After Midnight Has Gotten Weird in the Best Way

During After Midnight’s first week on the air in January, writer Skyler Higley tweeted a thumbnail from the show featuring Steve Harvey’s head on Pikachu’s body along with the following caption: “trying our best to make it as weird as we can on network TV.” During that night’s episode, halfway through a game in which contestants were shown inanimate objects that look like humans, contestant Robby Hoffman buzzed in at the sight of deli meat that resembled a butt and disregarded the prompt to imagine a quote it might say. “That looks like my great-uncle Eddie,” she said. “He used to take us swimming at the lake and his swim trunks would fall down. But now that I’m thinking about it, I don’t know if they fell down.” “It’s a game show, Robby!” host Taylor Tomlinson replied, half-entertained and half-distressed. “The next game is Tell Us a Traumatizing Childhood Memory, so just save it for that.”

These format-breaking moments have become increasingly common over the course of the show, which returned for its second season this week. And while each episode still gets inconsistent mileage from segments where contestants stand behind podiums and deliver canned, pre-written jokes — not to mention hearty doses of CBS and Paramount+ spon-con — the show has also leaned into chaos by booking delightful weirdos and anarchists and inventing games and segments that allow comedians more space to play. The result is a show that escapes the biggest pitfalls of its @midnight predecessor and frequently fulfills Higley’s promise: It’s as weird as a show can be on network TV. Here are ten moments since the show’s premiere that exemplify why, if you’re a fan of off-kilter late-night TV, After Midnight is worth your attention.

Pete Holmes Sells Some Tickets (February 9)

While guest plugs are a standard convention of any late-night show, the goal is typically to dispense with them quickly and painlessly to keep the show from feeling too transactional. In this After Midnight episode featuring comedians Pete Holmes, Billy Eichner, and Nico Santos, the contestants and host take a different tack: They bring up the fact that Holmes is scheduled to perform a Valentine’s Day show in Oxnard, California, on 12 separate occasions, in increasingly obtrusive ways. At one point, during a game where the contestants have to do an impression of Cher, Eichner buzzes in and says in his best, terrible Cher voice, “Hey, Pete Holmes, I’m coming to see you in Oxnard!” The post-script to this is a clip on the After Midnight YouTube channel of Holmes asking his crowd in Oxnard how many of them had bought tickets because they’d seen him on After Midnight. “So like eight of you?” he gauges. “There you go, Taylor. That’s the After Midnight bump right there.”

Adam Pally Can’t Get Past the Show’s Logo (March 7)

Adam Pally is nothing if not an accomplished little stinker, and early in After Midnight’s run, he brought this energy to the show by committing to an episode-length bit about the misplaced “@” symbol in the show’s logo. “The show is called After Midnight and the old show was called @midnight, but the logo is kind of the same,” he says immediately after being introduced. “I guess I’m just confused. What are we doing here? Where are we?” From there, Pally bends over backward to connect any prompt Tomlinson tees up back to this gripe. The next time he buzzes in, it’s ostensibly to deliver a joke about a novel way a celebrity could “quiet quit” their job, but of course that’s not what he wants to talk about. “It makes me think it’s going to be at a certain time,” he complains of the “@” symbol. Next, the host leads a game where contestants rename existing phenomena as if they’ve invented it, and Pally buzzes in again. “Punctuality,” he says to delayed laughs. “If you say something’s going to start at this time …” Tomlinson takes points away from him for the interjection.

Rob Haze Petitions to Be the Paramount+ Thumbnail (March 12)

“I know my mom’s asleep, so my goal for this show is to be the thumbnail on Paramount+,” Rob Haze says after being introduced at the top of this episode. Sure enough, he spends the remainder of the episode striking presentational, eye-catching poses fitting for a streaming-service title card. During the above game, in which contestants filibuster guided meditations about topics like microwaves and NFTs, he mugs extra hard, prompting the whole crowd to erupt into a chant of “Thumbnail!” Some might say a joke about gaming late-night consumption platforms to maximize personal exposure is too inside baseball, but not After Midnight. Plus, it worked.

Morgan Murphy Hawks a Desk (April 17)

After Midnight’s dedicated talk-show portion is a reliable highlight, because even when the questions and answers seem prepared ahead of time, the lack of rigid game structure gives the comedians lots of banter opportunities. Here, Morgan Murphy simply ignores the talk-show question she’s asked and chooses instead to try to pawn a used desk of hers off on someone in the audience. “What has this show become?” Marcella Arguello asks in confusion. But Murphy sticks to her guns: “When else would I have a chance to ask 100 people if they need a desk?”

