Open this photo in gallery Trevor Noah, seen here, is keeping it simple now, doing The Daily Show from his apartment, dressed in a hoodie and sitting at a table. Comedy Central

When will there be good news? A sure sign of a return to normality will be the return of the late-night shows taped in a studio with an audience present.

Right now, it’s impossible. During the first wave of isolation, social distancing and shelter-in-place advisories, most of the late-night hosts taped short, itsy-bitsy content at home and put it online. That was the easy part.

Now, many are back doing full-length nightly shows, but without the support of in-studio crews and technicians and only the support of staff writers available virtually or by phone. Hardly anything is working well. What you realize, while watching, is that the studio audience is the crucial factor that’s missing.

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Most late-night network shows have a staff of 100 to 150 people. The sudden surge of do-it-yourself shows done from home has been a fascinating phenomenon to observe. It is separating the gifted comics from those who are truly challenged by the lack of a team of expert staff to make everything slick, seamless and funny. But it’s the lack of regular folks in the studio bleachers, primed to laugh at the weakest joke, that is truly devastating.

Who is doing well? Well, Trevor Noah has been a revelation on The Daily Show. He’s formidably bright and astute, as anyone who has seen his stand-up show can attest. He’s keeping it simple now, doing the show from his apartment, dressed in a hoodie and sitting at a table. He does a monologue that’s less crammed with zingers and more given to social commentary. His recent interview with Dr. Anthony Fauci was superbly calm, informative and not diminished by pointless levity.

Several hosts pose at home in front of bookcases. This seems odd since few of them ever actually interview authors. Jimmy Kimmel doesn’t do the bookcase thing and a lot of people must be wondering about those curtains in the background. They’re very distracting.

Open this photo in gallery Kimmel’s show at home sometimes feels slap-dash. ABC

Kimmel’s material should be stronger in this new home-produced arena. His wife is Molly McNearney, the co-head writer and a producer of Jimmy Kimmel Live on ABC. She’s right there in the house with him. And yet Kimmel’s show sometimes feels slap-dash. Mind you, it can’t be easy putting the nuts and bolts together, when you are two joke-writers at home with the kids. As McNearney told The New York Times recently, “It took three hours to shoot six minutes. Just trying to get his eye line correct took forever. He’s used to having a teleprompter guy and a team of 140 people helping him there.”

As a result, Kimmel’s show has featured repeats of pranks carried out by the host over the years. Some of them never get old. But some do.

Seth Meyers struggled a bit to even find the right location. First he seemed to be at a card table on an upstairs landing. The sound and lighting were awful. Then he placed himself in front of the bookcase. That worked. Now he’s been doing the show in what looks like a small attic room he’d really like to escape from. Still, his A Closer Look segments have been as ruthlessly mocking as ever. Meyers has a finely honed sarcasm that is undiminished. It’s just that you can tell he isn’t entirely comfortable with something assembled quickly with the materials and setting that’s on hand.

Stephen Colbert has sometimes worn a suit and tie while hosting from home. Colbert’s show on CBS is the number-one late-night show in the ratings, but the current situation has revealed a surprising poverty of imagination. Just as Kimmel has relied on footage of old pranks, Colbert has relied on his friends and former colleagues – a video interview with John Oliver (they both worked on The Daily Show) was inane, hopelessly stuck in Oliver’s go-to material about HBO giving him the freedom to curse and swear while CBS restricts Colbert.

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The at-home edition of NBC’s The Tonight Show starring Jimmy Fallon is hit-and-miss, but mostly deeply charming. Fallon’s interactions with his two young daughters and his wife amount to a revelation – this feels like the authentic Jimmy Fallon, good-humoured and amiable. (With Noah too, you feel you’re getting the person, not the role he plays.) Not the guy in a suit frantically making the elaborate machine that is The Tonight Show whirl around him.

Anyone who has attended the taping of a late-night talk show is fully aware of how structured and machine-like the production is. Watching late-night now, you realize who can transcend the machine and who cannot.

Finally, this column continues with a “Stay-at-home-period daily-streaming pick” for the next while. Today’s pick is Back to Life (Crave). The drama-mystery-comedy, which follows a woman re-entering the real world after an 18-year prison sentence, is a truly original piece. It’s about melancholy and magnificently so, and one of the strongest series of last year, barely definable by genre-type. It’s also about happiness and the necessity of being upbeat sometimes. The person who is relentlessly upbeat is the central figure, Miri Matteson (Daisy Haggard), just released from jail after serving 18 years for a crime that isn’t revealed until several episodes have unfolded.

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