Who else thought this show was going to be really good? I was genuinely excited about it. I know the answer to my question already so don’t bother answering. A LOT of people were jacked up about “Lewis Black’s Root of All Evil”. The audience for the first episode was around 2.3 million people (most of those people being men 18-34) and recorded the second best debut rating for a show on Comedy Central. Dave Chappelle is the only man to do any better. Based on what I now know about the quality of their shows and stand-up, I agree with the Dave winning that battle. Black’s show quickly lost that viewership pretty quickly and was cancelled within 2008 when it started.
The premise of this program sounded great. Lewis Black (glorified political pundit, but funny) plays a judge. He pits two topics against each other (IE. PETA vs. NRA) and had a comedian try to defend the other topic. It sounded like a free-form comedy standoff with Black interjecting. The show kind of did what I hoped, but it seemed to fall flat to me each time. I think a lot of it fell on Comedy Central. I’m not sure if they didn’t let Black write his own stuff so he seemed very stilted and unnatural. If he did write out what he said, someone there should have edited the hell out of it. He seemed uncomfortable the whole show.
Complaints were levied that “Lewis Black’s Root of Evil” employed the use of “second tier” comedians. An article published by Variety Magazine actually uses those words exactly. I’m not sure what the programs detractors were expecting. Did they think Bill Cosby and Ellen DeGeneres were going to be on Black’s little cable show? I don’t think Jerry Seinfeld defending toothpaste against Eddie Murphy was ever going to happen. Would those things be entertaining? Of course they would. But it’s Comedy Central. I love a lot of their programming, but some people are beyond it.
That being said; the comedians on the show are pretty well known. If you follow comedy you certainly know them. If you don’t follow comedy closely, you’d at least recognize Andy Kindler from “Everybody Loves Raymond”. Now Ray Romano facing off against Fred Stoller advocating depression medication would have been fun. If some magazine thinks that Kindler, Greg Giraldo, Paul F. Tompkins, Patton Oswalt, or Andrea Savage are second tier they are crazy. Kathleen Madigan, Andy Daly, and Jerry Minor really aren’t unknowns either. It’s not like they grabbed some open mic comics and shoved them on television. I know at least four of those people have been on network shows.
Okay maybe they aren't that recognizable.
Maybe the writer of the article wasn’t a comedy follower and only watched episodes with Greg Giraldo. So I might be able to give them a pass in realizing the others were professional funny people. I say this because Greg absolutely dominated pretty much every show he was on. He was on 9 of 18 episodes so he killed it very often. He usually won the audience vote, but Lewis Black would smite him for being so great and rule in favor of whomever he was facing. Andy Daly ended up winning the most shows with 4. Coincidently he lost the audience vote 4 times. I have a feeling his victories came at the expense of old Greg.
Not you. I'm talking about something funny
This show came out about a year too late for me to really get into it. If it had come out in 2007 I’d have still been in high school. I went to bed around 10 every night. I watched television until Conan’s monologue was over though so this would have been right in television watching time. It was 2008 though and I was in college. I only worked weekends and my weeknights were a little more exciting. I was still lame, but I wasn’t always at my television. I’m kind of rambling now. I’ll end with asking Comedy Central to put this on Netflix please because I’ll never buy the DVD.
If only to give the world more of this man's greatness. It's been a long 3 years since he passed.