Graham Norton take note: Netflix is producing the best chat show on TV

Credit where credit is due: Netflix ain’t all bad. Despite becoming known in recent years for its unyielding conveyor belt of shapeless content slop, the streamer has, over the past 12 weeks, produced some of the year’s very best television. And it’s done it in a format that has come to embody the most banal and disposable aspects of our media culture: the late-night talk show.

Everybody’s Live with John Mulaney ended its first-season run last week, with an episode that culminated in its host, comedian John Mulaney, having a physical fight with three 14-year-old boys. It’s the sort of bizarre, semi-comic spectacle that calls to mind the late Andy Kaufman, and was just one of many rub-your-eyes-in-disbelief moments that have made up this weekly programme. The finale also saw Henry Winkler perform, and derail, an anti-drunk-driving educational play, amid interviews with Adam Sandler and an insouciant, chain-smoking Sean Penn; another recent episode saw Mulaney host the entire show blindfolded. Where US late-night talk shows have become staid and uniform, Everybody’s Live is inventive, unpredictable and conceptually daring.

But Mulaney’s scatty and delightful experiment hasn’t just shown up the flaws in the US’s old-hat talk-show circuit: it ought to make Britain’s chat-show equivalents take a long, hard look in the mirror. These days, the UK’s late-night chat-show scene boils down, more or less, to two men: Graham Norton, who hosts the country’s flagship Friday night chat show on BBC One, and Jonathan Ross, who hosts a rival show on ITV. Both men have been working in the format for decades now; both shows have been going through the motions for years.

Let’s focus, for a moment, on Norton, whose programme is the superior of the two (and the more popular). As a host, he’s consistently likeable and witty – perhaps the two key qualities required for a chat-show-host position – and The Graham Norton Show’s conceit, of having all the celebrity guests share a sofa at once, interacting with each other’s interviews, is one that has historically worked very well. Mulaney’s Netflix show actually adopted this same approach, having its guests (typically a couple of comedians, an actor, and an expert in the week’s designated discussion topic) all co-mingle, eschewing American chat-show norms.

But within this format, which also includes a musical guest and an interact-with-the-public section known as the “big red chair”, there’s little variation from week to week. There are no skits, no flights of whimsy; even the guest bookings throw up nothing in the way of the unexpected. Much like the US’s big late-night stalwarts – Jimmy Kimmel, Seth Meyers, Jimmy Fallon and Stephen Colbert – Norton and Ross are safe pairs of hands. But safe is hardly a compliment in the world of entertainment. Contrarily, the brilliance of a show like Everybody’s Live lies in its propensity for risk – a blithe readiness to fail. Jokes sometimes bomb; skits occasionally fall on deaf ears. But you always have to admire the effort.

It’s worth noting, perhaps, that the US’s entire talk-show heritage is different from that of the UK. Everybody’s Live didn’t come out of nowhere; Mulaney openly admits how much the show owes to David Letterman and, to an even greater extent, to Conan O’Brien, both of whom appeared as guests on Everybody’s Live this season. O’Brien’s three-decade stint as a talk-show host (spanning Late Night with Conan O'Brien, The Tonight Show and Conan) saw him produce outrageously inventive, often hilarious iterations of the talk-show formula, and establish a clear alternative model to the more buttoned-up mainstream options.

There is no British Conan O’Brien. If you were searching for an equivalently subversive British chat show of years gone by, you might identify someone like Barry Humphries, who hosted several under his Dame Edna persona. There’s a bit of his influence in The Graham Norton Show, to be sure, but perhaps a closer relative would be something like the dismal Brendan O’Carroll chat-show vehicle All Round to Mrs Brown’s, which was mercifully put out of its misery in 2020 after four seasons.

Everybody’s Live might not be an existential threat to the British chat-show scene – Mulaney is nowhere near as big a name here, and the LA-produced series has a quintessentially American sensibility. But it could well be a sign of things to come. The fact that it’s produced by Netflix – streamed live around the world each week – is significant: it’s a relatively new and wide-ranging distribution model for a genre that is scrambling for ways to stay relevant.

A major issue for many US talk shows has been the shift towards online content; increasingly, programmes such as The Tonight Show have, in a struggle for relevance, geared themselves towards short, clippable segments that might go viral on social media. The competition is no longer simply other talk shows, but online videos; TikTok influencers; oddities such as Hot Ones. The Graham Norton Show and TheJonathan Ross Show have largely avoided this, instead attempting to hold firm as traditional, tune-in-every-Friday-night-because-that’s-what’s-on fixtures of broadcast television. But if they won’t update their form, they must update their content.

Everybody’s Live may be too niche and too American to disrupt the template this side of the pond. But it’s provided a tantalising look at just what talk shows can be, when limits are tested – the potential for spectacle and idiosyncrasy that remains all but untapped here. It’s time our own limits were tested, too.

‘Everybody’s Live with John Mulaney’ can be streamed now on Netflix