Chelsea Handler is not impressed with late night, lightly disses Stephen Colbert and E!
Chelsea Handler doesn't like what she sees in the current late night TV world.
“There are 10 or 11 guys doing what used to be done by two guys,” she says in a lengthy new interview with The New York Times. “That’s not interesting.”
She calls out Stephen Colbert of the The Late Show in particular, saying that he's doing exactly the same thing as David Letterman before him.
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“Look what’s going on with Stephen Colbert and that show,” says Handler. “What is that? He’s being himself and he’s not. He didn’t go in and make a different show. He’s just following in the footsteps of someone else.”
Handler is preparing to debut her new late night show, Chelsea, on Netflix on May 11. She also revealed in the interview that she has a three year contract with the streaming company.
And though she's one of few women in late night, she's so tired of that whole conversation.
“I don’t think of myself as a woman — I think of myself as a person.”
“I don’t think of myself as a woman — I think of myself as a person,” she says. “Do you think that’s what I think about all day? No, I’m just trying to be entertaining.”
Handler previously had a long-running late night show, Chelsea Lately, on E!. She doesn't have many nice things to say about it, calling the series "one-dimensional. And I was one-dimensional."
“We’re on before the Kardashians or after the Kardashians,” she said. “We’re surrounded by people who are nonsense. No one’s coming to this network looking for news or political stories or human interest or global issues. None of the things I’m interested in are being talked about.”
Instead, her new show will be less topical and less focused on celebrities promoting their projects. Handler cites Dick Cavett as an influence, for brilliant and unexpected pairings like “when he would put on Janis Joplin with Henry Kissinger.”
Oh, also she doesn't care if you don't like her naked Instagram and Twitter photos.
“If you don’t want to see my boobs, you can unfollow me on Instagram,” Handler says.
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Topics Stephen Colbert
Yohana Desta was the senior film reporter for Mashable. She is a Northern Virginia native and an American University grad. She enjoys carefully curating her Instagram account and can often be found reading books, going to concerts, watching movies and learning way too much about pop culture.
