Netflix’s ‘The Break with Michelle Wolf’ Is Subtly Challenging Late Night

Late night has been able to get away with a lot lately. Stephen Colbert routinely makes veiled innuendos about the size of Trump’s package. Seth Meyers has an entire segment on his show devoted to politically incorrect jokes he can’t say. But Netflix’s latest talk show, The Break with Michelle Wolf, exists in an entirely different realm of intentionally inappropriate. Though it’s only been on the air for five episodes, The Break has already gleefully smashed through the unspoken barriers of late night talk shows and silently highlighted just how grossly sweet Wolf’s competitors can be.

When The Break first premiered, Wolf promised that she was going to do just that. If you hated her White House Correspondents’ Dinner, you were going to hate her Netflix show too… And Wolf has lived up to her promise. In its first few episodes, The Break has called out Bill Clinton for not giving Monica Lewinsky oral, slammed ABC for giving Roseanne Barr a show in the first place, aired a sketch exclusively devoted to mocking the New York Times‘ opinion section (with special scathing attention given to Bari Weiss), and shown multiple explicitly feminist sketches. It may still be a new talk show, but The Break’s message is clear. Much like the John Stewart era of The Daily Show, this is a liberal talk show dedicated to exposing the hypocrisy of both sides (but predominantly the Trump administration). It can be harsh — almost cringe-worthily so — but The Break uses comedy as accountability. And it uses it well.

Wolf’s take-no-prisoners approach inadvertently highlights how happily Stephen Colbert’s The Late Show, Seth Meyer’s Late Night, and Trevor Noah’s The Daily Show attack the Trump administration and its supporters, as well as these shows’ relative silence when it comes to mocking liberals. Her pointed jabs show how toothless and sloppy some of Jimmy Kimmel Live‘s Trump takedowns are. AndThe Break‘s love of pulling in genuinely entertaining guests who have something to say, like Amber Ruffin and Hannibal Buress, quietly point out how hollow most of the guests appearances on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon have become.

Even Wolf’s refusal to apologize for her White House Correspondents’ Dinner pits her against another beloved late night host — Samantha Bee. Though Full Frontal with Samantha Bee and The Break have the same fearless ethos, Bee lost some of that confidence and was ultimately forced to apologize for a joke she made about Melania Trump. Wolf still hasn’t apologized for her comments about Sarah Huckabee Sanders or really anything on her late night show. Whether or not these apologies were warranted is another discussion entirely. The fact remains that Wolf didn’t have to defend or apologize her jokes. Bee did.

Of course, the circumstances between Wolf and Bee are drastically different. Because Netflix isn’t dependent on advertising, when she outrages people there are no companies people can boycott except Netflix itself. And as the controversy around Dear White People has proven, anger over the existence of one show isn’t enough to convince a noticeable number of people to cut off their connection to Stranger Things, Queer Eye, and Ozark. Though a “boycott Netflix” campaign was started after Dear White People‘s trailer was released, the critically-acclaimed show has since been renewed for a third season.

As long as Netflix and her team approve it, Wolf can say it. And it’s that full embrace of a censor-free show that makes The Break so appealing. In that way, The Break is perhaps the closest to another controversial, weekly, and censor-free late night show, Last Week Tonight with John Oliver. But whereas Last Week Tonight deep dives into complicated topics that are too often glossed over by mainstream news, The Break has set its sights on examining the political news of the week, much like its daily peers. And it’s consistently proving it can hit way, way harder.

Stream The Break with Michelle Wolf on Netflix