Election Night TV: High anxiety on cable news, flat comedy from Stephen Colbert and Trevor Noah

The Washington Post

"Perhaps the best advice all along was to not turn the TV on this election night — to spend the evening making a good meal, listening to old jazz, reading a book, calmly sipping wine," says Hank Stuever. "While democracy started to crumble before our eyes, people shared song playlists, supplemented with Instagram pictures of dozing dogs and darkened TV screens. Sadly, most of us couldn’t avoid it, or didn’t have the luxury of tuning out. Too much hangs in the balance, and the dead seriousness of the outcome long ago stopped feeling like hyperbole. Having dreaded Tuesday night’s election coverage for, well, four long years now, there was the even more depressing realization that we could not not watch it. It was like forcing yourself to go to the umpteenth sequel of a horror movie in which the basement stairs never end, things just keep going down and down. Everything we were warned about came true: An early surge for President Trump didn’t officially reflect the hundreds of thousands of still uncounted votes in key parts of the swing states that were leaning heavily toward Democratic nominee Joe Biden, and no matter how many times CNN’s John King tried to point this out on his interactive wall map and urge patience and calm, nothing could penetrate his colleague Wolf Blitzer’s usual metabolic over-exuberance for the old ways. Just how many cases of borderline hypertension in American viewers is the cable news industry indirectly or directly responsible for, do you think? A rough guess will do." Stuever adds what fell flattest on election night were the two live late-night specials: Stephen Colbert’s Election Night 2020: Democracy’s Last Stand: Building America Great Again Better 2020 on Showtime and Trevor Noah's Votegasm 2020: What Could Go Wrong? (Again) on Comedy Central. "Now, after four years of pummeling Trump with the apparently useless ammunition of satire and outright disdain, Colbert decided to try again, opening with a tedious animated short from his Our Cartoon President spinoff (a Batman vs. Joker riff, in which Trump is the Joker) and, in his opening introduction, attempting to make light of the evening’s unknowability," says Stuever. "A reading of already old-news election returns resulted in groaner puns and jokes about different states...Noah didn’t fare much better with his show, which was set in his pandemic bunker and co-hosted by comedian Roy Wood Jr. The Daily Show’s usual attempts at humor from its correspondents felt, on this night, like a tired format, left over from a time when elections went more or less as planned — and lawfully."

ALSO:

• Four networks cut away from President Trump's early morning "victory" speech: ABC, CBS, NBC and MSNBC stopped airing Trump's comments shortly after 2 a.m. ET as the president started making false accusations. “We’ve got to dip in here because there have been several statements that are just frankly not true,” Savannah Guthrie told NBC viewers. “We are reluctant to step in, but duty bound to point out when he says ‘we did win this election, we’ve already won,’ that’s not based in the facts at all,” MSNBC’s Brian Williams said as one example, breaking in to the president’s comments and then having election analyst Steve Kornacki explain how there are millions of votes to be counted in several swing states.
• On Fox News, Chris Wallace called Trump's comments an "extremely flammable situation, and the president just threw a match on it": “He hasn’t won these states. Nobody is saying he’s won the states. The states haven’t said that he’s won," said Wallace.
• Fox News' early call of Joe Biden winning Arizona drove Fox News (and the White House) crazy: "The projection buoyed supporters of the Democratic candidate and sent President Trump’s aides into conniptions," according to The New York Times. Arnon Mishkin, the management and polling consultant who has helmed Fox News’ decision desk since 2008, was grilled on air. Then a false rumor that he had retracted the projection emerged and was debunked online. “That’s not true,” Mishkin told Fox News' anchor team. “I’m sorry, the president is not going to be able to take over and win enough votes.” He added: “We’re not wrong in this particular case.”
• On CNN, John King could barely contain his frustration with the excitable Wolf Blitzer
• MSNBC "King of the Board" Steve Kornacki was the only person worth watching on Election Night
• Breaking down how each network's "Magic Wall" star: From MSNBC's Kornacki to Fox News' Bill Hemmer to CNN's King
• Stephen Colbert was glad to be on Showtime again, where he could curse with abandon: "Holy sh*t, this is a weird f*cking election"
• Trevor Noah said during his election special that all drugs should be legal if Trump is reelected
• Roy Wood Jr. really captured the vibe of the nation on Comedy Central holding up two bottles -- one with tequila and the other with his own urine