Katherine Newbury (Emma Thompson) is a longtime late night talk show host. Her show has been declining for a decade. She is seen as demanding and cold. She is in a loving marriage with Walter Lovell (John Lithgow) despite his long illness. When she is challenged for being a hypocrite who hates young women, she orders the hiring a young female writer. In walks Molly Patel (Mindy Kaling). She worked at a chemical plant but saw herself as the funniest person at work. She is obsessed with comedy and admires Katherine as a hero. Her dream job is a lot tougher than expected especially when Katherine is told that this is to be her last season.

This is trying to be The Devil Wears Prada for late night. Emma Thompson is playing a female David Letterman. The main problem is that no such person has ever existed. This is fake in the way that it couldn't have happened. Joan Rivers is the only female late night host during her time and her story is nothing like Newbury. It also doesn't help that Emma Thompson doesn't have the right skill set. I guess that she is comparable to Ellen DeGeneres but she is still not a natural standup comedian. That's why she works better earlier in the movie when the show isn't funny. When she transitions to be funny again, it doesn't work because she doesn't feel right. The White Savior bit is the only good bit and that's because it's not a standup act. It's actually almost funny. Everything else is fine. The general story and Mindy Kaling's part are all well done. The combination of Newbury and Thompson keeps this from achieving reality.

It's an amusing comedy about how a completely unprepared Mindy Kaling lucks into a staff writing job at the only late night talk show hosted by a woman -- Emma Thompson -- when out of the blue she tells her producer to hire a woman; all her writers are young-to-middle-aged White men who have no contact with the star, are terribly anxious about keeping their jobs, because the show has been on a steady decade-long decline, and the crisis has come; the head of network thinks the show is old, tired, too White, and it's time to pull the plug on the star.

Fortunately, Miss Kaling (who wrote the movie) adores Miss Thompson, knows exactly what needs to be done, and over the course of the movie, starts to unclog the drain. Stated baldly, Miss Kaling is the Magical Negro of this movie. To be fair, we should update Spike Lee's term and call her the Magical Minority. The fact that the movie centers itself around her and her relationship with Miss Thompson doesn't affect the trope. All the movie requires is for Miss Kaling to say nothing offensive, while Miss Thompson has the Augean task of playing someone demanding, nasty and snobbish, and still have the audience on her side .... which she does. Happily for her character, she is married to John Lithgow, a well-known genius who happens to be dying of palsy. His role seems to have been sliced down to make more room for frat-boy digs at Miss Kaling.

There are some funny bits in the movie, which is a good thing, so far as I am concerned. However, Miss Kaling's script is the equivalent of a magician's force, in which you wind up picking the card that the magician wants you to, so he can astonish you by telling you what card you picked. The real trick is doing it so you don't notice the force. If you do, the joy is gone.

Emma Thompson is Katherine Newbury. A British progressive late night talk show host. However her show is in trouble, she is deemed to be old hat and ratings are down. Newbury is no longer in with the hip crowd.

The network plans to replace Newbury with a funny but racist and sexist stand up comedian. He is in with the young social media savvy crowd.

Newbury decides to freshen up her writing team who are all white men. So they hire a woman, an asian woman Molly Patel (Mindy Kaling) who has no experience in comedy writing and worked in a chemical plant. It looks like no established female comedy writers exist in America!

Late Night is a formulaic rehash of movies like The Devil Wears Prada. It is an appalling imbecile film.

Newbury is a terribly unlikeable misanthrope who is out of touch. She is a horrible woman. She fires some of her writing staff on a whim, she never visits the writer's room and did not even know that one of her favourite writer had died of cancer some years ago. Newbury is supposedly a right on liberal who tells it to her audience straight.

Now I understand that television comedy writers are badly treated. If you are a Bob Hope fan look away. Hope used to treat his writers as lackeys, little people who he used to throw dollar notes at which they scrambled to get and then look on in disdain.

Molly is the fish out of water, who constantly gets fired and rehired by Newbury and she suddenly comes up with zingers despite her inexperience in comedy and working in television.

Mindy Kaling has written a weak and cliched script. The only points of interest is old footage of Emma Thompson is used during her days as a stand up comic. The comedian who is going to replace Newbury is called Daniel Tennant. Similar to Doctor Who actor David Tennant, his final lines from that show are repeated here by Newbury.