By Joshua Tyler
| Published
Late-night talk shows were huge in the ’90s. They were hip and exciting. Like everyone else. I was crazy about The Late Show with David Letterman, Conan, and the rest. The minds behind them were geniuses.
Now I’m ashamed the talk show format still exists. It’s already been replaced, and instead of embracing the replacement, we’re all still acting like Seth Meyers is somehow relevant.
Watching interviews with staged questions from celebrities pushing something is no longer relevant. Modern audiences crave authenticity, something they’ve been trained to expect by reality television. That’s why Reality Talk Shows now exist.
A reality talk show takes the interview style of a standard talk show and changes one vital component: the guest.
Reality talk shows have guests, but they aren’t important people. The show wouldn’t work if they were. Instead, the guest is a nobody, a normal person. The interviewer’s job is to challenge that very average individual while taking the audience on a tour inside their head.
There are many types of reality talk shows. I’ll highlight just two varied examples here, neither of which I’m in any way endorsing.
Financial Audit With Caleb Hammer
Financial Audit with Caleb Hammer has 2.3 million subscribers. In a sense, it’s the Kitchen Nightmares of finance. In each episode, Caleb brings on a normal, average person with major financial trouble and tries to figure out where they went wrong.
One week, it might be a soft-spoken police dispatcher from Texas dealing with loss. Next, it might be an unemployed lunatic who blows all her money on vintage Beanie Babies.
The only consistent thing about the show is Caleb Hammer, a husky geek with an acumen for finance who sweats and gnashes his teeth over tough cases or shrieks in frustration when a guest isn’t listening to his solutions. Caleb’s reactions make the show fun, but watching him dive deep into his average guests’ real-life struggles and problems makes the show compelling.
Whatever With Brian Atlas
Whatever has 4.5 million subscribers and is nothing at all like Financial Audit. It’s controversial, extreme, and not in any way about helping people.
The show’s format is simple. Host Brian Atlas assembles a panel of women each week and grills them about their views on life and relationships. Each show lasts for many hours, and his guests are usually idiots, likely explicitly chosen to allow Brian and his friends to dunk on them intellectually.
Some of them are OnlyFans girls likely paid to be on the show, some are political activists, and a few are college girls or professionals. What they all have in common is that they’re nothing special. Atlas doesn’t bother with celebrity guests. He’s built a show on arguing with women out of their depth, and whether you agree with his approach or not, it’s become hugely popular.
The Future Of Talk Shows
So far, dinosaur television networks and private equity-controlled streamers have ignored the reality talk show format, but its simplicity means those networks aren’t needed. Reality talk shows are thriving and growing on YouTube.
Real people are the future of the talk show format. Celebrity is dead.
