‘The Nightly Show with Larry Wilmore’ canceled by Comedy Central

“The Nightly Show with Larry Wilmore” unfortunately does not have many nights left.

In a surprising announcement on Monday, the New York Times reports that Comedy Central has canceled the late-night show, and that Thursday will mark its final episode on the air. This move comes mere months before the Presidential election, which makes it sting perhaps even more than it would otherwise.

In a statement confirming the news, the network’s president Kent Alterman said the following to the publication:

“Even though we’ve given it a year and a half, we’ve been hoping against hope that it would start to click with our audience, but it hasn’t happened and we’ve haven’t seen evidence of it happening.”

Meanwhile, Wilmore himself expressed gratitude, but also disappointment, over the decision:

“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. And keeping it 100, I guess I hadn’t counted on ‘The Unblackening’ happening to my time slot as well.”

The timing of the move is what saddens us the most. We’d seen from the ratings that “The Nightly Show” may not be long for this world, but we hoped that Comedy Central at least would allow Wilmore and company to keep their jobs through the election. After all, you probably could have created special programming and generated higher ratings from that event. Now, “The Daily Show” and “@midnight” remain the sole warriors on the network’s late-night lineup, and we wonder if they will come up with another program to try to fill up the schedule.

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