Podcast Corner: Jimmy Kimmel and Seth Meyers join forces
Jimmy Kimmel and Seth Meyers are among the contributors to a new podcast, Strike Force Five.
“What would happen if five of America’s top 11 most beloved talk show hosts all talked on top of each other for an hour? We’re about to find out.” So goes Jimmy Kimmel’s introduction to the first of at least 12 episodes of Strike Force Five.
The other four of the talk show hosts are Seth Meyers, John Oliver, Stephen Colbert, and Jimmy Fallon, and they’re getting together - well, over Zoom - in support of their staff writers as the WAG strike continues.
“The last time there was a writers’ strike,” continues Kimmel, “there wasn’t a lot of communication between the late-night hosts, and as a result, there was a lot of nonsense that went on. So Stephen suggested we get together and talk through our issues.” There is a lot of talking over each other in the first episode, but considering the star wattage, it’s easily forgiven.
As Meyers gets in a plug for his own podcast - Family Trips with the Meyers brothers - telling his four co-hosts that they’re all going to be asked to come on in due course, topics covered include sending your children off to college, honorary doctorates, aliases, Bruce Willis, watching other talk shows, and other disparate, light issues.
Meanwhile, if that’s not enough late-night US talk show podcast news for you, according to Variety, former Daily Show host Trevor Noah has inked a deal with Spotify for a weekly show that is due to start later this year. Podcasting “just gives me an opportunity to expand a little bit more on some of the elements that television doesn’t necessarily allow you to as much — which is long form”, he said.
More star wattage is to be heard on Grammy-nominated Billy Mann’s podcast, which began earlier this summer. In the vein of Elizabeth Day’s How to Fail, “Mann invites his guests to peel back the veneer of success and reveal the humanity beneath”. Guests so far have been eclectic, from the E Street Band’s Steve Van Zandt to Kelly Rowland of Destiny’s Child to, most recently, Michael Bolton.
While Bolton says he wishes he hadn’t taken things so seriously when he was at his peak some 30 years ago, he also talks about other challenges, particularly early on in his career: “We had rent cheques that were bouncing to a landlord who was a nice guy, didn’t want to kick us out. We didn’t have the term homelessness back then, at least I never heard it, but we were close to that.”
