Why ‘@Midnight’ has clearly done enough for additional episodes
Let’s start off by saying that “@Midnight” is clearly not the sort of show that you can get away with writing an article about every night, mostly because it is the worst show to possibly recap. It’s comedy, and it would be like us being the guy who whispers the end to your favorite TV shows before you’ve watched them.
When we first watched the premiere, we thought to ourselves that it was a very funny show, and if we were lucky, it would become the sort of show that we caught a couple of times here and there when we were bored or felt like we needed a comedy pick-me-up after a long day. Since that time … well, we’ve seen every episode. We’ve even laughed about some of them in that awkward moment where you’re not even watching them, and you run the risk of people at the grocery store staring.
Chris Hardwick deserves a ton of the credit as the host of the show, and the guy who makes the comedians comfortable and keeps the audience engaged. But we also have to give some credit to Funny or Die and executive producer Thomas Lennon for helping to conceptualize this, and the writers (including one of Hardwick’s own Nerdist guys in Matt Mira) for coming up with bizarre games to play based on things that they’ve found on the internet. Sometimes they are deeply disturbing, sometimes they are obvious, but just about every time they are funny.
Finally, you have the contestants. There’s a great array of comics on here that have appeared in the first 12 episodes, whether you’re talking about pretty popular names like Patton Oswalt or folks like Baron Vaughn or Julie Klausner, who you may not know prior to watching and you may come to enjoy. There has been a personal amount of happiness that has come from watching and seeing names like Doug Benson and Nathasha Leggero, who you may not have thought about for a while but loved from something else.
So a few weeks in, this has to be a no-brainer for Comedy Central to pick up more episodes of this show following its initial test run. It’s more current than anything on TV, it’s social, and above all, it’s drop-your-mouth-on-the-ground funny. It’s the most that we’ve laughed watching a show since maybe season 3 of “Community,” which is why we’ve been left in that awkward position of getting hooked onto a show that we really have no time to be hooked on.
Next week, the show may have some of our favorite comics / actors on yet, including David Koechner of “Anchorman,” John Hodgman of “The Daily Show” and being a PC, the return of Benson, David Spade, Twitter comic god Rob Delaney, and even Judd Apatow. So yeah … we’re excited.
Finally, we have a video below of a recent game to pique your interest in watching: “Ryan Seacrest or Ryan Gosling Fan Fiction.” It’s just about as shocking as you would imagine.
Photo: Comedy Central