• by Adam Buckman , Featured Columnist, January 5, 2024

A replacement show announced Thursday for “The Late Late Show With James Corden” represents a break in the traditional format for late-night TV.

No more guest interviews, in-house band or pre-planned comedy bits. Instead, the new show takes up a style and format that has emerged as one of the most ubiquitous on TV. Call it the clips-and-comedy show.

These are the countless shows in which short videos culled from social media and YouTube are shown, and pseudo-celebrities and occasionally real ones make snarky comments and laugh from on-high at the foibles of others.

The new show is called “After Midnight,” set to premiere on CBS on Tuesday, January 16, at 12:37 a.m. (actually late-night Monday), CBS said in a press release.

Comedian Taylor Tomlinson (above photo) hosts the show, which CBS says is “inspired” by a similar clips-and-comedy show called “@midnight” that aired on Comedy Central from 2013 to 2017.

Comedy Central and CBS are both owned by media giant Paramount Global.

Stories about this new departure from late-night tradition began to surface last April as Corden was preparing to leave “The Late Late Show” after eight years as host.

The arrival of “After Midnight” officially marks the end of “The Late Late Show” after 29 years. It premiered in 1995 as a straight interview show with the late Tom Snyder as interviewer and host.

The original “@midnight” on Comedy Central was a half-hour show. CBS did not specify the length of its new clips-and-comedy late-night show. 

But the odds favor the show running for an hour, unless CBS is willing to cede a half-hour of network airtime -- 1:07 a.m. to 1:37 a.m. Eastern -- to its affiliates.

“ ‘After Midnight’ … is the smartest show on television about the dumbest things on the internet,” CBS said.

The show will feature “a panel of guests from the worlds of entertainment, comedy, music and beyond,” said the press release. 

“The show is “a late-night comedy series about what set the internet abuzz that day with a game show feel.”

This format has been in existence from at least as far back as the origination of “America’s Funniest Home Videos” in 1989.

The most dominant of these shows here in the present day has got to be “Ridiculousness,” hosted by Rob Dyrdek on MTV (also owned by Paramount).

The show takes up a lot of air time on MTV with its seemingly endless procession of videos of real people crashing bicycles, colliding with glass patio doors and flying off trampolines, while in-studio commentators laugh at them.

People have pointed and laughed at others ever since man first discarded a banana peel on a sidewalk and somebody slipped on it. 

This may be why there are so many of these stop-look-and-laugh video clip shows. One thing I’ve never seen on any of them, however: Somebody actually, in real life, slipping on a banana peel!