With Stephen Colbert, ‘John Oliver’ and others on board, Second City has a new path to late-night TV

CHICAGO — The recent news that Chicago’s The Second City comedy theater is adding Stephen Colbert to a new board of advisers means far more than the arrival of a supportive alum adding his name to help an institution that has gone through several crises and reinventions.

It looks to me like a major new pipeline from Chicago comedy to late-night TV.

Second City cast members certainly have found their way there by themselves, as have funny people who spend their formative years at the iO comedy theater, Annoyance Theatre and many others. As I wrote seven years ago on Colbert’s ascendancy to his marquee CBS gig, the Chicago influence on comedy airing around midnight is pervasive. Colbert. Seth Meyers. Amber Ruffin. Cecily Strong, live on a Saturday night.

But those performers mostly have landed there by their own efforts. The Chicago institutions certainly did their best to set up auditions and provide the best showcase possible, but they had only tentative links to the shows themselves. Part of that was by design: for decades, successive, independent-minded owners at Second City worried about their talent being stolen away, just when it was beginning to gel on one of their stages. They didn’t want to be a formal farm team, training performers for someone else’s benefit under someone else’s contract. Especially since TV tends to want people yesterday, once it wants them at all.

Plus there was a certain Chicago pride in that distance from all the coastal careerism. The British poet Philip Larkin used to say he liked living in the remote northern city of Hull because agents and journalists didn’t like changing trains in Doncaster. So too, Second City prided itself on making big names come to it. Meyers has long scouted writers by showing up at the Mainstage show, exactly like everyone else. Bernie Sahlins, the co-founder of Second City and its early driving force, didn’t want to be owned by NBC or anyone else.

But the problem that presented in an increasingly synergy-conscious media was a lack of formal business relationships. James Corden has hosted the Tonys because he is talent within the CBS stable. The networks have their people and they have the inside track.

If you look at the new board, you can see Second City’s new owner, the private equity firm ZMC, gaining a few lanes. Aside from Colbert, you will find Chris Henchy, the co-founder of the comedy video company known as “Funny or Die” (a decent potential partner for Second City’s long-standing interest in short-form video); Brad Jenkins, the CEO of Enfranchisement Productions and a man with strong connections to the Obama administration and its various post-presidency media endeavors; and Laura Kennedy, CEO of the Avalon Group, a talent agency and producer whose shows include “Last Week Tonight with John Oliver.”

I don’t know how the members of this for-profit board are being compensated, if at all, and ZMC said it would have no further comment beyond the announcement, as is its habit.

But if you’re the CEO of a company, or its main creative force, you join the board of another company because you can offer it opportunities to help its business (and, hopefully, its employees). And you’re also there because it can help you: tacitly or otherwise, there will now be an expectation that both Colbert’s and Oliver’s shows will be especially interested in the fortunes of the comedy theater on Wells Street in Chicago. Perhaps we’ll see a branded “Second City” segment on Oliver or Colbert, or a shout-out from the leading talent for the current revue in Chicago. Or maybe it will be possible for directors or writers to work both places at once.

This is good and, frankly, one of the advantages of being bought by a deep-pocketed and wildly connected investor like Strauss Zelnick, himself a former chairman of CBS. ZMC is a widely diversified company, which means it has interests in all kinds of media, including things like gaming, a natural narrative fit for Second City but not anything for which the comedy theater in Old Town has ever developed sufficient bandwidth.

The bad news? The new advisory board has, as far as I can see, no significant Chicago connections. There is certainly an argument to be made that all of these showrunners, producers and agents won’t help it better connect with its audience here, nor will they necessarily help it diversify that audience, which is what many of its current staffers and performers want to see. Those of us who care about Chicago’s history as a generator of cultural content for the rest of the nation and world, as distinct from being a gritty location, will need to keep watch. But as we all know, it’s tough to fight the hegemony of the coasts.

Better by far to hook up with them.

It’s not like this is entirely new. Andrew Alexander, who just sold Second City, was one of the forces behind SCTV, but that was years ago. So was the moment when Lorne Michaels basically walked away with the entire Toronto cast of The Second City and put them in a show he called “Saturday Night Live.”

Different name, different place. But lots of Second City talent.

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