Drew Carey Does Stand-up About Phish (April 24)

In another great talk-show-portion moment, Drew Carey is asked what he’d say if he wasn’t being “filmed right now.” In response, he leaves his podium and performs a minute-long, extremely vivid stand-up routine about seeing Phish perform at the Sphere. “It was like being edged for four days straight,” he says. “And then right before the face-melting climax at the end on the fourth day, an angel comes down from heaven — Gabriel — and he shoots fucking heroin in your arm and he says, ‘Good luck now, fucker!’ And he leaves, and then you have an orgasm for 15 minutes while your eyeballs fall out of your head.” “I don’t think there’s any universe where we’re still doing bits after that,” fellow contestant Thomas Lennon chimes in when Tomlinson tries to move the show along.

A Trio of High-Octane TikTok Duets (May 10)

Sometimes After Midnight’s guest lineup feels assembled at random, and other times the show’s talent booker curates an inspired lineup of comedians with existing relationships or complementing styles that allow them to work off each other to great effect. The show’s May 10 episode featuring contestants Eddie Pepitone, Steph Tolev, and Jessica Kirson was an example of the latter. All three comics, known to varying extents for manic stage personas, take this game wherein they’re asked to perform a scene with an actor via TikTok duet extremely seriously, and they give characteristically over-the-top performances. But Tolev pushes it to another level, physically transforming into a possessed gremlin of sorts as she leads her TikTok scene partner through a haunted house. By the end of it, she’s shaking Kirson’s arm and sneering, “I’m sorry I picked you to be my next victim!”

Just Some Great Bit Milking (May 24)

Whenever After Midnight throws caution to the wind and doesn’t even try to find a strained connection to the internet phenomena it purports to be about, it’s usually a sign that the segment in question is going to be unhinged. This one, in which Tomlinson asks comedians Arguello, Lennon, and Sarah Tiana to wear blindfolds and distinguish between containers of milk and water solely by feeling it with their hands, is one such segment. Lennon immediately makes the game overtly sexual; Tiana freaks out at the loss of her sight, prompting the other comedians to prank her; and Arguello goes full Conan O’Brien on Hot Ones, rubbing the liquids all over her chest and stomach. Imagine your elderly relative tuning in to CBS at 1 a.m. and seeing this.

Colton Dunn and the Sklar Brothers Demand Context (July 10)

When After Midnight is running according to script, the rhythms of the show can start to feel a little stiff. Case in point: the jokes that Tomlinson reads to tee up each segment, which tend to feel obligatory. In this clip, the host, along with contestants Randy Sklar, Jason Sklar, and Colton Dunn, pull back the curtains on this by interjecting commentary in between the setup and punch line of one of these sweaty intros. “I’m always saying that people are like vintage lamps,” she begins, heading into an obviously thin analogy. “I’m always saying that!” she reaffirms. The three contestants, in unison: “You are always saying that!” “How so?” Randy demands she tell them. “There’s no context to it!” adds Dunn. By the time Tomlinson delivers the punch line (“They’re like antique lamps because they’re unique, intricate, and with no guarantee there’s still a working light in there”), it’s beside the point. She gets bigger laughs by prefacing it with, “Because you asked …”

Chris Fleming Debuts His New Script (July 18)

To book Chris Fleming on a show is to concede ahead of time that you’re going to farm out a significant percentage of airtime to the comedian’s bizarro sensibility. Here, Fleming hijacks After Midnight for three minutes to rope fellow contestants Gillian Jacobs and Alaska 5000 into reading a oddball script he’d written loosely inspired by the movie Glengarry Glen Ross. No other late-night show is putting Fleming on the air, so After Midnight gets points (forgive me) for doing so twice.

Comedians Work Through Some Knots (July 26)

One could imagine a game like Untangle This — where contestants have to untangle messy electronics cords within a certain span of time — played on another late-night show. It just so happens that when you ask comedians, instead of movie stars, to play silly games, it results in better television. Here, the wrinkle is that the comedians must unravel these cords while speaking uninterrupted about thorny questions that also need untangling like, “How can you love others if you don’t love yourself?,” “Is it possible to live an ethical life in capitalist in America?,” and “How can you have empathy for your parents while still knowing that they let you down?” Contestants Maria Bamford, Vinny Thomas, and Pete Holmes are all up to the task of the monologue, and Bamford even tosses in a deranged impersonation of Peppa Pig in the process. But only Thomas can figure out the cord — all while delivering an inspiring manifesto about escaping toxic neoliberalism by moving to the “network of sewers and tunnels” and eating rats with the proletariat.