11 anti-talk shows that broke late night

Fernwood 2 Night is a pocket-sized bit of television genius. A fake talk show that spun off from a phony soap opera, both created by Norman Lear, Fernwood 2 Night was the talk show that existed within Lear’s satirical soap Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman. Produced as Hartman’s summer fill-in, Fernwood 2 Night and its follow-up, America 2 Night, pushed writers to generate five half-hour episodes a week for two seasons—the schedule of real talk shows except the interviews and spontaneity were scripted (with some improv). Imagine putting together a “mini-room” for that. Its format follows a typical talk show, with egotistical host Barth Gimble (Martin Mull) and his perpetually dumbfounded sidekick Jerry Hubbard (Fred Willard) inviting locals from around Fernwood, Ohio, to say goodnight to their fellow community members. Played straight as an arrow and with a garage sale Merv Griffin Show aesthetic, Fernwood is indistinguishable from a typical talk show until you get to segments like “Ask A Jewish Person” and “New Human Organ Discovered.” Despite its age and detours into racism, Fernwood remains remarkably fresh. Mull and Willard’s smarmy humor plays well with the delightfully cheap, period-appropriate set that helps sell the show’s realism, grounding the show’s lunacy in a simple form that allows anything to happen. None of the shows on this list would exist without stopping in Fernwood.

It’s very telling that most of the shows in this Inventory started in the immediate wake of David Letterman’s initial run on NBC. A talk show where the host treats guests with open contempt, a format that favored silliness and irreverence over corporate glad-handing, and that bleary-eyed what-the-fuck-am-I-watching mayhem we’ve come to know in anti-talk shows was the premise for a real one. Late Night With David Letterman did it all, and it did it all for real. Letterman allowed his show to be a true testing ground for off-beat ideas, experimentation, and fearless risk taking in the name of giving viewers some delightfully dumb things to laugh at. It’s easy to imagine Jerry “The King” Lawler slapping Andy Kaufman or Stupid Pet Tricks on an episode of Comedy Bang! Bang!; that it happened for millions of eyeballs on NBC is one of comedy’s greatest coups, providing to an army of aspiring talk show hosts with weirder inclinations a reason to keep annoying the hell out of their friends. Letterman showed the world there was a market for this stuff, and after he jumped to CBS, the dam burst.

Technically, The Larry Sanders Show is a late-night sitcom about a late-night talk show host, but its ability to mimic and parody late-night—through its clear and thorough understanding of the comedy world of the ’80s and ’90s—makes it a prime influence on outsider chat shows. Star and co-creator Garry Shandling, once a frontrunner for Johnny Carson’s chair, blends fact and fiction, commenting on the then-contemporary controversies, high points, and the politics of actual late-night TV. When Sanders attempts to recreate Drew Barrymore’s infamous flashing Dave Letterman or stop Bobcat Golthwait from reliving his infamous chair immolation on Leno, he calls into question the spontaneity of the whole institution, reveals its inner workings, and exposes how stupid this stuff is. Late-night thrives on stars acting in uncomfortable, surprising, or unscripted ways. The Larry Sanders Show had stars play themselves, often scripting them as egotistical bedwetters battling the id of Hollywood narcissism: a talk show host. Sanders pulled back the curtain on late-night production at a time when the “who will replace Johnny” debate erupted into the national discourse and fundamentally broke how we see these shows, gifting a generation a template for turning the comedy world into comedy.

Aha! Working in the Fernwood 2 Night mold, Alan Partridge’s debut series, Knowing Me, Knowing You, helped launch a comedy universe long before that became alt-comedies bread and butter. Steve Coogan’s Alan Partridge isn’t a comedian. Instead, he’s a snobby, pedantic, light entertainer, a master at banter and filling dead air. Structured like a traditional talk show and shot before a live audience, Partridge invites fictional guests to the studio for a late-night talk that generally ends with Partridge humiliating them or himself. Though it wrapped after six episodes with Alan murdering an elderly guest, leaving Partridge banned from the BBC until 2019, Knowing Me, Knowing You began the fake history of Britain’s most beloved fake broadcaster, creating a line that goes through two podcasts, three TV series (including the anti-radio call-in show, Mid Morning Matters), a movie, two books (with another on the way), and a handful of TV specials. Cult followings are the lifeblood of these shows, and Knowing Me gave other shows, like The Best Show and Comedy Bang! Bang!, permission to embrace their continuity—and community— and make these shows alienating to outsiders and lifeblood to weirdo insiders.

