![]() At its best, the show was a canny deconstruction of contemporary late-night comedy, which has been swamped with political satire since Stewart, the former Daily Show host, turned Bush-era liberal outrage comedy into its very own TV genre. For those hoping for the second coming of Jon Stewart, The Break may have been a letdown. To some viewers, this may have seemed like a bait and switch Wolf’s show arrived on the heels of her fantastic and somehow controversial White House Correspondents’ Association dinner speech, which offered no mercy to the president and his enablers in the press. “I guess I’m sort of like a cable news show in that way.” “I’m not gonna try to teach you anything or discuss political policy with you,” she vowed in the first episode. Over the course of ten uneven but steadily improving episodes of her abruptly canceled Netflix series, The Break With Michelle Wolf, the 33-year-old comedian flatly refused to play this part. If The New York Times and CNN have disappointed with their urge to both-sides every issue to death, liberals have come to count on late-night comedians to step into the much-needed role of truth teller. Nothing plays quite like shock and outrage, and when all else fails, there’s always a Donald Trump rally to fill the time or a “whataboutist,” bad-faith take to fill the op-ed pages. As Facebook and Google continue to swallow the advertising industry whole, media outlets ever more desperately chase those coveted clicks and eyeballs, luring audiences with the reliable bait of sensationalism. ![]()
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