnny Carson hosted "The Tonight Show" for 30 years. Craig Ferguson also relinquished his "Late Late Show" gig in 2014, a job he held for nearly 10 years.

Again, from that perspective, the lengthy run for Bee's "Full Frontal" is impressive, even when accounting for the fact that her show was weekly. However, unlike her male counterparts, who tend to retain their job security until they decide it's time to leave, Bee wasn't afforded that choice.




"I definitely hoped to have longer," Bee said. "... I've come to expect the unexpected, for sure. I was hoping that if they were going to wind us down, because they hadn't picked us up for another full season, I thought we would sort of wind down over the fall. I had hoped for that — again, having no knowledge. No one told me that. But I've worked in this business a really long time and seen a lot of s**t so, you know. That's what I thought."

Meanwhile, Jimmy Kimmel is contractually obligated to remain as the titular host of "Jimmy Kimmel Live!", which debuted in 2003, through 2025. Late-night's other Jimmy, Fallon, is signed on to "The Tonight Show" through 2026. Stephen Colbert's deal to continue hosting "The Late Show" ends in August, but there's little reason to expect he won't renew. 

"The people who were making decisions, like me, sort of thought, 'We need a guy to sit there. This needs a dude.'"




The longstanding absence of women in key front-facing late-night positions is rooted in several factors, including modes of thinking that may be as outdated as the format is quickly becoming. That's strange given the fact that, as Herzog put it, "amazing women are littered throughout the background of all these shows."

Herzog hired Madeleine Smithberg and Lizz Winstead to co-create "The Daily Show." Its current showrunner is Jen Flanz. Merrill Markoe was instrumental in forging the groundbreaking structure of "Late Night with David Letterman," including creating "Stupid Pet Tricks" and its oddball field segments. Debbie Vickers was the executive producer of "The Tonight Show with Jay Leno" for two decades.

Amber Ruffin, a featured performer on "Late Night with Seth Meyers" and the host of a talk-variety show on Peacock, is the first Black woman to write for a late-night network talk show.

Thede's work on "The Nightly Show with Larry Wilmore" made her the first Black woman to serve as a head writer on a late-night talk-variety program. 




Sam Jay, who hosted the weekly show "Pause with Sam Jay" on HBO until it was canceled after two seasons, is an alumnus of the "Saturday Night Live" writing staff. Colbert's "Late Show" and "Jimmy Kimmel Live!" employ women as co-head writers. (One, Molly McNearney, is also Kimmel's wife.) "The Tonight Show" employed three women as head writers between 2018 and 2021.

But this wasn't always the case.

In 2009, TV writer and journalist Nell Scovell began her Vanity Fair story essay "Letterman and Me" with a statistic few were probably thinking about at that time, since many were still reeling over Letterman's on-air admission that he had sexual relationships with women on his staff.

"At this moment, there are more females serving on the United States Supreme Court than there are writing for 'Late Show with David Letterman,' 'The Jay Leno Show' and 'The Tonight Show with Conan O'Brien' combined," Scovell wrote. "Out of the 50 or so comedy writers working on these programs, exactly zero are women. It would be funny if it weren't true."




When Colbert's "Late Show" debuted in 2015, the gender balance hadn't improved by very much. As The Atlantic pointed out, his writing staff at launch consisted of 17 men and two women, all of them white.

Defining Late Night

The common concept of late-night encompasses three different primary formats, with the two more contemporary iterations heavily influencing how the oldest and most venerated, "The Tonight Show," looks today.

That vision of an avuncular male host interviewing stars from behind a desk is nearly as old as NBC itself, dating back to 1954. It went on to spawn "Late Night," launched by Letterman in 1982. Eleven years later, and coinciding with Carson's retirement, Letterman launched CBS's first successful late-night entry of the modern era, "Late Show." The industry guilds are likely to still be on strike when it hits its 30th anniversary in August.

Since Leno left in 2014, both "The Tonight Show" and "Late Night" have been produced by Lorne Michaels, creator of the second-most durable American late-night comedy format, the sketch-driven "Saturday Night Live." (Michaels has served as the executive producer of "Late Night" since O'Brien became its host in 1993.) 




"There's an assumption historically that somehow, universally, everybody loves the lived experience of men."

"Weekend Update" was one of the main inspirations for "The Daily Show" in its original guise. The other was ESPN's "SportsCenter," from which Smithberg, Winstead and Herzog poached the show's first host Craig Kilborn.

When I asked Herzog to illuminate the thinking that went into selecting Kilborn for the job as opposed to considering a woman, he said, "Honestly I think we were always thinking about a guy. If I'm being honest, I don't know why. But I think that's, you know, what we were conditioned to think up until then." 




He added, "Like a lot else that we've discovered over the last couple of years that we've been missing out on, that was one of them."

