The Amber Ruffin Show and Larry Wilmore's Wilmore take two different approaches to un-gaslight America

Salon.com

Amber Ruffin's and Wilmore's new Peacock talk shows "both had relatively quiet debuts on NBC Universal's new streaming service Peacock – I should say, they were compared to the loud fanfare that tends to accompany the rollout of talk variety series that premiere on network, cable or even more established streaming services," says Melanie McFarland. "That said, Ruffin and Wilmore's streaming forebears, specifically talk series hosted by Sarah Silverman (on Hulu), Michelle Wolf, and Hasan Minhaj, (both on Netflix) have all been canceled...The way things are going in 2020, both (Wilmore) and The Amber Ruffin Show are at once on time and overdue." McFarland adds: "Wilmore's Peacock talk show and Ruffin's sketch odyssey hit recognizable notes, both in terms of format and what people know about each of them. Wilmore, who co-created Insecure with Issa Rae and is an executive producer on Black-ish, designed his eponymous program in the style of an old-school public affairs series like The Tavis Smiley Show or Charlie Rose (minus the sexual harassment allegations). In the place of sketches and bits, Wilmore arranges his monologue around thoughtful one-on-one dialogues with newsmakers and experts in a specific field or topic. Week one gave us conversations with U.S. women's soccer co-captain Megan Rapinoe and congressional candidate Cori Bush to bring context to protests...The Amber Ruffin Show, in contrast, has no guests and features no one else but the host dressing up daily frustrations common in friendly shenanigans. Like so many other comics she could have chosen to rip into Trump's idiotic and heartless declarations that Black Lives Matter is 'bad for Black' people or 'our (COVID-19) numbers are better than almost all countries' in a monologue, but instead she presents a series of large drawings to humorously explain why these statements are 'so false that anyone who believe (them) is "made of dumb."'" Meanwhile, Ruffin doesn't see her show beholden to the late-night format. “When you see it as ‘hosting a late-night show,’ you put a bunch of restrictions on it,” she explains to Variety. “But once you see it as ‘This is your show that is late at night,’ it becomes this beautiful alive thing — and you can make it whatever you want it to be.”