@midnight was a late-night Internet-themed panel game show that ran for four years (2013-2017) on Comedy Central. It’s not entirely clear why it ended, except that Comedy Central and then-host Chris Hardwick mutually agreed to do so (ratings were flat but consistent). It did fairly well after The Daily Show, however, and the decision to end it had nothing to do with Chris Hardwick’s issues (those did not surface until the next year).

In any respect, @midnight will be returning as the replacement for the unrepentantly awful James Corden’s The Late Late Show, which will effectively end the late-night program originally hosted by Tom Snyder and produced by David Letterman. Here, Stephen Colbert will be an executive producer of @midnight, the series that will follow Colbert’s The Late Show. Chris Hardwick is not expected to be involved in the reboot (indeed, aside from the host of an occasional episode of The Talking Dead, I’m not sure Hardwick is involved with much of anything these days).

No host has yet been chosen, but the idea is to reduce cost from the $60 million a year it took to run The Late Late Show to around $35 million for @midnight, which seems like a reasonable budget for that time slot. This is ultimately a good idea because @midnight dabbles a lot in Internet culture, although I’m not entirely sure that younger audiences are going to tune into a show on their grandparents’ CBS to find out what’s hip-and-happening on their Internet. I’ll also admit that I only ever caught a minute or two of @midnight here and there and never actually understood how the game was played. It did feature great guests, and if the reboot is anything like the original, it’ll be an opportunity to see a lot of those people we hear on comedy podcasts playing a game in person.

Interestingly, with all this “synergy,” and since CBS and Comedy Central are owned by the same company (Paramount), I wonder if they gave any thought to simply moving The Daily Show itself into that slot? All of these shows will eventually be consumed primarily on Paramount+ anyway.

via Deadline