Bowen Yang, Brittany Broski, and the 8 Other Hosts Who Are Shattering the Talk Show Format

For decades, cheeky daddy figures from Jack Paar and Johnny Carson to Jimmys Fallon and Kimmel sat atop the Hollywood food chain. They were industry gatekeepers, presiding over essential press tour pit stops and thresholds where an up-and-comer could become a household name overnight. Carson’s final episode of The Tonight Show reached 50 to 55 million Americans. Today’s network late-night shows struggle to get even a 10th of that audience. Because who’s sitting around at 11:35 watching TV anymore—if you even have a TV? This newer, more democratized model, where digital influencers wield more clout than many traditional “stars,” relies on realness. “I don’t want rehearsed talking points and guests going through the motions,” says Royal Court creator Brittany Broski. “The whole point of these internet-based shows is people crave a real parasocial connection with their favorite celebrity. There used to be this barrier between celebrities and the average person, and that has kind of dissolved.” New late-night hosts are not smooth professionals but stand-ins for the viewer: an awkward, enthusiastic fan rubbing up against a celebrity caught in the raw. The digital natives remixing showbiz’s oldest format grew up marinating in YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok content. Broski got famous in 2019 thanks to a meme of her trying kombucha. Quenlin Blackwell of YouTube series Feeding Starving Celebrities hit the big time at 14 after posting a Vine of a cheerleading stunt gone wrong. Sean Evans is a pioneer of this wave. When his YouTube talk show Hot Ones premiered in 2015, stars were hesitant to let down their guard while tasting nuclear-hot sauces: “They were like, I’m a huge A-lister. What am I doing on YouTube eating chicken wings?” Evans says older celebs now agree to go on either because their kids are fans or because of the show’s massive cultural reach. He beams as he recalls Glen Powell calling the show a Hollywood rite of passage. “I think sometimes guests look at Hot Ones as the official internet interview of record. It’s a deposit in the meme economy.” Talk shows have always been performative, conjuring an illusion of intimacy between strangers surrounded by lights, cameras, and a studio audience. The new crop of celebrity interviewers have found their own ways to short-circuit the artificiality and elicit real human moments: knocking guests off guard with the flirty discomfort of a date, as Dimoldenberg does on Chicken Shop Date, or the indignity of dressing up in medieval garb, à la Royal Court. Dimoldenberg sees her show more as “a performance between two people” than an interview. “It’s blurring the lines, which is what I really like about it, and what I think the audience likes about it too, because they really do want me to fall in love.” And unlike the quick-hit segments of yore, podcasts like Therapuss and Las Culturistas often spend an hour or more going deep with a single guest. “I think what really works for us is to not have too many ambitions and just follow the good feelings,” says Las Culturistas cohost Matt Rogers. “We’ve really benefited from just going with the flow. We treat our comedian friends that are promoting a UCB show the same way we treat Jennifer Lopez, It’s just a positive space with some healthy catharsis.” These hosts aren’t journalists, and they don’t pretend to be—they’d rather establish a mutually beneficial relationship than challenge guests. They don’t interrogate; they collab. “Why make someone uncomfortable? It’s just not worth it,” says Shane. “I never come in with an agenda.” When interviewing actor Lea Michele, he elected not to ask about an old rumor that the Broadway star is illiterate. “I’m not gonna sit here and ask her if she can read. Obviously she can read!” he says, giggling. “But then she brought it up, and we got there, which was great. That’s how I approach things.” Likewise, says Blackwell, “I talk to my guest like I’m interviewing someone to be my friend.” This is the aim of so many current shows—something Amy Poehler announced up front in the title of her own podcast, Good Hang With Amy Poehler. The political edge of the traditional talk show has largely vanished from the new late-night projects, though it lives on in content made by partisan streamers like Hasan Piker and Nick Fuentes. Ziwe is a dramatic exception to the no-controversy vibe. Part comedian and part provocateur, she exposes cultural nerves in her entertainingly squirmy interviews. “Why do you hate women?” she bluntly asks movie star Kevin Hart, needling him about rarely working with female film directors. Ziwe started out doing interviews on YouTube, then had a late-night interview and sketch comedy series on Showtime. Now she’s back on YouTube with Ziwe: You’d Be an Iconic Guest, where she slyly asked New York mayor Eric Adams about corruption and challenged body-positive Lizzo to say something nice about Senator Mitch McConnell’s physique. Watching Dick Cavett’s 1969 interview with James Baldwin about segregation impressed upon her that a talk show could be important. “That is actually American history,” Ziwe says. “I want to create American history. I want to be part of this greater discourse.” Traditional late-night TV always struggled with its white man problem, i.e., its inability to sustain a franchise not hosted by a white man. Over the past decade or so, networks, cable channels, and streamers launched shows by Larry Wilmore, Samantha Bee, Amber Ruffin, Desus & Mero, Lilly Singh, and, of course, Ziwe herself—but few of them made it past a few seasons. “For the longest time there’s been this cookie-cutter idea of what a late-night host is,” says Broski. “Online, you’re not beholden to anyone. It’s like a free-for-all.” At VF’s new-late-night photo shoot in Los Angeles, Broski never stops laughing as she and her compatriots gossip about spiders, romances, and blocking people online. “How amazing to look at