A Glimpse Into Late-Night TV’s Future?

LONDON, ENGLAND – Taylor Swift performs onstage during “The Eras Tour” at Wembley Stadium on August 15, 2024, in London. (Photo by Gareth Cattermole/TAS24/Getty Images for TAS Rights Management )

Gareth Cattermole/Getty Images for TAS Rights Management

When Conan O’Brien was inducted into the Television Academy Hall of Fame this weekend, he delivered what sounded, at least from a certain perspective, like an obituary for late-night TV. “Late night television as we have known it since around 1950 is going to disappear,” O’Brien said during his acceptance remarks, “but those voices are not going anywhere. People like Stephen Colbert are too talented and too essential to go away.”

He went on to predict that those voices will start showing up elsewhere — and it’s hard not to feel like we got a taste of what that “elsewhere” might look like a few days ago, when Taylor Swift revealed the cover art and October release date of her next album, The Life of a Showgirl. Because she didn’t break the news on The Tonight Show or in a glossy magazine spread. Instead, she did it on New Heights, the podcast hosted by her boyfriend Travis Kelce and his brother Jason.

Over the course of two hours, Swift opened up about her upcoming album, her relationship with Kelce, and the marathon that was her 21-month Eras Tour. For someone who’s long let her lyrics do the talking, it was one of her most personal conversations in years. And it happened not in a late night TV studio with a house band and a live audience, but in the relaxed environment of a podcast.

Taylor Swift’s podcast interview, and what it means

A format, by the way, that’s already been talked up as the future – or, rather, a kind of replacement – for the late-night TV ecosystem of softball interviews and conversations with celebrities who have a release of some sort to peddle. “Networks will start airing podcasts as late night shows,” one user predicted in a recent X post.

Not sure I’d go that far, especially given that the most successful podcasts tend to run much, much longer than a half-hour episode of TV. But it’s hard to disagree with the larger point there. For celebrities, meanwhile, the appeal is obvious; podcasts provide a safe space where they can open up without feeling rushed. It’s no coincidence that stars like Marc Maron and Theo Von became cultural fixtures by giving big names a comfortable platform. Taylor Swift’s New Heights appearance followed that same script.

The economics also back up the cultural shift here. As The Wrap recently reported, the biggest paydays in talk today aren’t even on TV. Joe Rogan signed a $250 million Spotify deal, Alex Cooper’s Call Her Daddy went to SiriusXM for $125 million, O’Brien signed a $150 million podcast deal, and the Kelce brothers themselves landed a $100 million deal with Amazon’s Wondery. Meanwhile, podcast listening in the U.S. has exploded 355% since 2015 (according to Edison Research), now reaching an average of 773 million hours per week.

As The New York Times noted about Swift’s interview on the New Heights podcast (which, by the way, tends to focus on football and pop culture), it racked up almost 9 million views in its first 12 hours of availability on YouTube – compared to around 11 million views that Joe Rogan’s October interview with President Trump likewise amassed in its first 12 hours on YouTube. As of this writing, the Swift interview is sitting at 18 million views on YouTube alone.

O’Brien himself is a perfect embodiment of this new reality. Amplifi Media notes that his Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend podcast gets around 1.3 million downloads per episode – a big improvement over the 282,000 viewers the final episode of his TV show got back in 2021. And his podcast is drawing major guests, just like he did on TV back in the day (recent episodes have featured Bob Odenkirk, Timothy Olyphant, and Andy Samberg).

The bottom line: Everyone is still gaming out what the future holds for late-night TV — with the prevailing assumption being that the current crop of hosts will be the last ones to helm the big network shows. But Swift’s decision to sit down for a podcast interview, instead of a traditional talk show appearance, is a reminder that the format isn’t disappearing so much as shifting to someplace different. The big stage and late-night desk may fade away, but the appetite for celebrity conversations and big cultural moments most certainly has not.