Inside CNN’s New Comedy Quiz Show. Yes, You Read That Right
“I believe the word we’re looking for … is motherf*cker.”
This was a correct answer to a question on a CNN comedy quiz show.
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That’s right, a quiz show.
That’s right, comedy.
That’s right… CNN!
The show is Have I Got News For You, which debuted Sept. 14 and is now streaming on Max. Hosted by Roy Wood Jr. and featuring comedians Michael Ian Black and Amber Ruffin as regular panelists alongside two guests per episode, the program satirizes and reflects on the week’s news. And the question to match that first answer, in case you were wondering, was what Kamala Harris may have nearly called Donald Trump at one point during last week’s presidential debate, but seemed to swerve from uttering at the last second.
A weekly satirical quiz show on a network not normally known for comedy, debuting at a time of fragmenting audiences, intensely polarized political discourse, and late-night TV budget cuts, feels like a big gamble for CNN. Just last week, The Tonight Show With Jimmy Fallon cut its number of new weekly episodes from five to four. Late Night With Seth Meyers recently dismissed its house band, while other networks like TBS, the former home of Conan, have seemingly stepped away from late night altogether.
And yet Have I Got News For You, or HIGNFY for short, is just arriving to the party. It is a U.S. remake of a British show that has remained popular for more than 30 years and routinely attracts high-profile politicians, newsmakers, and celebrities across the pond. The regular panelists there — comedians Paul Merton and satirical magazine editor Ian Hislop — have become household names for their spirited takes and jokes on the news. The show’s longevity is all the more remarkable when you consider that fierce competition and fickle viewer habits on British television makes it rare for any show to remain on screens for more than a decade.
It is an experiment that intrigues Wood, who used to be a correspondent at The Daily Show and notably hosted the White House Correspondents Dinner last year. “I want to try to do different things, and the fact that they’re doing [a] panel show, which isn’t frequent in America, and then they’re doing comedy on a network where comedy does not appear frequently — that’s a real fucking risk, and that excites me,” he says.
There are some tweaks in the show’s stateside iteration. Episodes in the U.S. are twice as long at 60 minutes, which results in more improvised comedy exchanges. The set is also different, with the British version featuring a backdrop of fake tabloid headlines reflecting how print media drives the U.K. news agenda. But the quiz rounds are similar, such as the “Missing Words Round,” where guests fill in humorous or correct answers from headlines. Or the “Odd One Out” round, where four pictures are shown and guests have to guess which image does not fit the pattern.
The U.S. premiere also featured an original segment on last week’s Trump-Harris debate, playing clips of bizarre statements Trump made onstage and asking panelists to speculate about how the moderator had sparked the remark in question. After playing a clip of Trump’s false claim that Haitian immigrants are “eating the dogs, they are eating the cats” in Springfield, Ohio, Ruffin responded, “The question is… What is the most racist thing you can think of?”
“I think the show is a lot easier than your run-of-the-mill panel show, because it is so exactly short-form improvisation,” says Ruffin, who had her own critically lauded late-night show on Peacock for three years. “They give you your rules, and they give you a suggestion, and then you’re allowed to bug out within those teeny little confines.”
A BIG PART OF ITS SUCCESS overseas is also the familiarity. While the guest panelists rotate, the permanent panelists remain the same, providing an appointment-viewing feel. In the U.K., the host Angus Deayton was replaced in 2002 by guest hosts after a tabloid scandal, but the show’s panelists have remained a fixture since the very beginning. In fact, Hislop has been on the show for every one of its 600 plus episodes, including one where he had appendicitis and came to the studio straight from the emergency ward.
“It’s a comedy show masquerading as a quiz show,” says Jimmy Mulville, who created Have I Got News For You and runs Hat Trick Productions, the production company behind both the U.S. and U.K. versions. “In fact, if you get the chemistry right between the host and the two team captains, it’s a sitcom, sitting inside a quiz, sitting inside a comedy show. That hybrid nature, I think, works really well.”
But still … CNN? “Since Gutfeld!, look, anything goes,” jokes Ruffin, referring to the Fox News late-night show hosted by former men’s magazine editor and current right-wing provocateur Greg Gutfeld. “But if you look at the landscape, late night is becoming more news-focused. And with news channels choosing more opinion shows, this was kind of inevitable, the meeting of comedy and topical news on a news station.”
Mark Thompson, CNN’s chairman and CEO, has a long history with HIGNFY. A Brit who previously served as CEO of The New York Times in 2012, helping to revive the paper’s digital fortunes, he previously oversaw the BBC department that commissioned the show back in the 1990s. He later became a senior executive, moving the panel program to the BBC’s flagship channel, and eventually became the broadcaster’s top role, Director General — arguably the most influential media role in the U.K.
With CNN, Thompson inherited a 24-hour news network in turmoil, with declining cable ratings and a calamitous folding of its own newly-launched streaming service CNN+. As well as overhauling its digital offerings, in recent months the channel has reinvested in original films and series it had previously scaled back, such as Eva Longoria: Searching for Spain. CNN has also been airing HBO’s Real Time With Bill Maher on Saturday nights, before the HIGNFY slot.
