Ben Gleib Built a Late-Night Show in His Home Theater. Late Night May Never Leave the House Again

For seventy years, late-night television worked like this. A network built a theater in New York or Los Angeles, hired a band, hung a curtain, put a desk in front of it, and found a man who could tell jokes about the news without sweating through his suit. It was expensive, and it worked, until it didn't.

Ben Gleib has a different idea. His show, Good Night with Ben Gleib, is billed as the first late-night show developed for YouTube, and he makes it in his own house, in what used to be his home theater. It has the pieces you'd expect: a monologue, a house band, a guest at the desk, a roundtable of comics. The audience watches from all over the world, online. There's a looser follow-up show called Nightcap, for what Gleib calls the weird stuff. A new episode comes out every Thursday.

The Los Angeles Times wrote about it this week and pointed out he isn't the only comedian doing late night on his own. I believe it. When I was young, if you wanted to be on television, you had to be invited into a building. Now you just need a building. A house will do. Some fellows are doing it from the car.

Here's my take, and it's a sentimental one, which I try to avoid, like dairy. Late night didn't die because people stopped wanting jokes at the end of the day. It got sick because it was too big and too slow, and the jokes arrived the next morning on your phone anyway. A man in his old home theater with a band and a desk is not a step down. He's going back to what the format was always about: one person, a few friends, a bad hour, and a reason to stay up.

The risks are real. It's hard to get famous guests to drive to a man's house, and nobody knows yet whether a virtual audience laughs as loud as a real one. But television was always just a room with a camera in it. Gleib simply cut out the part where someone else owns the room.