With late-night television shows on indefinite hiatus since the writers’ strike began in May, the five major hosts have found a new avenue for courting attention – and funds for their out-of-work staff. Like many a male friend group before them, the late-night crew have started a podcast.
Strike Force Five, named for the text chain between Jimmy Fallon, Jimmy Kimmel, Stephen Colbert, Seth Meyers and John Oliver, premiered on Wednesday with an hour and seven minute episode, a day after the project was announced at Spotify. All proceeds from the show, which has promised at least 12 episodes, will support their staff as the Writers Guild of America (WGA) strike heads toward its fifth month.
The show has promised chemistry over substance – five prominent television hosts, currently out of work and actually friends with each other, bantering in the name of their workers. Or, as Kimmel put it in the show’s intro: “What would happen if five of America’s top 11 most beloved talk show hosts all talked on top of each other for an hour?”
The answer: some insight into how the hosts have collectively handled the work stoppage, anodyne details about their summer lives, a few peeks behind the late-night curtains, several anecdotes about Tony Bennett and plenty of talking over each other. (Said Meyers of their respective staffs: “You’re really going to feel their absence while we’re talking without their help.”) Also, a crack at the clear lack of diversity among their ranks. “For those who would criticize us, who would say we don’t need a show hosted by a group of four middle-aged straight white men,” said Kimmel while introducing the hosts, “We bring you a fifth middle-aged straight white man, but this one is from England.” (That would be John Oliver, of HBO’s Last Week Tonight.)
Strike Force Five, we learn, grew out of an idea from Colbert for a hosts’ Zoom call to collectively discuss the strike, which immediately halted production in May. (Indeed, the sound quality is distinctly Zoom.) The Zoom call – which is, as far as we can tell in the podcast, chummy and good-humored – marks a distinct improvement in inter-host relations compared to the previous writers’ strike in 2008. Gone are the famous late-night wars of the 90s and 2000s – Leno v Letterman, then Leno v O’Brien, plus an overall competitive squabbling for ratings. Relations then were “a sequence of dying marriages that they were engaged in”, said Oliver of the 2008 line-up, which included Kimmel, Conan O’Brien, Jay Leno, David Letterman and Craig Ferguson on the major networks and Colbert and Jon Stewart on Comedy Central. As the hosts recalled, a production loophole allowed Letterman and Ferguson to return to air early, “and we were all mad”, said Kimmel.
Suffice to say, the hosts are all on the same page this time, that page being, among other things, that they miss their staffs and their work. “This is like a vacation in the same way a colonoscopy is like a nap,” said Colbert. “You’re unconscious for both of them, but one of them is really what you want on a regular basis.” Other topics covered besides the strike included: taking children to college, Kimmel hosting A-list guests in Montana, how Oliver is the only one without an honorary doctorate, their collective pasts as altar boys, and a bit about how Colbert’s mom somehow obtained the former Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza’s pants, to which all the other hosts had no references but plenty of jokes to add.
There were some professional bonding tidbits, such as Kimmel asking whether any of them had ever called a potential guest to ask why they hadn’t been on the show, or how they crack difficult guests (Colbert opted for a minute of silence with a notoriously reticent Robert DeNiro). And, natural for five comedians, plenty of relishing the delivery for ads from their sponsors, Diageo (which owns such luxury alcohol brands as Aviation Gin and Casamigos tequila) and Ryan Reynolds’s Mint Mobile (Reynolds contributed his own recorded ad).
It was overall loose and informal (“has it been an hour already?” Colbert asks at the end), heavily inflected by references to their past careers in comedy and quick to dispel any illusions of a rift between the hosts. As far as rambling podcasts go, at least this one goes to a good cause: feeling, as Meyers said, the indispensability of their staffs.
