Ask Chelsea Handler what she plans to do on her new Netflix talk show, and you’ll just as likely get a passionate response about what she doesn’t want to do. No sidekick. No house musicians. If she can help it, no predictable structures or formats of any kind.
“I don’t want people turning it on and seeing the same thing,” she explained recently. “Monologue. First guest. Band. Da, da, da. I just can’t do it that way.”
On this April afternoon, Handler, the acerbic comedian, author and former host of E!’s Chelsea Lately, was sitting outside Rosti Tuscan Kitchen, a restaurant where she waited tables years ago while trying to break into show business.
She was here to impart some wisdom to her niece Charley, a guileless, cheerful 11-year-old who hopes to be famous like her aunt. While a camera crew from Handler’s show followed Charley taking orders and receiving an education in the school of hard knocks, the host herself was giving another kind of lesson. The subject was the seeming staleness of the topical comedy format and how she hopes to avoid this when her show, Chelsea, makes its debut on Wednesday.
“All these shows try to start out selling something different, and ultimately all become the same, just with a different guy,” Handler, 41, said in a husky voice that never fully shed its New Jersey roots. “I have to do everything I can to prevent that from happening.”
As she understands, it is one thing to promise innovation and quite another to deliver it in a field with about a dozen competitors, mostly men.
That she is one of just a few women to have hosted a late-night show, Handler said, was unimportant. “I don’t think of myself as a woman — I think of myself as a person,” she said. “Do you think that’s what I think about all day? No, I’m just trying to be entertaining.”
Still, it is an unusual proposition that Handler would create Chelsea for Netflix, the streaming-video service that has no programming grid or daily schedule to speak of.
Netflix has touted its ability to get viewers to binge on its content in lengthy doses, but has no track record with topical shows. It is hoping for Handler to deliver a programme that has the freewheeling spirit of a late-night talk show, if not the customary formats or time slot. (New episodes will be posted at 12.01am Pacific time on Wednesdays, Thursdays and Fridays.)
It has made the deal more intriguing by taking this foray with Handler at a time when she wants to be known for her wider interests in how the world works and not merely as a comedian who jokes about drinking and not wanting children.
She is also a provocative entertainer — today she wore a necklace bearing a familiar two-word obscene phrase — who doesn’t disguise her restlessness and may even consider it her best quality.
“I’m totally impulsive,” she said proudly. “I was impulsive when I signed up with E!, and that lasted eight years. I was impulsive when I wrote my first book, and then I wrote five. I would never want to be another way.”
It’s been nearly two years since Handler brought the curtain down on Chelsea Lately, her home for raucous commentary on popular culture, round tables of stand-up comedians and celebrity guests.
Although the series ran more than 1,000 episodes, Handler said by its end she was bristling behind the scenes, tired of being constrained by what she felt was E!’s narrow focus on gossip and reality stars.
“We’re on before the Kardashians or after the Kardashians,” she said. “We’re surrounded by people who are nonsense. No one’s coming to this network looking for news or political stories or human interest or global issues. None of the things I’m interested in are being talked about.”
When she could feel herself losing interest, it was time to pack it in. “It’s one-dimensional,” she said. “And I was one-dimensional.” (E! declined to comment for this article.)
Handler said she intended to take the next year off from the industry and fended off inquiries from other networks (she would not specify which), believing they would never allow her the independence she desired.
But after a few conversations with Netflix, Handler said its lack of experience in the talk-show arena — and the freedom to experiment that came with it — were assets. “I’m my own island,” she said. “I have nothing to compete with. It’s exactly where I want to be.”
Ted Sarandos, Netflix’s chief content officer, said Handler’s willingness to inject herself into unfamiliar situations and bring a wry humour to these explorations suggested she could carry a show more expansive than “Chelsea Lately.”
“There’s nothing more boring than an interview where the interviewer is the functional expert,” Sarandos said. “What you want is somebody who’s super-curious and, in Chelsea’s case, remarkably funny. At the end of the day, the show is anchored on Chelsea and her comedy.”
As for Handler’s spur-of-the-moment nature, Sarandos said: “It’s the most exciting part. You don’t want to try too hard to contain that spontaneity, because great things come out of it.”
In Handler’s personal office, on the fourth floor of the David Lean Building at Sony Pictures Studios in Culver City, California, hangs a motivational poster of sorts. It reads, “You are remembered for the rules you break.”
The slogan applies to a performer who, at 19, uprooted herself from New Jersey to Los Angeles, where she slept on an aunt’s couch while going out for auditions. After early transgressions, including a DUI arrest at 21, she made headway as a stand-up comic with a saucy, flying-solo style she has retained in bestselling books (like Are You There, Vodka? It’s Me, Chelsea) and day-to-day interactions.
(When a departing Rosti customer told Handler, “I like martinis, too”, Handler grumbled audibly: “People like to tell me they like alcohol. Oh, OK, glad to know it.”)
Handler has been open about past relationships that have captured the public’s fascination, whether longer term, with Ted Harbert, the former E! networks president and now NBC Broadcasting chairman, or shorter lived, with the rapper 50 Cent.
Even as an increasingly prominent face for an increasingly prominent content service, Handler has no qualms about posting partly nude photos of herself to her social media feeds and makes no apologies for doing so.
“If you don’t want to see my boobs, you can unfollow me on Instagram,” she said.
With a similar candour, Handler stripped bare the homogeneity of late-night TV, where she said a new generation of hosts had brought little innovation to the genre. “There are 10 or 11 guys doing what used to be done by two guys,” she said. “That’s not interesting.”
