Video Podcasts Are the New Late Night

Interview shows like Amy Poehler’s Good Hang are taking the place of traditional TV.

I don’t mind the laughing. On Good Hang, the video podcast interview show hosted by Amy Poehler, there’s always faint laughing in the background. I assume the chuckles are emanating from producers and others lingering in the studio, off-mic, during taping. Some people find it annoying, but I don’t. On Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend, the host’s executive assistant Sona Movsesian and his producer Matt Gourley sit at the table with him, mic’d up, and they laugh uproariously at his jokes—the job Andy Richter used to do on his late-night shows. That, I have a harder time with—the laughter as blinking “Applause” sign to cue listeners. In comparison, the chortles on Good Hang bring a kind of authenticity. When Poehler or one of her guests says something unexpected or lands a solid bit, you’ll often hear one of these nameless shades, faintly audible, erupting in laughter. As if they’re not supposed to, as if they can’t help it. You can visualize their conversation as a hangout, with all the looseness and social porousness that implies.

But you don’t have to visualize. Like an increasing number of podcasts, Good Hang is filmed and edited as a bare-bones TV show. You can watch it in its native environment on Spotify or cross-posted on YouTube. You can find clips circulating near-constantly on Instagram Reels and TikTok. Good Hang launched in 2025, in a podcast landscape that was in the midst of a gigantic pivot to video. Video podcasting has been around since Apple’s launch of video podcast support on iTunes in the aughts, and shows like The Joe Rogan Experience have streamed video from the start. But the shift from audio-only to video—and the prioritization of YouTube as a distribution channel—is a phenomenon of just the past few years. The New York Times started pushing its popular podcasts onto YouTube in 2023; Call Her Daddy used to post video clips but has shifted to full episodes on YouTube; The Ringer podcast network began releasing video episodes of many of its shows in 2024, and then, in 2025, signed a deal to air its shows on Netflix, including a video version of the long-running The Bill Simmons Podcast. It’s probably not a coincidence that Marc Maron, who was outspoken against video podcasting, ended his extraordinary WTF With Marc Maron in 2025. The holdouts are no longer holding out; podcasting is video now.

There are a lot of commercial reasons for this shift, and few aesthetic ones. Most video podcasts have a stripped-down look, featuring little in the way of compelling editing, production design, or cinematography. They present what you were probably picturing anyway: the host and the guest talking in front of microphones. The video version of Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend is set, like many of these........

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