Classroom Instruments and Carpool Karaoke: Ritual and Collaboration in Late Night’s YouTube Era

Abstract

This article uses two recurring late-night talk show segments, “Classroom Instruments” (NBC’s The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon) and “Carpool Karaoke” (CBS’s The Late Late Show with James Corden), to explore how programming strategies are changing in response to late night’s adoption of YouTube as a distribution platform. Through close analysis of these segments, the series’ YouTube presences, and industry perspective, the article explores how late night’s digital turn has embraced historical qualities of late-night programming that have proven compatible with YouTube as a platform, with these segments prioritizing collaboration common in the YouTube community at large. It goes on to analyze how this content is being “re-ritualized” for online audiences, disconnecting the segments from their linear broadcast context and reframing them for nonlinear audiences in light of this once secondary space of distribution increasingly becoming the primary space of consumption in late-night talk’s “YouTube era.”