Lilly Singh, an extremely successful YouTuber who went by the name “Superwoman” on the platform, is getting her own late night spot.
Specifically, she’s getting Carson Daly’s late night spot over at NBC after he stepped down last month, Page Six reports. Singh announced the show A Little Late With Lilly Singh, which will air at 1:35 a.m. in September, on Thursday’s episode of The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon.
“I want to give a shout-out to all the women who’ve came before me and are currently in this space because I couldn’t have done that without paving the path,” Singh said. “But I do think it’s a little awesome for an Indian-Canadian woman to [have this show.]”
Singh, 30, is not some scrappy YouTuber, having been on the platform since 2010. You may have seen her on billboards and in advertisements for YouTube circa-2015. Her videos are a mix of personal vlogs and character sketches that poke fun at her Punjabi heritage, but as her star has risen she’s also featured celebrities in videos like Selena Gomez, Priyanka Chopra, and more. Last year she announced that she was stepping away from the platform, even with her 14 million subscribers awaiting her every post, to take care of her mental health.
That said, Singh nabbing a late night spot is still surprising given how hard it’s been for women to do traditional broadcast TV late night; while Chelsea Handler, Busy Phillips, and Samantha Bee have created late night programs at places like Netflix, E!, and Comedy Central to name a few, the late night landscape is still full of white men, and hasn’t come far since Joan Rivers launched her brief late night show in the late 1980s.
It’s also unclear how Singh’s audience will translate not just to traditional TV but late night specifically. When YouTuber Grace Helbig got a nightly talk show with E! back in 2015, nobody watched it and it was quickly canceled after just eight episodes. Singh’s demographic is also young women, mainly teenagers and women in their early twenties, which is partly the audience that doesn’t even watch late night TV or traditional TV anymore.
It’s clear in hiring Singh that NBC is trying to revamp stale, white ideas about what late night TV can be by hiring someone arguably nobody over 25 knows, for a medium that nobody under 25 watches anymore. But will the youths make their way to an ancient TV set to watch Singh? Only time will tell.