Sarah Silverman Deconstructs Late Night Form and Brings a Lot of Heart in “I Love You, America”
The traditional form of late night is so well established these days, parodying it is getting to be an old move as well.
Still, there’s room for reinvention as Sarah Silverman has shown in premiere of her new series I Love You, America. Right in the series premiere opening, she prefaces how different the show might be (case in point full frontal nudity in the first few minutes of the show) and even offers up a satirical sidekick of a white man at a desk a la most late night talk shows.
Aside from Silverman’s brand of humor that she has rode to success, Silverman leans in to her more genuine persona (something she has been slowly doing over the last couple of years) by actually having heart-to-heart conversations with a Trump voter family over dinner and a former Westboro Baptist Church member in her very living room style studio.
As she had warned, they may not be getting dozens of laughs per minute, but they are engaging and fascinating (and maybe succeeding in territory attempted by a show like Brand X with Russell Brand).
It’s the first episode, so we’ll have to see how I Love You, America progresses, but it is refreshing to Sarah really embody the heart in the title of her show.