A talkshow hosted by a stale cartoon character from the ’70s, Space Ghost Coast To Coast, was a flagship show in the primordial days of Cartoon Network and remained as such throughout the network’s first 20 years. Of course, Space Ghost wasn’t the first animated talk show host—those Muppets and Max Headroom have Space Ghost beat by a few years. But Space Ghost wasn’t just about its premise. A mix of neo-mid-mo-futurism and cheap public access decoration, Space Ghost plays its game as all great anti-talk show hosts do: By making the show all about them and treating their guests like a burden. He’s an animated Larry Sanders filtered through Liquid Television, setting the tone for Adult Swim’s onslaught of animated oddities that scandalized ’70s cartoon characters (see: Sealab 2021 and Harvey Birdman: Attorney At Law) and the “is anybody watching this” freedom that’s made the channel a post-midnight hotspot. But somehow, despite the mix of slow-moving animation and grainy live-action video, the show’s joke-rich template often lends itself to a conversational, improvised feel. Like Fernwood, Comedy Bang! Bang!, or Between Two Ferns, Space Ghost’s mastery of non-sequiturs kept the host’s interviews, with host and guest segments filmed months apart, punchy, funny, and weird as hell. As we stare down a future awash in AI-generated digital influencers, it’s nice to know that somewhere Space Ghost is still doing it the best.

It’s easy to draw a line from the detached, violent lunacy of The Tom Green Show to the chaos of Eric Andre. The Canadian’s ability to play dumb while making the lives of strangers and his loved ones a living hell was in a class of its own. Though made mainly from a collection of pranks Green foisted upon Canadian public access in the mid-’90s, the actual talk show part would turn the friendly relationship between host and co-host into a curdled cream of abuse and harassment. Green relentlessly doxxed and humiliated his real-life best friend Glenn Humplik through such gestures as revealing his phone number to Times Square, but it’s no worse than how he treated his parents, the proud owners of a 1992 Honda “Slut Mobile.” Under the guise of a real talk show, Green’s show was a burst of adolescent anarchy, the perfect accompaniment to Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater and Blink-182’s Enema Of The State. Green answered the question on everyone’s mind: What if a Mountain Dew-addicted 12-year-old skater from the Ontario suburbs hosted a talk show? The answer: grotesque humor, disdain for authority, and a complete breakdown of what we think these shows should and could be.

Ferns are by far the most represented tree on the list, with good reason. Between Two Ferns is addition through subtraction. By removing all the pageantry and pleasantry of talk show sets and bands, Ferns is an exercise in minimalism, relying on its charisma-sucking asshole of a host to ask inane questions that disrespect and alienate his guests. “Bad start,” Galifianakis says at the start of his Ben Stiller interview. It could be the show’s catchphrase. With only a black drape and the aforementioned ferns, Galifianakis needles his guests with flagrant disrespect, turning up the temperature until, typically, attacking him physically or leaving entirely. Even President Barack Obama sat between the ferns to mock the third Hangover, a fact the host used against his next guest, Brad Pitt. A pre-cursor to Ziwe, though obviously heavily scripted, Galifianakis’ web series is the anti-Chris Farley Show, a chance for the public to gleefully watch celebrities look uncomfortable and stare at their feet as someone reminds them of all the garbage they’ve been in and how bad they were in it.

