Inside Taylor Tomlinson’s Delightfully ‘Off the Rails’ Late-Night Debut

At the end of her fifth episode hosting After Midnight, Taylor Tomlinson challenged comedians Josh Johnson and Atsuko Okatsuka to offer up their funniest suggestions to make her late-night CBS show better. The live studio audience judged Okatsuka won Tuesday’s episode with her note: “The entire set should be underwater & renamed ‘AQUA MIDNIGHT.’”

So far, After Midnight (or @fter Midnight as it’s playfully stylized on screen) shows no signs of drowning nor treading water. In fact, CBS already has given a major vote of confidence in After Midnight, rewarding Tomlinson with a bonus Sunday episode following the Super Bowl on Feb. 11.

Never mind the early ratings reports, because the entire late-night TV landscape is not what it used to be a decade ago—when predecessor @Midnight first premiered on Comedy Central. Or two years ago when Samantha Bee, Amber Ruffin, and Ziwe all anchored their own late-night shows on cable and streaming. Or even a few days ago when Jon Stewart announced he’s returning to host The Daily Show, if only for one night a week, starting Monday Feb. 12.

America’s newest entry into network TV’s late-night pantheon may have produced only 1 percent of the episodes of its predecessor (@Midnight aired 600 episodes on Comedy Central between Oct. 21, 2013 and Aug. 4, 2017), but After Midnight already has proven itself worthy as a bigger, bolder hour of television that fulfills a promise of its most recent late-late night time-slot holder: Comics Unleashed.

Expanding the show from a half-hour (as it was on Comedy Central) to an hour has allowed them to really loosen things up, with writers and producers working with Tomlinson and the comedians to create curated chaos.

“To go from 22 minutes to 39 minutes [without ads] is really freeing. We get to have a lot more fun,” showrunner Jack Martin tells The Daily Beast. “It’s a comedy show first, it’s a game second. The game is important to have some sort of structure. But After Midnight works its best when everything goes off the rails. You know? People love to watch people actually having fun, and we take a lot of pride in our show, so you can just come and tell jokes, hear jokes, and have a great time.”

Martin is the Jack to whom Tomlinson often refers during the show, asking questions while putting her finger to her ear. @Midnight’s original showrunner, Martin has worked on other game shows in the interim (Misery Index for TBS, Tooned In for Nickelodeon, Raid The Cage for CBS), but tells us it’s a dream to be back helming a new version of the comedy show that gave him his big break in 2013. That it’s once again following Stephen Colbert, this time on CBS with Colbert joining Funny or Die as an executive producer, just makes it sweeter.

Of course, this is Tomlinson’s biggest breakthrough yet as well. Colbert has invited her onto The Late Show multiple times since announcing her hiring in November. She joined him onstage at the Emmys this month as a presenter, and he was on set for both the test runs and the series debut to toast her and the crew the night after the Emmys.

Tomlinson herself opened on a self-deprecatory note five minutes into her late-night hosting debut, saying: “I don’t even know what awards this show can possibly win. Because it’s kind of a talk show but there’s no conversation. It’s a game show, but the points are fake. It’s a vanity project, but it somehow makes me look worse?!”

That’s hardly the case.

As Milana Vayntrub, who appeared on Monday’s episode, tells us, “Taylor is what makes this show an upgrade from its previous version. Her ability to move the games along while landing every joke and riffing with guests is a rare kinda magic! She’s great at both: Being the rock star and sharing the light with the comedians.”

The Late Late Show with James Corden, which aired in CBS’ 12:35 a.m. time slot until that host stepped down last spring, also featured gimmicky games, but always with an eye on keeping both Corden and the starring guests in their best light. After Midnight, by comparison, showcases stand-ups and CBS personalities without as many guardrails.

When Max Greenfield from The Neighborhood joined comedians Robby Hoffman and James Davis for the panel on Jan. 18, Hoffman began to make Greenfield squirm and shirk, until the two of them turned on Tomlinson. As host, Tomlinson went from giving each of them points to keep their answers from the cutting-room floor, then minutes later declaring her guests had killed the vibe of the episode instead of the videos they were supposed to mock: “I’m gonna give you no points on that because you’re undermining me.”

