With late night at a crossroads, Ben Gleib is forging a new path.
Just a week after the permanent shuttering of The Late Show — the CBS franchise hosted for the last 11 years by Stephen Colbert — Gleib is poised to launch Good Night with Ben Gleib, which marks the world’s first late-night talk show built specifically for YouTube.
It’s a bet rooted in the belief that late night as a format is as vital as ever — even if the infrastructure that gave rise to it is crumbling.
Between exorbitant production costs and the continual erosion of linear television audiences, traditional late-night talk shows have been under mounting pressure for years, increasingly consumed via short-form clips scattered across social media rather than live and in full. In the last year, growing political and corporate pressures surrounding both The Late Show and Jimmy Kimmel Live! have only intensified questions around the long-term sustainability of the format on broadcast television.
For Gleib, the solution to late night’s problems is not reinventing the wheel, per se — although his show does feature a number of novel elements, including a virtual audience section for tapings and a post-show after-party experience. Rather, it’s embracing the reality of how content is consumed today — adopting YouTube as a new home base, rather than a mere promotional arm.
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With Black Eyed Peas drummer Keith Harris serving as band leader and Stewart Bailey (The Daily Show, Last Call with Carson Daly) as showrunner, Gleib’s show most importantly boasts a dramatically leaner footprint than a traditional network talk show.
The crazy part? He’s taping shows from his home in Los Angeles, producing a first season of 42 episodes, plus 42 post-show episodes, for around $1.5 million.
For Gleib, a self-described night owl who became obsessed with late night as a child, Good Night with Ben Gleib represents the culmination of a lifelong ambition — and something he’s been actively building toward since college. While attending UC San Diego in the late ’90s, he created and hosted The Gleib Show, a talk show serving as his honors thesis, which later ran on the National Lampoon College Network, finding success as the network’s #1 show airing to college campuses across the country.
Gleib’s work there led to a Fox pilot produced by Lorne Michaels’ Broadway Video — an early brush with traditional TV that ultimately did not move forward to series.
In the years since, Gleib has built an unusually eclectic career spanning stand-up, television hosting, podcasting, entrepreneurship, and even a presidential run — experiences as a “jack of all trades” that he now sees converging in a single project. With Good Night, he says he is channeling “the combined resources and goodwill and efforts and momentum” of his entire life and career into what he views as “the evolution of late night.”
Gleib envisions Good Night scaling to become a “multi-hundred million dollar brand,” between ad revenue, tickets sold to be part of the show’s virtual audience, spin-offs, live touring extensions, merch, and much more.
In today’s episode of Comedy Means Business, Gleib discusses the “confluence of forces” reshaping the late-night landscape, the years-long road to bringing Good Night with Ben Gleib to life, and the business plan behind the gamble.
Watch the entire conversation above.