A rightwing late-night show may have bombed – but the funding behind it is no laughing matter

A group of conservative donors spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to develop a rightwing version of late-night talkshows like the Tonight Show and the Late Show, leaked documents reveal, in a further indication of the right’s ongoing efforts to overhaul American culture.

News of the effort to pump conservative viewpoints into the mainstream comes as entertainment shows and the media at large are under severe threat in the US. In September, Jimmy Kimmel’s late-night show was taken off the air, under pressure from the Trump administration, after Kimmel’s comments after the killing of Charlie Kirk, while Donald Trump has launched multiple lawsuits against TV networks and news organizations.

Four pilot episodes, each of which has been watched by the Guardian, were made of the rightwing chatshow. It was promoted by the Ziklag group, a secretive Christian nationalist organization, which aims to reshape culture to match its version of Christianity. In an email in 2022, Ziklag – which ProPublica reported spent $12m to elect Trump last year – urged its members to stump up money for the project, called the Talk Show With Eric Metaxas.

“For too long, the late-night talkers on network tv have filled the airwaves with progressive rants and outright mockery of anyone who espouses traditional American values,” the Ziklag email read.

The Talk Show With Eric Metaxas, Ziklag wrote, will “change that forever”. The email said the show needed $400,000 to $500,000 to film five pilot episodes, “which will be presented to digital distributors, networks and tv ownership groups”.

The Guardian sat through nearly four hours of the Talk Show, and found it to be an almost exact copy of existing late-night shows, just worse: with hack jokes about tired issues and has-been, conservative guests. The show was never picked up, presumably to the chagrin of Ziklag and its investors, who had lofty expectations.

“Spoiler alert! The secular elites who currently reign over late-night tv are about to find out the joke’s on them!” Ziklag’s pitch email read. It lauded Metaxas, a conservative radio host and author who was an eager proponent of the false claim that the 2020 election was stolen, claiming: “His comedic bent has gone largely unnoticed until now that is…”

Unfortunately, across the four pilots, Metaxas’s comedic bent was noticeable only by its absence.

“Big news in the world of show business,” Metaxas began the first episode. “Harrison Ford will be returning for a fifth Indiana Jones movie. Yeah. In this one Harrison will find an ancient artifact … by looking in the mirror.”

There were a few titters from the audience, and scattered applause. Metaxas, appearing nervous, continued with the one-liners:

“Barbie’s longtime companion, Ken, just turned 61 years old. Yeah. And he said the perfect gift for his birthday would be to finally get a prostate.”

This time there were some audible groans. Metaxas stuck at it.

“In India, doctors removed 526 teeth from a seven-year-old boy’s mouth,” he chortled. “The boy is recovering nicely. However, the Tooth Fairy declared bankruptcy.”

Ziklag claimed the show would welcome “guests who are routinely shadow banned on other talk shows”, and quoted Metaxas as saying: “It’s kind of like Stalin has air-brushed these people out of the culture.”

But the common theme among the guests was that they had been naturally phased out of existing talkshows due to their irrelevance.

The first episode featured an exclusive interview with Carrot Top, the 60-year-old prop comedian. Carrot Top showed Metaxas some of his props, including a bottle of Bud Light that had a torch in the bottom of it and a dinner plate that had a hole in it. Carrot Top managed to say absolutely nothing of interest during the three-minute tête-à-tête, before Metaxas cut back to the studio.

“Tonight’s show is loaded with talent,” Metaxas announced to the live audience. The guests included a TikToker – “for our generation, Tic Tac was a breath mint”, Metaxas quipped – Tammy Pescatelli, a comedian who has been absent from the limelight for at least a decade; and Danny Bonaduce, best known for his work on the 1970s sitcom the Partridge Family.

Throughout the episodes – as Metaxas sang a song with a terrified-looking Victoria Jackson, a self-described conservative Christian who was a cast member on Saturday Night Live from 1986 to 1992 and has claimed Barack Obama is an “Islamic terrorist” – and as he continued with awful jokes about some scientists who had developed a robot that could build furniture but “cannot promise that the robot won’t swear”, it was hard to see what the point of this was.

In its email, Ziklag said it was offering the opportunity to invest as part of the “Media Mountain”, a reference to the Seven Mountain Mandate, a theology popular among the Christian right. The theology proposes that Christians should seek to take over seven spheres of influence in public life: religion, the government, the media, education, culture, entertainment and business.

Chris Himes, who produced the Talk Show, said the show was not intended to be a “rightwing late-night show”. The aim, Himes said, was “to create a broad, throwback late-night program for the entire country – not just one side”.

“These are not partisan or ‘right-wing’ shows. Think Letterman or Dick Cavett in tone: humor first, with no space for snark or ‘clapter’,” he said in an email.

“Sadly, much of late night over the past decade has shifted from being genuinely funny to becoming a vehicle for tribal signaling – even occasionally straying into messaging far beyond comedy. We believe the country deserves something better.”

Himes added: “To be clear, a ‘right-wing’ late-night show would be a terrible idea. What we’re building is something more essential: a genuinely funny, unifying alternative.”

In the pilot episodes, there were guests who were known for rightwing politics, but Metaxas largely didn’t ask them about those politics. In episode three, he seemed to decide he needed to at least say a bit of something to satisfy the rightwing donors funding this enterprise, but that came in the form of going over well-trodden ground about liberals.

“Botanists have discovered a meat-eating plant in Canada,” Metaxas said in his intro. “Researchers determined that the plant started eating meat because it just got tired of explaining its vegan lifestyle.”

He continued: “Detroit’s sanitation workers – I just read this – they’re threatening to go on strike. Detroit’s mayor said not to worry, because Detroit will continue to look and smell exactly the same.”

Another quip ventured into current affairs: “Gas costs a fortune. It’s insane how much it costs. And who would have thought that the best deal at the Shell station would ever be the $3 microwave burrito?”

Ziklag’s pitch to investors had promised big-name guests. It didn’t deliver apart from an interview – heavily touted by Metaxas – with film-maker Ron Howard. The interview turned out to be from a press junket, where directors or actors sit in a room for eight hours and basically anyone with a press pass can schedule time to question them.

It’s unlikely Howard knew he was appearing on what Ziklag described as a “faith-friendly, late night alternative”, but that’s perhaps irrelevant, given networks clearly passed on what is a confused, drab copy of shows that are actually successful.

But while Metaxas’s effort to shoehorn a conservative show into the mainstream may have been lamentable, the fact that wealthy rightwingers are attempting to do so should be cause for concern, given the threat television is under from Trump.

Earlier this year, CBS scrapped the Late Show with Stephen Colbert – Colbert had repeatedly mocked Trump – weeks after CBS’s parent company settled a lawsuit with Trump. Trump has also called for late-night show hosts Jimmy Fallon and Seth Meyers, who have both criticized the president, to be fired, while the president has overseen NPR and PBS being stripped of funding, having decried “biased media”.

The Talk Show was a terrible product, memorable only for dreadful humor and snooze-inducing interviews. In the current climate, however, it serves as a reminder that the right wing is waging a well-funded war on the media that is unlikely to end soon.