Taylor Tomlinson: can the standup comedian shake up late-night TV?

After years of contraction and stasis in the late-night television business – the end of Full Frontal with Samantha Bee and The Late Late Show with James Corden, the departure of Trevor Noah from The Daily Show, the Jimmys and co deja vu-ing their way through a third Trump candidacy – there’s finally a fresh twist to the lineup.

Taylor Tomlinson, a 30-year-old standup comedian, premiered her new late-night show, After Midnight, on Tuesday evening (technically Wednesday morning east coast time) in the slot vacated by Corden after The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. With it, Tomlinson becomes the only woman hosting a regular late-night show (Peacock’s The Amber Ruffin Show technically still exists, but has been reduced to specials only; Showtime canceled Ziwe last year), and by far the youngest.

Which makes After Midnight – and, by extension, Tomlinson – an experiment for a stalwart television format long on the decline. Late-night has hemorrhaged viewers and advertising dollars for years. Its topical mandate in the Trump era (Colbert, the Daily Show), fixation on the former president (Jimmy Kimmel, Seth Meyers) and pivot toward YouTube-ready celebrity games (Jimmy Fallon), has been a creative dead-end that’s struggled to draw younger viewers. After Midnight, which promises to focus on the memes of the day rather than the news – “we’re taking the internet and desperately trying to make it fun,” Tomlinson said in her premiere episode – will test whether the late-night format can appeal to young people at all.

In replacing The Late Late Show with James Corden, a celeb-friendly but not particularly beloved host (outside his Carpool Karaoke online segments), CBS is taking a bet on Tomlinson, a successful standup comedian though by no means a household name, who just two months ago was doing spon-con on Instagram for her million-plus followers. With several national comedy tours and two Netflix specials under her belt (her third, Have It All, premieres in February), Tomlinson certainly knows how to handle an audience. She can play things clean; raised in a strict religious household in Temecula, California, Tomlinson began her standup career as a teenager on the Christian church circuit, in part to process the death of her mother when she was eight. And she can play to her age group – her adult material covers the standard concerns of a twenty- or thirtysomething: sex, dating, career, existential crises, Teflon confidence and deep self-loathing. She has strikingly candid jokes about her experience with therapy, her use of anti-anxiety medicine and her diagnosis, in recent years, with bipolar disorder. She’s fluent in the language of TikTok, where she has over 2 million followers.

After Midnight puts those skills to use less as a successor to Colbert (an executive producer) than as a gameshow host. Somewhat confusingly, the show is a reboot of @midnight, a panel gameshow hosted by Chris Hardwick on Comedy Central from 2013 to 2017, rather than a traditional late-night show of monologues and guest interviews. The new version pits three comedians against each other to spit jokes on internet-y topics for points that don’t matter, a la Whose Line Is It Anyway?, and “the grand prize of my father’s approval”, Tomlinson joked during the premiere. “It’s rare, but it is winnable … at least I hear.” Or, as Tomlinson put it during a promo stop on Colbert’s show, “comedians compete to come up with funny answers to ridiculous questions on everything from internet trends to pop culture.”

The inaugural episode launched straight into games such as Group Chat, in which Tomlinson used viral tweets portrayed on a giant phone-shaped screen to prompt jokes by inaugural contestants Kurt Braunohler, Aparna Nancherla and Whitney Cummings. (Also, present-day events in the form of the Emmys; asked about After Midnight’s would-be Emmys category, Braunohler said “only female late-night host” and Nancherla tried “best at … whatever this is trying to do”.) There was a segment called “To smash or not to smash”, a take on Mark Zuckerberg’s FaceMash but without real people (Mario v Luigi, Patrick Star v Sandy Cheeks, Gritty v the Quaker Oats mascot, etc) and another called “Is that thing still cool?”, plus several jokes at the expense of CBS.

In other words, breezy fare riding on the charisma of standup comics and the general strangeness of being online. It’s an easy if redundant half-hour to watch; whether that works in the long run – in linear viewers, in memes, in viral bits on TikTok, in a hosting promotion for Tomlinson – will probably depend just as much on the show’s promotion as its actual production. In the meantime, Tomlinson has brushed aside questions on the format’s resistance to change, particularly for female hosts. “I happen to be the only one right now in this moment, but there’s been a lot of successful women in late-night, which is great for me because I have those people to look to as examples,” she told CBS News ahead of After Midnight’s premiere. “I think this idea that comedy is this boys’ club, or late-night is this boys’ club, I think that’s going away. I really, really do.” We shall see.