Not just another “White Guy Talk Show” debuts late-night weeknights on Fuse

The late-night TV landscape welcomes a new player tonight, as White Guy Talk Show debuts at 10:30 p.m. ET/PT on fuse — with one big catch, or make that two: Neither of its co-hosts are white guys!

Saurin Choksi and Grace Parra, comedians who coincidentally both grew up in Houston, take the helm of the new half-hour talker that jump-starts late-night TV Mondays-Thursdays. Fuse bills it as a show that celebrates “music, movies, social media, celebrity and tech news, but from a point of view that’s 100% unique to the talk show world: a younger, multicultural and millennial point of view.”

“I’m excited because this is a show that’s directly tackling the issue of late night being a predominately white male-driven genre head on, down to the title of the show,” Parra told The Comic’s Comic today. “It’s thrilling for me as both a Mexican and a woman to be at the helm of a new show, and I think it’s so awesome and progressive of Fuse to give us this opportunity. But beyond that, it’s goofy and funny and weird and smart and I’m hopeful that folks from all varieties of human DNA will enjoy it.”

Choksi moved to Detroit after attending the University of Texas and took classes at Second City there, before moving to Chicago to pursue stand-up, and now lives in Brooklyn. He was all over the comedy festival circuit in 2014, from Boston to Bloomington, Asheville to San Francisco and back to Chicago. Parra graduated from Columbia University, then moved west to Los Angeles, where her onscreen credits included How I Met Your Mother, Zeke & Luther, Late Night with Conan O’Brien, The Bonnie Hunt Show, and several TV commercial campaigns. She also hosted live talk shows in L.A. and starred in the webseries, Frida Kahlo: Junior Marketing Exec. Behind the camera, Parra wrote for shows such as Glory Daze on TBS and Work It on ABC.

More importantly, perhaps, she developed and sold a pilot to MTV produced by Jennifer Lopez and Nuyorican Productions — and also hosted NUVOtv’s The Collective, produced by JLo. In 2014, NUVOtv bought Fuse.

Choksi and Parra already have filmed several field segments and sketches in preparation for tonight’s launch. In this clip, they hit the streets of New York City to find out what their potential viewers want to see on TV, and then ask longtime late-night TV writer Joe Toplyn for advice (The Comic’s Comic interviewed Toplyn last year about his years writing for Letterman, Leno, Chevy and more).

Roll the clip!

White Guy Talk Show is executive produced by Brian McCann (longtime writer/performer for Conan O’Brien who more recently helped launch and/or write for Nikki & Sara Live (MTV) and Totally Biased with W. Kamau Bell (FX/FXX)). The writing staff includes Owen Bates, Phoebe Robinson and co-head writers Eric Cunningham and Jenny Hagel.

White Guy Talk Show premieres tonight at 10:30 p.m. ET/PT on Fuse, with airings Monday-Thursday nights, plus repeats the following day at 1:30 a.m., 9:30 a.m., 1 p.m. and 8 p.m.

Sean L. McCarthy

Editor and publisher since 2007, when he was named New York's Funniest Reporter. Former newspaper reporter at the New York Daily News, Boston Herald and smaller dailies and community papers across America. Loves comedy so much he founded this site.

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One thought on “Not just another “White Guy Talk Show” debuts late-night weeknights on Fuse

  1. Title is stupid at best. It’s a mistake to solely define yourself against something or someone else, to the point where your own show’s name makes you look race obsessed. It also ignores the many prominent black talk show hosts over the years, from Oprah (maybe the biggest, so to speak), Arsenio, Montel, Tyra, Sinbad, and lots of others. Maybe you should have called it the Black and White Person Talk Show. Or better yet a positive name that says something about you instead of people you apparently don’t want to identify with. If Fuse wanted to go out of its way to hire non-white hosts they could have done so without making the show’s premise overtly about race.

    But why care about race? Ideas are more important than skin color. If you wanted to do something truly different then why not hire politically conservative hosts? The common denominator between almost all the current talk shows (comedy and otherwise) is that they’re hosted by leftist hacks. There are tons of talented conservative comedians out there who are a lot funnier than Jimmy Fallon, Seth Meyers, John Stewart, etc.. The market for leftist hackery is already saturated. That’s probably why Kamau Bell’s show (another non white host) got cancelled a while back after a brief run. Who cares if he’s “totally biased”? So is everyone else, unfortunately in the same direction right now on most channels. Boring. This “White Guy” show just looks like more of the same. Unoriginal. Of course Fuse won’t put a conservative show on the air because the network is run by leftist hacks.

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