‘Have I Got News For You’ Sort Of Works

CNN’s new comedy panel show, Have I Got News for You, won’t seem particularly innovative or jarring to regular TV-comedy watchers, except for its odd placement at CNN, where the 10-episode limited series runs Saturday evenings.

Hosted by former Daily Show correspondent Roy Wood, Jr., it’s a one-hour panel show with a bunch of games about the week’s news that deploy short video clips and fill-in-the-headline-blank graphics. It contains DNA not only from Daily Show, but Bill Maher’s old show Politically Incorrect and both versions of the sort-of game show about internet culture @Midnight.

But HIGNFY owes its biggest debt to British comedy panel shows, including the one it’s directly based on. Previous attempts to make an American version were unsuccessful, including one featuring Michael Ian Black, who’s on this version.

Several episodes in, it’s starting to become evident what’s working and what’s not:

What works: Host Roy Wood, Jr. is very funny, as he proved on Daily Show, and his laconic, delivery is a welcome change from the fast-bordering-on-hysterical pace of, say, John Oliver on Last Week Tonight. His jokes and his segment introductions don’t feel rushed; and he is happy to park on a punchline or indulge one of the team captains when they’re onto a good bit, like Black ruminating for a while on the porn site Nude Africa that North Carolina gubernatorial candidate Mark Robinson allegedly frequented. That slow pace, however, contributes to one of the show’s bigger problems…

What’s not working: Have I Got News for You is an hour long, which is just too long. Even without commercials (you can stream it on Max), it feels punishing at 42 minutes. The amount of ridiculous news out there around politics and culture will always be too much to contain in one weekly show. This could be a half hour with fewer segments and leave the audience wanting more while still retaining the laid-back vibe. If this were a streaming-only show, runtime wouldn’t matter, but because it’s on CNN with ads, they have t0 shoehorn it into a half-hour format or a one-hour format without any wiggle room to let the show be as long as it needs to without padding.

What works: Team captains, panelists who appear every week amid rotating guest spots, are Amber Ruffin and Michael Ian Black. By the first episode, both had proven to be absolute comedic dynamite, with great timing and tremendous improv skills. They’re both smart and nerdy and relatively up-to-speed on news and politics, but their jokes and asides never feel pre-scripted like the one-liners you hear on @Midnight. Ruffin and Black are each strong enough comedians to host their own shows. As sidekicks, though, they are blessedly overqualified and hilarious.

What doesn’t work: The attempt to mix in politicians like former U.S. Rep. Charlie Dent or pundits such as Matt Welch along with a fourth comedian feels like a work in progress. It’s great when one of these non-comedians gets in a sharp line, like political advisor Mark McKinnon landing a comedic tag using Wood Jr.’s name, but too often in the first three episodes, they just seem out of their element, fact checking other people on politics or trying not to look too stiff.

What works: Despite the too-long running time and the hodgepodge of guests, you have three distinct comedic voices (Wood, Ruffin and Black) doing great work and feeding each other opportunities. And a running gag that’s already developed, Ruffin disapprovingly following a dirty or overreaching Wood, Jr. jokes with a plaintive “Roy.” repeated over and over has already proven durable. The show is funny overall and that’s what’s most important.

What doesn’t work: Points. There’s a half-hearted attempt to format the show as a series of games that award points to each team, but there’s no scoreboard and no attempt at assigning point values to anything that happens. @Mignight pulls this off by making the point values arbitrary, yet still keeping scores in view so there’s an illusion of stakes. On HIGNFY it doesn’t make sense to have points at all. Lose the game-show trappings and just be a funny panel show.

What works: Making the show weekly instead of trying to milk enough material from the news for a nightly show. Even if some of the material feels dated by the end of the week, as it did the Saturday after Trump/Harris presidential debate, the show has time to draw from a lot of different stories instead of scrambling against daily deadlines.

What doesn’t work: Putting this out on Saturday night in an election year when all eyes will be on Saturday Night Live. CNN is not a great place for this either, but as long as the show remains available on YouTube and Max, most people won’t care where it originated, and there’s nothing new about criticizing CNN for its content.