TikTok is Television, Television is TikTok
Michael Z. Newman / University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
At some point in the past few months I started watching After Midnight with Taylor Tomlinson on my For You Page (FYP), the addictive, secret-saucey TikTok feature that efficiently ushers users from “what even is this?” to “cool, another one.” After Midnight is CBS’s new-ish series that comes on after The Late Show with Stephen Colbert at 12:37 am. At first I was confused by After Midnight’s format, which appeared to be a parody of a game show (it’s actually a reboot of a Comedy Central series from a few years ago), but eventually it started to make some sense, and at any rate it didn’t need to make sense in decontextualized 21-second comical bursts. It fit fine into my eternal carousel of clips.
The predecessor to After Midnight, a desk-and-sofa show hosted by James Corden, was familiar from its viral Carpool Karaoke segments, so it would make sense that Taylor Tomlinson would eventually enter my consciousness during my daylight hours of social media diversion. Late-night comedies now seem designed at once for night owls watching TV and for vertical-video social media apps, and it’s hard to know how much their diminishing broadcast ratings matter. The shows are relatively cheap to make and take more commercial breaks than prime-time programming, and their stars function as brand ambassadors for the networks by hosting awards shows and upfronts and by showing up on social media.[1] The most popular After Midnight YouTube shorts ring up millions of views (the same content also circulates as Reels and TikToks), while the show’s average nightly audience is under a million. In some essential way, these are internet shows. If Carpool Karaoke epitomized the YouTube era of late-night, these After Midnight videos might indicate a TikTok era[2].
@aftermidnight @taylortomlinson sets the record straight on the internet’s talk show allegations #AfterMidnight ♬ original sound – after midnight
After Midnight is a TV show about the experience of online living that works best as miniature videos that promote the broadcast version, or maybe the broadcast version exists for harvesting the best moments for clips? It’s not a conventional talk show or game show, and its logic is duplicated from online forums, subreddits, Twitter threads, and reading the comments. Smart people see something stupid and say something funny and the studio audience laughs and claps. Somehow this quipping scores the celebrity guest panelists points. The Kimmels and Colberts of late-night are still riffing on mainstream news headlines and soundbites while Tomlinson asks her guests to come up with clever and profane reactions to pygmy hippos, dating app prompts, Gen Z fashion, and earwormy TikTok trends due to expire in five minutes. So many instances of social media consist of responses to other instances of social media (reply, reblog, retweet, repost, stitch, duet, etc.). After Midnight’s ecological niche is the network television version of this. News and talk shows of many varieties have been turning “here’s something our producers saw on social media” into cringey segments for years, but AM makes this the hip premise of a whole comedy show, in which a young millennial insider to this culture pays her often older guests the compliment of assuming a shared language and sensibility.
It seems to me that TikTok, along with the rest of the cluster of apps that collectively seem to be replacing TV in many people’s mediated rhythms and routines of daily life, is an intensely televisual medium. It appeals to me as another kind of television in the same way that Spotify is another kind of record collection and the New York Times app is another kind of newspaper. One reason I think so is that so much of TikTok’s content is television texts like After Midnight along with news, sports, awards shows, etc. But TikTok also follows many of TV’s fragmentary formal logics and its economic imperative of capturing and commodifying attention. And several of the most informative concepts in the history of theorizing television are good tools for thinking about TikTok too.
TikTok, more than any pre-streaming TV channel surfing session, epitomizes what Raymond Williams dubbed the miscellaneity of television.[3] Swiping up the touch screen even more than zapping channels imposes the televisual logic that Neil Postman named “now…this” at the speed of a twitchy finger.[4] TikTok also has flow, the structured relationship of elements in Williams’ miscellany that blend drama, advertising, and invitations to further drama. Williams analogized the experience of flow to “having read two plays, three newspapers, three or four magazines, on the same day that one has been to a variety show and a lecture and a football match.”[5] It took a full evening of TV to get this effect. You can find as much swiping through your TikTok feed in ten minutes. The algorithm learns from user behavior how to select these elements of the FYP. And the advertising matches the aesthetic of popular content on the app. Content, commercials, and paid brand partnerships blur into the same basic style to the point of confusion.
