Welcome back to Hot Takes and Deep Dives. This is Jess and my guest today is one of the

most powerful and influential people working in television and comedy today. Page Hurwitz

is fresh off executive producing and being Emmy nominated for the latest Netflix

specials for Tiffany Haddish, Wanda Sykes and Fortune Feemstar. She cast an executive

produced last comic standing for nearly a decade and was also the executive producer for Tabitha

Takes Over and Showrunner for Rosie O'Donnell's talk show The Oprah Own Show. Trust me we're

going to get into all of this and more. Please welcome Page Hurwitz. Hi Jess how are you?

I'm great how are you? I'm good thank you. It's nice to see you. So there's a lot that I want to

cover with you. I guess to start to sort of explain your role in these very inconvenience careers.

So some of these people you sort of discovered through last comic standing is that would that be fair

to say? That would be fair to say Jess. Yes it's been a great journey so far my career and

what's been really nice is that I've been able to shepherd and champion a lot of

comedians that I love and been able to I've been able to work with them in different

projects and and see them grow and hopefully help them grow and that's been incredibly rewarding

for me. So you were you you were an executive producer of last comic standing for many years.

Yeah I was and I but I did it a little differently because you know a lot of producers and showrunners

run shows but they don't get that hands on in terms of their casting and I always like to do

my own casting. So when I when I was working on last comic standing I was kind of that's well I

was a little bit surprised by how that casting process worked because it was there it was a little

disorganized and also I felt like there was not in that much diversity among the comedians who

are on that show and keep in mind at the time it was the only opportunity for a stand of comedians

in Primetime Network Television and it was before the proliferation of all the streamers and so

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