What are you up to after the show?
"As someone with anxiety, comfort shows are very important to me and I would love for After Midnight to be that for people."
After Midnight Isn't a Game Show or a Late-night Show — It's a Comfort Show
After Midnight, CBS’ reboot of Comedy Central’s show At Midnight, isn’t quite sure what it is yet. On paper, it’s a show where “comedians compete to come up with funny answers to ridiculous questions on everything from internet trends to pop culture,” as host Taylor Tomlinson put it on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. But, in practice, it’s more like how Tomlinson described it on the show itself: “It’s kind of a talk show where there’s no conversation. It’s a game show, but the points are fake. It’s a vanity project, but it somehow makes me look worse.”
While Tomlinson is wrong about the show making her look worse — even if the program fails, she stands to come out with a stronger career than ever — she’s right that After Midnight isn’t quite a talk show, nor a game show, nor a traditional late-night show. It’s slowly finding its footing, but what it may be lacking is far outweighed by what it already has: all the makings of a perfect comfort show.
While After Midnight pulls topics directly from social media, it manages to avoid talking directly about anything too hard-hitting, like politics or international news. “For the most part, these are jokes, these are like the smartest jokes about the dumbest things on the internet that day,” Tomlinson told CBS New York. Any mention of hard news is tongue-in-cheek, calling attention more to the public reaction than the news itself.
This gentle, everything-is-silly reality that the show creates gives it a sense of escapism, allowing viewers to engage without feeling like they have to tune in to yet another news-focused late-night show. There are no monologue jokes here about the latest political blunder, only just-cheesy-enough bits about social media trends. The “talk show” portion doesn’t ask guests to talk about the world or their latest project, instead having them answer ridiculous questions like “If you could have dinner with anyone dead or alive, what would you cook?” and “Are you happy?”
After Midnight allows you to enter into a world that’s just silly, lighthearted, and completely unserious. It asks you to take a break from the never-ending news cycle to laugh for a bit about inconsequential memes, playful headlines, and internet trends. Being able to achieve some kind of escapism is vital for comfort shows, and After Midnight manages to shine a spotlight on the silliness of humanity without getting bogged down in the heaviness of what’s happening in the offline world.
That feeling of escapism is only made stronger by the show’s hour-long runtime, which differs from the 30 minutes the original show was confined to. It allows guests to explore within that reality it’s created, offering structure but begging panelists to play around however they see fit. “To go from 22 minutes to 39 minutes [without ads] is really freeing. We get to have a lot more fun,” showrunner Jack Martin told The Daily Beast. “After Midnight works its best when everything goes off the rails. You know? People love to watch people actually having fun, and we take a lot of pride in our show, so you can just come and tell jokes, hear jokes, and have a great time.”
And having a great time is exactly what you want from a show that’s meant to make you feel comfortable and satisfied. It’s hilarious to watch comics slowly dismiss the show’s format and push the limits of what exactly they can get away with — whether that be Whitney Cummings’ disregard for what she can say on air or Arden Myrin throwing herself on the ground to do the worm. It’s delightful, and it sucks you in, but it’s so unserious that it keeps your attention without demanding too much of it.
Perhaps the most important aspect of a comfort show, though, is how easy it is to watch. A comfort show won’t be full of data or lore — it’s instead padded with dialogue, or jokes, or unrelated plot lines to give viewers the chance to tune in and out as they so choose. You should be able to watch a comfort show over and over without feeling like you need to be fully invested. Luckily, as The Guardian notes, After Midnight is “an easy if redundant half-hour to watch,” which is more to the show’s benefit than its detriment. It’s is a simple watch, in that it allows you to watch without fully turning your brain on. It’s the perfect show to put on in the background or to binge, which is key for comfort shows. You know what’s going to happen format-wise, so you can kind of just zone out to it, catching jokes here and there but not necessarily following any kind of through line.
And while, thanks to its improv-based nature and penchant for going off the rails, After Midnight isn’t necessarily “the familiar, the predictable, and the known” — as Andrew Selepak, a media professor, told CableTV.com comfort shows typically are — there’s something satisfying in knowing that it’ll get increasingly chaotic every time. Like watching a police procedural and knowing it’s the same set-up every episode, you can always count on After Midnight guests to forgo rules in favor of their own shenanigans. It’s predictable despite being, well, unpredictable, which makes it perfect to escape into as much or as little as you want.
Comfort shows are more than just silly, bingeable programming; they allow viewers to escape into a world built on safety, satisfaction, and predictability. After Midnight, though it still has a ways to go before it fully comes into itself, has managed to strike the perfect balance of all three. It’s an easy watch, but it’s engaging and keeps you wanting more. And right now, that’s all Tomlinson is asking for. “As someone with anxiety, comfort shows are very important to me and I would love for After Midnight to be that for people,” she said during an Instagram Live, as reported by Sean L. McCarthy in The Daily Beast.
Lucky for the host, After Midnight has already laid a strong foundation to be just that.
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