Ranking Taylor Swift Late-Night Appearances By Tolerability

Taylor Swift’s latest album, The Life of a Showgirl, had a chart-topping, record-setting first week of sales. She remains at the top of the music industry, and with her pending nuptials to Super Bowl-winning tight end Travis Kelce, she’s basically conquered the full breadth of American culture: pop music and football. 

Another vein to tap into in her All-American takeover? Late-night shows. She has done two for her album release: The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon and Late Night with Seth Meyers. 

There’s. So. Much. Material. from just these two appearances. Even though she didn’t make it over to CBS or ABC for Colbert and Kimmel, there are eight different YouTube videos clipped from her appearances on Fallon and Meyers. Here are just a few:

It’s understandable that the ratings-pressed late-night shows would be willing to give Swift as much screentime as she desires, but it’s a little more confusing why the reigning queen of album sales and songs about Kelce’s penis would want to spend so much time on the late-night shows. 

What’s more confusing than that is why none of the collective two hours of content available on YouTube of her late-night appearances are the least bit compelling. In her interview with Meyers, she launches into a long tale of Kelce not being able to recognize his “favorite director,” Greta Gerwig. It’s the worst story about a fiancé you could ever tell the general public, especially when that fiancé is already widely believed to be slightly dulled by repeated high force impact to his skull. 

But trying to make me believe that one of the most popular players in the NFL has seen Gerwig’s version of Little Woman aside, the Meyers interview is still significantly more tolerable than Swift’s guest spot on Fallon. 

As I already extolled, the extended cut of the Fallon interview was both unnecessary and over-indulgent, mirroring the method of “special-edition releases” favored by Swift to extort her fans out of the most money possible. Moreover, Fallon is, compared to Meyers, an unskilled interviewer who lacks charisma and authenticity. 

But no matter how middling the entertainment value of either show is, the strategy of pushing a ton of Swiftie content onto YouTube seems to be a winning strategy for NBC: the top performing of the three videos racked up over a million views, and all the videos from Fallon and Meyers scored a minimum of 300,000 views. 

Unfortunately, this might only further incentivize the late-night shows to continue adopting Swift’s content saturation strategies. Though, it’s hard to say if seven different interview snippets — including some benign “game” segments with Fallon — will work so well on guests who aren’t among the most popular pop stars on the planet.