EXCLUSIVE: More change is coming to the late-night landscape, as comedian Ben Gleib is preparing to launch Good Night with Ben Gleib, the first-ever late-night talk show made exclusively for YouTube, on May 28.
Marking the first independently owned late-night talk show franchise, Gleib’s weekly series is designed to evolve the traditional celebrity-focused late night space, offering chats with the usual suspects, while broadening in scope to include top thought leaders, creators, experts, and entrepreneurs, including but not limited to wellness & financial experts, relationship coaches, AI futurists, and psychologists.
Shows will tape one day ahead of air date, premiering on Gleib’s Good Night YouTube channel with 2.9M+ subscribers, every Thursday at 10 p.m. ET. There will be a live in-studio audience, along with a wall of screens showcasing the first global virtual studio audience in late night, bringing in-real-time reactions from viewers around the world. Each week will also feature a post-show after-party episode, where Gleib dives deeper with his guests and additional curated invitees — often over drinks and candid conversation.
Late-night veteran Stewart Bailey — the four-time Emmy and two-time Peabody Award-winning co-executive producer of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and showrunner of NBC’s Last Call with Carson Daly — will serve as showrunner. Meanwhille, Keith Harris, the two-time Grammy and Juno Award-winning drummer of Black Eyed Peas fame, will serve as band leader and musical director.
Early backers of Good Night with Ben Gleib include Nikki Glaser and Scott Galloway, who will appear in Season 1. Other initial guests slated include Bob Odenkirk, Tiffany Haddish, Craig Robinson, Sophia Bush, Adam W, Jeff Ross, Adam Ray, Aisha Tyler, and thought leaders including Dr. Mark Hyman, Lori Gottlieb, Dr. Shefali, and Emily Morse (Sex with Emily), among others to be revealed.
Gleib’s move beyond the traditional network confines of late-night talk shows comes at a moment of existential crisis for the format, with the forthcoming end of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert being just one major illustration. CBS is preparing to shut down a franchise dating back to the 1990s following their wind-down of late-night talkers After Midnight and The Late Late Show. And CBS is just one network scaling back its late-night presence, amid the continuing decline of linear TV, which has made these expensive productions an increasingly outdated proposition: A couple of years ago, The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon pulled back to four episodes weekly, after holding out for decades as the only late-night franchise with five shows a week.
Amid economic headwinds and the fragmenting of audiences with the ongoing evolution of the internet, there have also been recently been concerns regarding censorship within the traditional late-night context, with Jimmy Kimmel Live! briefly taken off the air last fall following backlash to remarks from Kimmel on the death of Charlie Kirk. For Gleib and company, we understand, the ability to circumvent such considerations is another part of the appeal of going to YouTube with a late-night show, at a time when the world has changed and the late-night format is calling for reinvention.
A comedian, actor, and TV host, Gleib is perhaps best known as the host, head writer, and co-executive producer of the Emmy-nominated game show Idiotest, which ran for 210 episodes on Game Show Network, later trended on Netflix, and is currently streaming on Pluto TV. Prior to Idiotest, he gained recognition on Chelsea Lately, appearing on the roundtable more than 100 times, and as a regular guest on The Today Show alongside Kathie Lee and Hoda.
Gleib has appeared in over 500 episodes of television and amassed over a billion views online. He previously hosted the popular podcast Last Week on Earth on Kevin Smith’s Smodcast network, which debuted at #9 on iTunes Comedy. Other notable past projects include Telethon for America, which focused on increasing voter turnout, and Nowhere Comedy, the world’s first virtual comedy venue, created by Gleib during the pandemic, which helped save the livelihoods of hundreds of comedians and brought live entertainment and community to people around the world at a time they needed it most.
As a stand-up, Gleib is known for specials like The Mad King and Neurotic Gangster. He has also appeared on late-night shows like The Tonight Show, The Late Late Show, Last Call with Carson Daly, and more, and has appeared in various films including Jay and Silent Bob Reboot and Ice Age: Continental Drift. He is repped by Feig Finkel LLP.
GIPHY App Key not set. Please check settings