Last Comic Standing gone… again

by Brian McKim & Traci Skene on March 23rd, 2011

From the FutonCritic.com:

LOS ANGELES (thefutoncritic.com) — NBC has passed on another summer cycle of its veteran reality series “Last Comic Standing,” a network spokesperson has confirmed to the site exclusively.

Craig Robinson hosted the franchise’s most recent edition, which wrapped on August 9 with a season low 3.91 million viewers and a 1.5 rating among adults 18-49.

This is a negative development. The show was good for comedy, at least the last season was. (And we say that not merely because we were on it! The five finalists who spread the cheer throughout ComedyLand on the monster LCS tour were solid, diverse, professional and no doubt a gateway for many thousands to subsequently sample comedy in local comedy clubs.)

For the “haters” who will no doubt crawl out of the woodwork and say that the show’s cancellation is long overdue, we counter that they simply don’t know what they’re talking about. Almost any time standup comedy is presented in a sane manner on primetime network television, it’s a good thing for standup comedy.

And those numbers cited above don’t tell the whole story– at its peak in Season 7, the show was pulling in 7 million viewers (and plenty more via Hulu.com and other viewings). We think NBC will relent and bring the show back yet again. It’s inexpensive to produce, it gets decent numbers in the summer doldrums and, who knows, one of these seasons, they might actually “discover” a comedy star who can anchor some sort of NBC series– A sitcom? A game show? A reality series? Who knows?

We’d start a letter-writing campaign, but we don’t have enough faith in our fellow comics that they’d actually spearhead such a campaign. Of course, fans would love to see the show return, but the comics would have to be the engine for such a movement. And we’re not convinced that they’ve seen the light as far as the clear benefit that the return of LCS would bring.

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