The Nightly Show With Larry Wilmore has been canceled by Comedy Central after a year and a half on the air. According to Deadline, the final show will air Thursday.
“I’m really grateful to Comedy Central, Jon Stewart and our fans to have had this opportunity. But I’m also saddened and surprised we won’t be covering this crazy election or ‘the Unblackening,’ as we’ve coined it,” Wilmore said. “And keeping it 100, I guess I hadn’t counted on ‘the Unblackening’ happening to my time slot as well.”
Comedy Central President Kent Alterman praised Wilmore for his contributions to the network and show.
“They really have been doing great work in terms of creating a stable of contributors who fill the show with comedy bits and takes on what’s going on—all driven by Larry’s very strong and unique point of view,” Alterman said. “But unfortunately, it hasn’t been resonating with our audience; it’s been struggling for quite a while as far as connecting with our audience. We stuck with it for a year and a half, but ultimately, we didn’t feel that we see enough traction to justify doing another year.”
It's interesting that the network would actually cancel the show right at the crux of election season, but Alterman said it had to do with contract renewals.
“Ideally, we would do that, but because these renewals were all coming up before the election, [it made it hard],” Alterman said. “The other thing we didn’t want to do is create a slow death through the election; it didn’t really make sense. Unfortunately, it is what it is; it was a business decision.”