New MTV Late Night Show Wakes Its Celebrity Hosts and Ambushes Them

middle of the night show

What would happen if instead of hiring a host for your late night talk show, you invited guests to host your show, then woke them up in the middle of the night, ambushed them with a set and cue cards, and started the cameras rolling?

Well for starters you’d have MTV’s newest answer to the competitive late night talk show market, the “Middle of the Night Show.” MTV invites celebrities to New York City to guest host the show, and it gets really weird fast. For each episode, the show’s crew, along with a live band and plenty of cue cards crash the bedroom of an unsuspecting celebrity who is forced to host a talk show on the spot without any preparation and on very little sleep, and sometimes wearing nothing more than the hotel bedsheets. Brian Murphy from College Humor serves as the celebrities’ co-host and guides them throughout the evening.

The first episode stars guest host Thomas Middleditch, from HBO’s Silicon Valley, and airs tonight, October 8th at 11pm. It’s weird, its exciting,its hilarious, and we talked with Brian Murphy about how it all happens.

The Interrobang: Where did the idea for this insane show come from?

Brian Murphy: There was a college humor video in 2011 where– it was one of our writers ideas, and some of the staff woke him up and had him host a show from his bed. It was a short video, a talk show in bed, and then years later, we pitched it to MTV and had to expand it out to the streets of New York to bring it to a 22 minute episode.

The Interrobang: How much do the celebrity guests know about what’s happening, because you can’t really be surprising them mid sleep like we’re seeing in each episode.

Brian Murphy: They really don’t now what’s going to happen. Part of the beauty of us flying them in and putting them up in a hotel is that we have the key to their room. And they know they’re filming something the next day. Our producers are making sure that we know that they’ll be there… but they don’t know what’s going to happen. They have no idea.

The Interrobang: Did anyone get upset by the ambush?

Brian Murphy: Everybody’s great, everybody’s had a ton of fun….It’s a lot more ‘oh great I get to have fun now’, and less ‘I’m in danger, there’s people in my room.’

The Interrobang: Who has had the craziest reaction to being woken up?

Brian Murphy: Waka Flocka Flame, the rapper, was so funny on it. His reaction was so muted and quiet. He was definitely a deep sleeper because he woke up so slowly for having so many people in his room and he just had no clue what was going on. He has a ton of energy– you see as his episode goes on how much fun he has, and he’s screaming at me during the game portion of it. He’s competitive and he’s having fun and everything, but the whole bedroom stuff with the monologue, he’s just kind of baffled by the whole thing.

The Interrobang: Who are some of the people who are going to be guest hosting?

Brian Murphy: Thomas Middleditch is the first episode, from Silicon Valley, we have Jordan Sparks as the second host. The Miz who is a WWE wrestler, Nina Agdal the supermodel, Adam Pally From Happy Endings, Waka Flocka Flame, and Emily Kinney from The Walking Dead.

The Interrobang: Do you have a favorite bit from the first series of episodes?

Brian Murphy: Yeah…we did a bit with The Miz who is the WWE wrestler. We did a tag team pillow fight in his bed where we brought in these characters who were the evil wall street types, that engaged in a pillow fight with him and it ends with him beating me up, and it was insane. I grew up watching wrestling so getting beat up by a pro wrestler was a dream of mine.

The Interrobang: You have a crazy segment in this where you make a birthday cake that says Happy Birthday Mike and wandered New York until you found someone named Mike whose birthday it was. How hard was that?

Brian Murphy: The original idea for that was Happy 27th Birthday Dan. We were going to try to find a Dan on his 27th birthday, and obviously that was never going to happen. So we tried to find an actual person named Mike who was out celebrating their birthday so that we could bring them a cake. And yeah we finally found that guy after about 3 hours of running around and tons of people lying to us. We had to check IDs to see if they were telling the truth or not.

The Interrobang: Once the cat is out of the bag and the first episodes air, how will you deal the element of surprise for season 2?

Brian Murphy: I guess I won’t worry too much about success. If the show’s a big hit and we get a second season, I’ll take that as a challenge and we’ll figure out a unique way to surprise people.


The “Middle of the Night Show” premieres on Thursday October 8th at 11pm et on MTV. Watch the trailer below.

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