For a while, it seemed like The Chris Gethard Show could survive a nuclear holocaust. Moving from New York public access to Fuse and, ultimately, its final resting place, TruTV, TCGS made something out of nothing every week, taking the SNL maxim, “it’s not on because it’s ready; it’s on because it’s 11:30 p.m.,” to the extreme. Host Chris Gethard spent most of the series feeling put upon by the show, with segments, themes, and stipulations that made the series a bucking bull and Gethard its hapless (and chap-less) rodeo clown. TCGS was a perfect advertisement for improv’s follow-the-fun freedom, ditching the formalities and trying to create something out of nothing live and without a net. The show was left to the whims of the odd channel surfer or his army of writers who knew the best episodes were the ones where Chris wanted to quit. With such episodes as “One Man’s Trash,” in which Paul Scheer, Jason Mantzoukas, and callers spend 40-whole minutes guessing what’s in a dumpster (the answer is genuinely one of the most magical things to ever happen on television), The Chris Gethard Show made a case for letting the night happen as it happens.

Ostensibly a show where host Scott Aukerman talks to interesting people, Comedy Bang! Bang! is whatever Aukerman wants it to be. Stemming from a long-running and still very active podcast, Aukerman’s IFC version of Comedy Bang! Bang! dutifully adapted the show for television: a celebrity interview followed by two segments of comedians playing characters. But, with the added feature of a new-fangled tech called video, the show could go even further, parodying television tropes and heightening the show’s already tenuous connection to reality. Comedy Bang! Bang! challenged Aukerman and his staff to think out of the box and shake up the form at the foundation, delivering episodes that took place upside down, inside of time paradoxes, and while Scott has amnesia. Comedy Bang! Bang!’s gently meta touch also did so without resorting to cynicism. Like Pee-Wee’s Playhouse, Comedy Bang! Bang! found the world a hilarious and enjoyable place, as long as the tongue is firmly planted in cheek.

It’s the reason for the season. Heading into its sixth round in 11 years, The Eric Andre Show doesn’t just deconstruct talk-show tropes; it decimates them. With André infamously and violently attacking his desk, chair, and house band at the start of every show, every joke feels like a heat-seeker intended for whatever audiences want out of late-night gab and go. But The Eric Andre Show is also a finely chiseled comedic diamond where everything feels apiece with its host’s vision. For example, its first episode’s musical guest features good-feeling indie rockers Modern Time Machines playing simultaneously with no-bullshit Oxcore hardcore band Retaliate. The result is a welcome, entertaining, and strangely captivating cacophony that feels at home in the Andre-verse. As does André’s deconstructionist monologue in which he repeats the phrase “words, words, punchline” in the cadence of a shouted joke for a minute. Through a mix of vile man-on-the-street bits, celebrity interviews intentionally edited to make guests look bad, and a bored co-host (Hannibal Buress, who left the show during season five), The Eric Andre Show has remained a surprisingly long-running series—despite the show’s overall atmosphere of a radio about to fall into a bathtub. The 2010s laid waste to traditional late-night forms. Out of the ashes came Eric Andre, which took a flamethrower to the past and made the 11:30 time slot smell like farts. Where would we be without him?

After cutting her teeth on late night via Desus & Mero, Ziwe embraced and refined the typical talk show poison known as “confrontation” with her solo ventures. As incisive as she is welcoming, host Ziwe Fumudoh invited friends and fellow comedians for a sucker-punch-fueled conversation about race, politics, and their personal lives on the Baited With Ziwe web series. While the first round saw comedians Josh Gondelman and Pat Regan squirming for the exit after a barrage of questions about the Black people in their lives (or lack thereof), it was during the 2020 uprising in the wake of George Floyd’s murder that Ziwe found herself on the cutting edge of late night. Quarantined to Instagram due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Ziwe began interviewing white women of note, including Caroline Calloway, Alison Roman, and Alyssa Milano, and disarming and confronting them about their privilege. With the help of A24 and Showtime, Ziwe would nationalize making celebrities uncomfortable on premium cable, with Ziwe. With an unshakable smile, Ziwe was a performative allyship wrecking ball, hammering into glossy Hollywood activism that stymies real progress and conversation. Ziwe had frank discussions with a smirk, unconcerned with how it made her guest feel.