Welcome to the weekly TV thread. There’s no prompt today.

The Original TV Score Selection of the Week is jazz guitarist Cory Wong’s funky theme from the recently canceled After Midnight with Taylor Tomlinson, CBS’s hour-long revamp of the half-hour 2010s Comedy Central panel game show @midnight.

Last week, the ax fell on yet another female-hosted late-night show. CBS actually renewed After Midnight, which I sometimes watched on Paramount+, for a third season, but then Tomlinson wasn’t up for another season and chose her stand-up act over After Midnight.

“Juggling touring and hosting the show has become unsustainable, and I’ve made the difficult decision to step away so I can focus on stand up [sic],” wrote Tomlinson on Instagram.

Instead of embarking on a search for a new host to replace Tomlinson—which would have saved the jobs of hundreds of After Midnight staffers—CBS said, “Aaa, fuck it. Let’s kill the show and put hundreds of Angelenos out on the street.”

Tomlinson will continue hosting After Midnight until June, when it joins Full Frontal with Samantha Bee, The Rundown with Robin Thede, and The Amber Ruffin Show in the graveyard of female-hosted late-night shows that deserved longer runs.

After Midnight is, fortunately, less like the unwatchable Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon and more like Dropout (a streaming service I don’t subscribe to, but I’ve enjoyed on YouTube tons of clips from Make Some Noise). Speaking of Dropout…

After Midnight isn’t a costly show—another thing that makes this cancellation sting a bit. And now I’m having flashbacks to the disappointing cancellation of the animated Star Trek: Lower Decks, another inexpensive show I watched on Paramount+.

However, Lower Decks, my favorite show from the current era of the Trek franchise (I hate it when people on this site or in other spaces call this era “NuTrek,” and outside this site, it’s often MAGAts who do that shit), was consistently funny, while After Midnight, like so many other late-night shows, can be hit-or-miss. Even The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson—one of After Midnight’s time slot predecessors on CBS and my favorite network TV late-night talk show after Conan O’Brien, who hosted my previous favorite one (his version of NBC’s Late Night), left NBC for basic cable because of Jay Leno’s bullshit—was hit-or-miss.

That inconsistency is why I don’t watch After Midnight on a regular basis and I prefer to watch it in YouTube clip form. (Also, I’ve purged all politics from YouTube and the streaming services I subscribe to for the sake of my mental health, and I’m trying to do the same with my Bluesky timeline. The stress-inducing headlines that are all over The Daily Show, The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Kimmel Live!, Late Night with Seth Meyers, and Last Week Tonight with John Oliver are seeping into Tomlinson’s opening monologues.) CBS’s massive amount of YouTube clips of After Midnight was where I first heard Thomas Lennon telling an anecdote about now-former Bond movie producer Barbara Broccoli—in the news recently for taking the money and running from the 63-year-old franchise her late movie producer dad built—shutting down Chitty Chitty Bang Bang remake ideas he and Robert Ben Garant, his screenwriting partner, pitched to her.

I got a kick out of Lennon’s anecdote because I’m a lapsed Bond fan (I saw all the negative things Yo, Is This Racist? co-host Andrew Ti and Boots Riley said about the Bond movies a few years ago, and I realized Ti and Riley were right), and the history of the Broccolis as movie producers is a fascinating one (in addition to producing Bond movies, Cubby Broccoli produced Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, which was based on an Ian Fleming novel just like most of the Bond movies were). Also, Lennon is one of After Midnight’s best and most frequent guest panelists.

After Midnight is only funny either when Tomlinson is energized by other comedians who are panelists (any time voice actors from Lower Decks are panelists, whether they’re Tawny Newsome and Eugene Cordero or Lauren Lapkus and Paul F. Tompkins, the show isn’t going to be a slog) or when panelists take the pre-written, Hollywood Squares-style bits and use their improv skills to either improve them (Newsome, Cordero, Lapkus, and Tompkins are all improv vets) or steer the show towards anarchy.

For instance, Drew Carey was the worst and most visibly uncomfortable improviser when he hosted Whose Line Is It Anyway?, but all those years of hosting The Price Is Right (after his run on Whose Line) and thinking on his feet as contestants make odd decisions or lose their minds over Plinko must have sharpened his improv skills. His profane anecdote about a transcendent Phish concert is one of After Midnight’s wildest moments.

Carey’s unscripted monologue led to amusing callbacks afterward from Lennon and another panelist, “Weird Al” Yankovic. Like someone in the YouTube comments section below CBS’s footage of Carey’s monologue said, it’s great to see that hosting The Price Is Right hasn’t neutered Carey.

Tomlinson is a solid stand-up, and she’s currently one of the best at doing crowd work. As a host, I prefer her over @midnight host Chris Hardwick.

