Julian Shapiro-Barnum Wants To “Revolutionize” Late-Night By Keeping It Exactly The Same, Except On YouTube

In just over a week, Julian Shapiro-Barnum is launching Outside Tonight, a late-night show that shares DNA with the likes of The Tonight Show, except it won’t be airing anywhere near broadcast television.

Shapiro-Barnum’s show premieres on June 17 on YouTube. Oh, and his desk is outside.

“I’m launching the internet’s late-night show. It’s no secret that mainstream late-night TV is struggling. It started in the ‘50s as a way to bring the entertainment industry into your living room, but now it’s 2026 and we don’t even have living rooms, we have the internet. It might be easy to say that late-night isn’t relevant, but that clearly isn’t true. It’s endured 70 years and has remained a cultural touchstone. It just needs an update,” he said in one of his early trailers for the project.

Shapiro-Barnum is best known for creating YouTube series including Celebrity Substitute and Recess Therapy, scoring millions of views on the Google-owned platform, with celebrities helping him interview children.

He actually started preparing Outside Tonight during the pandemic before Recess Therapy with just a desk and a band on the street in New York city. “It was an early test,” he told Deadline. “I did that in 2020 and then in the winter of 2024, I was like, ‘This is my dream. I grew up with late-night. I love late-night but I’m not seeing it clicking anymore. I’m seeing the internet rise and I [thought] how has nobody brought true, variety late-night [online]’.”

That’s when Shapiro-Barnum started putting together a team that includes showrunner Lauren Mandel, who was a producer on Jimmy Fallon’s The Kids Tonight Show and also produced SNL50: The Homecoming Concert.

The show will feature interviews, comedy bits as well as music and segments with the general public. There will initially be ten weekly episodes for season one. The goal is to produce 45-minute episodes for YouTube and then have them also cut down for various platforms.

“Something that I’m really excited about, especially with a show that is like this, is trying to be this democratized version of late-night, in terms of run-time, filming time, actual time on the ground. I’m really excited to just sit with people to do these long-form interviews, and not worry about having to fit into any time slots or anything like that,” he added.

Outside Tonight is not the first late-night show to launch on YouTube. Ben Gleib launched Good Night last month with Kevin Smith as his first guest, and others such as Brittany Broski’s Royal Court, which recently launched its third season, are in a similar world. But it’s a high priority for YouTube, which has been helping Shapiro-Barnum promote it in recent weeks.

He said that he didn’t think his show could work on another platform. “I feel like YouTube has gotten to this amazing place where it’s like we are just making the TV ourselves. We are pretty we’re not waiting on anybody to open any door for us or unlock any budget, like we are going to brands with an idea, getting it funded ourselves, and are up in production with that project within less than a year of coming up with the idea,” he added. “It’s very freeing and exciting.”

The launch coincides with a troubling moment in late-night where politicians and administration officials are trying to censor what the likes of Jimmy Kimmel are saying and The Late Show was axed for “financial reasons”.

Shapiro-Barnum is not a political figure but he knows that YouTube allows him to say what he wants. “You see this light censorship that’s happening across late night, left and right. My writers’ room, producorial team and myself will be the people making all the final calls on that without needing to worry about a higher-up, with some hammer, controlling us, which is really exciting,” he said.

In a video teaser, Shapiro-Barnum said that he’s going to try “really, really, really, really, really hard” to make it work. “I’m not stressed at all. Gone are the days where late night is dominated by straight, white men named Jimmy. Enter a bisexual white boy named Julian, and that makes all the difference to me,” he joked.

He referenced the early work of Conan O’Brien as an inspiration and is aware that they are going to be “throwing stuff at the wall”.

“I bet a lot of it isn’t going to work. I’m okay with that, because this isn’t one season for me. This is many, many, many seasons. I want to be competitive with traditional late-night,” he added.