An Emmy For ‘Hot Ones’? Late-Night TV Is Going Up In Flames

What started out as a quirky internet show about chicken wings has turned into one of the most formidable media products of the century.

Jessica Karl

22 Jun 2024, 09:48 AM IST

Cheers to that?

(Bloomberg Opinion) -- YouTube show that started out with a simple premise in 2015 — man eats spicy chicken wings with celebrities! — is looking to compete against the likes of Seth Meyers and Stephen Colbert for a Primetime Emmy Award(1).

If you needed a sign that late-night television was dead, there it is.

Maybe that sounds like a hot take to those who grew up on David Letterman, but on the Scoville scale, host Sean Evans would say it’s pretty mild.

Evans, who just ushered in his 24th season (2) with star Chris Hemsworth, has been building up to this moment for his entire career. What began as a quirky internet chicken show in the “pivot-to-video” era is now one of the most formidable media products of this century, garnering more than 3 billion lifetime views. If the show with “hot questions and even hotter wings” walks away with the Emmy for outstanding talk series, it will spell the end of late-night as we know it.

For years, creator Chris Schonberger and his research team at First We Feast have hustled to scour not only hundreds of celebrity Wikipedia pages, but every single link within them, from Reddit AMAs to Grammy performances. The result? A collection of questions only the savviest of internet sleuths could assemble — not the run-of-the-mill inquiries often lobbed on variety shows. And it’s all done in front of a simple black-curtained set. Late-night hosts have known that non-traditional competitors were on their heels, but perhaps felt a little helpless. The conventional lineup operates in a wildly different business environment, filling time slots on a daily basis not because that’s what the audience wants but because they are bound by the shackles of linear TV.When you turn on , you’re watching celebrities get their mouths obliterated by hellish condiments, yes. But you’re also watching their psyche get obliterated by a guy who’s throwing decades-old biographical facts at them as if it’s the weather. “You are a very serious interviewer. You take it seriously, and you ask really good questions. I am very impressed with your dedication to it,” Conan O’Brien, last season’s epic ender, told Evans through his meat sweats.

O’Brien isn’t the only television host to suffer on . Since its inception, Evans has interviewed nearly all the greats, from Jimmy Kimmel to Andy Cohen — even Louis Theroux has been through the ghost pepper gauntlet. It’s in these interviews with his personal heroes — not A-listers like Billie Eilish or Pedro Pascal — where Sean “Careful Around Your Eyes” Evans really shines.

While endless ink has been spilled over the future of late-night, the sauce spilled on has been far more illustrative of the medium’s decline.Evening talk shows used to be “the only place you ever see these huge stars as themselves,” James Corden explained to Evans in 2022. “Now, you can open your phone and see some of the biggest stars in the world in their house, talking to you from their kitchen. … It’s a tricky thing as a traditional talk show host to think about and combat, whereas I think something like this [gesturing to the set] feels completely organic because it came from a really organic place.” Seth Meyers felt the same way when he appeared on the show in 2019: “The difference between this and my show is — not that genuine things don’t happen on my show — but it’s obviously a of a conversation with somebody. Like, I’m not performing right now.”

Then there are the disadvantages of timing. When’s the last time you flipped to CBS, NBC or ABC to watch a host do their thing live on air? These shows come on very late — in some cases, even after midnight. Why would you ever stay up if you can watch the best clips on YouTube the next day?

An Emmy For ‘Hot Ones’? Late-Night TV Is Going Up In Flames

Plus, there are so many time-sensitive topics, guests, jokes and musical guests to get through within an hour. That fast-paced environment means that late-night hosts are not afforded the space nor time to get into the nitty gritty details with their guests. There will always be a timer behind the camera indicating how many seconds are left until the next commercial break. Evans, on the other hand, can take however long he wants and edit out the boring stuff afterward. That breathing room provides with far more viral, meme-able moments than traditional late-night segments:

In addition to now being a mandatory stop for stars on publicity parades — see: actress Cate Blanchett during her Lydia Tár era — it’s become a beloved piece of Americana, so much so that Colbert and Jimmy Fallon repurposed it on their own shows by having Evans on as a guest. (I’m not sure whether that’s lazy or genius, but it speaks volumes about the show’s success.) Even more telling is hearing actress Anna Kendrick talk to Meyers about her “life-altering experience” on . Or seeing SNL do not one, but two parodies of the show:

To be clear, by no means exists in a vacuum. British creator Amelia Dimoldenberg is also in the poultry streaming biz with her show , which is a new Emmy entrant as well. In fact, the chicken shows crossed their respective roads in November, when Dimoldenberg guest-starred on and Evans met up with her for a date in a chicken shop.

A Primetime Emmy for either one would illustrate how the lines have blurred between linear TV and online video platforms. But why, when so many upstarts are thriving, aren’t the late-night heavyweights working to develop the next ? Is late-night TV not worth saving? The industry’s veterans seem unsure.On the one hand, Conan found greener pastures outside of the network with his podcast, , and a new travel show on Max called . But on the other, you’ve got Seth Meyers renewing his contract to host through 2028. By then, who knows what shape the landscape will be in, especially given the rise of AI and successful comedy specials like . on Netflix. The industry is in desperate need of a shake-up — with new voices, longer formats and more focus — not unlike the one Deborah Vance is looking to inspire.

Awards shows, too, need to rethink their perch: In a recent op-ed in the Hollywood Reporter, YouTube CEO Neal Mohan encouraged more of them to honor digital content creators. “If you think creators are just recording vlogs from their bedrooms, then I have some big news. Creators have writers’ rooms, production teams, and business strategies. They’re developing programming that’s not just popular and relevant – it’s breaking boundaries,” he wrote.

That’s gotta make the late-night industry sweat even more than ’ Da Bomb sauce.

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