Bespoke Spoken Here

Christmas came late — or very, very early, depending on how you look at it — when Comedy Central's new sitcom, The Other Two, debuted on January 25 to critical raves.

"The year's first great new comedy," gushed New York magazine's Vulture site. NPR called it "a comedy series so densely funny that even its throwaway jokes deserve to be kept," and Entertainment Weekly said, "[Its] ensemble is across-the-board excellent," summing it up as "a goofy gem." Perhaps most important of all these days, it notched a 94 percent on Rotten Tomatoes.

The Other Two — about a pair of underachieving siblings whose own craven ambitions are sparked when their much younger brother unexpectedly becomes a tween pop star — is not only a hit, it's a particularly desirable kind of hit.

Its urbane snark harks back to 30 Rock's razor-sharp screwballery, and, like that show, it was created by a pair of SNL head writers (Chris Kelly and Sarah Schneider). It's smart, quotable and buzz-provoking.

That Comedy Central renewed it for a second season a mere 17 days after its premiere seemed not only a vote of confidence, but a way to prolong that buzz.

Though it still has its share of popular fare — Tosh.O and South Park remain stalwarts; last year's roast of Bruce Willis continued a tradition of crowd-pleasing, star-studded abuse-fests; and Drunk History and Corporate (which just wrapped their sixth and second seasons, respectively) continue to perform respectably — Comedy Central, at 28, has seen its share of the limelight reduced of late by Netflix, Amazon and other new competitors.

"It's not that they've lost their way," says Stacey Schulman, chief marketing officer at the Katz Media Group. "It's just that things have evolved and they're no longer the tastemaker."

What changed? It's hard to overestimate the effect of losing Stephen Colbert (in December 2014) and Daily Show host Jon Stewart (in August 2015). When they left, they were by far the most popular, newsworthy and influential talents on the channel… perhaps on cable television overall.

A slew of rising stars from their shows followed them out the door — John Oliver, Samantha Bee, Jessica Williams, Michelle Wolf and Hasan Minhaj — and went on to topline their own shows elsewhere.

The last few years have also seen the end of a number of popular and/or well-regarded shows, including the sketch vehicles Key & Peele and Inside Amy Schumer, the docu-comedy Nathan for You, the slacker sitcom Workaholics and Chris Hardwick's trivia quiz show, @midnight. Top that off with the recent signoff of Broad City, the channel's most celebrated show of recent years, and it's no wonder you hear the word exodus so much.

In addition, it's a cruel irony that Comedy Central's hip young target audience is the demo most likely to eschew a cable-TV subscription in favor of streaming services, social media and phone apps.

"Their brand has mostly been about how they talk to and embody youth culture," Schulman explains. "[But] youth culture has moved on to finding that content in an on-demand world."

Add to those challenges a mixed-at-best ratings picture and declining ad revenues, and the result is a climate ripe for new ideas. Comedy Central believes it has them.

The first order of business has been pursuing those cord-cutting millennials on other platforms. "The way people watch TV is changing, and we talk about it constantly," says Sarah Babineau, the channel's New York–based co-head of talent and development. "We want to make sure that we're putting our shows where people will watch them."

To that end, Comedy Central has flooded digital and social platforms with content. Some is clips from full episodes, and some is standalone, like the two vignette series Hack Into Broad City and Between the Scenes. The latter, which features clips shot during commercial breaks at The Daily Show with Trevor Noah, won an Emmy for Outstanding Short Form Variety Series in 2017.

All this content is uploaded to Comedy Central's streaming channels, to its app and to social media like Instagram and Facebook. The channel says its digital content received a whopping 5 billion views in 2018, up 108 percent over 2017. A recent press release boasted a 37 percent increase in streaming in the first three weeks of the second fiscal quarter of 2019.

In early March it launched the "Comedy Central Originals" channel on YouTube and aired its first-ever web-debuting stand-up special, Emily Heller's Ice Thickeners.

Topping off all of that, in early May the network hung out its in-house shingle, Comedy Central Productions, which has deals in place with creator Anthony King (Silicon Valley, TBS's Search Party), executive producer Stuart Miller (The Daily Show, Klepper) and production companies Paulilu (Sony's Rough Night) and Irony Point (Netflix's I Think You Should Leave with Tim Robinson).

And those talent defections of the past few years? Babineau is largely dismissive, calling them "just part of the ebb and flow" of running a TV channel. Senior vice-president for communications Steve Albani ascribes a "natural" dynamic to the talent turnover.

"We're entering a new chapter, probably the fourth or fifth chapter of [our] history," he says. "HBO had their Larry Sanders era, then they had their Sopranos era, then their Game of Thrones era."

While unfortunate timing and a changing of the late-night guard accounted for some of the exits, others were surely driven by the outsized paydays possible on premium cable and deep-pocketed streaming services.

As for the Netflixes and Amazons of the world, Derek Baine, research director at S&P Global, says, "I've heard a lot of industry executives bemoaning the fact that you can't compete on a lot of levels when you've got companies that don't really care about short-term cash flow, that are just trying to build those subscriber numbers." He concludes, "At the end of the day, people are going to be interested in money."

That's a situation Comedy Central is eager to counter. "I think it's fair to say that Netflix is sort of like the big-box competitor — they kind of have to be everything to everyone," says Jonas Larsen, the channel's Los Angeles–based co-head of talent and development. "We've always had a very curated approach to stand-up."

Babineau concurs: "If Netflix is vacuuming people up, we are putting on gloves and individually picking certain people that work really well with our brand."

Comedy Central president Kent Alterman offers his own twist: "For us, stand-up isn't just about how many checks we can write and how many [comics] we can get on the air. It's about: who are we in relationships with, that we start early and nurture?"

