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Amelia Dimoldenberg had been on more than 80 first dates before she finally met her match in a North London chicken shop in November 2023.

The British comedian and internet personality, who made a name for herself by flirting through her interviews with celebrities on her popular YouTube series "Chicken Shop Date," was finally sitting across from someone who could understand what it's like to have chicken be an integral part of one's career.

"This may be the greatest crossover of all time," Dimoldenberg proclaimed to Sean Evans, the host of First We Feast's YouTube talk show series "Hot Ones," which bills itself as "the show with hot questions and even hotter wings."

"Marvel, I don't think, has anything on us," she deadpanned.

In the world of upstart talk shows, the match-up of Dimoldenberg, 31, and Evans, 38, could indeed be likened to "The Avengers." The pair are the epicenter of a new kind of celebrity interview show, one that doesn't air on linear TV and frequently goes viral.

Though both share a poultry-based gimmick, what really unites "Chicken Shop Date" and "Hot Ones" is their thoughtful execution of consistently revealing and meme-able interviews. Whether Dimoldenberg is disarming celebrities with awkward flirting or Evans is asking them probing questions amid the increasingly physical demands of the Scoville scale, the chicken shows have each perfected their own unique recipe for entertainment that viewers want to see — and celebrities want to participate in.

Over the last decade, both shows have worked to prove they're not just a flash in the pan, amassing hundreds of millions (or, in the case of "Hot Ones," billions) of views, millions of subscribers, and producing over 100 episodes each. The fan fervor for both series has reached high enough levels that "Hot Ones" now sells its own hot sauces. Meanwhile, Dimoldenberg's mega-viral "Chicken Shop Date" episode with Andrew Garfield inspired such enthusiasm that fans dressed up as the pair for Halloween.

Both shows also benefit from being independent: BuzzFeed sold First We Feast, the studio behind "Hot Ones," to a group of investors in 2024 for $82.5 million, while Dimoldenberg has called her decision to keep ownership of "Chicken Shop Date" under her production banner, Dimz Inc., "the best thing I've ever done."

Eschewing a corporate overlord hasn't kneecapped either show's opportunities for industry acclaim, either. "Hot Ones" and "Chicken Shop Date" are both now Emmy eligible; "Chicken Shop Date" entered the 2024 race in the outstanding short form comedy, drama or variety series category, while "Hot Ones," which has previously been nominated for Daytime Emmys, successfully petitioned to be considered in the outstanding talk series category at the Primetime Emmys alongside late-night heavyweights.

As ratings for traditional late-night talk shows continue to decline, shows like "Hot Ones" and "Chicken Shop Date" are gobbling up space in pop culture consciousness as a more appetizing alternative.

"These new shows are not a trend," Liza Anderson, the founder and president of Anderson Group Public Relations, told Business Insider. "I really feel like they're the way for the future."

'Hot Ones' and 'Chicken Shop Date' transcend their gimmicks to showcase an unfiltered side of celebrities

In the era before the internet, TV appearances were an essential part of a traditional celebrity press tour. In a 5- to 10-minute slot on national TV, stars could simply promote their show or film by answering a host's canned questions, reaching a large audience of people tuning in live.

"Everything that we used to do 10 years ago was scripted," Anderson told BI. "Any time I put somebody on a major talk show, we had the questions ahead of time. We rehearsed the answers. We knew what was coming."

The rise of social media and streaming has dramatically changed viewers' appetites. Though morning talk shows and late-night interview shows soldier on, large swaths of younger audiences have moved to the internet, where they can watch shorter, more offbeat clips of their favorite stars on digital series and interact directly with them via social media.

"There was a time when you had a TV or movie star, and you didn't want to pierce the veil and get to know the actual actor. The psychology was that it took away from the character," Anderson said. "Now, the opposite is true. The philosophy and psychology behind it is that you want to watch actors that you feel a connection with personally, not just professionally."

