Wanda Sykes has trust issues.
Last week, a few days before her debut as the host of The Wanda Sykes Show, a new weekly talk show that began Saturday on Fox, Sykes recalled that her last venture with that broadcast network did not work out exactly as hoped.
When Wanda at Large, a situation comedy, started as a midseason replacement in March 2003, it was scheduled after American Idol, and Fox executives assured her, she said, that they were fully behind the show. But the next fall it was moved to Friday nights and was canceled within a few weeks.
Sykes' more recent experience, as a regular character on The New Adventures of Old Christine on CBS, has also brought frustrations. Despite the show's solid performance in its first two years, CBS shuffled it between two time slots in the second and third seasons.
"It's just the business of network TV," Sykes said with a sigh. "It wasn't just Fox I was leery about. It was the whole thing of ‘Do I really want to get back in there? I know how hard it is to launch a show. Do I want to spend that much energy, and everything is just left up to them?'"
It is that ability to speak uncomfortable truths that has gotten Sykes her newest job and has gotten her into places she did not expect to be. Like, for example, onstage at a gay-rights rally in Las Vegas last November, shortly after California voters outlawed gay marriage. After being recognized in the crowd and asked to come onstage, Sykes, with little forethought, she says, began discussing her feelings as a recently married gay woman, something that she had never before done publicly.
Soon after, Sykes began regularly referring to her wife, Alex, and their fraternal-twin infants in her stand-up act. She also takes on some subjects that other comics might not be willing to touch, at least on television -- such as the Obamas' sex life.
Todd Yasui, the senior vice president for late-night programming at Fox, said he expects Sykes to be just as pugnacious on the new show. "When you hire someone like Wanda Sykes, you know her body of work, you know her voice and the tone of her comedy," he said. "We're not expecting something timid and mild."
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