The applause, dear God, the applause. It has you bracing against the headboard and groping for the remote when Comics Unleashed detonates on to the screen just before midnight. A soulless barrage of whoops, cheers and apparatchik-grade terror clapping, it hits like a jet engine at takeoff, swallowing the show’s disembodied announcer in a silo of his own manufactured zaniness.

The applause snuffs out introductions to the guests, all standup comics – a who’s who of who’s that – and upstages a modest studio audience that appears to have been rounded up from pamphlet-clutching LA tourists. It even leaves the host himself, 65-year-old Byron Allen, limply shuffling to reclaim the frame as the show’s cameras whip around him from every conceivable angle. In the reverse shots, you can already see the night’s guests parked in the makeshift waiting-room set up at stage left, apparently settled in for Allen’s monologue. But there is no monologue. Comics Unleashed has no writers, no comic sensibility, no discernible point of view – because CBS bent the knee to Donald Trump, and Allen makes Jimmy Fallon look like Eugene Debs.

A day after Stephen Colbert signed off from The Late Show – the comedy institution abruptly euthanized to grease the skids for a plutocrat-coded media merger even as it dominated the ratings – Allen inherited the slot with Comics Unleashed, which feels less like a late-night show than an infomercial for one. Viewers conditioned to expect sharp monologues, celebrity interviews and some kind of live-wire unpredictability at bedtime should try Kimmel instead – or, better yet, wait for John Oliver. Comics Unleashed is not a show you tweet about in the moment, discuss the next morning or DVR with anticipation. It exists one evolutionary rung above a looped fireplace video, the sort of thing Walmart might run silently on a showroom TV wall.

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Years ago on his Netflix show, the late, great Norm Macdonald distilled the essential lie of Comics Unleashed: “Oh, you couldn’t be more leashed,” he deadpanned. The show takes the loose, conversational group-chat format of programs like The Graham Norton Show and Politically Incorrect and drains every last trace of spontaneity until only a shriveled husk of human interaction remains.