Nowhere was that craving for a parasocial connection more apparent than in the aforementioned and now-legendary 2024 episode of "Chicken Shop Date" with guest Andrew Garfield. After two years of flirtatious interactions on red carpets, Dimoldenberg and Garfield finally sat down for a "date" — one that repeatedly broke the fourth wall so convincingly that fans were adamant the pair should date in real life.

"i can't believe the best rom com of 2024 is an 11 minute promo interview between amelia dimoldenberg and andrew garfield," one fan wrote on X.

Flirting with Dimoldenberg was far from the only thing Garfield did to promote his A24 romantic dramedy "We Live in Time." But amid sitting for a slew of press junkets, posing for magazine covers, and dragging a cardboard cutout of his costar Florence Pugh down the red carpet (yes, really), Garfield's viral moment on "Chicken Shop Date" was arguably his most impactful appearance. It was watched 11 million times.

Even bona fide A-listers of older generations are becoming keenly aware that chicken — or, at least, digital interview series — is the key to staying relevant to a generation that lives on the internet.

"The other night, I was interviewed by Amelia, the chicken nuggets," Nicole Kidman told the Guardian of Dimoldenberg. "That's all my daughter cared about, and I loved that." So Kidman looked up Dimoldenberg's show and was charmed by her work. "I loved her with Billie Eilish, and Andrew Garfield and her was so funny. And now I have to go for a date with her. I'm asking for the date."

Celebrity publicists, too, are grateful for these unique concepts, which help portray their clients as multidimensional. "It's a good shift from a strategy perspective because it's something fresh and different," said Beth Booker, founder and CEO of Gracie PR.

"Traditional PR practices are still definitely at play, but we have to have those digital components to make our campaigns really effective because a press release and a radio tour just aren't going to cut it anymore," she added. "You have to find a way to cut through the noise, and those shows give you a really good opportunity to do that."

As late-night ratings plummet, talk shows are relying on social media-friendly digital segments to keep up

In their heyday of internet popularity, late-night talk shows broke the mold with gimmick-based celebrity interview segments like "Day Drinking" with Seth Meyers, "Carpool Karaoke" with James Corden, and "Wheel of Musical Impressions" with Jimmy Fallon.

Media outlets like Vogue, BuzzFeed, and Elle also emerged with their own specialty celebrity interview series, and some newer daytime talk shows have gotten in on the action, too: "The Jennifer Hudson Show" crew's backstage hype-up chants for guests, dubbed the "spirit tunnel," continue to go viral.

Still, it's no secret that traditional late-night is in its downsizing era. In 2024, "The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon" was cut down to four days a week, and "Late Night With Seth Meyers" dropped its live house band, 8G, reportedly due to budget cuts.

And while late-night shows continue to do games and other segments with stars, there's now more competition and diminishing returns. The most-watched video on the YouTube channel for "Late Night With Seth Meyers" is his day-drinking episode with Rihanna, which was released five years ago. The most popular video on the "Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon" channel is an a capella segment with the cast of "Star Wars: The Force Awakens," posted eight years ago.

"I don't know if there will be any late-night television shows on network TV in 10 years," Jimmy Kimmel said in August 2024 on the "Politickin'" podcast. "There's a lot to watch and now people can watch anything at any time; they've got all these streaming services."

Booker, however, is optimistic that late night isn't dead yet — though it is going through a transition period.

"I think the late-night shows are still going to survive, honestly, because a lot of them are bridging that gap to add in more of those viral-friendly segments," she said.

Anderson said that for now, there's still room for conventional talk shows in a press tour. However, most people are probably catching up on the latest celebrity news and talk show highlights while scrolling on TikTok, Instagram, and X rather than tuning in live.

"If you get a viral moment on ["The Drew Barrymore Show"], it can make or break somebody's career," Anderson said. "But nobody's sitting at home watching Drew."

What makes something go viral, though, has changed. Gone are the days when an ultra-gimmicky setup (think: James Corden's "Spill Your Guts or Fill Your Guts" or Jimmy Fallon's "Egg Roulette") could guarantee clicks on its own. When it comes down to it, the moments that audiences latch onto are the ones that use a contrived setting to pull a genuine emotion out of their guest.

