CBS All Access is turning to animated news to draw more customers to the service. The talk show host is executive producing Tooning Out the News, an animated series that will both riff on current events and interview real guests.
The show will have weekly episodes like you’d expect with most of these shows. Real guests will also be invited to the show in interview segments and will also be daily segments that looks at some news topics from a few hours ago with a humorous light. According to the announcement video, the magic of “computers” will help get that done.
There are no details for casting or the premiere date at this stage, although The Late Show’s Chris Licht will help Colbert executive produce. Some of the animation expertise comes from RJ Fried and Tim Luecke of Showtime’s Trump spoof Our Cartoon President.
This is unusual for All Access, which has focused largely on live-action comedies and dramas so far. It’s not shocking that CBS might consider this given the competition, though. Rival services like Netflix have their own shows covering hot topics, and CBS can take advantage of both Colbert’s talk show experience and its news faculties to offer rapid-fire programming that might be difficult for others to match.
CBS All Access is an American over-the-top subscription streaming video on demand service owned and operated by CBS Interactive, a subsidiary of ViacomCBS. It offers original content, content newly aired on CBS’s broadcast properties, and content from CBS’s library
Here is the announcement video