Samantha Bee’s ”Full Frontal“ was canceled after seven seasons, but most late-night shows hosted by women have much shorter life spans
Rivers’ ’80s show on Fox didn’t even last a full year, while subsequent late-night forays from Goldberg, Sykes, Mo’Nique and Thede also failed to score a second season. YouTuber Lilly Singh’s “A Little Late,”This show, which was last with a female host, ended in 2021 after being in the late-late slot of NBC for two years.
“Women are wildly successful in daytime and on TikTok and Instagram, so why can’t women succeed in late night? What’s the disconnect? It doesn’t make sense,” Caissie St. Onge, who was the showrunner for Busy Philipps’ short-lived 2018 show “Busy Tonight,”The story was told
The seven-month period of “Busy Tonight,”St. Onge declared E! Philipps was constantly given notes by executives about what she wore, her speech and how to enter. “Busy really got attention by doing Instagram stories. That’s how she got pulled back onto television,”St. Onge spoke of the actress who was first to break out in the cast of cult favourites. “Freaks and Geeks.”
“Executives said, ‘Oh, we love what you’re doing on Instagram.’ But then everything that she was doing on Instagram seemed like it wasn’t what they wanted,”St. Onge spoke. “So it was a conundrum. I’ve worked for a lot of men and I have never heard anyone tell a man to calibrate the tone of their voice or to change the way that they move their body.”
That kind of micromanagement, though, was not the case for Chelsea Handler, who hosted E!’s “The Chelsea Show”2006. “Chelsea and I were the two creative forces and we were really given free rein. It’s one of the few shows that I’ve worked on where I was shocked at the lack of supervision. [The network]’s attitude was, ‘Let her do what she wants to do.’ And in that freedom, she was a success,”Freeman said that E! was the answer to all your Google searches. From 2006 to 2010, President Ted Harbert and Handler were romantically inseparable. (Handler went on as host “Chelsea Lately”E! From 2007 to 2014
Many in the industry believe there is a bias against women — on both sides.
“Most of the hiring and development is done by men,”Freeman stated. “As much as people like to think that they’re breaking new ground and they’re trying new things, they still fall into certain traditions and late-night, those have traditionally been male roles. So when a spot opens up, certain people’s brains just automatically go towards that archetype. They’re not open to cast a wider net.”
However, the audience can also be very close-minded. “The bias that I see in the comedy community, from comedians and from audiences, is just a reflection of the perception that female comedians are not as funny, which is incredibly unfair,”He said. “That carries over into being given late-night slots or being the leads of their own sitcoms. I don’t know if it’s indigenous to late night, but late night is an example of a microcosm of society at large.”
Ned Rice, retired comedian and comedian, says that not all audiences are alike. “not comfortable” with a woman leading a show, whether it’s on a soundstage or at a comedy club.
“My theory is, it’s difficult for women, because when someone’s on stage talking, and not just telling jokes, but presenting a point of view, that person is, in a sense, an authority figure,”He said. “Think of a comedy show as a bus — they’re the bus driver. And just because of the way we are raised, many audiences are not comfortable with having a woman in that role.”
Other than Handler and Bee “I don’t know if any woman has ever been given a fair shot” with a late-night gig,” Rice said.
Joan Rivers was the first woman to host a late night show in 1986. She only had an eight-month stint on Fox. “The Late Show Starring Joan Rivers.” Her slot ended up going to Arsenio Hall, the first Black late-night host, who became a mainstay of ’90s late-night. It was a huge landmark for the Black community and a major setback to women.
Rivers was done dirty by two networks: She long served as Johnny Carson’s favorite substitute host on “The Tonight Show,”But after learning she had been left off NBC’s list of his 10 potential successorsShe accepted an offer to host a competing solo show on Fox’s fledgling network. Carson learned of the move before she could tell him. He never forgives her, and many affiliates refuse to carry her show.
“Despite being a major star of the 1980s, Joan Rivers didn’t have the sort of career support or structure that her male colleagues enjoyed,”Shawn Levy is the author of “In on the Joke: The Original Queens of Standup Comedy,”Told. “Few, if any, female comedians did, in fact.”
He said that Rivers and Edgar Rosenberg were also her producer and manager. “were more or less a team of two against the world — and no match, on paper or in reality, for [Fox network founders] Rupert Murdoch and Barry Diller.” When the show’s ratings dropped, “Diller and Murdoch were happy to dump her… And because she didn’t have the backing of a powerful Hollywood agency or manager, she had to walk away looking like a loser. I just don’t think it would’ve played the same way if she had been a man,”Levy stated.
