I don’t mind the laughing. On Good Hang, the video podcast interview show hosted by Amy Poehler, there’s always faint laughing in the background. I assume the chuckles are emanating from producers and others lingering in the studio, off-mic, during taping. Some people find it annoying, but I don’t. On Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend, the host’s executive assistant Sona Movsesian and his producer Matt Gourley sit at the table with him, mic’d up, and they laugh uproariously at his jokes—the job Andy Richter used to do on his late-night shows. That, I have a harder time with—the laughter as blinking “Applause” sign to cue listeners. In comparison, the chortles on Good Hang bring a kind of authenticity. When Poehler or one of her guests says something unexpected or lands a solid bit, you’ll often hear one of these nameless shades, faintly audible, erupting in laughter. As if they’re not supposed to, as if they can’t help it. You can visualize their conversation as a hangout, with all the looseness and social porousness that implies.
But you don’t have to visualize. Like an increasing number of podcasts, Good Hang is filmed and edited as a bare-bones TV show. You can watch it in its native environment on Spotify or cross-posted on YouTube. You can find clips circulating near-constantly on Instagram Reels and TikTok. Good Hang launched in 2025, in a podcast landscape that was in the midst of a gigantic pivot to video. Video podcasting has been around since Apple’s launch of video podcast support on iTunes in the aughts, and shows like The Joe Rogan Experience have streamed video from the start. But the shift from audio-only to video—and the prioritization of YouTube as a distribution channel—is a phenomenon of just the past few years. The New York Times started pushing its popular podcasts onto YouTube in 2023; Call Her Daddy used to post video clips but has shifted to full episodes on YouTube; The Ringer podcast network began releasing video episodes of many of its shows in 2024, and then, in 2025, signed a deal to air its shows on Netflix, including a video version of the long-running The Bill Simmons Podcast. It’s probably not a coincidence that Marc Maron, who was outspoken against video podcasting, ended his extraordinary WTF With Marc Maron in 2025. The holdouts are no longer holding out; podcasting is video now.
There are a lot of commercial reasons for this shift, and few aesthetic ones. Most video podcasts have a stripped-down look, featuring little in the way of compelling editing, production design, or cinematography. They present what you were probably picturing anyway: the host and the guest talking in front of microphones. The video version of Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend is set, like many of these shows, in a dark room with a conference table in the middle. The now-defunct Charlie Rose is a frequent aesthetic inspiration. On Good Hang, we see Poehler and her guest on opposite sides of a round table in a bright room filled with tchotchkes and houseplants. The show has three shots—a shot of Poehler, a shot of her guest, and, occasionally, a two-shot of them both—and no other real visual appeal.
But video podcasting is big business. As John Herrman observed in a New York magazine article, titled “HOW YOUTUBE ATE PODCASTING,” Gen Z consumers vastly prefer video to audio-only, and podcast producers have found that the easiest way to go viral and attract new listener-viewers is to circulate video clips on TikTok and other short-form video apps. Pods are moving to video because it’s how you get discovered.
In the streaming era, much attention has been paid to the ways that TV is becoming less and less like its historical self: Episode dumps have functionally done away with time slots; binge-watches have warped audience relationships to serialization; subscription streamers have dispensed with commercial breaks as structural elements; studios have shrunk writers’ rooms; algorithms dictate green lights. In an age when TV doesn’t look like TV anymore, podcasts are looking more and more like TV every day.
The Ringer podcast network launched Good Hang in spring 2025. Only a few years ago, this might have seemed like a bizarre trajectory for a star of Poehler’s magnitude. A legendary SNL performer and all-time great four-time host of the Golden Globes, Poehler was also the lead of Parks and Recreation, one of the most beloved sitcoms of the twenty-first century. Parks and Rec was one of a few sitcoms that saw a resurgence during the pandemic lockdowns, so it’s notable that, of all the directions she could have taken, what Poehler decided to do was sign a podcasting contract with Bill Simmons. A-list actors spurned TV until Matthew McConaughey and Nicole Kidman broke the dam; now, Poehler joins the ranks of Oprah Winfrey and Michelle Obama as a lowly podcaster. In January 2026, Good Hang won the inaugural Golden Globe award for best podcast, beating out veteran blockbusters like SiriusXM’s SmartLess and Call Her Daddy as well as NPR’s daily news pod Up First.
Each weekly episode is built around Poehler’s interview with a celebrity guest—from SNL veterans like Tina Fey and Julia Louis-Dreyfus to guests as wide-ranging as Cole Escola and Judge Judy. Her style as an interviewer is chummy and informal—this isn’t Fresh Air—but, despite the show’s title, it isn’t a pure “hangout” pod. Poehler is a curious and prepared interviewer, even when interviewing old pals. Her conversation with Viola Davis becomes unexpectedly intimate, and her episode with former SNL writer Paula Pell is surprisingly emotional, as Pell talks about her late coming-out and the small tragedies of spending her formative years in the closet. “The most heartbreaking thing is to go home and not be able to be heartbroken,” she tells Poehler, tearing up. “I’m cryin’ already, guys. This is supposed to be lighthearted, right?”