When late-night legend Conan O'Brien ate his way through Evans' challenge in what's widely considered to be one of the best "Hot Ones" episodes ever, he paused his stream of frenetic anecdotes for a brief moment of sincerity.

"I've watched your show. You're a very good interviewer," O'Brien said, addressing Evans.

"I mean, this is fun, I like this, I get why you guys do it, and it's really fun, and it's compelling," he said, motioning to the hot sauces, the wings, and the camera, "but you are a very serious interviewer. You take it seriously, and you ask really good questions."

Evans laughed and thanked him, a little bit in shock.

"You'll cut that out. That won't make it in. No laughs there," O'Brien said.

It stayed in the final cut.

• Sean Evans criticized advertisers for undervaluing YouTube's 'Hot Ones' compared to shows on TV.
• YouTube is challenging traditional TV, yet some advertisers still ignore it.
• He said 'Hot Ones' success highlights YouTube's influence, despite initial fears of cancellation.

Sean Evans, the host of chicken wing-eating talk show "Hot Ones," said he's "sick of" having to make the case for his popular YouTube series to advertisers who still think of the platform as lesser than TV.

"The hurdle that I think we all want brands to get over is this idea that there's some difference between eyeballs that exist on YouTube versus eyeballs that exist on linear TV," Evans said, speaking on a creator panel presented by YouTube at SXSW.

"It's absolutely worthy of comparison and competition with all of those other shows, and in a lot of ways in those categories, it dunks on those shows," he said. "That's sometimes a hard thing for brands to wrap their heads around, but it's just an observable fact that is plainly obvious, and I'm kind of, like, sick of having to explain that over and over again."

YouTube has become the top TV viewing destination for two years running, according to Nielsen, on the strength of independent creators, increasingly threatening legacy Hollywood players and causing some to play catch up and look for their own creator-fronted shows.

However, some blue-chip advertisers still consider the platform less valuable than traditional TV, owing to its many user-generated videos.

Evans is one of the earliest and most successful YouTubers. Started 10 years ago, "Hot Ones" grew out of Complex Media, which became part of BuzzFeed in 2021. Over the years, it's hosted guests like Margot Robbie, Scarlett Johansson, and Gordon Ramsey. He and an investor group bought First We Feast, the studio behind "Hot Ones," last year from BuzzFeed in an $82.5 million deal.

During the session, Evans expressed his worry about the show being canceled in its early days.

"It wasn't a big hit at first, and I used to joke with Chris [Schonberger, 'Hot Ones' cocreator] all the time about how we're eating this really spicy food and no one cares at all," he said. "If this were on a network or something like that, we probably would have been canceled before we never got a chance to figure out exactly what the show was and what it meant."

He also talked about his passion for reading viewers' comments, which he uses to stay connected to the audience.

"I always go through the comments," he said. "There's Nielsen ratings or whatever, but you don't have that two-way street. That is kind of a drug to me. It's actually a dopamine hit that I really look forward to every week. "

Evans also explained how he prepares for interviews. Depending on the guest, he listens to their music, watches their movies, or reads their books.

"You just dive into the material as much as you can," he said. "After you have kind of an idea of who this person is, see if you can extract an interview of that, and then do a little armchair psychology sit-down with the person."

He also revealed there's no special sauce to dealing with the aftereffects of consuming all the hot wings.

"I just ride it out, you know. I think about, you know, as painful and miserable as it could be sometimes, as uncomfortable as it is, it's a whole lot better than my life before it," he said.

• BuzzFeed used to be a high-flying digital publisher. Now it has shrunk considerably.
• BuzzFeed needed to find a way to pay off a big debt obligation due this month.
• It solved that problem by selling the company behind "Hot Ones" for $83 million to a fund controlled by investor George Soros.

Good news for BuzzFeed: It no longer has a huge debt problem looming over its head.

Slightly less good news for BuzzFeed: Solving the debt problem means the company needed to sell one of its buzziest assets — First We Feast, the production company that owns the "Hot Ones" interview show.

