Will Late-Night TV Work on YouTube?

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.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/03/business/media/youtube-julian-shapiro-barnum-late-night.html