Larry Wilmore's 'Nightly Show,' at 18 months, dies of antiviral causes

Both Wilmore and “The Daily Show’s” Trevor Noah were given the next-to-impossible tasks of replacing Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart, who both moved on, in a double-whammy, to other work. The stakes couldn’t possibly be higher in the race to outsmart, out-snark and outperform the antics of the 2016 campaign. “The Nightly Show” was often funny, but it failed to become a habit, both on television and online.

Online, of course, is where these things matter most: If last night’s riff isn’t making the rounds on Facebook and Twitter by 9 the next morning, with effusive likes and shares, then you may as well have never aired the show to begin with. As Comedy Central’s president, Kent Alterman, soberly noted to the New York Times, “The Nightly Show” (which will air its final episode Thursday) never achieved that thing that is far more ineffable and difficult to measure than simple ratings. It “hasn’t resonated,” Alterman said.

Resonance, which is a fancier way of describing buzz, is a subject that strikes fear in the hearts of not just late-night hosts these days, but just about anyone whose job, in executive newspeak, involves creating content for multiplatform audiences. That means networks big and small, but it also means record labels, movie studios, book publishers, radio stations, news outlets – all the way down to the dregs (such as television critics).

We’d all like more buzz than we’re getting, and it’s starting to dawn on us that buzz occurs in painfully brief and finite quantities. In the late-night realm, there is only so much topical humor and commentary that viewers can absorb and share. At some point, all that buzz just becomes a din.

It’s probably not Comedy Central’s favorite thing for people to point out that two of the buzziest and most viral comedians in the late-night sphere, HBO’s John Oliver and TBS’ Samantha Bee, were rather recently in the network’s employ as “Daily Show” correspondents; if the timing had been slightly different, it’s not hard to imagine one or both of them where Noah and Wilmore are. (In fact, such an outcome was very much desired by many fans of “The Daily Show” and “The Colbert Report.”)

In this frenzied media age, 18 months seems like a generous amount of time for a weeknight comedy to find not only an audience but also a certain indispensability to the conversation.

But it also seems like the order might have been too tall. Witness the wild glee with which viewers greeted the brief “return” of Stephen Colbert’s former persona on his CBS “Late Show” during last month’s Republican convention, which included a much overdue appearance from Jon Stewart.

Hard-core fans of the old shtick haven’t been shy about expressing their grief through the election year; they want things back the way they were – enough with all this New Coke. It doesn’t resonate! That’s not just Wilmore’s or Noah’s or Comedy Central’s problem; it also isn’t such great news for Colbert’s efforts on “Late Show” or Stewart’s forthcoming experiment with animated shorts for HBO.

Wilmore may be the latest to succumb to the resonance flu, but he won’t be the last.