She’ll be hosting a show called After Midnight that will air after The Late Show, beginning next year. There have been too few female talk show hosts. I don’t know her style too well, but I wish her luck. Colbert is a tough act to follow.
Looks like they’re doing it as a panel show instead of a traditional talk show. The late night talk show format is dying.
Taylor Tomlinson is freaking hilarious. Check out her Netflix specials. She’s one of the best.
I’m up in the air on this one. I like her comedy specials, and if you see her Youtube videos she’s good with crowd-work, but I don’t know about her just sitting and talking to someone famous. She’s good with Conan, but she’s also known him for years.
It’s not clear that it’s dying. The problem is that recently there have been too many late-night shows of various sorts. Look at all the ones that are still there:
She’s hilarious, but I think people will be surprised because she’ll have to use her “indoor voice” for a talk show.
But very few of those are actual talk shows. And even some of the ones labelled “talk shows” aren’t the traditional “guest sitting next to the desk” talk shows.
The original @midnight was one of my favorite shows. Three comedians a night goofing around with fixed targets rather than random thoughts or recycled bits. With a dozen comedians needed every week, a good sampling of styles and degrees of fame resulted, not to mention introductions to scads of people to look up.
If we get something comparable not only would it be a great show, but it could give a huge boost to network late night.
What? The Fallon, the Kimmel, the Colbert, and the Meyers shows on broadcast television are certainly talk shows. The Maher show on cable is certainly a talk show. Many of the other shows have substantial talk portions. This is as much as usual, perhaps more than usual. Talk shows are not disappearing.
I agree that Meyers, Fallon, Kimmel, and Colbert are still doing the late night format. Heck, Fallon is on the Tonight Show, with originated it, as far as I know.
But Maher’s show seems sufficiently different to me. Sure, he has a monolog and then a guest interview. But that’s followed by a panel discussion, with debates. And Tomlinson’s show being a panel show is exactly what the poster considers not to be part of the format.
Granted, I also didn’t really count Corden’s show as being in that format. It decided to take from the British late night chat show format. They were already trying to change the formula with his show.
Reading up on the original Comedy Central show, it seems that the show attempts the UK panel game show format, with comedians as guests who play various Internet-themed games. That sounds intriguing. But I hope Tomlinson also gets to do at least a short monolog, since standup is her specialty. Maybe go the Jimmy Carr route, having a brief set of jokes after each break.
I think the two of you are talking about different things.
The Wikipedia page did have several network shows that I certainly wouldn’t have thought of as talk shows: Nightline, CBS Overnight News, Early Today just as examples. They even list SNL, which is crazy.
There are a lot of competition in the 11-1 time slot. But the four you mention are the only ones on broadcast tv, down from five earlier this year. I don’t think that’s too many or more than usual. Maher and Oliver are only on once a week. Streaming is something else entirely, but none of the three on that page are coming back next year.
Maybe the traditional Tonight Show format is played out. Maybe some younger hosts can revive it. I think there’s still a place for a funny monolog on the day’s news, served up fresh that day. What comes after that for the rest of program doesn’t really matter.
I just watched the late-night shows and the only difference between them and the ones from 10 or 20 or 30 or 40 years ago is that their content is flashier. They all mix interviews with additional material. And they are spread out between broadcast, cable, and streaming now, so there are more of them so they can each do something slightly different from anything other late-night program.
A bigger problem with the claim that the talk show format is dying is that it doesn’t understand what a trend is. Trends are not something that happens when there is a slight difference from one year to the next. If the average temperature is one degree more than last year, that doesn’t mean that we can certainly expect that it will continue to increase every year from now on by one degree, so ten years from now the average temperature will certainly be ten degrees more. If the average unemployment percentage is one percent more than it was last year, that doesn’t mean that it will continue to increase every year from now on by one degree, so ten years from now it will certainly be ten percent more. That’s not how you discover trends. A trend is something that you have to wait a decade or so to discover what the changes are over that longer period.
Similarly, one less talk show than last year doesn’t prove anything about what the trend in talk shows is. What has been happening is that one talk show is cancelled. Then in a few months another talk show premieres. To prove there is any trend in talk shows, you would have to show that over decades there is a consistent slow change in what has been happening. Show me that there is any consistent pattern in the number of talk shows over the past few decades, not over the past year.
I fully agree. Not only is she freaking hilarious, but anyone who can also make the extremely difficult job of standup seem easy, spontaneous, and genuine has a heck of a lot of talent. I hope her new show is really successful – she deserves it. She was just 25 and 27 when she did her Netflix specials.
I also find her freakin’ hilarious and very real. In a thread of best up and coming female comedians a couple months back I mentioned her.
Glad to hear she’s got herself a show. No idea if her formidable standup skills will translate to a talk or panel show or whatever it’s going to be, but she deserves a shot at more fame for sure.
“@midnight” was an improvised panel game show that aired on Comedy Central from 2013 to 2017 and was hosted by Chris Hardwick.
“We are thrilled to be reunited with our friends at Funny Or Die,” said Colbert in the news release announcing the new show. “My hope is that, every night, AFTER MIDNIGHT will be just as ridiculous as the internet is every day.”
What CBS seems to be saying at this point is that it is a reincarnation of an improvised panel game show. It’s not clear that the format will be the same.
My hope would be that they would take a leaf from the Brits’ book of comedy panel shows, like 8 Out Of 10 Cats, or the late lamented Mock The Week. But probably not. My second hope is that this wouldn’t just be a nightly riff on stupid stuff on the internet, which gets boring real quick. Maybe the actual format and subject matter will be fleshed out more between now and when the show starts.