The other night, James Corden did a Carpool Karaoke segment with Adele that was really remarkable. I find Corden's in-studio interviews hard to watch but some of his non-chat segments are quite good and the one with Adele was quite special. In this article, one of his producers explained how they arranged it.
I think I've figured out why I don't enjoy his interviews. He brings all or most of his guests on at the same time. Now, that might make for a unique, fun conversation if they all joined in on every topic…but too often, it reminds me of what Joe Franklin used to do on his long-running, little-watched talk show. Joe would have on three guests who had nothing to do with each other and he'd just fire questions at them in rotation, serializing the Q-and-A. He'd ask Guest 1 about his profession. Then he'd ask Guest 2 about what he did. Then he'd ask Guest 3 something and then the discussion would jump back to Guest 1 and what he did.
If you were only interested in Guest 1, you had to sit through all the irrelevant banter that you didn't care about to hear the next moment he got to speak. And usually, you could see the guests who weren't speaking at the moment weren't interested either. They were just patiently waiting for it to be their turn again.
So the talk was halting and it jumped all over the place…and I've learned doing my silly convention panels, if everyone on the panel isn't engrossed, the audience won't be, either.
Mr. Corden usually manages to have one guest I'd like to hear and two or three who'll be discussing their TV series I don't watch or their new CD I'm not going to buy. Johnny Carson used to be great at making you interested in guests you hadn't heard of before. I don't think any current talk show host does that well and I'm not sure I've even seen any of them try. At least though when Jimmy Fallon brings on a guest I don't know, I can fast-forward to the next spot. When Corden is directing every third question to a guest I don't know, it's time to watch something else.
All that said, Corden's doing fine in the ratings and his YouTube hits are probably the envy of most other shows. This one with Adele is going through the online stratosphere. So maybe he's doing something right…