What’s the Matter with Netflix’s ‘Chelsea’? Pretty Much Everything.

Streaming services have created a sea change with scripted formats over the past few years — can you imagine Transparent or Lady Dynamite on NBC? — but one format that streaming services either haven’t cracked yet or haven’t even attempted is talk shows.

Hulu has tons of network talk shows like The View, Charlie Rose, Late Night with Seth Meyers and @midnight with Chris Hardwick but hasn’t launched one of its own. Amazon Video, as best I can tell, doesn’t have any original or partnered talk shows. Netflix’s Chelsea, a half-hour series hosted by comedian Chelsea Handler that launched earlier this year, is the only original talk show among the three big SVOD services.

It’s not clear whether Chelsea has found a following, but the anecdotal indications are there it has not. The show is struggling to draw a sizable social media following, doesn’t generate much entertainment coverage, and hasn’t had a newsworthy interview in its three months on the air. (It’s worth noting that the show did have a vaguely racist moment courtesy of Frank Grillo, but Decider is just about the only outlet that reported on that.) And last week’s announcement of a Chelsea renewal isn’t exactly a sign that the show is growing; Netflix renews everything.

Chelsea has suffered from creative problems since its outset. Showrunner Bill Wolff, who came from The View and who Netflix touted as “the visionary we have been looking for to create a dynamic new format that’s global, informative and entertaining,” was shown the door only three weeks into the show’s run. The initial reviews were mixed to negative, and the show has not improved in the months since.

Despite being the only talk show on Netflix — a service that close to half of American households subscribe to — and landing high-profile guests like Gwyneth Paltrow, Anna Kendrick, and Melissa McCarthy, Chelsea mostly exists in a media vacuum. Netflix has so many other things to promote that the network has posted only one Chelsea clip — an interview with Narcos star Wagner Moura — to its YouTube feed in the last month.

The show is riddled with execution problems, which the episode that aired on July 29 illustrates:

• In an opening desk segment, Handler talked about the importance of voting but had nothing new or interesting say about it.
• An interview with the The Go-Go’s to promote their reunion tour was unbearably long and would have made more sense as a performance (or a better interview).
• A taped segment — and the only good segment in the episode — about renting out her home on Airbnb was well done and captured Handler at her funniest, i.e., as a deadpan curmudgeon.
• An interview with Orphan Black’s Tatiana Maslany focused on the actress’s accent work but didn’t include a clip from the series, any discussion of what the series was about, or any mention of Maslany’s recent Emmy nomination.
• An interview with science writer Mary Roach was a discussion about the female orgasm — the subject of Roach’s 2009 TED talk — but didn’t include a single question about Grunt, her new book about the effects of military combat on the human body. (The book was sitting on the edge of the desk throughout the interview.)
• Handler’s closing segment — a limp rant about her annoyance with people saying “nother” instead of “another” or “other” — was clearly supposed to be another curmudgeonly bit but wasn’t funny at all.

New episodes, which appear every Wednesday, Thursday and Friday, have an air of timeliness but seem walled off from the daily news cycle because you know that the episode you’re watching was taped at least a day ago — they post at midnight — and maybe longer. Handler has made the point that she wants Chelsea to be a learning opportunity for her and for the audience, and the producers are apparently trying to craft episodes that will have the same relevance a month from now as they do today.

If that’s the desired effect, Chelsea is doing it wrong. All three interviews from the July 29 episode were pegged to the guests’ current projects, and all three were unmoored from any temporal reality. A talk show can’t be timely and evergreen, and Chelsea hasn’t yet decided which one it wants to be.

The network recognizes that there’s a problem and is actively soliciting feedback from subscribers. Decider got ahold of a customer survey that Netflix recent sent to some subscribers asking how Handler compares with late-night hosts like James Corden and Trevor Noah, whether they consider Chelsea a talk show or a reality show, why they’re not watching it, and even how Netflix’s association with Chelsea affects their commitment to continue subscribing to the service.

On the production side, one oddity of Chelsea that I’ve seldom seen with other talk shows is that the scale of the set makes the show cold and impersonal. There are more sitting areas than on Downton Abbey, and Handler always seems like she’s incredibly far away from her guests. Additionally, the directors use a lot of two-shots — like the one below with Keith Olbermann — that emphasize that scale and distance.

The most effective recurring segment is when Handler has dinner with three or four other people, a set-up that she used frequently in the much better Chelsea Does series of four topical documentaries — marriage, Silicon Valley, racism and drugs — that she made for Netflix before Chelsea started airing. Handler is a better improvisational wit than she is an interviewer, and the dinner segments in both Chelsea Does and Chelsea benefit from the intimate setting, particularly in contrast to Chelsea‘s airplane hangar of a set.

I hope Chelsea finds its beat and that the lack of the show’s zeitgeist uptake doesn’t discourage other streaming services from experimenting with talk shows. They create appointment viewing, they’re cheap to produce relative to scripted content, and they provide a way to engage with current issues — politics, sports, celebrity gossip, business — in real time.

The new HBO series Any Given Wednesday with Bill Simmons is suffering from ratings difficulties and bad reviews, but the fact that the show knows what it wants to be — a timely discussion about sports and pop culture — says a lot about why it has made a bigger media splash than Chelsea and has a better chance of being relevant a year from now if both shows stay on their current paths.

[Watch Chelsea on Netflix; new episodes air every Wednesday, Thursday and Friday]

Scott Porch writes about the streaming-media industry for Decider. He is also a contributing writer for Signature and The Daily Beast. You can follow him on Twitter @ScottPorch.