Norton take note: Netflix is producing chat show gold

‘Everybody’s Live with John Mulaney’ has been an odd, inventive delight for the past 12 weeks, writes Louis Chilton. It’s a shame our own late-night talk shows aren’t a patch on it

- Louis Chilton

Credit where credit is due: Netflix ain't all bad. Despite becoming known in recent years for its unyielding conveyor belt of shapeless content slop, the streamer has, over the past 12 weeks, produced some of the year's very best television. And it's done it in a format that has come to embody the most banal and disposable aspects of our media culture: the late-night talk show.

Everybody’s Live with John Mulaney ended its first-season run last week, with an episode that culminated in its host, comedian John Mulaney, having a physical fight with three 14-year-old boys. It’s the sort of bizarre, semi-comic spectacle that calls to mind the late Andy Kaufman, and was just one of many rubyour-eyes-in-disbelief moments that have made up this weekly programme.

The finale also saw Henry Winkler perform, and derail, an antidrunk-driving educational play, amid interviews with Adam Sandler and an insouciant, chain-smoking Sean Penn; another recent episode saw Mulaney host the entire show blindfolded. Where US late-night talk shows have become staid and uniform, Everybody’s Live is inventive, unpredictable and conceptually daring.

But Mulaney’s scatty and delightful experiment hasn’t just shown up the flaws in the US’s old-hat talk-show circuit: it ought to make Britain’s chat-show equivalents take a long, hard look in the mirror. These days, the UK’s late-night chat-show scene boils down, more or less, to two men: Graham Norton, who hosts the country’s flagship Friday night chat show on BBC One, and Jonathan Ross, who hosts a rival show on ITV. Both men have been working in the format for decades now; both shows have been going through the motions for years.