Liz Delillo
Staff Writer
Chaotic newscycles throw wrenches into the production processes of late-night comedy shows. On “The Daily Show,” these challenges are tackled through collaboration.
“It changes everything that we do, and it also changes nothing,” said the shows supervising producer Max Browning. “The process, as (Jennifer Flanz) said, has been the same since she hired me as an intern in 2007.”
Browing, Flanz, and other members of the team behind the “The Daily Show” spoke at 10:45 a.m. Tuesday in the Amphitheater for the Chautauqua Lecture Series, with comedian, actor and writer Jeff Stilson moderating the panel. They discussed everything from the history of late-night to the news cycle to the structure of “The Daily Show.”
Co-executive producer Elise Terrell joined the show as a production assistant 20 years ago, and she currently helps manage production of package segments.
Matt O’Brien is a writer and producer at “The Daily Show” and previously served as the head writer on “Conan.”
Supervising producer Browning currently co-runs the Topical Assignments Group, which works on current events, breaking news and deep dives.
Executive producer, writer and showrunner Flanz has worked on the show for over 25 years. She oversaw the transition from Jon Stewart to Trever Noah, the recent shift to a multi-host modality, and Stewart’s return as a host.
Stilson is a comedian, writer and producer who has worked on various late-night television shows. He is best known for “The Chris Rock Show,” “The Osbournes” and “Good Hair.” Stilson contributed as a correspondent to “The Daily Show” in its early years.
Following a montage of clips from “The Daily Show,” Stilson kicked off the panel with a brief history of how late-night television evolved over time.
“I’m a creature of late-night television, and ‘The Daily Show’ is one of the most influential late-night television shows in our history,” he said. “It’s true — late-night television started in 1954 when Steve Allen hosted what was then called ‘Tonight’ and later became ‘The Tonight Show.’ ”
From Johnny Carson to David Letterman, Stilson recounted how impactful these shows, and “The Daily Show” in particular, have been for late-night television.
“If you watch late-night now, you see the fingerprints of ‘The Daily Show’ all over it,” he said.
Stilson and Flanz briefly discussed their time on “The Daily Show” during Craig Kilborn’s tenure as host.
“I came in before Jon, and it was a different show,” she said. “It was a little more pop-culture content, and we still did politics too — but then when Jon came, it became laser-focused and more politically driven.”
The panel then embarked on an explanation of the basic structure of an episode. On Mondays, when Stewart is hosting again, the show has three acts: covering the headlines, a guest interview segment and a handoff.
“Act III on his nights is always a correspondent at the desk that’s going to be hosting the rest of the week,” Flanz said. “We call it the handoff.”
On other nights, the show typically has four acts. After the covering headlines, Act II consists of a self-contained, or “package,” segment, which can be written and produced in advance.
Terrell elaborated how “prepackaged” segments are “when we go out in the world and talk to people in a field piece or do a ‘Man on the Street’ segment or a scripted sketch.”
Because Terrell’s department works on stories in advance, “it’s great to have something to fall back on in the Act II so that we don’t have to worry too much about producing another active material that day,” she said.
“An Act II is topical but maybe not hyper-topical to that day — it’s a little bit broader of a trend or an issue,” O’Brien said. “… Hopefully the topicality of whatever we are addressing is broad enough that it’s got, say, a three- or four-week shelflife, as opposed to ‘Elon (Musk) is yelling at the president,’ and we have to make the jokes today before all the meat is off that bone.”
Stilson joked that his experience working on late-night television looked a little different.
“I worked on Letterman, and all we got is a call at 2:30 p.m. from Dave: ‘I need more jokes.’ That was it — then you’d frantically barf out 10 new jokes for Dave because he wasn’t happy with the jokes.”
Flanz elaborated that their rewriting process is collaborative and takes place between rehearsing and taping, giving the team roughly an hour to rewrite. While the process varies depending on what needs to be done for a given day, rapidly unfolding stories can throw a wrench into production plans, making rewrites much more difficult.
