Comedy Central has canceled “The Nightly Show With Larry Wilmore” after the series failed to take off among the network’s target audience of young men, the New York Times reported Monday.
“Even though we’ve given it a year and a half, we’ve been hoping against hope that it would start to click with our audience, but it hasn’t happened and we’ve haven’t seen evidence of it happening,” Comedy Central president Kent Alterman told the Times, saying the show “hasn’t resonated.”
Wilmore was informed of the show’s cancellation last week, and the final episode is slated to air in its regular 11:30 p.m. slot on Thursday.
Wilmore was first introduced to Comedy Central’s audience as the “senior black correspondent” on “The Daily Show,” and he received his own spinoff in January 2015. “The Nightly Show” was known for paying close attention to racial politics in the U.S. and to the 2016 election, but failed to attract the ratings the network hoped for among the viewers who once flocked to Jon Stewart’s long-running show. Nielsen data found that Wilmore received only 776,000 viewers a night this year, compared to 2.1 million for “The Daily Show.”
In a statement obtained by the Times, Wilmore lamented the fate of his show.
“I’m really grateful to Comedy Central, Jon Stewart, and our fans to have had this opportunity,” Mr. Wilmore said in a statement. “But I’m also saddened and surprised we won’t be covering this crazy election or ‘The Unblackening’ as we’ve coined it. And keeping it 100, I guess I hadn’t counted on ‘The Unblackening’ happening to my time slot as well.”
