Inside ‘Outside Tonight,’ the internet’s late-night show

Julian Shapiro-Barnum doesn’t know if he’s going to save late night. But he does know that it’s fun to say.

It’s a standout line in his opening monologue in the very first episode of Outside Tonight, the YouTube-based internet late night show that debuted in June. The first season consists of nine weekly episodes, which follow the typical late-night script: a headliner guest, supplemental skits and bits, and a musical performance.

Viewers may ask: How is Outside Tonight—which does practically the same thing as a traditional late night show—going to save the genre? After all, the greats are suffering: CBS controversially pulled Stephen Colbert’s The Late Show off the air, with the network citing financial concerns amid “a challenging backdrop in late night,” per a statement shared with People in May. The audience for The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon declined 64% over the last decade, dropping from 3.6 million viewers in 2015 to 1.3 million in 2025, and Jimmy Kimmel Live! was down 13%, going from 2.3 million to 2 million viewers in the same time period, according to Forbes; however, the ratings for Jimmy Kimmel Live! have shot up almost 25% following Colbert’s cancellation.

Perhaps the answer is a small dose of existentialism. The thing that arguably sets Outside Tonight apart from the shows that paved the way (besides literally placing the desk outside) is Shapiro-Barnum’s framing of each episode around a question; for instance, “When is the right time to leave a party?” or “What’s so wrong with letting our insecurities define us?”

“I have a lot of opinions about the celebrity chat show thing,” Shapiro-Barnum told us. “With this, we tried to, more so than a traditional late-night show, give a framing device for every episode and at least have a conversation topic, so it wasn’t just like we’re talking about anything you want to.”

Still, Shapiro-Barnum doesn’t think his questions (or skits or interviews) will revolutionize late night immediately. Making Outside Tonight is a work in progress—he’s listening and learning, as they say, from both his peers and his predecessors, and he hopes to do so for a very long time.

Your friendly neighborhood late night host

At the time of writing, seven episodes of Outside Tonight are live, and the most watched episode sits at 316,000 views. It’s a much smaller number than Shapiro-Barnum is accustomed to with Recess Therapy and Celebrity Substitute, the web series that brought him into the public eye. Those shows can pull in millions of views per episode, both on YouTube in their full form, as is the case with Celebrity Substitute, and on TikTok in short clips, as with Recess Therapy.

But the lackluster numbers, at least relative to his previous successes, don’t seem to bother him. In fact, Shapiro-Barnum credits his previous shows as the reason he’s able to make Outside Tonight at all.

“I have the luxury of [having] these other projects that work. This is my passion project,” he said. “I don’t need to be doing three full-time shows, but I want to be.”

His passion project is made possible by brand sponsorship. In the first episode, Shapiro-Barnum states plainly that Outside Tonight is entirely brand-supported, which he said allows him to “call a spade a spade” and acknowledge the brand integrations that appear in every episode.

Season 1 is sponsored by Amazon and Chase Freedom, which appear in comedic, improvised sketches in a dedicated segment of each episode. For Wittney Rachlin, general manager at Chase Freedom, Shapiro-Barnum’s personality helps bring the brand message to life in a way that fits both the show and the brand.

“His freshness and his everyday life integrations, he’s bringing this warm, surprising kind of joy to simple things,” Rachlin told us, describing the brand’s sponsored segment as involving Shapiro-Barnum interacting with people on the street, like a bodega customer or duo on a first date, and picking up their tab as a way to show off Chase Freedom’s cashback offering. The entirety of this partnership lives on YouTube, according to the company, and it’s the first time Chase Freedom has ventured into any type of late night, internet or traditional.

That down-to-earth nature is something Shapiro-Barnum wants to preserve as he grows the show, specifically by continuing to have non-celebrity guests. Frequent watchers of internet shows might notice that stands in direct contrast to a common critique in comment sections, which calls out series like Subway Takes for only featuring celebrities once they see mainstream success (a notion that Kareem Rahma, host of Subway Takes, has refuted).

While episodes in the first season of Outside Tonight do feature well-known personas like Benito Skinner, Hasan Minhaj, and the cast of Adults, secondary guests also include Shapiro-Barnum’s exes, a bodega worker, and an “elderly New Yorker panel” gathered to talk about their sex lives.

“With this show, the human interest, the real people side of it, is to me what makes it special,” Shapiro-Barnum said. “We have the celebrity slot. That need is filled in Outside Tonight, then we can do everything else. To me, I don’t see that going anywhere.”

Sweet freedom

To make the show, Shapiro-Barnum said he and his team completed a month of pre-production work followed by a month of shooting all episodes at once. Filming on location outdoors helps the show stand out, but it also can present logistical challenges.

“Sometimes we didn’t have locations locked until day of,” he said. In the fourth episode, rain made an outdoor setting impossible, so the team pivoted to an indoor warehouse that still allowed the monologue to be shot against an outdoor background through an open doorway, preserving the show’s spirit, Shapiro-Barnum said.

As he looks toward a second season, he’s thinking about logistics like weather and seasonality that might limit or expand his ability to make the show. But at the end of the day, all of these decisions are up to him, something he recognizes as a freedom that brand support ultimately allows him compared to a traditional studio model.

“I think a brand has a lot of say over their integrated piece of the show, and I think it’s up to me to be like, look, if I want these brands to be a part of the show, I know what I know the line is,” Shapiro-Barnum said. “There’s a line for everything, and it’s up to me to feel that out and be my own vibes master. But at the end of the day, no one is ever gonna cancel my show.”