“The worst rewrites were on the day that Elon and Trump started tweeting about each other; it happened at about 4 p.m., and we call it the 4 p.m. curse,” Flanz said. “… You’ve written an entire show from the morning, but you have an audience waiting outside — and they have cell phones, and they have Twitter, and they’re looking at what’s happening — so then they come into the studio at 6 p.m., and if you do the show you were going to do in the morning, they’re waiting the whole time for you to talk about Trump and Elon going at it.”
“If it’s a big enough story at 4 p.m., then we do have to go back in and really overhaul the script,” she said.
While the changing landscape of the newscycle and how people interact with it changes the production process in significant ways, in other respects, the process itself is not all that different from what it used to be.
“There’s definitely a change over the last 12 years of what we consider to be news and how we’re inputting and finding videos on social media,” Browning said.
However, the changing landscape of news and media has worked well for constructing “The Daily Show.”
“The media changed, the pace of the news changed, (but) the way we construct the show has minimally changed and adapted because the process has worked,” Browning said. “Jen has been the leader of the process for 20 years. The process is the thing that keeps us running.”
The rapidity and chaos of the newscycle greatly affects the audience’s expectations regarding both the topicality and comedy components of the show.
“I think late-night comedy, especially, is reactive to whatever is happening that day, things people are talking about,” O’Brien said. Despite the chaos everyone is experiencing, “there’s never been more to react to — so even though the chaos is probably not great overall for our well-being, there’s more for us to write.”
“It keeps us employed, basically, so thank you for suffering,” O’Brien joked.
Although the news fuels the show’s material, they don’t cover every story, head-on.
“If there is something that’s sensitive or touchy or makes us unhappy and uncomfortable, sometimes we don’t go after the story, but we go after the people that are talking about the story (and) that are covering this story, so they can be the butt of our jokes — as opposed to the people that are in the immediate crisis or situation,” Terrell said.
While “The Daily Show” does not cover every big story per se, there are difficult stories that they sometimes want to address nonetheless.
“We don’t feel we have to cover everything, but sometimes we feel that we should be talking about this,” Terrell said.
They face this problem particularly with tragedies, Flanz added.
“It’s sad because there’s a formula to it. This tragedy happens, and then politicians and media come out and have to cover it or take a stance on it for the next 24 to 48 hours,” Flanz said. “You just wait and then surely some politician or journalist or somebody will say something ridiculous, someone else will rebut it, and that will become the story we do on ‘The Daily Show,’ rather than punching down or making fun of the actual tragedy.”
That same formula of waiting, however, can further complicate stories as well.
“It used to be, wait 24 hours (and) you find somebody to make fun of; now, if you wait 24 minutes, somebody’s going to say something, and it changes,” Browning said.
Because stories could potentially shift, collaborating and planning stories ahead of time are crucial pieces of the production process.
“Each department knows what the other is working on and how we can work together,” Terrell said.
Earlier in the panel, she shared that their afternoon meeting is called the “Laughternoon.” During these Laughternoons, “we look at either bigger trends or just viral videos or stories that maybe we haven’t covered in depth yet, but we want a little bit of a longer lead time (on).”
A more recent development for collaboration on “The Daily Show” has been the multi-host modality adopted after Noah left the show. Flanz recounted the time between Noah’s departure and Stewart’s return as both challenging and fun.
“I think that gave us, as a staff, the confidence that we could do this work for anyone because we were literally meeting people and then, within the week, taking them through the whole process and trying to make them look as good as we could in the constraints of ‘The Daily Show,’ ” she said.
The shift to multiple hosts changed what working in the studio looks like in some respects, which Browning views as part of what works well at “The Daily Show.”
“It’s impossible to feel like you can just breeze through the day. It keeps you on your toes, and I think that’s why the show has been so successful — that never feels stale,” Browning said. “It’s always evolving, growing because the news is always changing, and our circumstances are always changing.”
They also discussed working with Lewis Black, famed for his “Back in Black” segments on the show, and who was present in the audience.
“He’s involved in the rewrites. After we rehearse it, he comes up with us and is sitting there hashing it out with the rest of us trying to figure out what parts don’t work. It’s pretty painless, to be honest, because he knows his voice very well,” O’Brien said. “He’s a really fun voice to work and write for, obviously, because he taps into that inner insanity we’re all carrying around and just vocalizes it better than the rest of us.”
