Weekends at the D.L.
D.L.
Hughley is a smart, thinking comedian, as evidenced by his appearances
on panels on “Real Time With Bill Maher” and his act in the movie “The
Original Kings Of Comedy.” It’s too bad that his own show, “Weekends at
the D.L.,” airing 11 p.m. Friday, Saturday and Sunday nights on Comedy
Central, shows only small flashes of that intelligence, and instead
falls into the trap of cleaving to the late night talk show format
without doing anything inventive with it.
Like Craig Ferguson, a likable enough presence who took over for Craig
Kilborn on “The Late Late Show” on CBS, Hughley seems compelled to stick
to a format, perhaps while he gets more comfortable as a late night
host. Unfortunately, the pieces of “Weekends at the D.L.,” a 30-minute
show, seem borrowed from others -- like the panel discussions Bill Maher
uses and in which Hughley himself has taken part and appeared
much sharper; filmed sketches about race that mostly fall short of the
edge displayed by Dave Chapelle on his show; and a regular monologue
that comes off too much like the voices of Hughley’s writers and not
enough like his own voice.
In the panel segments, Hughley isn’t as incisive and involved as Maher
is, so he doesn’t bring as much out of the panelists -- on one of the
first three shows, Lewis Black simply turned to material from his own
act to keep the discussion going. Hughley has made it a trademark of
this show to drink wine and smoke on camera at points in the show, maybe
to make it feel like the viewer is at a comedy club. But this could be
part of the show’s problem -- that this slows Hughley down. Just a
guess. |