Back-to-back cancellations of talk show staples like The Kelly Clarkson Show and Sherri have heightened fears that video podcasts are coming for traditional TV. Podcasts have already been taking a greater share in the media space, as the shows are able to land the same high-profile guests (take Michelle Obama on Call Her Daddy or Leonardo DiCaprio on New Heights). At the same time, they command a broad reach on YouTube, and now on platforms like Netflix.
The concern from network executives is a further erosion of cable viewership. The shift to low-overhead shows on digital platforms also raises concerns for Hollywood unions, which are entwined in the TV talk show system but largely do not have a presence on major podcast platforms. Sherri, the talker hosted by Sherri Shepherd, was averaging 720,000 viewers before it was canceled after four seasons.
Cable viewership declined 39 percent between the spring of 2021 and 2025 and accounts for a little over 24 percent of viewership, according to a Nielsen report last year. Meanwhile, since 2015, the total time spent with podcasts has grown 355 percent to 773 million hours a week, per Edison Research.
TV executives, producers and talent note that video podcasts produce a product that is familiar to talk show and news viewers at a fraction of the price. “I think it’s pretty clear to everybody when you look at things like Call Her Daddy or Joe Rogan and the kind of sway they have. That’s not to say that the [TV] shows don’t have their own sway still — it’s just that they’re all kind of considered equals, right?” one late night veteran laments.
A talk show producer says they are now competing for bookings with some of the bigger podcasts as publicists weigh the audiences they are vying for with whatever product or project their clients are selling. Late night shows like The Tonight Show typically include comedy sketches, and those have become a point of differentiation as the battle for guest bookings intensifies. “A big key piece here is people come to The Tonight Show because of Jimmy Fallon. They know he’s going to do something fun with them, and they know that we’re going to make it look good,” says Nick Dyer, supervising producer and head of digital at The Tonight Show.
But one of the major points in favor of video podcasts is their focus on longform conversations. Bill Simmons — head of talk strategy at Spotify, which has made a big push to video, and founder of The Ringer — says he’s seen podcasts take share away from talk shows for the past seven or eight years, in part because many guests are more comfortable with the format. “Part of the issue is that podcasts were becoming a more reliable place for conversation,” he says. “One of the reasons I structured my HBO show [Any Given Wednesday] the way I did, which didn’t work, but I was having celebrities tell me it was more fun to do a podcast that was a longform conversation than it was to go on a late night show and only talk for seven minutes.”
As the popularity of podcasts have risen, Simmons notes that they’ve become a stop on the promotional tours for most TV and film stars, Matt Damon and Ben Affleck, as one of the latest examples, when the two appeared on The Joe Rogan Experience and The Big Picture podcast to promote their new Netflix film, The Rip. Notably, then candidate Donald Trump guested on Rogan’s podcast, and vice president Kamala Harris guested on Alex Cooper’s Call Her Daddy in the leadup to the presidential election.
“Podcasts have to be part of the strategy now if you’re promoting something,” said Simmons, whose own podcast and several others have now also ended up on Netflix.
But the biggest fear in the halls of the legacy TV networks is that viewers will choose to spend more time watching podcasts on TV and less time watching traditional talk shows. After all, YouTube is now by far the largest streaming platform on TV sets in terms of viewership, and it has become a bona fide podcast powerhouse, with more than 700 million hours of podcasts viewed each month.
“The ‘new’ television doesn’t look like the ‘old’ television,” YouTube CEO Neal Mohan wrote in a letter to creators Jan. 21. “It’s interactive and includes things like Shorts (yes, people watch them on TVs), podcasts and livestreams, right alongside the sports, sitcoms and talk shows people already love.”
Netflix, already a competitor to legacy TV, has also begun to feature podcasts on its service after striking a deal to license shows from Simmons’ slate at Spotify, iHeartMedia and Barstool Sports. This is part of an effort to compete with its biggest rival, YouTube, and an initial effort to capitalize on the popularity of the medium.
But Netflix has also been putting more emphasis on time spent on the service, leading some executives at competitors to wonder if the platform was beginning to think more like a TV programmer, which considers the different types of content that work in different dayparts. Just as TV execs learned that things like talk shows and sports debate shows work well during the daytime hours, Netflix seems to be leaning on video podcasts to fill that void, without the legacy costs of network studio shows.
“Of course we look at the view hours,” co-CEO Ted Sarandos told Wall Street analysts Jan. 20. “But we also look at a myriad of other signals to assess how our members are engaging and how important do they value that engagement. So members have different value for different types of programming.”
CNN, among others, has also started bringing podcasts to its streaming offering after striking a deal with Lemonada, home to such shows as Hasan Minhaj Doesn’t Know, with executives citing the growing popularity of the medium.
Talk shows have been a heavily unionized operation. The Jennifer Hudson Show (which was just renewed for a fourth season after rumors of being on the brink), for instance, has WGA writers who pen segments, IATSE crewmembers who operate the cameras and a DGA stage manager who oversees rehearsals and tapings. With some exceptions, those union jobs are threatened by the rise of lo-fi programming made for digital platforms that in many cases are not beholden to union contracts.
The industry labor group that perhaps has made the deepest inroads in podcasting is the WGA East. Since 2019, it has unionized scribes at The Ringer, Pushkin Industries, Pineapple Street Studios, Spotify Studios, iHeartMedia and Crooked Media. That’s no small feat, considering those companies have titles that are popular on both podcast platforms and YouTube, including Good Hang With Amy Poehler and Pod Save America.
But other Hollywood unions have a ways to go. In a statement, IATSE — the union that represents crewmembers like grips, camera operators and script coordinators — pointed to its recent organizing campaign with the WGA West at the YouTube content studio Theorist Media as proof that it is taking the transition seriously.
“Many video podcasts and social media productions now operate at a scale that resembles unionized talk shows or studio productions,” an IATSE spokesperson said. “Labor standards should not disappear simply because the content lives online. It’s true for streaming, and it’s true here. Union contracts and rates should instead be set based on budget and the actual work being performed on the ground, across all possible verticals.”
Leaders at the WGA West have previously raised the issue in public statements. In an election statement in 2025, WGA West board member Adam Conover — who has his own popular channel on YouTube with nearly a million subscribers— exhorted the union to organize around YouTube and podcasts. “Like it or not, this is the future of television,” he wrote.
WGA West president Michele Mulroney also raised the issue of organizing YouTube shows, noting in a statement, “We are sitting on a shrinking iceberg and must be willing to look beyond our current employers.”
This story appeared in the Feb. 11 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.