Review: Late Night’s Dissection of TV’s Backstage Politics Is Bizarrely Uneven

Compared to the more lacerating The Larry Sanders Show and 30 Rock, director Nisha Ganatra’s Late Night is a mostly toothless send-up of backstage politics in television, namely the writers’ room of the increasingly dying late-night talk show. Like Molly Patel (Mindy Kaling), a chemical plant efficiency technician who becomes a junior writer on one such show, the film is so desperately earnest in its desire to affirm the possibilities of one of the most limited forms of comedy that even its criticisms are mitigated by its affections.

In a rare bit of incisive commentary, Molly, an amateur stand-up comic with no professional writing experience, manages to score an interview for an open writer position on Katherine Newbury’s (Emma Thompson) late-night show by networking with the CEO of the conglomerate that owns both the chemical plant where Molly works and the TV network that runs Katherine’s show. It’s not as cutting as any of the dozens of jokes 30 Rock made at the expense of General Electric’s ownership of NBC, but it’s nonetheless a pointed reminder of the corporate machinations at work behind the scenes of even filler television shows.

Soon, such moments of social critique are forgotten in the face of an extended character study of Katherine, an ill-tempered narcissist so obsessed with her legacy of Emmy-winning excellence that she refuses to see that her show lapsed long ago into moribund irrelevance and will fire anyone who dares point this out to her. Katherine finally receives a wake-up call from a network executive (a wonderfully acidic Amy Ryan) who informs her that she will be fired at the end of the season. It’s only then that Katherine finally acknowledges that she’s fallen into a rut, and she comes to rely on Molly, the only woman and person of color on a staff of otherwise white, Ivy League-educated men, to shake up her show’s formula.

Kaling, who wrote the film in response to her memories of being brought on as a diversity hire for The Office, portrays Molly as a walking contradiction, a nervous wallflower who struggles to work up the nerve to pitch jokes for Katherine’s show but will shut down a sexist comment from a co-worker in a matter of seconds. Kaling’s strongest material skewers the male-centric world of TV writing, where someone like her can be considered a specialized hire because of her race and sex while white men who are largely hired as a result of their connections think that they got their jobs solely due to their talent. But these points never sound convincing coming from Molly, whose timidity suddenly evaporates when it’s time to give an impassioned speech about the injustices women are subjected to when they break into all-male spaces.

Kaling’s shrewd parody of certain details of the writers’ room, from its demographics to its tunnel vision, doesn’t extend to her assessment of the world of late-night comedy, which bears no relation to her oddly sophisticated, culturally detached conception of the format. The film cannot decide if Katherine, like Molly, is a realistic depiction of a struggling, insecure comic or an avatar of ambitious feminism, which results in jarring oscillations between her overriding concerns over the jokes for each show’s opening monologue and her strident insistence on booking high-brow interviewees like Doris Kearns Goodwin while her colleagues go viral with the likes of Robert Downey Jr. This contradiction is heightened further by Katherine’s fear of using political material at the risk of alienating viewers, a patently absurd concern given the endless referencing of political matters on talk shows and the current era of late-night TV largely subsisting on a steady diet of cracks about our Cheeto in Chief.

On top of this thinly sketched critique of its milieu, Late Night runs through various underdeveloped subplots, from Molly’s interest in another writer, Charlie Fain (Hugh Dancy), whose nice-guy attitude barely masks his manipulative sexism, to the dark secret at the heart of Katherine’s loving marriage to her Parkinson’s-affected husband, Walter (John Lithgow). There’s also an extended storyline involving Ike Barinholtz as a comic who’s a conspicuously dated caricature of Dane Cook. Such diversions merely compound the bizarrely flat dynamic of the film’s look at the bustle behind the scenes of a daily show, robbing Late Night of the manic, farcical energy its premise demands. In portraying the characters and subject matters as irrelevant but still capable of greatness, the film constantly mitigates its most barbed comments with specious, soft-ball encouragement. Perhaps the only thing it captures with razor-sharp accuracy is the degree to which late-night comedy involves so much work to tell jokes that the audience won’t remember the next morning.