David Spade to Host New Late-Night Show on Comedy Central – TCA
by Nellie Andreeva and Denise Petski
February 11, 2019


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"The Daily Show with Trevor Noah" is getting a new companion late-night show, hosted by David Spade. The announcement was made today at TCA.

The yet-to-be-titled new nightly series will air at 11:30 PM following "The Daily Show" on Monday through Thursday nights starting later this year. It will feature Spade’s signature take on the pop culture news of the day.

The show will include a rotating group of Spade’s comedian and celebrity friends, while also incorporating field segments that mirror his popular Instagram stories. You can watch Spade’s video announcement, which played at TCA, below.




The late-night show stems from the "Verified with David Spade" pilot Comedy Central pilot did for a weekly comedy series skewering pop culture and news through the lens of social media. Some elements from the pilot may remain, but the just ordered program is a new nightly series.

"The Daily Show" has been without a lead-out show since "The Opposition with Jordan Klepper" was canceled in June.




The most successful Comedy Central late-night series to air after 11:30 PM was "@midnight", which aired for 600 episodes. It had a similar lighter, pop culture-focused comedy, which appears to be the type of programming viewers gravitate toward after the politics-heavy "The Daily Show".

“We are really thinking that there is a Trump joke fatigue in late night,” Kent Alterman, president of Comedy Central, Paramount Network, and TV Land, said about the decision to steer away from politics.

https://deadline.com/2019/02/david-spade-to-host-new-late-night-show-for-comedy-central-tca-1202554474/

Comedy Central has set Monday, July 29 at 11:30 pm for David Spade’s new late-night show "Lights Out with David Spade".

The series, hosted by Spade, will follow "The Daily Show with Trevor Noah" Monday through Thursday each week.

https://deadline.com/video/david-spade-late-night-show-premiere-date-comedy-central-teaser/

Oh BOY !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

David Spade on his politics-avoiding, "kind of dumb" new late-night show: "The thinking stops here" (https://ew.com/tv/2019/07/29/david-spade-comedy-central-lights-out-8-heads-in-a-duffel-bag/)

Comedy Central's Lights Out with David Spade premieres tonight in the valuable and challenging post-Daily Show 11:30 p.m. timeslot, airing four nights a week. “I’d like to say the show is different than any you’ve ever seen, but it’ll be about four percent different," he says. "It’s going to be a pop culture show, but I don’t love that term. I would say: current events focused on Hollywood. But no real politics, unless Cardi B runs for mayor. I don’t want my crowd to be arguing when they see the show. My tagline should really be, ‘The thinking stops here,’ because it’s just going to be kind of dumb. I train with Cardi B’s brother — Cardi O — and he was saying, ‘I like that you have smart jokes.’"

ALSO:

Comedy Central has done research showing viewers crave David Spade (https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/22/arts/television/david-spade-is-back-on-tv-even-though-he-never-left.html): “Not just familiarity, but affection and love and a desire to see him,” Comedy Central president Kent Alterman tells the New York Times. “On the one hand it wasn’t surprising, and on the other hand it was like off the charts."
Spade's debut week guests include Whitney Cummings, Amy Schumer, Kaley Cuoco, Jim Jefferies and Dana Carvey (https://press.cc.com/press-release/2019/07/29/press-lights-out-with-david-spade-premiere-week)

I like David Spade. His show is cute and funny!

I watched it in bits and pieces on YouTube. It was funny, I recommend it.

Lights Out with David Spade had a disappointing premiere week (https://www.thewrap.com/lights-out-with-david-spade-ratings/)

Comedy Central's latest attempt to fill the post-Daily Show timeslot averaged 270,000 total viewers across four episodes this week. On Monday, Spade's show premiered to 970,000 gross viewers as Comedy Central simulcast Lights Out across sister Viacom cable networks Paramount Network and TV Land. "It’s been downhill since there," according to The Wrap. The Nightly Show With Larry Wilmore in 2015 and (https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/live-feed/lights-david-spade-premiere-week-ratings-1228374) The Opposition With Jordan Klepper in 2017 (https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/live-feed/lights-david-spade-premiere-week-ratings-1228374) both premiered to higher numbers than Spade's Lights Out, but they also debuted in a time of year with higher viewership.

Lights Out with David Spade is succeeding in its mission of offering escapism from politics (https://decider.com/2019/09/26/lights-out-with-david-spade-review)

David Spade's Comedy Central show has also found success retooling and rebooting the panel show that made hits out of Politically Incorrect with Bill Maher in 1993 and Tough Crowd with Colin Quinn in 2002.

Lights Out with David Spade becomes the third show to fail in the post-Daily Show timeslot (https://variety.com/2020/tv/news/comedy-central-david-spades-lights-out-1234570770/)

Variety reports that David Spade's late-night talk show will be shopped to outside networks and platforms and won't return to Comedy Central. Lights Out premiered last summer on July 29, providing a no-politics alternative (https://variety.com/2019/tv/news/david-spade-late-night-tv-comedy-central-trump-politics-1203276716/) to other late-night shows. "But Lights Out ultimately didn’t deliver audiences that lived up to network hopes," says Variety's Brian Steinberg. He adds that Lights Out, which had been scheduled to run through June, was hampered by the coronavirus shutdown that ended the possibility of Spade growing his audience. Lights Out becomes the third failed attempt at launching a late-night talk show after The Daily Show since The Colbert Report ended in December 2014. The Nightly Show with Larry Wilmore ran from January through August 2015 and The Opposition with Jordan Klepper aired from September 2017 through June 2018. Over the past few weeks, Spade has done a stripped-down version of his show on Facebook Watch, YouTube and Instagram titled Live from the Bunker. Lights Out's failure on Comedy Central comes as Trevor Noah is enjoying great success with The Daily Social Distancing Show. His interview with Dr. Anthony Fauci last week was watched by more than 27 million viewers across all platforms.