@aftermidnight true love is just an Instagram ad away #taylortomlinson #aftermidnight #comedy #dating #googleforms #latenight #latenight #madmen @taylortomlinson ♬ original sound – after midnight
The quintessential TikTok is presentational, addressing the camera and implying an audience, a new iteration of the “video approximation of theater” that David Marc identified as key to TV style.[6] TikTok energy is upbeat, and creators are constantly reminding us of who they are and what they do. Virtuosic skill is shown off, emotional impact is maximized, and everyone looks as cute as possible. Every clip works its own appeals, but they tend to add up to something more if you’re a regular on the app. Clips from TV of talk show segments and cable news hits merge seamlessly with the online creator vlog style. So many of the TikToks I see also have the pedagogical and authoritative voice of many kinds of TV such as halftime sports analysis, cooking and home decorating shows, and news and documentary programs.
The ritualized quality of daily life with television is duplicated in the experience of getting to know the random, bizarre, and mundane assortments of personae in one’s feed. No one clip captures any of them adequately, but watching habitually gives it all a logic and coherence, a comfort of the familiar. This is the quality of parasocial interaction that scholars and increasingly regular folks know from the academic literature on mass communication, whose key original example of this was of television “quiz masters, announcers, ‘interviewers.’”[7] For me, these personae include standup comedians, earwax-extracting doctors, chefs reacting to recipe videos, Broadway stars and gossips, ambitious hikers and runners, media elite pundits, jazz teachers and vocal coaches, creators living with and normalizing physical disabilities, therapists, sex workers, linguists, Survivor fans, a talmud scholar (“shalom friends!”), amateur talk show hosts interviewing people on the street or in the subway, AOC, Disney World pianists, drain uncloggers, geolocators, French tutors, laundry and houseplant care advice-givers, and so, so many sports opinion-havers. Taylor Tomlinson is just another funny and charming character among this dramatis personae of the intimate “friends” who live in my smartphone.
@aftermidnight make the comments section honest but flattering
♬ original sound – after midnight
TikTok has the advantage over channel surfing of eliminating some of the tedious and interruptive parts of TV. I was a bit deflated when I switched to viewing entire recorded episodes of After Midnight, recognizing that it has the same dull stretches and segments that don’t really work as any late-night comedy show, and that it cuts to commercials with irritating frequency. In this way, TikTok is the superior medium: all highlights, and selected just for me. Marshall McLuhan wrote that the content of any medium is always another medium, and television is undoubtedly the content of TikTok, but in shows like After Midnight, the internet is also the content of television.[8] It’s all people and screens.
As the date for a US TikTok ban to take effect, January 19, 2025, approaches, the platform’s future seems precariously uncertain. A court might still decide to give TikTok a reprieve, and even if not, the incoming presidential administration may not enforce the new law. If TikTok does disappear from American app stores next year, its creators will surely migrate elsewhere. Yet I expect it will also feel to many of us like just as big a loss as would banning TV itself, which is so impossible to imagine.
Image Credits:
- Figure 1. Screenshot of After Midnight TikTok Page (author’s screen grab)
- Figure 2. Taylor Tomlinson on Show Format on TikTok
- Figure 3. Tomlinson on Instagram Ad Dating on TikTok
- Figure 4. Bianca Del Rio on After Midnight on TikTok
- Alex Weprin and Rick Porter, “How Late Night TV is Downsizing,” The Hollywood Reporter, September 12, 2024, https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-news/late-night-tv-downsizing-1235997584/. [↩]
- Myles McNutt, “Classroom Instruments and Carpool Karaoke: Ritual and Collaboration in Late Night’s YouTube Era,” Television & New Media 18, no. 7 (2017), 569-588, https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1527476417718363. [↩]
- Raymond Williams, Television: Technology and Cultural Form (Wesleyan UP, 1974), 81.. [↩]
- Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (Penguin, 1985), 99-113. [↩]
- Williams, Television, 89. [↩]
- David Marc, Demographic Vistas: Television in American Culture Rev. ed. (U of Pennsylvania P, 1996),11. [↩]
- Donald Horton and R. Richard Wohl, “Mass Communication and Para-Social Interaction: Observations on Intimacy at a Distance,” Psychiatry 19, no. 3 (1956), 215-229; 216. [↩]
- Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (McGraw-Hill, 1964), 8. [↩]