Peacock Unveils First-Look At Late Night Shows ‘Wilmore’ & ‘The Amber Ruffin Show’

Peter White
·3 min read

Peacock is preparing to launch two weekly comedy shows, Wilmore and The Amber Ruffin Show, and has debuted clips from both.

Both shows, which launch on September 18 and September 25 respectively, would have, in the old world, been considered late night shows, although in a streaming environment this is less the case.

Wilmore marks the Black-ish exec producer’s return to late-night television following his stint as a correspondent on The Daily Show between 2006 and 2014 and The Nightly Show with Larry Wilmore, which ran for two seasons on Comedy Central, ending in 2016.

In the show, Wilmore will have discussions with high profile people from all different backgrounds including sports, politics and entertainment. Each episode will cover the election and important conversations of the week.

Peacock has ordered 11 episodes of the show and over the weekend, he told the New York Times that this is a limited run. “Is it going to get picked up? No,” he said. “This is going to be done, and then we’ll sit down at the right time and say, Is this something we want to do as a permanent thing?”

Wilmore also joked that the show, which he will host from a studio without an audience and guests interviewed remotely has “zero budget”. “I almost owe them money at this point,” he joked.

It will be exec produced by Wilmore, who has an overall production deal with Universal TV, Jo Miller, Tony Hernandez, Brooke Posch, David Miner and Michael Rotenberg. It will be produced by Jax Media and Universal Television.

Meanwhile, The Amber Ruffin Show will feature a mix of jokes, sketches (she’s seen dressing up as MC Hammer in the clip) and “thoughtful monologue on how to defeat systemic racism”.

The show will initially launch without an audience but Ruffin hopes to be able to have an audience by early next year.

Jenny Hagel, who will exec produce alongside Ruffin, Seth Meyers and Mike Shoemaker, recently said, “What’s fun about Amber’s show is that we’re not married to a particular format going in. One of the things that Amber does the best is let the content of the day dictate the format vs. format dictating content. Amber does a beautiful job of looking at the day’s headlines and saying, ‘What’s the best way to address this insane series of headlines?’”

Ruffin will also continue with her duties on Late Night With Seth Meyers, where she is a writer.

The series is produced by Universal Television, a division of Universal Studio Group, and Sethmaker Shoemeyers Productions.

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