Netflix has abruptly cancelled the show The Break with Michelle Wolf after just 10 episodes, while it was on a brief hiatus. I had watched all of the shows and am puzzled by the cancellation. Netflix has not given its reasons for the decision and since it keeps its audience view numbers private, it is hard to know what triggered this.
Well, that was fast. On Friday, Netflix quietly pulled the plug on The Break with Michelle Wolf, one of the only “late-night” shows on “television” hosted by a female comedian, just three months after it premiered.
…“None of us can believe how classlessly Netflix has handled this,” a source connected to the show told The Daily Beast after the news broke, noting that the entire writing staff and even the showrunners found out they had been fired on Twitter.
…The utter opacity of Netflix’s model makes it impossible to know how many people were watching The Break on a weekly basis, but the show’s cultural impact could be felt on a near-weekly basis. Wolf is an expert at outraging conservatives—perhaps something Netflix was less-than-thrilled about—from her “God bless abortions” segment over the 4th of July to her commercial parody that equated ICE to ISIS a couple of weeks later.
Here is a clip from one of her last shows.
I am sorry to see her lose the show. She, along with Samantha Bee, was one of the few women hosts of such shows and they tackled topics and took stances that would be difficult for male hosts to do convincingly. She had a fearless attitude but delivered her barbs with a constant smile on her face.
I hope somebody else picks up her show.
I had been waiting for an excuse to cancel my netflix sub, and sign out.
So long, and thanks for the 4tb hard drive full of movies!
Her writer’s room wasn’t that funny, anyway.
Her entire act wasn’t very funny. I was surprised that she got the show in the first place on the strength of her performance at that White House press shindig, as her jokes were frequently cringe-inducing. Sometimes she even appeared to be aiming for the cringe intentionally.
Which is a shame, because the points she was making were consistently good; plenty of those jabs she took at people hit home. Perhaps if she had garnered a little more experience before going solo, she could have done very well.
Holms,
Did she get the show because of her WHCA dinner performance? I feel that these shows are planned well in advance and that she may have got the WHCA invitation because she was getting her own show.
If I had to guess, I’d say it might be to do with the writing team not consistently producing enough good material. There were points in the later shows in that first series where it just seemed to be coasting.
Keep in mind that, while Netflix has been producing single-shot comedy specials for a long time, they don’t appear to have a lot of experience with a weekly format that’s solely humour (i.e., no plot or story to pick up the slack) where you have to grind out good jokes week after week after week, on a deadline. I’d imagine that’s rather difficult to do.
Her voice reminds me of Bobcat Goldthwait.
Mano,
I don’t know, I’m not a watcher of much television so that is just the impression I had. I only knew her from that correspondents’ dinner, and then she had a tv show… I could easily be inferring from too little information.
Liked her a part of The Daily Show team, but I just couldn’t get behind a whole 30 minutes of her.
I just wasn’t laughing very much (if at all).