all this talent coming out of the woodwork,” she says, “and see there’s room for everyone at the table.” Streamers are neck and neck with broadcast and cable TV networks these days, and YouTube ranks as America’s most watched streaming service, consistently beating out Netflix. In October viewers watched more than 700 million hours of YouTube podcasts on their living room devices, up from 400 million the year before. Netflix is fighting back, recently signing deals with iHeartMedia, Barstool Sports, and Spotify to create its own heavy-hitting video podcast slate. YouTube, with its billions of monthly logged-in users, is eager to mark its territory as a champion of the new talk show. When the company’s execs heard that Recess Therapy’s Julian Shapiro-Barnum was planning to launch a new weekly talk show this spring, he says they made it clear that “they were incredibly interested in the future of late night being on YouTube.” Shapiro-Barnum grew up loving Conan O’Brien and the like but feels the genre still hasn’t fully transitioned into the modern era. Lots of people now exclusively watch Fallon’s or Kimmel’s shows in the form of YouTube snippets, “but that is network TV packaged to look like a YouTube video. I thought: How can I make late night that is literally for a YouTube audience?” A year ago he hatched the idea of Outside Tonight: “I’m taking all the stripped-down DIY craziness and honesty of internet shows, doing it in a very formalized, classic late-night fashion. But we’re not doing it in the studio, and there’s no network notes.” Such freedom is both exhilarating and exhausting, since it places all the creative and financial burdens on individual hosts. Royal Court has been going for almost three years, but Broski says it’s only recently become profitable; before that she was subsidizing her show with brand deals and other internet income streams. She now has about 30 people working for “Broski Inc.” and on the show, as compared to the 200 staffers employed by The Late Show With Stephen Colbert—some of whom have worked at the Ed Sullivan Theater since the David Letterman days. A lot of new late-night shows operate on even more of a shoestring. Blackwell says she’s turned down offers to buy a stake in her shows; she dreams of buying a house but won’t do it at the expense of losing control over Feeding Starving Celebrities. “I’m 24. I don’t need to sell everything so soon! The audience feels how much I care about it, and I want to keep it that way.” Instead of worrying about ratings, the new late-night creators are directly beholden to their viewers. “I look at every comment, every chart placement. I’m very, very obsessive about it,” says Shane. He admits that this makes him anxious. But when he comes across something positive? “It’s like a drug! It makes all the pain worth it.” Las Culturistas cohost Bowen Yang, who recently departed SNL and has a thriving career in movies and TV, grows reflective at the thought of the traditional late-night format vanishing altogether—and with it the power to speak to a wide range of Americans all at once. “I feel very protective of it. Especially after Kimmel, especially after Colbert,” he says, referring to the network hosts who have been directly attacked by the Trump administration for their political monologues. Last fall Kimmel was temporarily yanked off the air after ABC was threatened by FCC chairman Brendan Carr; last summer Colbert’s show was canceled, purportedly for financial reasons, right around the same time its parent company was seeking Trump’s approval for a merger. “It’s clear there’s a nerve that’s being hit,” says Yang. Even beyond the political tensions, the old late night faces increasingly intense financial pressure, and the ad revenue from online platforms can be much higher than what linear television once brought in. Recess Therapy’s Shapiro-Barnum originally dreamed that his online projects would serve as an entrée into the mainstream entertainment world. Now, he says, “I have drunk the Kool-Aid of the internet. I do genuinely believe in the power of being able to produce something myself. I have really fallen in love with the freedom. So I will probably continue to make things online, as long as there is an online to make things on.” Group portrait: Evan’s shoes by Jimmy Choo; watch by Jaeger-LeCoultre. Blackwell’s dress by Versace; shoes by Jimmy Choo. Shane’s shoes by Carmina; socks by Falke; brooch by Cartier High Jewelry. Broski’s tuxedo jacket by Dolce & Gabbana; pants by St. John; bow tie by Giorgio Armani from Bloomingdale’s; ear cuff by Swarovski. Rahma’s tuxedo pants by Polo Ralph Lauren; shoes by Church’s; socks by Pantherella. Dimoldenberg’s shoes by Aquazzura; earrings by Cartier High Jewelry. Ziwe’s shoes by Aquazzura; necklace by Van Cleef & Arpels. Rogers’s shoes by Jimmy Choo. Yang’s shoes by Marsèll. Shapiro-Barnum’s socks by Falke. Blackwell’s hair products by Color Wow. Broski’s hair products by Leonor Greyl; manicure products by Dior Le Baume. Shapiro-Barnum’s, Rahma’s, Yang’s, and Rogers’s hair products by Living Proof; grooming products by Armani Beauty. Dimoldenberg’s hair products by SexyHair; nail enamel by Chanel Le Vernis. Ziwe’s hair products by Moroccanoil; makeup products by Ilia; nail enamel by Chanel Le Vernis. Evans’s and Shane’s hair products by Leonor Greyl. Set design, Tim Gehling (Blackwell, Broski, Evans, Shane), Colin Phelan (all others); hair, Shin Arima (Rahma, Rogers, Shapiro-Barnum, Yang), Marty Harper (Dimoldenberg), Johnnie Sapong (Broski, Evans, Shane), Ursula Stephen (Ziwe), Davontaé Washington (Blackwell); makeup, Renee Garnes (Ziwe), Charlie Riddle (Dimoldenberg), Lisa Storey (Blackwell, Broski); manicures, Sreynin Peng (Blackwell, Broski), Yuko Tsuchihashi (Dimoldenberg, Ziwe); grooming, Chloe Grae (Rahma, Rogers, Shapiro-Barnum, Yang), Lisa Storey (Evans, Shane); tailors, Caroline Trimble (Blackwell, Broski, Evans, Shane), Katy Patzel (all others). Produced on location by Preiss Creative. For details, go to VF.com/credits.