🇮🇳 "Throw some melanin up in your Late Night" 🇨🇦

September 17, 2019 7:04 PM

Lilly Singh’s NBC series debut proves late night TV and YouTube need each other Lilly Singh is the first queer woman of color to get her own late night talk show on a major network, and at 30, she’s one of the youngest late night hosts in NBC history. Check out her cold open from the debut episode: Hello my name is Lilly and I ain't a white man/My skin has some colour and it ain't a spray tan/I know you're only used to Jimmys up in the spotlight/But I'm gonna throw some melanin up in your late-night.

Lilly Singh talks late-night, Trump and cultural appropriation [NOWToronto]

Barriers will be broken when A Little Late With Lilly Singh premieres September 16. A drastically underrepresented demographic is getting a loud mic. But as NOW contributor Rachna Raj Kaur asked in a sharp and insightful assessment of Singh’s career in March, what will the YouTube star do with this opportunity?

“The reality of the situation is, I could do whatever I want,” says Singh when I interviewed her in June, addressing concerns that she’s a rather apolitical figure.

“I want my show to be representative of the world, which is why I don’t want to do a show that is just all American politics – especially being a Canadian. I want to talk about women’s issues, race and rights, but through sketch comedy. I’ve always felt that was the best vehicle to talk about issues because people are more receptive. I’m a woman of colour, I have to make social commentary.”

It's Lilly Singh's Turn to Ask the Questions [Marie Claire]

“When my show got announced, people said to me, ‘Ohhh, two billion people are counting on you,’” Singh, 31, says of the pressure funneled her way, not just a result of her being a woman breaking into a man’s world but because she’s a bisexual Indian Canadian woman unleashing a much needed swell of diversity into an aggressively vanilla landscape. She’s also encountered fan after fan relying on her to detonate the glass ceiling. “I’m not viewing that pressure as negative, to be honest,” Singh says cheerfully. “I feel lucky to be in this position. I’m a minority in many, many ways, and I want to make sure that anyone, no matter where they are in the world, can relate and feel represented.”

posted by nightrecordings (9 comments total)

For some added context on just how historic and significant this is, from June: "‘Late Night’ makes late night look bleak for women. So we asked how bad it really is."
posted by nightrecordings at 7:06 PM on September 17, 2019

🙌🏾 Indo-Canada represent! 🙌🏾
posted by Fizz at 7:06 PM on September 17, 2019 [19 favorites]

I can't stay up late for these shows, but this makes me so happy. I hope it does great!
posted by invokeuse at 8:21 PM on September 17, 2019

For those who don't/can't usually stay up that late, but still want to show Lilly support and keep her on the air, subscribe to her YouTube channels:

A Little Late With Lilly Singh

||Superwoman||
posted by nightrecordings at 9:11 PM on September 17, 2019 [1 favorite]

So this is replacing "Last Call with Carson Daly"? Cool. He passed his sell-by date years ago, and late night network TV definitely could use some diversification.
posted by Nat "King" Cole Porter Wagoner at 9:32 PM on September 17, 2019 [2 favorites]

She’s also encountered fan after fan relying on her to detonate the glass ceiling. “I’m not viewing that pressure as negative, to be honest,” Singh says cheerfully. “I feel lucky to be in this position. I’m a minority in many, many ways, and I want to make sure that anyone, no matter where they are in the world, can relate and feel represented.”

I could not imagine being under the burden of not only the pressure of putting on a funny show every night, but also the pressure of being a representative for women, the queer community and basically every non-white ethnicity. It's genuinely alarming.

Anyway, I wish her all the jokes because people will have absolutely no patience if her show is not brilliant out of the gate, and it's late night so they suck for years. (I suspect this is why there's so many white men in late night: only a white man can suck for the years required to get good at it and still have people be willing to give them a chance. Look at Trevor Noah: it took him a while to find his feet and in doing so, everyone stopped caring.)

(I do not know why they're all called Jimmy though, nor why people aren't constantly making fun of how many James and Jimmys there are in late night.)
posted by Merus at 12:12 AM on September 18, 2019 [2 favorites]

> “They’re teaching me about ridiculous things like unions and stuff. And I’m teaching them about community building and social“.

Unions, ridiculous! They’re the well known inverse of community building.
posted by durandal at 2:08 AM on September 18, 2019

Big news for a major network. I'm still angry/sad that we only got 10 episodes of Michelle Wolf's netflix show.
posted by msbrauer at 7:09 AM on September 18, 2019 [2 favorites]

durandal - let's put this in the appropriate context. Spending some time listening to Singh (or a similar slice of desis, particularly those that grew up in remnants of the British empire), reveals that "ridiculous" doesn't have to mean "deserving of ridicule". It can mean "complex" or "out of my world" or "insane I didn't know this" or "OMG". A killer stunt is ridiculous. An amazing outfit is ridiculous. I suppose you could still argue that it's disappointing she didn't know more about unions already, but I would argue that it's far more fantastic that she's leveling up and open to learning while holding a position of power. (How many young white male news anchors on tv do you think actually understand unions?)

I'd also note that in the vid (second link) she reps her diverse writers room : "not because I had to, it's because I could." Yeah, I'm not going to make fun of her about what she didn't used to know. I'm excited about what she'll do now.
posted by BlueBlueElectricBlue at 8:46 AM on September 18, 2019 [3 favorites]