Comedy on CNN? Incongruous, incompatible? Or incandescent?
It is, at a minimum, incurring some attention: this past Saturday night, Have I Got News For You was the highest rated primetime program on the cable news channel.
The people responsible for making the show are delighted with this development, even if they themselves are a little surprised.
“Doing comedy on CNN about the news is something I could not have forecasted in a million years,” says Jodi Lennon, who is co-executive producer and a writer for the series.
It’s on at 9pm on Saturday night, and if that doesn’t sound like late night, the format and the ambitions—a willingness to compare how their show handled the Zelensky White House debacle to SNL’s cold open the same night—surely do.
Head writer Mason Steinberg says of the show: “Definitely, without a doubt, it has a late-night feel. Because it’s obviously topical in a news space.”
And then there’s this. Jim Biederman, HIGNFY’s executive producer and showrunner, sees the show as part of a weekend continuum of shows that joke about the news, in a distinctive late-night way.
“Bill Maher is first because he’s doing it on Friday night. For the weekend shows, we’re first to get in jokes, then Saturday Night Live gets it, then on Sunday you have [John] Oliver, and then on Monday, from our point of view, The Daily Show episode which is worth watching, which is Jon Stewart’s.”
Biederman cites two specific late-night segments as inspirations for the HIGNFY team. “Seth Meyers’ ‘Closer Look,’ and SNL’s ‘Weekend Update.’ Those are like our: ‘OK, Are our jokes like that?’ I mean, on ‘Weekend Update’ the jokes are really impressive. And Seth’s take is what we really like, which like the smart/silly.”
Although Have I Got News For You is a panel show with some faux game-show elements (like two teams “captained” by its regular comic participants, Amber Ruffin and Michael Ian Black), it’s also host-centric, in a very late-night way.
And Roy Wood Jr, not too distant from his run on The Daily Show, is that crucial player.
“We really could not have picked a better host,” Biederman says. The joke-writing on the show is all about Wood, who doesn’t do a monologue per se, but cuts real jokes into every segment, some of which he writes himself.
“Roy puts so much thought into the way he delivers a joke,” Steinberg says. “He’s as thoughtful as anyone I’ve ever worked with.”
Ruffin, of course, had her own, well-regarded late-night show on Peacock and is a regular writer/performer on Late Night with Seth Meyers. She’s been in the news herself for apparently being too edgy for the people putting on the White House Correspondent’s Dinner—and thus disinvited.
Ruffin addressed that issue on last week’s episode in some unfettered and utterly uncensored comments. Censoring is not a part of this show. “We’ve told them they can say whatever they want,” Lennon says.
Black has become the in-house, much-informed, sound-off voice, not discouraged from confronting a political guest he is rankled by—usually in a funny way.
“Paramount to everything,” Biederman says, “this is a comedy show.”
The comedy is emphasized in the editing, which is extensive. The show tapes on Friday evening for two hours, which get reduced to 42 minutes.
Lennon says she and Biederman carve the show down, even one time reducing a 30-minute segment to five minutes. “We have to, though it can drive us both crazy.”
All the key elements of the show come from the template of the show of the same name that has run in the UK for over three decades. For Biederman, the fifth time was the charm in adapting the show for American TV.
He made pilots for Bravo (2004); NBC (2009); TBS (2012) and ABC (2020). The last one was intended to fill in for Jimmy Kimmel on ABC on Friday nights, but COVID intervened.
In three cases, British producers who had moved to the US were involved, speaking to their fondness for the original. The latest is CNN CEO Mark Thompson who didn’t even demand a pilot for the fifth effort. He just wanted an American version of a show he loved when he led the BBC.
Having already brought a replay of HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher to Saturdays, Thompson saw a way to match it up with Have I Got News For You.
The British production company behind the original, Hat Trick, gives regular notes, although it isn’t an active participant in the production of its American spinoff. One note, Biederman says, was about too much Trump-centric material. Their argument: “The show when it really works is an equal-opportunity offender,” Biederman says. But he counters. “The world hasn’t had to deal with a guy who’s so, I mean, it’s a firehose. It’s just constant.”
Many of the show’s segments, which are mostly news-oriented game-show style questions, under headings like “Lie-Curious” and “Offend-O-Meter,” come directly from the British version.
“The quiz show element is a Trojan horse for us to joke about the news,” Lennon says. The production team had added a few topic cards of its own, which may qualify as “reciprocal” ideas. “We’re putting a 78 percent tariff on the British ones,” Steinberg jokes.
The writers do not write jokes for the comic regulars, nor the political-type guests. They encourage the non-entertainment guests to be natural, not to try to be funny.
The one major offender of that proscription so far was Republican representative Mike Lawler, who unexpectedly broke into a pro-Trump musical parody of the Beach Boys song, “Kokomo:” “Aruba, Jamaica, Panama, I’m gonna take ya.”
“We didn’t edit it out,” a still-pained-sounding Lennon says. Steinberg adds, “You’ve never seen someone so eager to shoehorn something into a conversation.”
The show’s spring season will conclude with two more episodes, one Saturday and one next week.
That was labeled the “second” season after a fall run of ten episodes. As for a third, it’s not official yet, but the production team is all in.
“If they ask us to do more,” Biederman says, “yeah of course we will.”
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the UK show rotates a new guest host each week, ever since the original host was obliged to “step away” after becoming the butt of cocaine and hooker related jokes himself. Roy Wood Jnr was drafted in for this spot to mark the launch of the US show, so now he’s done both