🌙 Late night talk shows just are not the same anymore

Used to watch late night talk shows fairly regularly years ago, genuinely enjoying the specific format, a relaxed, familiar host, a celebrity guest doing rounds for whatever they were actually promoting at the time, and some fairly loose, genuinely spontaneous feeling comedy woven throughout the whole segment together. Tried watching a current version recently purely out of nostalgia, and something about it genuinely felt different, more polished perhaps, but also noticeably less spontaneous somehow, like every single specific moment was carefully calculated for eventual short clip circulation online rather than actually working as a genuinely coherent, complete segment meant to be watched properly in full from start to finish. Mentioned this specific observation to an older colleague who has genuinely followed the format for considerably longer than I personally have myself, and he said this shift genuinely happened gradually as social media clips became the actual primary way most people now consume this kind of specific content, rather than watching the entire show live or properly recorded the way audiences traditionally used to do previously. That explanation actually makes a lot of real sense honestly, if the actual specific goal now is producing a viral, shareable thirty second clip rather than a genuinely coherent full segment, the whole underlying structure and pacing would naturally shift considerably to actually accommodate and optimize for that specific new primary purpose over time. Part of me genuinely misses the old, more unhurried format, but I also recognize that expecting an entire industry to simply resist an obvious, genuinely major shift in how people actually consume this kind of specific content generally is probably not entirely realistic or fair to expect of them either. Does anyone else miss the older, more unhurried late night talk show format, or does the current, more clip optimized approach genuinely work better for how most people actually consume this kind of specific content these days generally?

Losing the couch and studio audience format killed something these shows never quite recovered from for me personally, the energy through a screen just is not the same as a whole room full of people reacting live together in the moment, laughing at the same beat at once. Clips shared online now feel more like content than a real conversation happening naturally between two people talking.