And now Hot Ones — the show where celebrities answer questions while eating increasingly spicy chicken wings — is going to be owned by … investor George Soros and his family.

There's a bit going on here. We can break it down in a minute. But the big picture is that BuzzFeed, once considered a world-beating digital publisher, has staved off a potential extinction event (and, for what it's worth, has likely extinguished a threat posed by investor and political player Vivek Ramaswamy). And in addition, George Soros has added another asset to an interesting collection of media investments he has assembled in the past few years.

OK. Here are the details: As I've noted before, BuzzFeed was on the hook for $124 million in debt and interest payments and was facing the prospect of having to pay it back this month.

But now BuzzFeed has sold First We Feast/Hot Ones to what it's calling a consortium "led by an affiliate of Soros Fund Management LLC" for $82.5 million in cash. Then it took the proceeds from that sale, threw in some cash it already had on hand, and paid back some $90 million of its debt obligations. BuzzFeed says it has $30 million in debt remaining, and that money is due in a year.

"BuzzFeed says its remaining businesses — BuzzFeed, the pop culture site best known for listicles, quizzes, and celebrity news; Huffington Post, the left-leaning news site; and Tasty, its food vertical — will power the company in the future, along with what CEO Jonah Peretti calls "new AI-powered interactive experiences."

First We Feast, meanwhile, says it will now operate as a standalone company. It says the deal and its new ownership structure will let it "fuel existing and new content franchises" and fund "future partnerships and acquisitions with other creators." A press release from the company says "Hot Ones" host Sean Evans is one of the investors in the new company, which suggests he's going to be sticking around for a while.

And while it might seem weird for Soros, who is worth a reported $7.2 billion and whose funding of liberal causes has made him a bogeyman for some US conservatives, to own a celebrity interview show, it's not a total shocker, for a couple of reasons.

For starters, Soros' empire — now run by his son Alex — has been making movies into media over the last few years. In 2022, it acquired a minority stake in Crooked Media, the podcast company best known for its "Pod Save America" show. And earlier this year, Soros acquired a controlling stake in Audacy, a bankrupt radio company with more than 200 stations in the US — a deal that incensed some Republicans.

There's also some connective tissue between Soros and BuzzFeed at play here via media executive Michael Del Nin. Back in 2021, Del Nin put together the deal that allowed BuzzFeed to go public, and he was set to become one of BuzzFeed's top executives in 2022. Instead, Del Nin went to Soros, where he leads the investment company's media unit.

The deal also means that BuzzFeed has reduced its risk that Ramaswamy, an investor and soon-to-be DOGE cochair advising the next Trump administration, will have meaningful influence in its future.

Earlier this year, Ramaswamy bought up a 9% stake in BuzzFeed and told Peretti he should bring a group of conservative media types onto BuzzFeed's board and turn BuzzFeed into a Twitter-style platform. Then he suggested that when BuzzFeed's debt came due this month, the company would be unable to pay it back and that somehow Ramaswamy would end up controlling the company. That doesn't seem like an option anymore.

• A few years ago BuzzFeed was supposedly worth close to $2 billion.
• Now it's worth much less, and it has been scrambling to solve a looming $124 million debt problem.
• That seems likely to come to a head this week, and may require the company to sell assets like "Hot Ones," its interview show.

What's going on with BuzzFeed, the formerly high-flying digital publisher?

This is a good day to ask. That's because today is the day that BuzzFeed could be on the hook for $123.5 million in debt and interest payments — money that it doesn't appear to have.

It is possible that BuzzFeed has a plan to deal with the debt — by selling off assets, or renegotiating a deal with its creditors, or both. And over the past month, public investors have seemed to think there's some kind of good news coming: They have pushed up BuzzFeed shares more than 72% in that time (though shares have dropped by as much as 5% today).

Last month, when BuzzFeed announced its quarterly earnings, it promised investors that "in the coming weeks, we look forward to sharing an update on our debt, balance sheet, Q4 financial outlook, and the results of the strategic review process we initiated last year with our financial advisors."

