Late Night Women Fighting Each Other

By: Rose McInerney

This time women aren’t fighting men to climb to the top or even to keep their place when they get there.

They’re fighting each other because there’s only so much room, right?

If I have to hear this one more time, I’m going to boycott popcorn until we women get together and straighten things out. But the sad truth is that, while I found myself screaming at the flagrantly stereotypical typecasting and blatantly manipulated scenes in Mindy Kalig’s Late Night, I still enjoyed it.

Photo Credit: Indie Wire

Perhaps, it’s because I’m a sucker for Emma Thompson who plays Kathryn Newberry, a late night comedic talk show host struggling to save her long-running show. The network has announced her contract won’t be renewed because she’s out of touch with audiences.

It’s true, of course. Kathryn is out of touch with audiences, she’s invisible on social media, and she’s so insular that she refuses to hire a woman or a person of color to write material for her show.

Poised to lose it all, she indulges her manager who reluctantly hires a warehouse manager named Molly Patel (played by writer, producer and actor, Mindy Kalig) to change things up.

Hiring Molly, an Indian woman with no experience in the comedy or writing business, certainly pushes the plausibility envelope. It’s a convenient for advancing the plot, even though most people realize comedy shows have a horrible hiring record for women, let alone women of color.

As a writer, producer and actress, Mindy Kalig speaks from experience when she wrote this screenplay directed by Nisha Ganatra.

Photo credit: JustJared.com

The story is entertaining but we know from real life that even superstar Tina Fey has stepped up to call out institutionalized sexism in shows like SNL (Saturday Night Live). When Vanessa Middleton became the first Black female writer at SNL in 1992, she lasted only one season.

In Late Night, Kathryn is a success because she’s ignored women and is a nasty, unappreciative boss. She doesn’t give a flying you-know-what about women even though she reluctantly lets Mindy stay occupy space in the writers’ editorial meetings.

Not even the chopping block is enough to push her queen-size ego over the edge until Molly saves her from repeated media disasters. All this from Molly who is confident one day and breaks down the next sobbing uncontrollably while hiding under her desk after a nasty verbal attack by Kathryn.

Still, it’s hard to believe that Kathryn doesn’t realize her old jokes are too safe and boring, or that her moral high ground includes avoiding political potshots (don’t know if that’s even possible anymore in the comedic world) when her treatment of other women - the show’s producer and a guest YouTube comic – are so despicable.

Nevertheless, the tension fuels the fire in predicable ways. There’s girl-type screaming matches, near hairpulling fights and Kathryn’s masculine persona (short haircut and men’s suits) that all play into the stereotypes we’ve all come to know and hate.

So when Kathryn starts to climb back up the charts after attending an unplanned appearance at a club where her impromptu routine bombs (something Joan River did frequently to test her chops), it takes something bigger like a dormant past affair with an intern to move her to act (reminiscent of David Letterman’s sexual tryst).

The highs and lows of Kathryn’s career comeback are just too predictable because they have happened to many hosts.

But I still say, who cares. I found myself laughing and cheering for Molly and Kathryn and the very predictable outcome.

SPOILER ALERT: Of course, we can expect Molly to be offered a job at a rival station and Kathryn will have to come begging her to come back.

But I know I will always root for women even whether they’re behaving badly or not. I think most women do, although this may be it’s different at the top. I hope not but like any pedestal, it’s crowded no mattered who you are.

I’ve never been there so I’ll never know. But as Canadian Lily Singh heads to NBC as the first female Late Night talk show host in it’s history, we’ll see who’s fighting who as I snuggle up with my bowl of popcorn.