Mulville, for one, was happy to have someone at the head of the network who was already familiar with the show. “When he took over CNN, he and I had a conversation,” said Mulville. “I just said, ‘I don’t have to explain the idea to you.’ Explaining to most American entertainment executives can be challenging, because their paradigm for ‘quiz’ is that people answer questions in a straightforward manner. They get pumped in a very structured way, and there’s a prize at the end. And as you know, if you have watched Have I Got News For You, the points don’t matter and people win fuck all.”
THE QUIZ HAD INTEREST from other networks before, including Bravo in 2005 and NBC in 2009, but neither went beyond pilots. Mulville said those networks preferred the format to be more pop-culture and celebrity-based, whereas CNN’s news agenda can better replicate the original format.
“We can deal with really big, important, serious stories because CNN has been talking about them all week,” Mulville says.
“That sort of newsy British panel show just does not exist here,” notes Black. “ I don’t know why; it has always seemed like perfect architecture for somebody here, and yet, for some reason, nobody’s quite figured it out. Now, has CNN figured it out? I have no idea, but I’m optimistic, if only because the directive from CNN to us was to just go as far as we want to go.”
After accepting the offer to host, Wood told producers that he did not want the show’s agenda to be influenced by what CNN is covering. He received reassurances from Thompson and Mulville that this wouldn’t be the case. “My hope for this show is that CNN is its own thing,” Wood says, “and this show becomes that cool sidecar accompaniment to the mothership.”
Episodes are recorded on Fridays and air on Saturdays. “We’re probably not going to tape until late in the day, like six, seven o’clock,” says Wood. “So even if the media tries to sneak something in on a four-thirty press dump, we got you bitch, there’s no escape.”
As the British version airs on BBC, a broadcaster that strives for impartiality because it receives public funding, HIGNFY traditionally takes shots at all politicians, which Mulville says positions the show as “a kind of soft opposition to whoever is in power.” It is this philosophy which is also being taken to the U.S. version, where the first guest panelists were the libertarian political pundit Matt Welch and the comedian and actress Robin Thede, creator and star of A Black Lady Sketch Show on HBO.
“We need to be equal. I said to the CNN team, Have I Got News For You, when it’s working, gets complaints from the right and the left,” says Mulville. “We need to punish both the Democrats and the Republicans.”
“We’re not looking for an echo chamber,” says Black. “We’re not looking for platitudes. We’re not looking for talking points. It’s important to call out bad Democrat behavior, bad Republican behavior, bad public behavior, and to do the opposite if a Republican does something really well, bravo, and give it to them.”
Appearing as a guest panelist or host on HIGNFY can be a sign of respectability on British television, but it can be fraught with danger. In a recent British episode, former English footballer and guest host Gary Neville was grilled by Hislop about receiving money from a Qatar-based broadcaster during the World Cup, despite that country’s poor record on LGBTQ+ rights.
“My view has always been that you either highlight the issues and challenges in these countries and speak about them, or you basically don’t say anything and you stay at home,” Neville told the audience in a contortion of logic when the topic came up. “I’ve always said we should challenge.”
“There’s another option: You stay at home and highlight the abuses. You don’t have to take Qataris’ money,” responded Hislop, to which the audience applauded.
No-shows are also pilloried. One notable episode from June 1993 was supposed to feature the then British Conservative MP Roy Hattersley, but having canceled at the last minute and for the third time, he was replaced on the set by a tub of lard. It remained on the desk for the episode’s duration “as his replacement is likely to give such the same performance and imbued with the same qualities,” quipped Deayton, then host.
It wasn’t just a one-time thing. In 2016, former Conservative Education Secretary Nicky Morgan pulled out from appearing on the show after she criticized the then British Prime Minister Theresa May’s ￡995 ($1,303) leather trousers, despite owning an expensive designer handbag herself. So, naturally, they replaced her on a show with a handbag.
Wood promises there won’t be “gotcha moments” in the U.S. version of the show, but he hopes it will be a place “where politicians can come and kick back and punch, but also be punched.” He explains, “I think that is what has made the U.K. version so special is that you can bring someone on who doesn’t realize they’re getting laughed at, so we can all laugh at them. Then you also could bring someone on who’s smart enough to punch back. That’s still interesting television.”
The U.K. version of HIGNFY has featured politicians that many viewers were not fans of, such as former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson. Wood’s wishlist include Gretchen Whitmer, the governor of Michigan, and Nikki Haley, former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations under the Trump administration who suspended her presidential campaign in March.
“I wouldn’t mind RFK [Jr.] as a guest,” Wood muses. “It would be funny, I guarantee you that. And it would be, at times, very ‘what the fuck is happening?’ But informative at the end of the day. And I think that part of it is fun to see.”
The fun, though, conceals something significant and action-oriented at its root, Wood says: “The thing that I’m trying to remain conscious about with the American version of this is that there are still a lot of people suffering under a lot of these policies that are quarterbacked by people that were thrown around [to appear] as guests. And so there’s a way to tend to the wounds of people that are in pain, while creating a space of accountability or explaining yourself for people that have pushed some of these policies.
“I don’t want to laugh at stuff that’s insensitive, but at the end of the day, we’ve had six days to yell, curse, and cry,” Wood adds. “On Saturday nights, we will laugh.”
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