A crowd-pleasing comedian has become Conan O’Brien’s first apprentice. With late night television more crowded than ever, he’s aiming to be different.
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Pete Holmes stood in front of his small stage. At 6'6", the comedian towered over the first row of audience members, who he addressed a few feet in front of the tape that signaled where exactly he would deliver his monologue in just a few minutes.
"Sometimes, people are nervous," Holmes told the crowd in the small studio on the Warner Bros. lot in Los Angeles, where he is taping his new TBS late night program, The Pete Holmes Show. "We're a new show. People are tense, nervous for me, nervous they're gonna be made fun of or something, and nothing like that is gonna happen, so let's all just enjoy it. You're in a safe place."
Soon, the 34-year-old Boston native's soft and kind voice turned a bit more (jokingly) severe, as he expressed his concern that the show could be "pre-canceled ... Maybe they'll watch this episode today and say it's not working; lesbian Val Kilmer is not clicking with the people."
"You better laugh at everything I say," Holmes continued. "In two minutes, I'm going to be on this mark and there will be cameras rolling and I'm going to be doing a monologue I've never done before, and if you leave me, and I'm up here and you just decide to judge me on my merit, I'll burn down your childhood home," he implored, his faux anger overridden by his inability to fully hold in a booming laughter.
The small studio audience, mostly high schoolers and twentysomethings, more than complied with the request, applauding at each wild assertion Holmes made in his several-minute monologue riff about farmers and Daylight Savings Time.
After several segments, including a rant about hotel towels and a goofy interview with The Mindy Project's Ike Barinholtz, Holmes debriefed his small team of writers and producers. Then, he met up with BuzzFeed in a small dressing room behind his set, which looks like a version of Don Draper's second apartment that's been filled with cartoon artwork.
It was the end of his first week of filming the show that Holmes has been anticipating since he shot three pilots in August 2012, and instead of exhausted, the host was buzzing with energy.
The enthusiasm was par for the course for the boyish comedian, who spent years doing stand-up, as a sitcom writer, online video star, and podcaster before Conan O'Brien selected him as the host for the midnight show that follows his TBS program, a deal that was made official last February after the previous summer's test run.
Holmes, whose first real show aired on Monday night, enters a late night field more crowded than ever before: David Letterman has signed an extension at CBS through 2015; Jimmy Kimmel took over the 11:30 slot at ABC; Jimmy Fallon is ascending to the Tonight Show and Seth Meyers to Late Night in February; Comedy Central has added Chris Hardwick's Midnight behind The Daily Show and Colbert Report; W. Kamau Bell is hosting Totally Biased during the 11 p.m. hour for FXX; and IFC has a cult hit in Scott Auckerman's Comedy Bang Bang.
Holmes is well aware of the deep competition. Hell, his podcast, You Made It Weird, is hosted on Hardwick's Nerdist network, and now they're midnight rivals. So the question is, as Holmes asks himself rhetorically, why create yet another late night show? Why put all that time and effort into a program that will have to swim upstream for the foreseeable future?
Because, as Holmes points out, their time slots may be similar, but his show's content is its own strange breed. There is no desk, the monologue is one long riff and usually not all that topical, and guests — who will be pulled from his deep list of comedian friends, at least for now — aren't coming on to plug their projects.
"The experiment is like, What if late night is really transparent and authentic?" he says. "I think a lot of shows have transparent or authentic elements, but we're trying to upload my entire personality for enjoyment."
As a stand-up comedian and podcaster, Holmes has made habit of putting it all out there, using his personal life — including the divorce he went through at the early age of 28 — as fodder for conversation and comedy. He plans on continuing that with the TV series, promising, "I'm not going to be telling any fake stories or representing any of the writers' experience as my own."
And if you're looking to Holmes for your late night dose of political humor, you've come to the wrong place.
"I don't care that the government is shut down," he said. "I don't care about Obamacare's website. I'm not proud of the fact that I'm not political, but I feel like people can have three main interests… and my three were already taken. One of them isn't politics. I know that there are other people like me who don't really care. So we'll do a monologue about how I don't know what the government shutdown means."
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