‘Chelsea’ Would Have Been A Better Fit On Hulu Than It Was On Netflix

Television in 2017 is a spewing fire hydrant of broadcast, cable, premium and streaming shows, and it’s a shame that storied slow starters like Cheers, Seinfeld, Parks & Recreation would likely be one-and-done shows today anywhere but Netflix, which itself has cast off a half-dozen or so originals this year.

Late-night talkers like Larry Wilmore’s The Nightly Show on Comedy Central and Iliza Shlesinger’s Truth and Iliza on Freeform were solid shows that couldn’t find an audience on cable channels that have lost millions of subscribers to cord-cutters. Had Stephen Colbert’s The Late Show premiered in 2015 on a cable channel rather than on CBS, which has the audience and the time to let the show find its voice, the show would have quietly disappeared after a lackluster first season instead of evolving into a sharp, daily commentary on Donald Trump’s reign of errors.

And then there’s Chelsea, Netflix’s first swing at late-night TV. Fourteen months ago, I wrote off Chelsea Handler’s hot mess of a show (which was then three months into its run) as a failure:

• “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.”
• “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.”
• “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.”
• “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. … 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.”

I’m a fan of Handler’s standup and her terrific Chelsea Does documentaries and liked her previous talk show on E!, and I hoped Chelsea would find its legs. I wrote at the end of that piece: “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.” I did not, however, stick around to find out.

When news broke Wednesday evening that either (a) Handler was ending the show later this year to focus on political activism and other projects, or (b) Netflix had cancelled the show at the end of its second-season order — you can guess which one was Handler’s Twitter announcement and which came from The Hollywood Reporter — I had not seen a single episode of Chelsea since panning it in 2016.

Late Wednesday night and early yesterday morning, I watched a lot of Chelsea segments on Netflix and clips on YouTube and was pleasantly surprised at how much better the show had gotten.

• Chunk — Handler’s dog — is still wandering the stage, which was one of the things I’ve loved all along.
• Handler’s interviews are significantly improved, the transitions between segments are better, and the show feels both more intimate and more timely.
• Comic Fortune Feimster has become a unique presence on the show — see the highlight reel above — playing Ann Coulter, Sarah Huckabee Sanders and Santa Claus in character bits and tagging along on field segments as an Andy Richter-like deadpan observer.
• Netflix has recently started putting more Chelsea clips and full segments on YouTube, which would significantly improve the show’s chance to find the zeitgeist over time.

The transition from three episodes a week, which never made sense to me, to a single, hour-long episode has given the show a timelier, more appointment-like feel that has made Samantha Bee’s Full Frontal on TBS and John Oliver’s Last Week Tonight on HBO so much more impactful than a nightly show that piles up on your DVR like unopened mail. Chelsea’s move from half-hour to full-hour makes less sense given that it’s already a collection of separate segments, but that’s just about the only gripe I have about it.

If more people — myself included — had kept watching over the last two years, we would have seen the show become that much better version of itself. Well, too bad. That’s now how TV works today. If a show can’t find an audience out of the gate, it effectively disappears. If a tree falls in the woods, do it make a sound? Nobody cares.

Given how Netflix distributed Chelsea (the show is released around 3pm ET on Fridays) and how people typically watch it (one show all the way through followed by another show all the way through), the service is not very conducive to weekly appointment viewing. As best I can tell, Chelsea is the only show on Netflix here in the United States that was posting new episodes weekly.

Sarah Silverman’s I Love You, America, which premiered last week on Hulu, has a better prognosis because it’s better out of the gate than Chelsea was and because Hulu, which premieres new episodes of shows every day, does have a culture of weekly appointment viewing. Notably, Hulu is premiering new episodes of I Love You, America not just on Thursday but on Thursday night, when it can pop into your menu between episodes and give you that little dopamine pop that comes with getting something Brand New Right Now Now Now.

Netflix premiered its second talk talk show, Bill Nye Saves the World, in a full-season binge earlier this year, and that’s the way I watched it. That’s also how Netflix premiered Handler’s Chelsea Does docuseries, and I suspect it’s how Netflix will premiere its David Letterman and Carol Burnett talk-format projects in 2018. That’s what works for Netflix and part of what didn’t work for Chelsea.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to start watching Mindhunter while people are talking about it. It’s already a week old, and those 10 episodes are not gonna watch themselves.

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

Watch Chelsea on Netflix