A self-professed introvert, Tomlinson admitted in a CBS Sunday Morning interview, which was shot before the completion of the construction of the After Midnight set on the Paramount lot, that she was extremely nervous about interacting with the panelists. After that interview, Tomlinson mastered the “interacting with the panelists” part of After Midnight pretty damn quickly. She’s much more fun to watch than the now-reclusive Hardwick, who first became famous for hosting Singled Out and was later disgraced by allegations of domestic abuse, which were first posted in a 2018 Medium essay where Chloe Dykstra, Hardwick’s ex-girlfriend, accused him of a litany of terrible things (controlling behavior was among them) during their relationship.

On @midnight, Hardwick was good at moving the show along, but otherwise, I found him to be obnoxious when he guest-hosted Attack of the Show (wow, G4 programs like that one and X-Play have aged like milk) and hosted the asinine Walking Dead after-show Talking Dead. Remember the recurring Late Night with Conan O’Brien sketch “Frankenstein Wastes a Minute of Our Time”? Talking Dead should have been called AMC Wastes a Half-Hour of Our Time.

Speaking of obnoxious things Hardwick did, check out illustrator Brandon Bird’s jabs at the former Nerdist Podcast host on Bluesky.

Meanwhile, in most of her interactions with the panelists, Tomlinson cares about the world outside hers, and she’s as great of a conversationalist as she is in her crowd work. More than one person in the r/AfterMidnight subreddit has said that they like Tomlinson’s kid sister vibe. (If Tomlinson is like a kid sister, then Hardwick is “Gen-X Bob Eubanks,” but replace Eubanks’s anti-Semitism with an off-putting anger towards sex workers. The only routine I can remember from Hardwick’s stand-up act is a rant about strippers, whom he called “pigeons with tits” because “they go where the bread is.”) Though Tomlinson is more likable than Hardwick ever was, After Midnight isn’t the ideal format for her.

Tomlinson’s decision to not continue hosting After Midnight after June proves that she’s aware that 1) her talents are better suited for live comedy shows that aren’t game shows and that 2) late-night hosting has lost its luster and isn’t worth damaging your mental health for—Tomlinson was diagnosed with bipolar disorder—every Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday. (After Midnight tapings are scheduled so that Tomlinson can leave Hollywood early in the week to travel to weekend stand-up gigs.) She’s doing the same thing O’Brien and Trevor Noah wisely did: They ditched late-night TV because it’s too constraining, and they know that viewers are drifting away from late-night talk shows—the last late-night talk show I watched on a regular basis was Showtime’s now-defunct Desus & Mero—and preferring to consume them in YouTube clip form.

If I want to watch or listen to a celebrity interview, I’ll go to an uncensored comedy podcast for that nowadays. The network TV late-night talk show format no longer appeals to me. O’Brien has outgrown the late-night talk show format as well. On Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend, he’s clearly liberated by not having to censor himself anymore and not being told by Jeff Ross, his longtime executive producer from his NBC and TBS shows, to pause the interview for a commercial break that will be inserted there in post (although there have been ad breaks during COBNAF, but O’Brien and co-host Sona Movsesian recorded them at a separate time from the interview).

The dominance of comedy podcasts like COBNAF (and the web talk shows Hot Ones and Chicken Shop Date), NBC’s decision to eliminate its 1:35am time slot (which was previously occupied by the Later franchise, Last Call with Carson Daly, and finally, A Little Late with Lilly Singh), the massive budget cuts to Fallon and Meyers’s shows, and the end of original shows in CBS’s 12:37am time slot are all signs that late-night talk shows are going the way of Saturday morning cartoons. I was going to add daytime soaps to “Saturday morning cartoons,” but then I realized that the new Beyond the Gates, the first Black-led daytime soap since Generations, has been proving on CBS that daytime soaps still have fight left in them. According to TVLine, Beyond the Gates’s audience, 55% of whom are Black viewers, is 78% bigger than the audience that watched The Talk, the Sara Gilbert-created talk show that previously occupied Beyond the Gates’s time slot.

While CBS’s daytime soap block remains a dominant force (The Young and the Restless has been the top-rated American daytime soap for 37 consecutive years), the network’s late-night block will look anemic when Tomlinson leaves, which will make Colbert, who co-produces After Midnight, CBS’s only late-night host. Even though After Midnight is hit-or-miss (and Dropout shows like Game Changer and Make Some Noise are better comedy panel game shows), it has been a great platform for younger improv comics, POC comedians, and LGBTQ celebrities, and when it hits, it hits, like when Sasheer Zamata, Nicole Byer (another Lower Decks voice actor), and Matteo Lane were challenged to punch up scenes from unfinished screenplays and read them aloud.

One of the things that are missing from those GIFs is, of course, the sound of Byer’s voice, so here now is the funniest component of Zamata and Byer’s steamy performance of an unfinished screenplay about a French gentleman ruby thief and his lover: Byer’s attempt at a French accent.

Byer famously hates the little kids who stop her on the street and know her only from hosting Nailed It!—the only reality show I ever liked—because they call her “Cake Lady” (cake as in the amateur bakers’ failed cakes on the show, not cake as in booty).

Maybe she should show them the above clip of her and Zamata on a pretend chimney to scare them away.