There’s a desk. There’s a band. There’s an opening monologue. There are interviews, musical guests and sketches and games.
The new show, “Outside Tonight,” shares a lot with traditional late-night television. But the overlap basically stops there.
For starters, full episodes of “Outside Tonight” are on YouTube, not a broadcast network or a subscription streaming service like Netflix. Next, it’s hosted and created by a 26-year-old digital native whose claim to fame comes from the internet, not from a connection to “Saturday Night Live” or “The Daily Show.”
There’s no media company bankrolling it, and the budget is a very small fraction of a typical late-night show, which can balloon to well over $100 million. It’s filmed outside, as the name suggests, and new episodes appear weekly. And yet Julian Shapiro-Barnum, the host and creator of the show, believes those contrasts will help save late night.
“Outside Tonight” is the latest attempt to ignite a spark in a genre that has fallen into an existential crisis and is in need of new ideas. Ratings and advertising revenue have plummeted, and so has the number of late-night series on broadcast, cable and streaming. CBS left the business after it canceled Stephen Colbert’s “Late Show,” citing financial losses that the network said had reached $40 million last year. Whenever Jimmy Kimmel decides to hang it up — he has been talking about it for years — ABC may get out of the business, too.
“Is it cocky to say that ‘Outside Tonight’ is saving late night?” Mr. Shapiro-Barnum asked in his opening monologue of the first episode of the show, which premiered in mid-June. “Definitely. Is it true? I don’t know. But I know for sure it is fun to say.”
Mr. Shapiro-Barnum then led the small outdoor audience in a chant: “‘Outside Tonight’ is saving late night!”
These are long odds. There is a graveyard dedicated to hosts who have tried to make a late-night show work on the internet. Streaming services like Netflix and Hulu have taken stab after stab at comedic talk shows over the years — tapping luminaries like John Mulaney, Sarah Silverman, Norm Macdonald, Chelsea Handler, Michelle Wolf and Joel McHale, among other hosts — to virtually no success. None seem interested in trying again.
Mr. Shapiro-Barnum, an energetic and wiry comedian, is the creator of “Recess Therapy,” a “Kids Say the Darndest Things”-like series that became a big digital hit in the early 2020s. He thinks the internet helped shatter the late-night format. YouTube, TikTok and Instagram deliver their own celebrity interviews (now on video podcasts), sketches (all over TikTok and Reels) and musical appearances (everywhere). He wants to reassemble those elements back into a cohesive long-form show, with a digital native’s point of view.
“More than loving capital L, capital N late night, I love the skeleton of late night,” Mr. Shapiro-Barnum said. “Like, all the pieces of what make late night late night are, like, core pieces of my, like, creative identity.”
The show’s pace can be lightning fast, and the opening monologue is broken into two or three separate parts over an episode, to better help the attention span of viewers with a device or two in their hands.
Each episode has a theme, and everything is filmed with the internet in mind. Episodes come out on Wednesdays — the nine-episode run will end in August — but more than a dozen short clips are produced from each episode and posted all over Instagram and YouTube.
Though he’s doing it all with a skeletal staff, Mr. Shapiro-Barnum has some powerful champions. The William Morris Endeavor agency is a big supporter, another example of a major Hollywood firm’s putting its weight behind a digital creator. YouTube is another. The tech company paid for Mr. Shapiro-Barnum’s premiere party at Cherry Lane Theater in Manhattan, and financed an oversize “Outside Tonight” billboard in Times Square. (It is also helping to pay for his campaign to get an Emmy nomination for another popular digital show he hosts, “Celebrity Substitute.”)
YouTube does not bankroll original series, but it is getting increasingly aggressive in trying to serve as a liaison between creators and sponsors who can finance their series. “YouTube gave me ample, ample opportunities to be in the room with brands,” Mr. Shapiro-Barnum said.
“Outside Tonight” has two sponsors: Amazon and Chase.
Still, the operation is no frills. For each episode, the show rotates to a different New York City location, including the Whitney Museum of American Art and the main branch of the Brooklyn Public Library. The third episode was filmed in a distant industrial corner of the Greenpoint neighborhood of Brooklyn, underneath a bridge that connects the borough to Queens. Some matters could not be planned for, including a near-constant chorus of trucks backing up and unloading at nearby depots, as well as a distinct stench that seemed to waft from either a river or a factory. “That smell is crazy,” one member of his staff observed.
Tom Hanks and other heavyweights are not on the show’s guest list, but comedians who have prominent online footprints, like Matteo Lane and Gianmarco Soresi, have been guests. So have cast members from “Adults,” the FX series about 20-somethings.
The first three episodes of the long-form YouTube version of “Outside Tonight” have reached small audiences thus far, a humbling reminder that nearly all experiments in the late-night space have gone sideways in recent years.
But Mr. Shapiro-Barnum said the short-form results were going better than he had anticipated, pointing to a clip that had garnered more than 2.8 million views on Instagram last month. Because there’s no network, he just needs to persuade sponsors that the show is worth bankrolling. And he needs only a handful of viral hits before viewers find the long-form show, he said.
“We have many, many, many tries, and we really only need one to really click and connect with a broader audience,” Mr. Shapiro-Barnum said. “Then, all of a sudden, they see this backlog and go, ‘Whoa.’”