To stay competitive in the talent-acquisition and retention game, they cannily counter the streaming services' lucrative (but one-dimensional) offers with contracts that offer more and broader exposure via a varied communications infrastructure.

"We have such a rich ecosystem of platforms," Larsen explains. "Our podcast network, our social presence, our digital arm, on-the-ground events like Clusterfest." (That's a live comedy-and-music confab that made its third annual stand June 21–23 in San Francisco.) "We look at it like a big playground for talent to come in and create stuff that can either go on the linear channel or elsewhere — whatever their heart's desire."

The result, Larsen says, is "bespoke" deals that play to each performer's strengths and interests. The channel's recent deal with comic Chris Distefano, for instance, includes a one-hour stand-up special, an animated series, an unscripted show and the continuation of his interstitial-vignette franchise, Stupid Questions with Chris Distefano.

Similarly, comedian Anthony Jeselnik's new deal has him starring in and executive-producing an untitled half-hour TV series, as well as hosting an original weekly podcast. A recent pact with Aussie funnyman Jim Jefferies includes a first look at his future concepts and renews his eponymous late-night news-and-commentary series for a third season.

"We're not relying on an algorithm to tell you what to do," Larsen says. "We're really out there building someone's brand, building someone's career."

Comedian Roy Wood Jr. may be the quintessential exemplar of that model. He made his first appearance under the Comedy Central banner in 2002 at a competitive stand-up show called Laugh Riots. He went on to appear on the channel's stand-up showcase Premium Blend, then as a celebrity contestant on @midnight, and in a number of shorts on the network's website.

That all led, in 2015, to a prized gig as a Daily Show correspondent (which he's still doing), two hour-long headlining specials (in 2017 and 2019) and his current gig: hosting the half-hour stand-up revue This Is Not Happening.

"My evolution with the network has allowed me to go more deeply into my creative psyche," Wood says. "I haven't been pushed to steer away from that."

Another sweetener Comedy Central offers prospective hires: the ability to hype their shows on all of its platforms.

"The biggest complaint that any producer has ever had is, 'My show didn't make it because the network didn't put enough promotion behind it,'" Schulman says. "It's great to be on Netflix, but the power of promotion, the power to actually elevate what you're doing to the degree that people can actually see it and find it, is a different thing, and this is what television — broadcast and cable — do best.

"A brand like Comedy Central can offer something like an anointing: 'Hey, we identify this as something that is valuable and that everyone should see.'"

A different kind of promotion is at play in the channel's current programming strategy, which now sees diversity — in front of and behind the camera — as a new path forward.

Not surprisingly, said path began with the South African Noah's taking the reins at The Daily Show, where viewership among African Americans has nearly doubled since Stewart's exit. And that jump has included a truly surprising diversity two-fer — since late 2017, most of Noah's African-American viewers have been 55 or older.

Female viewership is up too, following the successes of Amy Schumer and Broad City. It's a sign of how much things have changed that, in 2018, the former home of The Man Show (1999–2004) notched its highest-rated year among women 18 to 49 since 2014.

No wonder Comedy Central snapped up the rights to the Amy Poehler–led Parks and Recreation, and that Broad City's Abbi Jacobson and Ilana Glazer have three series in development under their production deal with the channel.

A broadened ethnic palette has also been in the works. When Awkwafina's eponymous new sitcom bowed this summer, it is both a female-driven vehicle and the channel's first series fronted by an Asian American.

A stand-up series set to bow later this year is called The New Negroes, while How to Be a Couple centers on the travails of an interracial twosome. South Side will take viewers inside the world of African-American entrepreneurs in Chicago, and Alternatino, starring Arturo Castro (Broad City , Narcos), will provide a dizzying take on the Hispanic-American experience.

The diversity initiative isn't limited to race, gender and sexual orientation; it will be geographic, cultural and experiential as well, as evidenced by Rory, starring stand-up Rory Scovel and set in rural America. Similarly, Klepper, new from former Daily Show correspondent Jordan Klepper, is a weekly travelogue that finds him exploring off-the-beaten-track subcultures.

"There's no desk and no studio component or anything like that," Babineau says, contrasting it with Klepper's previous project, the failed late-night news spoof The Opposition. "It's actually more in the spirit of an Anthony Bourdain show."

Speaking of former late-night shows: with The Opposition and Larry Wilmore's Nightly Show both having failed to fill Colbert's 11:30 shoes, Comedy Central has decided to veer away from politics in that window and provide, as Larsen puts it, a "palate cleanser."

He notes, "There is Trump fatigue. People don't want to be constantly reminded how crazy and crappy the world around us is, and we want to provide them with an easier and softer path to their bedtime." The channel's everything-old-is-new-again strategy also finds David Spade hosting a half-hour of withering show-biz shade on weeknights.

While the Spade and Klepper shows angle for a breather from the news cycle, some new shows are wading into more real-life issues. With Noah and The Boondocks creator Aaron McGruder, Wood is coproducing a series about two overworked parole officers and their charges. He says Reestablished (tentative title) will feature some hard truths along with the laughs.

"My comedy has always been related to the world around me," Wood explains. "This pilot is an opportunity to tell the story of the 4 million men and women that are going in and out of our incarceration and parole system."

All of this, Alterman says, is a way of expanding the boundaries of what a comedy channel — what this comedy channel — can do. "It's not about choosing between a core audience and a growth audience. Let's just find great talent with a really strong point of view and a unique voice that will appeal to the core audience but also have potential to bring in a growth audience."

What this strategy will foster in Comedy Central's next chapter remains to be seen. But Alterman and Company are wagering that accurately and inclusively mirroring the country and where it's at may inspire a cachet all its own.

Truth as tastemaker — how's that for cutting-edge?

This article originally appeared in emmy magazine, Issue No. 7, 2019