In particular, Handler criticised Stephen Colbert, the former star of Comedy Central’s The Colbert Report, who took over from David Letterman at CBS’s Late Show in September.
“Look what’s going on with Stephen Colbert and that show,” she said. “What is that? He’s being himself and he’s not. He didn’t go in and make a different show. He’s just following in the footsteps of someone else.” (A press representative for Colbert declined to comment.)
How much does it cost to be different?
Now the burden is on Handler, who is being paid a reported $10 million (Dh36 million) salary (a figure her representatives declined to confirm), to show that she can do something different. At her disposal she’ll have a series unencumbered by commercial breaks or running times, although each episode will be about 30 minutes long.
Handler has already given a preview of how she would approach this task, in four Netflix documentaries released in January, where she explored broad topics like racism, marriage and drugs, and travelled to Peru to drink ayahuasca, a psychoactive plant brew. (“It made me a lot more patient with my sister,” she said.)
For the past few months, Handler and her producers have been busily producing field segments far and wide, trying to find topics that are timely but approaches that are evergreen, for segments that will appeal to viewers in the US as well as the nearly 200 other countries where Netflix is available.
Bill Wolff, the executive producer of Chelsea, said his role at this stage was to help Handler “identify compelling material and stories which make sense with her comedic mechanism.”
As Wolff, a former executive producer of The View and The Rachel Maddow Show explained, “There’s a lot to be known about Chinese farm subsidies and how they affect the American worker — what can Chelsea do to talk about that? Is that something she’s really interested in?”
“Chelsea, sitting in a room, just talking to one person, is not really what we do,” he added. “It’s Chelsea engaged. Chelsea out in the world. Chelsea doing stuff.”
Pinned to an office wall behind Wolff were some 50 index cards representing pieces Handler had already filmed on subjects like the so-called “gig economy” (working as a Lyft driver or taking furniture-assembly assignments from TaskRabbit); and on trips to Moscow and Mexico City. Another recent trip to Florida had yielded segments tied to the 2016 presidential election, like one where Handler travels on a “souls to the polls” trip with a black church group to illuminate the practice of early voting.
At a nearby soundstage on the Sony lot, work was under way on a modular set where Handler will record segments in front of a live audience, a la Chelsea Lately, including one-on-one interviews and panel discussions.
But Handler said she wants to avoid inviting celebrities just to promote their projects and would rather emulate hosts like Dick Cavett, “when he would put on Janis Joplin with Henry Kissinger,” she said. (Even so, Handler has also taped a dinner party with actors from comic-book movie Captain America: Civil War.)
Netflix says it has the capability to post episodes of Chelsea within hours after they are completed. Still, Sarandos said, “Most people are going to watch it a day or two later, a week or two later, or even a month or two later. And the show is built for that. Meaning that it’s topical, but it’s not a melting ice cube.”
Getting Netflix viewers regularly watching a topical show is “a definite break in our normal model,” Sarandos acknowledged. But, he said, “It’s not really trying to change their habit of coming to Netflix, as much as it is what you do while you’re here.”
Asked whether Chelsea would make content available to share outside the Netflix site, Sarandos said, “We’re likely to experiment with ways that we can introduce a broader audience to the show. But it’s not the driver. We’re not trying to create viral moments but we’ll find some.”
Smooth move?
Some of Handler’s industry colleagues are confident she will make a smooth transition to her Netflix series and that it will help energise the category.
Rob Burnett, a long-time executive producer of Letterman’s Late Show, said that this was no longer a TV era in which “you got somebody to be a very genial master of ceremonies and it goes on for 30 years.”
The way to make a talk show now, Burnett said, is to feature someone who can “make a big splash, and almost by definition, maybe in five years, people are tired of it — there’s no shame in that.”
Jo Miller, an executive producer of TBS’s Full Frontal With Samantha Bee, said that there was ample room for multiple hosts to cover similar subjects.
“Larry Wilmore, Chelsea and we could all do the same topic,” Miller said. “We’d have three different points of view, and all three would be interesting and funny to watch. There are going to be topics that are perfect Chelsea topics, that she can do better than anybody.”
Miller deflected any questions about gender in topical comedy before they could be asked. “If it’s about our vaginas, I’m going to seriously hang up,” she said, laughing nonetheless. “Chelsea’s got a brain. That’s what it’s about.”
On the morning after her taping with Charley, Handler was in the kitchen of her Bel Air mansion, having her hair and make-up done while she reviewed the script she would be filming that afternoon. Near the home’s front door was a giant book of rock ‘n’ roll photography, open to a 1970s-era portrait of Bob Dylan; in a den was a vase whose shape was formed from numerous conjoined female breasts.
Handler said at first that she had “no idea” how long her contract with Netflix ran, although when pressed further she said it was “a minimum of three years,” adding that she took the job seriously.
“This is a TV show,” she explained. “I would take a marriage more lightly.”
Whatever the duration, Handler cautioned that Chelsea “won’t be the show that I want, probably, the first or second day. It’ll take three months for it to be where I’m like, ‘This is great. This is what I want to do.’”
“By the way,” she added, “it becomes clearer and clearer as the show gets closer and closer.”
While her dogs Chunk and Tammy strolled in and out of the kitchen, Handler pointed to them and said, “That’s what you do when you don’t have children.”
Compared to humans, she said, “Dogs can’t talk, and that’s a whole big bonus.”
Reminded that babies do not talk either, Handler replied, “Yeah, but then they don’t shut up for the rest of their lives.”
Don’t miss it
Chelsea is now streaming on Netflix.