Herzog also points out that in Comedy Central's early days, the audience was predominantly male. "By the way, we really built that over time too," he adds. (He also recalls that one of the first shows to get "big, big ratings" for the channel was its U.S. run of "Absolutely Fabulous," a British sitcom featuring an ensemble of women and created by two women, its star Jennifer Saunders and her comedy partner Dawn French.)

Kilborn looked the part of a smug network anchor around whom the producers built their first version of a news satire revolving around actual headlines, few of which had any real stakes. But after Kilborn made an obscene joke about Winstead in a 1997 profile, he was suspended for a week. Winstead quit. Kilborn left a year after that. In March 1999 he took over for Tom Snyder as the second host of CBS' "The Late Late Show," making way for Jon Stewart's formative era.

Stewart's "Daily Show" begat the version of late-night that holds sway over much of TV today: headline-driven segments sugaring information and politics with comedy. Under his stewardship, according to Pew Research Center polling, the show became a preferred source for younger viewers who had grown weary of the evening news, especially in the wake of 9/11. When many TV news outlets were accepting administration and corporate spin with little questioning or qualification, Stewart, Colbert, Bee and other correspondents became truth-brokers as opposed to gentle, politically impartial comedians in the mold of Leno.




In the lead-up and aftermath of the 2016 presidential election, that served them and other hosts wonderfully. Colbert's "Late Show" didn't hit its stride until he was encouraged to return to the pointed satire he cultivated while hosting "The Colbert Report," a spoof of "The O'Reilly Factor." Oliver's "Last Week Tonight" became comedy's "Frontline." Meyers' "Late Show" is an extension of his experience hosting "Weekend Update," but it's fair to say that its harder edge was sharpened on the "Daily Show" whetstone. 

Other direct and indirect spinoffs from "The Daily Show" may not have enjoyed those other series' duration, but they made their mark. Hasan Minhaj's "Patriot Act" lasted for six seasons on Netflix before ending in 2020. The Stewart era also yielded "The Nightly Show," Wyatt Cenac's public affairs-style HBO series "Problem Areas" …and "Full Frontal." 

"There's an assumption historically that somehow, universally, everybody loves the lived experience of men," Winstead told Salon. "But nobody can universally love the lived experience of women who they live with every day. That has been the assumption, always. Right?"






Bee's time with "Full Frontal" is illuminative in unraveling the knotted history of women in late-night, in that it explains what it takes for a woman to succeed in a field that's stacked against her. In short, it requires promotional resources and institutional support. 

Jo Miller, who left her longtime producer position on "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart" to serve as the head writer, showrunner and executive producer of the first two seasons of "Full Frontal," recalls that at the series' launch, it had both.

"TBS was also kind of rebranding itself. It was, we could say, new, and 'Full Frontal' was going to be its little prestige show," she said. "So they threw a lot of money at marketing because nobody knew TBS, and nobody knew Samantha Bee, according to their research ... And they moved those numbers [with] big marketing campaigns on both coasts, until people knew TBS and knew Samantha Bee. ... They stayed and [TBS] could charge more for advertising." 




"Their support never wavered creatively. But it did wane financially."

TBS also allowed "Full Frontal" time to find its voice and its niche. And the cable network's patience paid off. Following a premiere that drew 2.16 million viewers, episodes settled into an average weekly viewership of around 600,000 or so before the 2016 election heated up. Bee's show scored its best ratings averages at the outset of the Trump presidency when it was regularly topping a million viewers per episode. 

"It's a small data set, but when we were doing 'Full Frontal,' because it was a female voice, female interest and female topics, a lot of it, we had huge female viewership," Miller said. "And I think our most loyal viewers were college women, which was great." 




"They gave us tons of support at the beginning of the show, at a level that was really unprecedented for them," Bee said of TBS. "It was really quite remarkable...Their support never wavered creatively. But it did wane financially. And it's just really difficult to find new and ingenious ways to penetrate all the noise out there with bigger and broader things. Just trying to make your own press is very difficult."

Out of all her "Daily Show" colleagues, Bee and her team were the only satirists consistently covering issues related to reproductive rights, voting rights, structural discrimination and labor issues. And as she looks back, she's not surprised that her show, which managed to survive AT&T's acquisition of Time Warner in 2018, became an early casualty of the Warner Bros. Discovery merger.

"Our last show was the day before they overturned Roe v. Wade," Bee recalls. "The timing was wild. But again, it's a great and stark reminder that there aren't too many shows that get to be on TV just because the message is important, or now's the right time to say these things. Every once in a while in this business, you get reminded that, oh, it's actually a business... And if you are working for a parent company who's trying to make wallpaper for teenage boys, perhaps your show is not really fulfilling that need."

By Melanie McFarland


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Melanie McFarland is Salon's TV critic. Follow her on Twitter: @McTelevision