Project · 2022

Last Night’s Late Night – High-Speed Curation & Editorial Judgement

>1,000 minutes of content whittled down to the best 6 minutes in only a few hours.

Last Night’s Late Night was a recap of late night that I developed and Executive Produced with Entertainment Weekly. We produced over 100 episodes of this daily short form clip show featuring the best of The Tonight Show, Conan, Kimmel, Colbert and dozens more.

Our incredible host, Heather Gardner, who had to roll with the punches as we produced, improvised and taped her host wraps overnight until 2 a.m.

The greatest technical feat of this daily show (besides the fact that we produced this daily show during the 2020 pandemic in Heather Gardner’s house) was a massive overnight curation effort. There were more than 20 late night shows back when we produced the show. A group of the latest shows (Carson Daily, Seth Meyers, Corden) aired around 1:30am PT and ended around 2:30am PT. And we needed to deliver the show in time for QC and ingest to air for east-coasters catching up on late night the next morning at 6am… 3am PT!

Fast Editorial Operations Without Sacrificing High-Quality Human Curation

Behind the scenes of the giant video wall where we could throw to clips.

>1,000 minutes of content whittled down to the best 6 minutes in only a few hours. This is a unique problem of rapid and scaled editorial judgement.

How could this be possible? From a technical perspective, we had to get access to east coast feeds of all the shows (which bought us a few hours) and record them on special server appliances that encoded and indexed them. From a curatorial perspective we had three layers: 1) a team of Associate Producers assigned a group of shows they watched top-to-tail live, taking notes and marking highlights 2) Executive Producer and Supervising Producer editorial review to curate down to the main segments from a pitch meeting with APs 3) a team of three editors making finer selections, each owning a 2-minute section of the 6-minute show that was all merged into one singular video around 2 or 3am. Before the show launched, we conducted dry-run simulations in pre-production and calibrated each nights’ curation against a subjective rubric of comedy and the more objective performance of the clips on YouTube, after they aired. Over time, we were able to develop a skill for predicting the most popular clips and sketches from late night TV in near realtime using principles of editorial judgement.

Appendix: The late night shows we covered

It’s hard to remember but not long ago, late night was a fiercely competitive space and everyone network and outlet wanted to launch their own version. This made a sea of content to catch on YouTube the next day. It also led to an opportunity for us to intercut the very best jokes and takes in monologues from over 20 different perspectives.

Heather patiently standing in and probably wondering when we’re going to finally get started.

The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon
The Late Show with Stephen Colbert
Jimmy Kimmel Live!
Late Night with Seth Meyers
The Late Late Show with James Corden
Last Call with Carson Daly
A Little Late with Lilly Singh
Conan
The Daily Show with Trevor Noah
Lights Out with David Spade
The Jim Jefferies Show
Full Frontal with Samantha Bee
Watch What Happens Live with Andy Cohen
Last Week Tonight with John Oliver
Real Time with Bill Maher
Wyatt Cenac’s Problem Areas
Desus & Mero
Busy Tonight
Patriot Act with Hasan Minhaj
My Next Guest Needs No Introduction with David Letterman
Saturday Night Live