Nell Scovell was the second woman to ever write for this magazine. “Late Night With David Letterman,”The L.A. Times
Scovell said it in her 2018 memoir. “Just the Funny Parts: … And a Few Hard Truths About Sneaking Into the Hollywood Boys’ Club,” Rivers’ firing was “pure sexism.”She told Bill Carter, the author of, that she had been married to her in 2021. “The Late Shift,”Rivers being canceled “hurt women in late night for years,” and left the impression that they just couldn’t cut it as hosts.
For decades, top women continue to be snubbed. Jon Stewart’s departure “The Daily Show” in 2015, the show’s longest-running correspondent, Samantha Bee, was never in the running to take over. Even worse, Comedy Central didn’t tell her for several weeks that Stewart had instead tapped Trevor Noah, a South African comic who had joined the show as a recurring contributor only four months before.
“I mean, literally, no one called or even emailed from the network — at all. It was awful. It was really awful,”Bee spoke on The Daily Beast’s “Last Laugh” podcast2019 “I want to say it was a full month or six weeks after Jon had announced that he was leaving [that they told me]. I was never in contention and I very much knew that. I don’t know that people in the outside world knew how much I was not being considered for the job.”
Amber Ruffin, who became the first Black woman to write for a late-night network show when she was hired by Seth Meyers for NBC’s “Late Night”In 2014, told Bill Carter about his “Behind the Desk: The Story of Late Night” podcast: “There are these tiny opportunities for people of color, and then they are gone as quickly as they arrived. But lots of bigger networks give a lot more money and a lot more time to young white men finding their footing, whereas people of color are rarely granted that opportunity. You just have to come ready-made and it is harder and it is unfair, but it is not impossible.”
Jenny Hagel is also a writer for Meyers. “The Amber Ruffin Show,”According to the L.A. Times “Even being able to find out about jobs is so difficult and relies so much on systems that inherently have gender bias built into them, because the whole field is so male-dominated.”
St. Onge suggested networks and streamers give women room and time, like NBC did for Conan O’Brien, whose first NBC late-night show famously took a long time to find its creative groove (and its audience). “It’s just leaving it alone and letting people get used to the idea,”She said. “And then someday, it won’t seem weird. The presidency and late night are the two things that [women] haven’t cracked yet. It’s just wild.”
Phillipps is her podcast host. “Busy Philipps Is Doing Her Best,” largely because there’s “zero gatekeeping” involved.
In 2021, Robert Smigel and Carter shared similar thoughts. “There’s no woman that anyone’s willing to take a chance on the way they’ve taken a chance on James Corden or Conan O’Brien or Craig Ferguson. I mean, none of these people have the cachet that they would have said, ‘Oh, of course, Craig Ferguson, the guy who played Drew Carey’s boss. Why hasn’t he had his show already?’”
Meyers gave Ruffin, Hagel and their work their first major breaks. “Late Night”This has proved to be a valuable launching platform. Ruffin launched her own television show on Peacock in 2020. Hagel was the chief writer. Ruffin said that the show would return for a third season. Both writers continue to work for Meyers. They share the desk in The Meyers. “Jokes Seth Can’t Tell” segment and deliver the punchlines he can’t.
Hagel, who’s gay and Puerto Rican, came up with the segment after realizing that Meyers could not be a good fit to deliver the lesbian jokes she was writing. She explained that she was gay and Puerto Rican, and created the segment after realizing Meyers could not be a good fit to deliver the lesbian jokes she was writing. Northwestern MagazineMarch “I pulled aside Amber and said, ‘What if we did a sketch where we told jokes about our respective identities?’ We both kind of laughed, like, nobody will ever let us do that on television… And then to our great surprise, they chose it. We thought they’d let us do it one time — and then to our even larger surprise, they thought we should do it again. And I think now we’ve done almost 50.”
Many women have benefitted not only from strong mentors and allies, but also from each other’s support. While BET’s “The Rundown With Robin Thede”Thede only lasted one season. Ruffin consulted Thede when she was trying to negotiate a contract for her show with Peacock. (Thede stars now and is an executive producer). “A Black Lady Sketch Show”On HBO Max.
“If it wasn’t for Robin, I don’t know what I would have done,” Ruffin told WrapWomen in May, adding that a number of Black women working in the tricky timeslot have each others’ back. “Forty percent of all Black women in late-night television are on a text chain. If I found out that another Black lady who had a late-night show, and they were doing it wrong, I’d be there.”
