‘Touchy-feely’ Drew Barrymore isn’t the real problem with US talk show interviews

Drew Barrymore is certainly no Jeremy Paxman – but her interview technique is becoming just as infamous. The actor and TV personality has developed her own distinctive interrogation style as the host of CBS’s The Drew Barrymore Show – and it involves a lot of breathy hand-holding. A particularly touchy-feely interview with Oprah Winfrey and a recent love-in with Kamala Harris are among the most eyebrow-raising examples – not inappropriate, necessarily, just really, uncomfortably intense. It’s a tack that some fans had even deemed “creepy”. This week, Barrymore suggested she would try and pare back her intimate, tactile approach to interviews, explaining: “I guess a lot of people say, ‘You’re too touchy’ about me. Talk about shame and embarrassment. I’m horrified when I hear that, and yet I can’t stop.” But Barrymore needn’t worry. On the mirthless content carousel that is the US talk show circuit, being a little intense is only a minor offence.

The fact is, the entire American talk show scene is in the throes of what we might call a silent crisis. Once the go-to forum for A-list interviews, it’s now become a trough of banal showbiz miscellanea. Perhaps the most egregious presence is ex-Saturday Night Live performer (and corpser extraordinaire) Jimmy Fallon. The nadirs of Fallon’s 10-year stint as host of The Tonight Show are infamous: the time he interviewed a pre-presidency Donald Trump, for instance, affectionately tousling the real estate mogul’s hair. Or in January 2022, when Fallon spoke to Paris Hilton about their respective “Bad Ape” NFTs (no, me neither), a segment that was as nauseatingly venal as it was eye-scouringly awkward. But while Fallon might be particularly dismal, the other big talk show players – Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Kimmel, Seth Meyers – are all rotting on the same vine of sycophancy and blandness.

It’s not even really the fault of the individual presenters, but rather a systemic dumbing-down brought on by the Era of Internet Content. Talk shows are now designed in such a way that they can be broken down into digestible three-to-eight-minute segments, which are then shared on YouTube in the hopes of going viral. (This pathology is of course everywhere now – from podcasts to presidential debates – but talk shows are one of the most cynical adopters.) It’s a format that is preclusive to good, in-depth interviewing, a format that encourages only the most surface-level, “clickable” interactions with celebrity guests. It’s a waning of ambition that has also taken root in the UK, in series such as The Graham Norton Show and the dusty Jonathan Ross Show. The Graham Norton Show is, to be fair, particularly adept at contriving these viral moments, thanks largely to the clever decision to squash dissonant celebrities onto the same sofa and just let them bounce off each other. How else would Lady Gaga come face-to-face with EastEnders’ June Brown, if not through the antic alchemy of The Graham Norton Show?

Part of the problem with the modern talk show archetype is just how phoney it all seems. The talk show circuit is essentially a form of advertising: 99 times out of 100, a celebrity will only appear in order to promote their new film, or album, or skincare line. This is unavoidable, and hardly new, but it has resulted in a generation of interviewers who are utterly unwilling to bare their teeth – or even a bit of gum – lest they ruffle corporate feathers. The promotional aspect has always been a necessary evil, but with Hollywood’s ever-expanding infrastructure of publicists, managers and agents exercising more control than ever, we are increasingly left with tame, pointless interviewers, conducted with a rictal pleasantry. Everything is all nice, all the time – even as incendiary media reports tell us otherwise. (Fallon and a now-retired Ellen DeGeneres are among the TV hosts to have weathered “toxic work environment” allegations.)

As a Brit, I find it infuriating to absorb so much bland, pointless and shamelessly advertorial content piped directly over from the States. There was a time, not so very many years ago, when the American talk show circuit was virtually alien to the UK. Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show (1962-1992) was a towering, seminal force in American pop culture, but a complete obscurity here – the same goes for Dick Cavett. After this, David Letterman was the man who then reinvented late-night TV, injected it with a pointedly un-Carson-like levity. But he too was simply not a thing here. (Among the public, at least: there was a run of attempts by British TV execs to Letterman-ify the British talk show scene, via ill-fated series fronted by presenters such as Danny Baker and Johnny Vaughan.) We had our own talk show heritage of course, one revolving around the pillar of Michael Parkinson, whose meaty and substantial interviews (everyone from Muhammed Ali to Orson Welles to Tom Cruise) bear little resemblance to the sort of fare seen now on British or American broadcast television. One of the dispiriting things about the current British chat show framework is just how much it seeks to ape the American one. It was once a true art form, a format where celebrities were actually exposed and interrogated, rather than simply advertised.

Obviously, not all interviews can be Paxman-style grillings – it would become as testing for the audience as it would be for the participants. But we watch interviews in the hope of seeing something revealing. What is it like to spend 20 minutes in the company of someone exceptional? As it is, modern talk shows are unable to answer this. Somewhere along the line, the power balance between interviewer and interviewee shifted, and the model of an entire programme was broken.

So what is the future of the chat show? Earlier this year, John Mulaney’s anarchic six-episode live show Everybody’s in LA presented a different vision of the format – but one that’s surely too scatty and niche to be sustained for a season. It’s telling, perhaps, that Letterman has continued to conduct interviews after hanging up his Late Show mantle in 2015 – only now, he conducts them for Netflix, and they’re an hour long apiece. (Interviewees on My Next Guest Needs No Introduction include Will Smith, Robert Downey Jr and Kanye West.) Broadcast television is crying out for more interviews like these: long, in-depth and sincere. Interviews that are filmed to be watched in their entirety, not as a two-minute TikTok highlight. Until talk shows start looking for something deeper, the question of whether or not a presenter like Barrymore is being too “tactile” is completely beside the point.