Amber Ruffin launched her eponymous late-night talkshow during the pandemic and as such has never experienced the roar of her own studio audience.
This will now change in August as The Amber Ruffin Show prepares to bring in a live crowd for the first time.
The Peacock show will introduce a fully vaccinated audience starting on August 13, after Ruffin returns from hiatus. The streamer will require all guests to have had their jabs and will be required to bring their physical vaccination card to prove it.
Ruffin joins the likes of Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Fallon and Jimmy Kimmel, who have all started to bring back audiences over the last few weeks. However, Ruffin’s other boss, Late Night host Seth Meyers told Deadline last week that he wasn’t planning to bring back an audience until September at the earliest.
The Amber Ruffin Show, which shoots in New York at 30 Rock’s Studio 8G, features Ruffin’s friend and announcer Tarik Davis with Jenny Hagel as head writer along with writing supervisor Demi Adejuyigbe and writers Shantira Jackson and Dewayne Perkins. The series was renewed through September.
Hagel told Deadline last year that despite the show being created and produced during the pandemic, it was pretty similar to the one they were planning to make, albeit without an audience.
“The only difference is that we don’t have an audience. While that is a bummer for obvious reasons, it’s fun to get laughs and to have the energy of an audience, in a way, it gives you the freedom to explore different kinds of jokes in the same episode of a show. When you have an audience, the jokes that work are the jokes that those 200 or 300 people get, that’s when you get a big laugh. But it’s also fun to [make] jokes for only five people. It makes every joke get treated with equal weight,” she said.
But before she does get guests giggling, Ruffin herself will be in in Tokyo to cover the Olympics for Peacock. The former gymnastics coach will be providing her own unique, comedic analyses of the competition, as well as a look-back at her own experiences in the world of sports.
The show is produced by Universal Television and Sethmaker Shoemeyers Productions with Ruffin, Meyers, Mike Shoemaker and Jenny Hagel as exec producers.