We Need to Talk (Or Do We?)

Falling under the heading of “just what we needed,” two new late night talk shows made their debuts this week. First up was Fox’s The Wanda Sykes Show (Saturdays, 11pm), a marked improvement over the show it replaces, the self-satisfied and laugh-free Talkshow with Spike Feresten. And while better is, well, better, don’t look for Sykes to pose any kind of threat to Saturday Night Live anytime soon, even though her premiere ratings were literally 100% higher than Feresten’s numbers last season.

From the first episode, it appears that Sykes’s stock in trade is going to be political humor. It’s nice to see that she’s not being asked to steer clear of harping on her corporate brethren over at Fox News—she and those conservative pundits certainly don’t see eye-to-eye—but a full nine minutes of politics in her opening monologue grew tiresome, mainly because none of it was all that funny, a shame given how gifted a comedian Sykes really is. Things perked up a bit during the “Wandarama” segment, her attempt at a “Weekend Update”-type newscall, which was capped by a bit about recycling sex toys and had more uses of the word “dildo” than I think I’ve ever heard on network television.

What about the guests, you ask? This week's trio—Amazing Race host Phil Keoghan, 24's Mary Lynn Rajskub, and Daryl "Chill" Mitchell from Brothers—showed up during a panel discussion at “Wanda’s Bar,” where topics included spanking children and a space hotel set for 2012 (according to the new movie, won't we be in the middle of an apocalypse by then?), all served up with a smart cocktail. This format has been done on Chelsea Lately for years (minus the on-camera booze), but it’s nice to get away from celeb appearances where all they want to do is plug their latest project; here they have to engage in talk about current events. Sykes herself has said that she’s not trying to reinvent the talk show, and that lack of inventiveness in itself is surprisingly refreshing. More than anything, though, The Wanda Sykes Show benefits from the looseness of its star. Sykes is clearly having a good time (can you say that about Letterman?), doesn’t seem nervous in the slightest (hello, Jimmy Fallon), and is comfortable enough in her own skin to make her audience sit back and relax.

George Lopez, on the other hand, seems to want his audience to be anything but relaxed. He’s got an ebullient crowd with him in the studio and spent much of last night’s debut of Lopez Tonight (TBS, Monday-Thursday, 11pm) trying to yell over them, though he was still using his outside voice even when interviewing his guests, if you call letting Eva Longoria Parker talk about how she got a year’s supply of M&Ms an interview.

If Sykes’s hot-button topic of choice is politics, Lopez’s is race. That makes for an edgier monologue than Leno would ever deliver, but I can’t shake the feeling that Lopez is pandering to a segment of the population he thinks wouldn’t get the joke if he dared to give them something smarter. (Here’s a sample punchline re: the slogan for 50 Cent’s fragrance: “Manly, yes, but the bitches like it, too.”) It’s one thing to be able to make ethnocentric jokes, and another thing altogether to dumb yourself down for it. Like Sykes, Lopez isn’t trying anything groundbreaking with the format of his show. And also like Sykes, who is the first black woman to host a late night network talk show, sometimes simply being a groundbreaking individual (Lopez is the first Latino to host a late night show) can be enough. But I wouldn’t fault either of them if they brought a little more funny to the proceedings.

Definitely delivering the comedy goods last night was CBS’s How I Met Your Mother. What do you get when you put Alan Thicke, a Storm Trooper, a guy dressed as the Lost in Space robot, a porno called “Archisexture,” and a ballooning Neil Patrick Harris together? Easily one of the funniest episodes of the season, that’s what.

After realizing that Robin and Barney are miserable as a couple, Ted, Marshall, and Lily set out to break them up by culling things that would remind them of their biggest fights. They needn’t have gone to so much trouble, though, as Robin and Barney—whose relationship has turned them ugly and fat, respectively—see their sorry reflections in a restaurant window and decide that this just isn’t working for them. It’s sad that something Barney spent the majority of last season pining for ultimately didn’t work out, but how great will it be to have the merry womanizer back to his old tricks? Thankfully, since he and Robin are “back together as friends,” there’s no damage to the core quintet. The best thing to come out of the episode, however, is the promise of another Robin Sparkles video. If you haven’t seen the hilarious video for “Let’s Go To the Mall,” click here and soak up the kitschy goodness that is undoubtedly one of Mother’s series highpoints.