My educated hunch is that the update-to-be will happen later this week. But right now, BuzzFeed PR isn't commenting. I've also asked Vivek Ramaswamy, an investor and soon-to-be DOGE cochair advising the next Trump administration, for comment. That's because earlier this year Ramaswamy amassed a 9% stake in BuzzFeed and issued a set of demands to CEO Jonah Peretti, which Peretti seems to have ignored. Ramaswamy has not responded to my request.

Earlier this year, BuzzFeed was shopping First We Feast — its business that owns "Hot Ones," the viral hot-chicken-wing interview show (Yup! I just typed that!) — for a reported $70 million. In September, Bloomberg reported that BuzzFeed was in talks with Netflix about some kind of deal. I've asked Netflix for an update on those chats, which it has never publicly acknowledged.

But just selling First We Feast/"Hot Ones" wouldn't be enough to pay down BuzzFeed's debt, and there isn't a lot left for the company to sell. In 2023, the company shut down its money-losing BuzzFeed News operation. Its remaining assets are BuzzFeed, the publishing operation best known for pop-culture quizzes and listicles; HuffPost, a news site; and Tasty, which used to dominate internet food content in a pre-TikTok world but doesn't anymore.

It's also worth noting that BuzzFeed doesn't necessarily have to pony up all $124 million today. Today is just the first day that BuzzFeed's creditors can get that cash, if they want it.

So if BuzzFeed does have good news to share this week, it is likely that it sold one of its content businesses — or at least struck a licensing deal — used that money to pay down some of the debt, and renegotiated the terms of the remainder. I think we'll know soon, either way.

• Kamala Harris' campaign sought an appearance on "Hot Ones," but the show declined.
• Nontraditional media played a large role in the media strategy of both presidential campaigns.
• Harris campaign officials said "Hot Ones" didn't want to delve into politics.

Vice President Kamala Harris' campaign wanted her to appear on the popular internet show "Hot Ones," but the show declined, campaign officials said.

On a "Pod Save America" podcast episode about what went wrong with the Democratic presidential campaign, host Dan Pfeiffer interviewed Jen O'Malley Dillon, the Harris-Walz campaign chair, Quentin Fulks, deputy campaign manager, and senior advisors Stephanie Cutter and David Plouffe.

Pfeiffer, once an advisor to former President Barack Obama, asked about the campaign's media strategy.

"It was my understanding that you guys wanted to do a bunch of the larger, more popular, not specifically political podcasts," Pfeiffer said.

He asked why that may not have happened, citing "Hot Ones" as an ideal fit for the vice president.

"Never in time has there been a candidate better suited for a podcast than Kamala Harris on 'Hot Ones,'" he said.

The show, which has over 14 million YouTube subscribers, involves celebrities eating increasingly spicy wings as they discuss their lives and careers.

Recent guests include Bowen Yang, Paul Mescal, and Jimmy Fallon.

Stephanie Cutter, who spearheaded the campaign's media strategy, said: "I think if I remember correctly, on 'Hot Ones,' they didn't want to delve into politics."

She later elaborated, saying: "'Hot Ones,' which is a great show, they didn't want to do any politics, they weren't going to take us or him," referring to now-President-elect Donald Trump.

BuzzFeed, the owner of First We Feast, which produces "Hot Ones," declined to comment.

In its history, the show has never featured a political candidate.

In the interview, Pfeiffer also touched on Harris' absence from "The Joe Rogan Experience," despite Trump appearing on his podcast during the campaign.

Trump appeared on Rogan's podcast in October and talked with him for three hours.

Harris campaign officials said that Rogan wanted to conduct the interview in Texas, but logistically it was too difficult to make it happen in such a short race.

"What's clear is we offered to do it in Austin, people should know that," Plouffe said on the podcast. "It didn't work out."

This year's presidential election shone a light on a growing trend: politicians moving their fight to new media battlegrounds, everything from podcasts and gaming streams to Substacks and TikTok debates.

Trump pursued an unorthodox media strategy, which involved sitting down for many podcasts and YouTube shows as a way to target a key demographic — undecided and politically disengaged young men.