After a nearly 18-month absence, David Letterman’s Netflix talk show is finally set to return — and you won’t have to wait long to see it. Vulture has learned that season four of My Next Guest Needs No Introduction will drop on May 20 and that this year’s lineup of six celebrity guests includes one name guaranteed to get attention: Oscar winner–slash–Chris Rock slapper Will Smith. Unfortunately for anyone hoping to hear Smith talk at length about the you-know-what, Netflix says all of this season’s interviews were “filmed prior to March 2022,†thus ruling out any possibility of Smith discussing the events of March 27. The conversation should be fascinating anyway, if only as a time capsule of Smith’s career just before its trajectory was forever altered.
As for the rest of Letterman’s 2022 lineup, it includes two superstars from the music world (Cardi B and Billie Eilish), an NBA giant (Kevin Durant), and two more big-name actors (Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Ryan Reynolds). The last season of My Next Guest debuted all the way back in October 2020 and — no doubt because of the challenges of the pandemic — included just four episodes. Letterman launched the Emmy-nominated franchise in January 2018, two and a half years after wrapping up his decades-long run in late night on NBC and CBS. More recently, he’s been appearing regularly in a series of (very funny) comedic interview segments on his newly supersized YouTube page.