Elmo is getting his own (not too) late night talk show, and it looks pretty adorable.
The Not Too Late Show with Elmo will skewer the traditional late night talk show format and, in addition to Elmo, will feature Sesame Street Muppets like Cookie Monster, The Count, Oscar the Grouch, and celebrity guests including John Mulaney, Blake Lively, and Cookie Monster’s old pal John Oliver.
It’s called ‘The Not Too Late Show’ because Elmo’s bedtime is 7:30.
Elmo
The series will be one of six original shows that will be debuting on HBO’s new standalone streaming service, HBO Max. Although Sesame Street has been most closely associated with public television (PBS) for half century, but new episodes have been premiering on HBO since 2016 as part of a five year deal struck between Sesame Workshop and HBO (PBS now broadcasts new episodes of Sesame Street several months after their HBO debut). This latest collaboration between HBO and Sesame Workshop is expected to be one of the cornerstones of HBO Max’s “Kids & Family” offerings.
There have several attempts to combine puppets with the variety/talk format over the years, including ALF’s Hit Talk Show and the Henson Company’s That Puppet Game Show, but these types of series tend to stall after a single season/series and their novelty factor wears off. Clearly, HBO and Sesame are betting that the popularity of Elmo and the rest of the Sesame Street gang will help them buck the trend, and they could be right. Even if Not-Too-Late doesn’t click with audiences, the Jim Henson Company and Disney+ are waiting in the wings with their own late night puppet talk show, the alien-themed Earth To Ned, which is scheduled to debut later this year.
The Not-Too-Late Show will debut on May 27th and will likely be carried here in Canada by the HBO-afiliated CraveTV. Other international availability hasn’t been announced yet, but HBO Max will launch in Latin America and other markets where HBO is already available sometime next year.
