Quarantined late-night hosts are shaking up their genre with home-based shows

Vulture

"Figuring out how to make a TV show from your home, with no staff present, is, by nature, a spontaneous act, and it’s injecting an organic vibe back into 'late night' that is right for the internet and right for this moment," says Jen Chaney. For instance, she finds Jimmy Fallon more relatable and better at interviews with his stripped-down web shows. "His casual, regular guy persona — something that can seem discordant with the fancy, expensive set he normally appears on — is more relatable in the on-the-fly context in which he’s been forced to work." Late-night stars have also been able to incorporate their kids in their web shows, like The Daily Show's Roy Wood Jr.'s 3-year-old daughter interrupting her dad by apparently chewing on toilet paper. "Moments like these bring late-night TV and its hosts back to their core purpose, which is to make viewers feel like they know the people on the other side of the screen," says Chaney. "By being forced to strip away the pretenses that come from working behind a desk on a set, they’re driving home the notion that we really are all in this together, an idea further underlined by the fundraising efforts included with some of these streaming efforts...When we’re allowed to wander outdoors freely again and TV starts to return to its regularly scheduled programming, let’s hope they take the DIY spirit they’ve been forced to find this week and make it part of a new standard for what late night should look like."

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