The Amber Ruffin Show

Plot

Season 1 (2020–2021)

The show begins on Friday, September 25, 2020, taped live from 30 Rockefeller Plaza in the middle of the pandemic, with a 24-minute episode that sets the template. Ruffin opens with a short, visibly joyful monologue on everything from coronavirus to how her show differs from Late Night with Seth Meyers, then banters with her sidekick, Tarik Davis. The first episode's centerpiece sketch introduces the "White Forgiveness Countdown Clock," a device that tallies the seemingly unending string of transgressions against Black people and calculates how long forgiveness should take. It never finishes counting. The episode closes with the first installment of The Cool Down, a deliberate antidote to the news: Ruffin's floating head in a field murmuring calming absurdities until viewers are soothed rather than enraged.

From there the season settles into a rhythm of monologue, sidekick banter, and a rotating cast of segments other late-night shows do not attempt. Ruffin does a bit on the need for White History Month, delivered with deadpan sincerity. She takes on the history of racism in scientific research and explains its relationship to Black vaccine reticence, a topic no other host was touching in 2020. She plays Harriet Tubman in a sketch. She and fellow Late Night writer Jeff Wright perform a musical parody called "Now That's What I Call Spirituals 2021." A February 2021 episode stacks a murder-mystery farce sketch, an '80s power ballad sung directly to the coronavirus, and a Black History Month performance of "Lift Every Voice and Sing" by Broadway performer James T. Lane, during which Ruffin stands behind him flipping cue cards of commentary. Davis is temporarily replaced that episode by Wright, giving the sidekick chair a revolving-door quality during the pandemic stretch.

The Cool Down is the segment people remember, and the Angela Bassett episode is the one they replay. The staging is the whole joke: a montage of Ruffin's disembodied head drifting over a peaceful field while she recites lines of absurdist comfort, such as "Imagine a hot person smiling at you on the sidewalk," "A sincere apology from your college boyfriend," and "A man with 20/20 vision that confused you with Academy Award winner Angela Bassett." The last line is where the segment breaks open, because Ruffin cannot let the idea go. The meditation spirals into an increasingly earnest love letter to Bassett herself, the soothing voiceover becoming a full confession of admiration, until the show's calmest segment has turned into the funniest. It is the series in miniature: a bit designed to lower the audience's heart rate that instead becomes a showcase for Ruffin's inability to be anything but specific, generous, and ridiculous at the same time.

The season ends where it began, with the news converted into comedy and the audience sent to bed calm. Ruffin states the mission outright in the first episode: "Watching a show about current events can be real anxiety-inducing. And there's nothing we want less than for you to leave our show all riled up." Every episode after that ends in a good mood.

Characters

• Amber Ruffin (Amber Ruffin) is the host and the engine of every segment. She arrived at Late Night with Seth Meyers as the first Black woman to write for a major network late-night show, built the signature segment "Jokes Seth Can't Tell" and the solo interlude "Amber Says What," and in June 2020, after George Floyd's death, Meyers ceded the opening minutes of four Late Night shows so she could describe a lifetime of frightening encounters with police in a way he never could. Her own show is that voice given the whole half hour: joyful, sharp, and allergic to both decorum and despair.
• Tarik Davis (Tarik Davis) is the sidekick, the straight-ish man for the opening banter and a willing participant in sketches. He is briefly replaced in early 2021 by Late Night writer and performer Jeff Wright, who also joins Ruffin for the "Now That's What I Call Spirituals 2021" musical parody.
• Jenny Hagel (Jenny Hagel) is the head writer, Ruffin's longtime Late Night collaborator and co-owner of the production company behind the show. She led the writing staff that earned the series its Emmy nomination.

Interpretations and controversies

No major controversy attaches to the show itself, but its existence was a debate about the genre. Paste argued that its streaming-only placement on Peacock rather than NBC was remarkable because every other attempt at a streaming-only late-night talk show had failed, and predicted, correctly, that most viewers would encounter it as YouTube clips rather than as episodes. The show itself makes the argument that late-night's interviews, guests, and bands were never the point; the comedy was, and everything else was negotiable.