Photo: Rebecca Rotenberg / CleftClips / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0). Rory Scovel at SXSW Comedy, Austin, March 11, 2013.
Rory Scovel’s new hour is on Netflix. Show Must Go On landed Tuesday, August 11. It is his fifth stand-up special and his second for the streamer, nine years after Rory Scovel Tries Stand-Up for the First Time.
He taped it at The Neptune in Seattle. Scott Moran directed. Listings clock the runtime at 68 minutes. Netflix rates it TV-MA.
Netflix’s own line: “With a hypothetical home invasion, a biblical reenactment and his late dad’s final wish, Rory Scovel delivers unrelenting laughs in this raucous special.” Watch it on Netflix.
Religion, family, and a closer he was scared to tape
The hour keeps circling religion, marriage, parenting, and the kind of political riff that sounds like a heel turn until it isn’t. Sean L. McCarthy at Decider, who watched it, flags Disney adults, a hypothetical home invasion, a biblical reenactment, and a closer that brings in Scovel’s father, who died in June 2020.
Scovel told The Hollywood Reporter he wanted this one “much more personal and vulnerable.” He would have preferred to tape in a red state. “It just timed out that Seattle was the right city,” he said. He’d worked there early in his career.
On TODAY Wednesday, he put the dad material in plain terms: “My dad passed away about six years ago and this was the special where I was like, you know I really could maybe lean into some kind of therapy in this. It was very cathartic.”
The last one was Max
His previous hour, Rory Scovel: Religion, Sex, and a Few Things in Between, went up on Max on February 22, 2024, taped at Minneapolis’s Goodale Theater. Before that: Live Without Fear (2021, YouTube), the 2017 Netflix special, and The Charleston Special (2015).
Deadline, which broke the August 11 date, lists producers as Scovel, Alex Bach and Daniel Powell of Irony Point, Molly Mandel, and Matt Schuler.
Rory Scovel: Show Must Go On is streaming now.
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