TV

Busy Philipps’ Late Night TV Show Is The Shake Up The Genre Needs

'Busy Tonight' finally gives us a talk show which doesn't feature a white-dude named Jimmy.

by Kara Eva Schlegl  19 December 2018
Busy Phillipps Busy Tonight

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If you want to know if you’re going to like Busy Philipps’ new late night show, Busy Tonight, you should probably skip to the end.

If you can’t get behind a Mr Rogers style exit song, where Philipps puts on ‘Mr Nightgown’ and sings about how ‘there’s no more tequila’ so it’s time to go to bed, I doubt you’ll like this show.

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But that’s OK, because maybe this show isn’t for you.

Perhaps you relate better to a white man in a suit and tie, who quips nightly about news headlines that don’t affect him.

You might even roll your eyes at seeing women — sorry, “ladies” — down margaritas on a couch. I know, what is this, Sex and the City?

A late night host should be behind a desk, nursing a glass of scotch, like a neglectful dad in the 1950s.

He should have a lesser man nearby too, who can laugh at all his jokes, even when the audience is too stupid to get it. This is comforting, because all of your friends are too stupid to get your jokes. Maybe you could be a late night host one day. You should book 5 minutes at a Laugh Box, or a Comedy Square, just to see.

Busy Philipps Loves You

Busy Tonight is unique to late night — not because it has a woman host, or even because she tells you at the end of every episode that she loves you.

It’s because the show is different. Like, actually different.

Her comedy is dry, and totally chill like a conversation with your funniest friend. Her set looks like the open plan living room of a wealthy white American woman in her mid-to-late 30s, which she is.

She isn’t trying to confuse us into respecting her by looking like she’s at an important business meeting. She gets comfortable. She takes off her shoes. She puts on a freakin’ nightgown.

This isn’t so much a rebellion against the Johnny Carson desk, as Samantha Bee’s choice to continuously stand during Full Frontal has been characterised: it’s an antithesis to it.

It says, fuck standing, fuck desks, this isn’t work, and it shouldn’t be.

A Diverse Writers Room

Philipps doesn’t have a side kick, but she does have a selection of her writing staff sitting in the front row.

They are some of the best comedy writers in America right now — Jenny Yang, Shantira Jackson and Kelly Oxford. They actively engage in the show, such as Jenny Yang recently hoovering weird Thanksgiving treats like ambrosia salad and aspic, saying joyfully that this extremely gross white people food is “really exotic” for her.

Phillips’ writing staff is in fact entirely made up of women comedians, who are diverse in ethnicity, sexuality, and even body diverse. I know this not because Philipps made it a talking point in her promotional tour (she didn’t), but because in a segment on her show, she took her entire writing staff to be fitted properly for a new bra.

For once, in Hollywood, “diversity” in a late night show doesn’t mean hiring one woman, or one person of colour, to stand on the sidelines and laugh.

Having written on a late night TV show (humble brag) — well, a cancelled late night TV show (very humble brag) — I’ve seen first hand the impact a diverse writers room can have on its substance. It can pull a show out of the arse of a white cis heteronormative man to look at the world, and get oxygen flowing to the brain so it can think of new ideas.

Looking Behind The Scenes

But when people cite diversity, or look for diversity, they often don’t look behind the scenes.

A show with a diverse cast can still have a writers room dominated by white men, as exhibited in every season of Saturday Night Live, ever. This season of SNL, for example, has 7 women in its cast of 16 (that’s 43%), and 6 women featured in its writing staff of 27 (22%).

In a scathing review from Variety’s chief television critic Daniel D’Addario, he describes Busy Tonight as “theoretically refreshing”.

This is a textbook neg, which I now plan to use the next time some guy pitches me a “great idea”. He claims the show is less politically engaged than the current Trump-fuelled trend in Late Night, and suffers without a clear “point-of-view”.

The show does have a frenetic energy, un-polished — like we’ve been invited into the rehearsal rather than the final cut. Its opening monologue lacks the refinement of a Harvard education, or the delivery of a 10 year stint on SNL. Busy Philipps might not be a seasoned comedian, but her unpredictability rivals early Conan O’Brien.

At any moment, a horse could walk into frame, and it would be handed a margarita and made to feel at home on the couch.

How To Be Human

Philipps’ politics are administered like she’s telling you to dump your abusive ex.

In the midterm elections she wore a colourful vote T-shirt, and then told her audience “there are only two thing you have to do to be human: you have to be nice and kind, and you have to participate in our democracy so it fucking works.”

But her politics extend further than direct intervention. When 80% of women are wearing the wrong sized bra, encouraging women to get re-sized for a bra that actually fits tells us that we deserve to be comfortable, and to do something for ourselves. Inviting Jenny Yang on stage to taste exotic white food tells us that white is not “normal”, that we white people are weirdos who eat meat jelly like that’s an OK thing to do.

Her guest list, including Tess Holliday, Mindy Kaling, Bryan Tyree Henry and Tracey Ellis Ross — people who do not fit any Hollywood mould — shows a commitment to making a space for those who are often overlooked. And, of course, you need only look at the crew behind the scenes — the writers, directors, producers, even the gaffers and runners, to see where a show’s politics truly lie.

Philipps’ “point-of-view”, and in fact, the point-of-view of Busy Tonight is a huge “fuck you” to anyone who is looking for something that already exists.

It does not want to be Jimmy Fallon Tonight, or Jimmy Kimmel Up Late, or any other man named Jim who still looks to a show made 50 years ago for inspiration. It isn’t trying to be new, it is something new.

I’ll drink to that.

Aussies can watch Busy Tonight on E! at 10pm, Monday to Thursday, or on Youtube.

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Kara Eva Schlegl is a writer, comedian and producer out of Sydney. She writes for SBS Comedy, co-founded Sydney comedy room Wolf Comedy and hosts Little Tiny History Podcast.