Comedians Kelsey Cook and Chad Daniels brought their real-life relationship into play throughout Monday night’s episode, zinging each other and worrying if their competitiveness might cause them to break up. Although perhaps the most embarrassing story came at Tomlinson’s expense, when Cook recounted the time they attended a “Magic Mike Live” show.

On Wednesday night’s episode, producers changed the sound the buzzers made halfway through without telling the comedians. Marcella Arguello began acting out an impersonation of the noise, which sounds a bit like a car alarm. “That’s not a machine doing that,” Guy Branum joked. “They just have a sea lion and a stick.” Replied Tomlinson: “We’re a new show. We don’t have the budget!”

“We don’t really know what’s going to happen when they turn on the cameras,” Martin says. “We have a plan, but you know, that’s part of the fun. We build it, we structure it, and then we blow it up.”

And then they give themselves only a three-and-a-half-hour window from the time they stop filming at 6 p.m. in Hollywood to when the episode airs that night on the East Coast, with at least a half-hour’s worth of extra jokes and banter to edit in between. “We push the limits. It’s part of the adrenaline of doing the show,” Martin adds.

After Midnight has made some slight structural changes in this reboot. Instead of previous host Chris Hardwick exclaiming “POINTS!”, Tomlinson presses a button that sounds like an electronic slot machine rewarding answers she enjoys, and much like another improv-based comedy show Whose Line Is It Anyway?, the point totals themselves are quite arbitrary and beside the point.

Also, there is absolutely no mention of Twitter (or X), whereas @Midnight’s Hashtag Wars segment used to dominated the trending topic sidebar every weeknight in its heyday. Instead, Tomlinson plugs After Midnight’s social media accounts on TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, and Threads, making a running joke about the latter. The decision to leave Twitter out of the conversation speaks for itself. For his part, Martin would only say, “We used to drive the original show to go to one place. And now the internet's changed quite a bit in 10 years.”

The show’s Instagram has 132K followers so far, with many more watching individual reels and commenting. They’re also picking up several hundred Facebook comments under each of the nightly Hashtag Wars prompts. And the full premiere episode has racked up 1.1 million views on YouTube in its first eight days.

Then there are the actual TV ratings. Last week’s Nielsen report seemed to show After Midnight had gotten off to a slow start, averaging 579,000 viewers compared to NBC’s Late Night with Seth Meyers (887,000) and ABC’s Nightline (883,000). But Tomlinson’s show jumped to an average of 819,000 in viewing live+3 days, not including streaming, social media or that million-plus on YouTube.

For all the talk about TV viewership fading out among gen Z and millennials, the one thing After Midnight has going for it that none of its broadcast network rivals can boast is that its premise leans into the very online nature of its target audience. And After Midnight taps into the immediacy of online trends and viral videos in a way other shows simply cannot.

Saturday Night Live, for example, waited until Dec. 9 to surprise viewers with a Julia Stiles cameo during “Weekend Update” that largely came about in response to a viral TikTok from two months earlier shining a new light on her climactic audition scene from Save The Last Dance. After Midnight is built ready to challenge its comedians to do that choreography the same week.

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Hiring Tomlinson to host at age 30 puts her in great company with the lineage of late-late-night TV hosts who have had success reaching previous generations of college-aged viewers. Conan O’Brien was 30 when he took over Late Night in 1993, and the media infamously gave him little chance of surviving his first season on air. David Letterman was 34 when he started Late Night in 1982; Jimmy Fallon, 34 in 2009. And yet Comedy Central is hoping to turn the clock back on The Daily Show with Stewart, now 61.

In an Instagram Ask Me Anything over the weekend, Tomlinson told her followers that she didn’t have any interest in hosting a traditional talk show because she still wants to tour comedy clubs and theaters on the weekends. But this?

“It’s just a silly goofy show hanging out with other comedians, so obviously I wanted to do that,” she wrote. And where else can stand-ups, new or established alike, find any national TV exposure as in 2024? Only Fallon’s Tonight Show still regularly books comedians to tell jokes. After Midnight is already a destination for comedians to plug their upcoming dates and attract new fans by demonstrating how funny they can be in the moment.

“Tbh I think it’s a great comfort show,” Tomlinson wrote on IG. “As someone with anxiety, comfort shows are very important to me and I would love for After Midnight to be that for people.”

She’s off to a comforting start.

For more, listen to Taylor Tomlinson on The Last Laugh podcast.