Late-night TV is dead and the internet has killed it. Sort of. The influencer is rapidly succeeding the late-night talk show host as the mediator between celebrity and fan, as more and more of us get our popular culture fix from Call Her Daddy or Chicken Shop Date than we do The Tonight Show or Late Night. From 2018 to 2022, America’s seven biggest late night programmes saw a drop of approximately 41 per cent in advertising revenue. Vanity Fair recently wrote a piece featuring the new guard of late-night talk show television including TikTok influencers like Brittany Broski, Quen Blackwell and Jake Shane. The peculiar thing about these people, however, is that they do not feature on television, nor can they only be seen late at night, and their chosen title isn’t ‘talk show host’.
The format of celebrity interviews looks nothing like it did when Johnny Carson reigned supreme, and we cannot be surprised given that all our traditional media is shifting. Talk shows are facing something that every kind of cultural output has had to face in the past 15 years: streaming. As Vanity Fair puts it: “who’s sitting around at 11:35 pm watching TV anymore—if you even have a TV?”. Our lives don’t follow a universal structure anymore, where an entire country can be expected to be at home and gathered around a television at the same exact time. You can now listen toCharli XCX on Royal Court whilst at the gym, or watch Matthew McConaughey on the tube to work.
The detachment of celebrity interviews from traditional television also means that hosts are not subjected to the creative restrictions of a network like ABC, who suspended Jimmy Kimmel Live! last year over comments about Charlie Kirk. A host like Adam Friedland, dubbed the millennial Jon Stewart, can joke around with a sex worker and interrogate a New York congressman on his show in the same month without it being deemed distasteful. These cowboy hosts have the freedom to implement embarrassing gimmicks, like dressing Paul Mescal up in medieval garb, or pose risqué questions which no major television channel would have the guts to ask.
This invasive nature of interview is on the rise due to the growing popularity of what can only be called the ‘rude interviewer’. Figures like Friedland, Amelia Dimoldenberg, or Ziwe do not shy away from seeming confrontational if it would make the audience laugh. This is in part due to the fact that the grandeur of celebrity has disintegrated. Any kind of mystique that once surrounded famous actors or pop-stars has faded. The excitement of my favourite singer appearing on Kimmel does not quite hold up when I can watch them thirst-trapping on TikTok in the dressing room five minutes prior to walking on stage. Because of this we now value relatability and authenticity more than glamour. Audiences now revel in seeing celebrities stumble over their words whilst in conversation with Brittany Broski because she feels — bar a couple million followers — just like us.
Making the audience laugh is a large part of what is at stake here, and many of these up-and-comers quite frankly, make funnier content. That’s not to say that the likes of Jimmy Fallon and Seth Meyers can’t make a good joke, after all, both of them were Saturday Night Live giants during its most hilarious era. Their traditional format just does not allow them to cater their content to a public audience, whether that be uncomfortable moments craved by irony-poisoned audiences who have no desire for earnest interviews, or long form podcast-style content for those constantly on the go. Moreover, late-night interviews are not made to be clipped.
As a British viewer, I’m accustomed to watching late-night programmes in frustratingly fragmented parts on YouTube since they are not entirely accessible in the UK. Even with British shows like The Graham Norton Show, I am simply not bothered to log into iPlayer. YouTube allows for the democratisation of talk shows, since they can be viewed anywhere, by anyone, largely for free. However, we know what streaming can bring: the curse of ‘second screen’, the idea that media must be simplified because it is inevitable that the consumer will be on another device while viewing the primary content. It begs the question, are these long form conversational podcasts becoming more popular because they feel more authentic, or is it merely because they are convenient to consume when partaking in secondary activities?
Although the death of traditional forms of media can be exciting as it better considers a younger audience, it is also often a reflection of our diminishing ability to dedicate our wholehearted attention to a piece of culture.
Photo by Maxim Klimashin on Unsplash.