Wanda Sykes Has a Show her busy life's an unending adventure
LOS ANGELES — Wanda Sykes has trust issues.
This week, a few days before her debut as the host of “The Wanda Sykes Show,” a new weekly talk show that begins on Saturday on Fox, Ms. Sykes recalled that her last venture with that broadcast network did not work out exactly as hoped.
Her more recent experience, as a regular character on “The New Adventures of Old Christine” on CBS, has also brought frustrations. Despite the show’s solid performance in its first two years, CBS shuffled it between two time slots in the second and third seasons. In the last two seasons the network has been slow to commit to extending the show’s run.
When “Wanda at Large,” a situation comedy, started as a midseason replacement in March 2003, it was scheduled after “American Idol,” and Fox executives assured her, she said, that they were fully behind the show. But the next fall, it was moved to Friday nights — the valley of death on the broadcast networks — and was canceled within a few weeks.
“It’s just the business of network TV,” Ms. Sykes said with a sigh. “It wasn’t just Fox I was leery about. It was the whole thing of: ‘Do I really want to get back in there? I know how hard it is to launch a show. Do I want to spend that much energy, and everything is just left up to them?’ ”
It is that ability to speak uncomfortable truths that has gotten Ms. Sykes her newest job and has gotten her into places she did not expect to be. Like, for example, onstage at a gay rights rally in Las Vegas last November, shortly after California voters outlawed gay marriage. After being recognized in the crowd and asked to come onstage, Ms. Sykes, with little forethought, she says, began discussing her feelings as a recently married gay woman, something she had never before done publicly.
“Someone said to me afterward, ‘Do you know what you just did?’ ” she recalled. “I wasn’t really thinking about coming out. I was just speaking from the heart. I think even I was caught a little off guard.”
Soon after, she began regularly referring to her wife, Alex, and their fraternal twin infants in her stand-up act, which was recently featured in an HBO special, “I’ma Be Me.” She also takes on some subjects that other comics might not be willing to touch, at least on television — like the Obamas’ sex life.
It was a different joke this year that drew a rebuke from President Obama’s press secretary, Robert Gibbs. As host of the White House Correspondents Association dinner this spring, Ms. Sykes ripped the conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh for saying that he hoped that the Obama administration would fail; she accused Mr. Limbaugh of treason and referred to 9/11 in calling Mr. Limbaugh the “20th hijacker” who missed his flight because of his well-publicized previous addiction to painkillers. That led Mr. Gibbs to say that 9/11 should not be the subject of jokes and also drew rebukes from conservative commentators.
Todd Yasui, senior vice president for late night programming at Fox, said he did not expect Ms. Sykes to be any less pugnacious on the new show. “When you hire someone like Wanda Sykes, you know her body of work, you know her voice and the tone of her comedy,” he said. “We’re not expecting something timid and mild.”
The new series faces plenty of challenges. It takes over the time period (11 p.m., Eastern and Pacific times; 10, Central time) that was occupied for 14 seasons by “MADtv,” a sketch comedy show. While that show had a long run, Saturday night typically does not draw big audiences, and many of those watching television that late tune in to NBC’s “Saturday Night Live,” which begins a half-hour later.
Of course Ms. Sykes, who is also known for her appearances for several seasons on HBO’s “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” stands out in more ways than one, both from the mostly white cast of “Saturday Night Live” and from the sea of white men who make up the circle of hosts of late-night talk shows. (The exception is George Lopez, whose own late-night talk show begins on Monday on the cable channel TBS.)
Her show is different behind the scenes as well, where her eight-member writing staff includes four women and four blacks. “I think we have more female writers than all the other late-night shows combined,” she said.
The weekly talk show will feature Ms. Sykes doing stand-up material, as well as taped segments of the type used on “The Daily Show With Jon Stewart” or “The Chris Rock Show,” the late-1990s HBO series on which Ms. Sykes was a writer.
Her hourlong program will end with a “Bill Maher-type of panel discussion,” she said, but one that takes place over drinks. The topics will focus on the week’s news but, she said she hoped, they will not lend themselves to easily defined points of view.
Ms. Sykes said she would welcome Mr. Limbaugh, for one, on her show, as well as celebrities who she believes have something to say. “I will not be showing a clip of your new movie,” she warns potential guests. “I want to talk about relevant things and get into some really good arguments. I don’t want to sit around and talk about show biz.”
Knowing that show business is a business, however, she made sure of one thing before she signed on to do the new series — that her time slot was secure.
Comedy? Her standup routine made President Obama laugh at the White House Correspondents' Association dinner this year.
And snowboarding? Well, that's a battle her French-born 35-year-old wife, Alex, is winning.
"Yeah, my wife learned how to do it on the Swiss Alps and what not, which annoys me. I was so happy when she got pregnant. I was like 'Aw. We're going to miss snowboarding season. Too bad,' " Sykes deadpans. "Of course, a couple of days after she gave birth, she was like, 'We can go snowboarding again!' "
Snowboarding is the least of Sykes' concerns these days; she's got a full plate. Her challenge is juggling two TV shows, being a good mom to twin babies (daughter Olivia Lou and son Lucas Claude, born in May) and staying on the front lines of gay rights issues.
Sykes is still co-starring with Julia Louis-Dreyfus in The New Adventures of The Old Christine (8 p.m. ET/PT Wednesday, CBS), and she's launching her talk show, The Wanda Sykes Show, which premieres Saturday at 11 p.m. ET/PT on Fox.
Her hour-long show will feature panel discussions and her biting perspective on current events. There also will be pre-recorded skits.
The show won't be a platform for her gay rights activism – that began after she publicly came out in Las Vegas last year, shortly after California passed Proposition 8, which says that only marriage between a man and a woman is valid in that state. But she will talk about her family life, as she did in her HBO special that aired last month.
Sykes says she hadn't planned to come out. She and her wife were legally married for about a month when Sykes wrapped up a show at Planet Hollywood and ventured into the city to find a rally protesting Prop 8. "They called me out in the crowd and I went up to the mic and I just said what I wanted to say. And it was so funny, because as soon as I left the podium, my wife was like 'Do you know what you just did?' I was like, 'Yeah.' "
Almost immediately, the blogosphere posted videos of Sykes' announcement, and she worried that people would unfairly attack her wife. So far, people haven't bothered the couple too much, she says.
"I was prepared for whatever. But I didn't want a lot of press and nonsense thrown at my wife's direction. I'm the one in show business," Sykes says. "She's her own person."
Coming out has changed her comedy, and it's something that viewers will see on her talk show.
"Being out and just open: It's very liberating. Now I don't have to dance around anything. I don't have to think 'Well, if I say that, they're going to figure this out and that's going to lead to this.' Now, everything is out on the table," she says. "I don't have anything to hide; I can be even bolder."
thanks to EDWARD WYATT andKelley L. Carter