Lacking Maron’s searching melancholy, Rogan’s dumbass philosophizing, or O’Brien’s constant efforts to lob jokes to his guests, Poehler projects a kind of friendly hospitality. Whereas traditional late show hosts were ironically courtly, and the more journalistic interview shows operated in a mode of skeptical prodding, Good Hang is all about making guests comfortable through constant praise. In a recent episode, Mindy Kaling even told Poehler how refreshing it was to be able to give and receive compliments on the show after recalling that producers on the Late Show used to warn guests not to compliment David Letterman. Your relative tolerance of this interview tactic will vary—it’s easy for the mutual appreciation society vibe of the show to become grating. But Poehler is good at portraying this cheeriness as just part of her social manner, and, because such a large proportion of the guests thus far have been friends or former co-workers, the praise rarely feels fully insincere.
Because so much of the appeal of Good Hang lies in the chemistry Poehler and her guest develop over the episode, the video actually does add to the experience. The same is not true, for example, of any of The New York Times’ pivot-to-video podcasts: There’s not a soul alive whose experience of The Ezra Klein Show is meaningfully altered by seeing the blank podcast studio in which Klein conducts his interviews and nods politely; nor did seeing the anguished slump of Ross Douthat particularly enhance an episode of Interesting Times. On the other hand, Poehler’s interview with Cole Escola gains a layer of tension when you can watch the two interlocutors feeling each other out, trying to make each other crack, even to impress each other. The same goes for Poehler’s episode with SNL alum Will Forte—Poehler’s shifting reactions to Forte doing old bits on-demand wouldn’t come through on audio alone.
Yet the limits of the Good Hang format are fairly clear. If Poehler’s improv background makes her a uniquely attentive and supportive interviewer, the interview, as a structure, restricts what Poehler can do improvisationally. Her wild physicality and manic range as a sketch performer have nowhere to go on Good Hang. On the show, she is a performer at rest, comfortable, no longer living or dying on every line.
It’s easy to imagine that there’s a clear line between TV and not-TV. House of the Dragon is a TV show; You’re Wrong About is not. But this distinction takes for granted the degree to which we reflexively grandfather in a lot of streaming television’s claim to medium-specificity. Sure, Yellowstone is a straightforward network prime-time soap, but Stranger Things, with its multivolume episode dumps and inconsistent run times, some stretching to feature length, is all but straightforward. It’s TV, perhaps by birth, but now only TV by association. Or, rather, TV in lieu of some other more holistically accurate category to claim for itself. Lots of shows operate like that now.
What’s striking, however, is not the fluidity of TV’s formal boundaries; it’s that podcasts, encroaching on TV’s terrain, seem much more like old-time TV than lots of the things we call “TV” now. Poehler and Rogan and Klein and O’Brien are all working in the very familiar televisual mode of the talk show. No longer merely an aping of NPR-style interview programming, these shows are tapping into their inner PBS.
Meanwhile, the TV talk shows on actual TV are becoming an endangered species. The Late Show is off the air, and ratings are down for all the remaining network late-night variety shows. CBS News has become the television arm of Bari Weiss’s The Free Press. Decades ago, Jon Stewart lambasted the vapidity of political debate show Crossfire, but if Crossfire were on TV today, it would look like the Algonquin Round Table. It’s easy to critique a podcast like The Ezra Klein Show, which has sometimes given an all-too-sympathetic hearing to bad-faith actors (such as Christopher Rufo and Ben Shapiro), but most cable news interviews these days operate at the discursive level of an NFL sideline report. The kinds of conversations that used to happen in corners of TV are increasingly happening on YouTube, on shows that only recently feature moving images.
This new spate of podcasts may not have the reach The Dick Cavett Show once had, but they also don’t rely on the power of a big broadcaster. Instead they run on the star power of the host and guests. At the beginning of every Good Hang, Poehler briefly interviews a close friend of her guest, who offers a question only they would think to ask. Oftentimes, it’s someone not-so-famous: a spouse or a former roommate. Most of the time, though, it’s another ultra-famous celebrity (Natalie Portman dropping by to big-up Lena Dunham; Christopher Nolan warming us up for Matt Damon). I will admit that I am usually disappointed when it’s a normie, or, worse, a niche celebrity I’ve never heard of. There’s a thrill—even if it’s artificial—in the experience of seeing a star with their guard down, humbled into the same Zoom square you or I might occupy. It might seem like a demotion for them, but it’s fun for us. And stars aren’t particular—they go where the cameras are.
