Bob Odenkirk had second thoughts when he walked onto the set of the long-running YouTube talk show “Hot Ones” last month. After all, he was about to take the “wings of death,” as the treacherously spicy chicken lineup is called.
“I heard such great things about the show,” Odenkirk told Sean Evanshis even-tempered host, once the cameras were rolling, but “I think I’m perfectly capable of talking without having a part of my body injured.”
Despite peppering the interview with a couple of F-bombs, Odenkirk, the Emmy-nominated actor for “Better Call Saul” and “Breaking Bad,” experienced a familiar change: He had warmed up, emotionally. Particularly after wing three, when Evans, citing a 1989 Chicago Tribune article, asked him about his one-man show “Half My Face Is a Clown.”
“That was way more entertaining and fun than I thought it would be,” Odenkirk said over the end credits through a spice-induced cough.
“Hot Ones,” a groundbreaking pop culture phenomenon in which stars eat 10 progressively fiery wings (or, increasingly, a vegan substitute) while being asked 10 deeply researched questions, has become an online mainstay. , holding firm amid the changing tides. of digital media.
Since 2015, First we party, the food culture site that produces “Hot Ones,” has aired nearly 300 episodes, nearly all of which have racked up millions of views. Guests for this season, the twentieth, include Pedro Pascal, Bryan Cranston, Jenna Ortega and Florence Pugh. In the early days of the show, the guests were mostly rappers, comedians, and athletes. Now, Oscar winners like Viola Davis and Cate Blanchett often take the hot seat, as do headliners like Dave Grohl and Lizzo. The two most viewed episodes, featuring Gordon Ramsay and Billie Eilish, both in 2019, have a total of 165 million views. Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson appeared to discuss our place in the universe and his place in us.
Evans uses his suave, unpretentious approach to his advantage, with his insightful questions disarming guests as the wings set them on fire. Often visibly in pain, guests are quickly drawn to Evans’ knowledge of his careers and his uncanny ability to keep conversations on track, even when they’re dangerously close to veering off course.
When asked Josh Brolin why the Geva Theater Center in Rochester, New York, was special to him, Brolin replied, “Literally the best questions I’ve ever been asked. Oh really. I’m impressed. I don’t know who’s working for you, but don’t fire them.” (Turns out it’s the little theater where he earned his stripes as a character actor).
In recent years, “Hot Ones” have gotten into the big leagues: with parodies on “The Simpsons” and “Saturday Night Live,” and Daytime Emmy nominations for Evans and the show. His influence seems to have resonated with the bevy of late-night or online segments that test celebrities in one way or another: “Seth Meyers spends the day drinking” either The Vanity Fair Lie Detector Series.
Since its inception, Evans said, “We’ve lived as four different generations of new media during that time, and we’ve been able to navigate those rocky waters in the smoothest of ways.”
The show could easily have been pigeonholed as a novelty or a gimmick, but Evans and Chris Schonberger, the co-creator and executive producer of “Hot Ones,” say its steady rise is a product of their dedication to the art of interviewing and, perhaps, unexpectedly, to linear TV: new 20-30 minute episodes drop on Thursdays. “‘Hot Ones’ is a bit like an ’80s or ’90s sitcom,” said Evans, comparing its cozy watchability to “The Office” or “Friends.”
Schonberger calls “Hot Ones” a “true Venn diagram,” where the current emphasis on viral formats overlaps with time-tested journalism. “It’s based on doing the research, trying to be factual, trying to be broader than the gossip of the day,” he said. His lodestar has always been answering the classic question: “What would it be like to have a beer with that person?”
All of this is much more than Evans, 36, and Schonberger, 39, could have imagined when the idea was born nearly a decade ago.
First We Feast, started by Complex Networks in 2012 and run by Schonberger, was struggling to catch up with legacy food brands like Gourmet Magazine or Bon Appétit, with their thousands of recipes or restaurant listings. Then, in 2014, digital brands pivoted heavily towards video. “It was this incredible flattening of the landscape,” Schonberger said. “Suddenly we weren’t very far behind the starting line, and we also had this brand that could credibly speak about pop culture and not just about food.”
And with platforms like YouTube evolving, Schonberger said, “People were looking for something to pierce the celebrity look—how interviews were becoming more experiential and playful.”
“’Hot Ones’ was the dumbest idea ever,” Schonberger said, half joking. “How is it, philosophically, that the dumbest idea is the best?”
“It’s like, well, we can’t just get people drunk or high,” he continued, “but I think we can get people to eat spicy food, which could be fun.”
Casting someone formally wasn’t in the budget, Schonberger said, so he went looking for screen talent “down the hall.” And there was Evans, who had been hosting segments for Complex News, golfing with Stephen Curry, for example, or eating the Dwayne (The Rock) Johnson diet.
At first, the show had a more controversial and unhinged quality (like a “Wild West UFC barroom”, as Schonberger put it). The publicists, Evans said, would bring their client in, “half apologizing for it in front of us.” The conversations Evans had during Season 1 (which he didn’t feature any women), such as when he used numerous swear words during a question to Machine Gun Kelly about his relationship with Amber Rose, wouldn’t work today.
In 2018, the Charlize Theron episode opened the door for A-list guests such as Scarlett Johansson and Halle Berry, who were previously difficult to cast, partly due to the show’s unconventional and untested concept, which hadn’t quite come off. his brother’s. central box.
If you’ve imagined Evans hiding out for a week before every interview to consume every bit of his next guest’s career, you wouldn’t be wrong. But he also gets a lot of help from his brother, Gavin Evans, the show’s researcher, who compiles a dossier on each celebrity that can be 50 pages long: no magazine profile, podcast interview, IMDb entry, Wikipedia page, or archived local news story. . it is left without plumbing.
Sean Evans, a Chicago native who grew up admiring Howard Stern, David Letterman and Adam Carolla, turns out to have a knack for demystifying celebrity. Near the end of his interview, Oscar nominee Austin Butler, who recounted a moving story about riding roller coasters with his late mother, hugged Evans and said: “I’ve made a new friend who I hope will stay in my life for a long time.” time.” The night after the Grohl episode, in which the two drank an entire bottle of Crown Royal whiskey, Evans attended a Foo Fighters show for friends and family.
Despite being a consistent trend on YouTube, the show has managed to maintain some level of underdog appeal. Perhaps it is that a team of about 10 people has worked on it since its inception. This includes one hot sauce curator: Noah Chaimberg, the founder of Heatonist, a Brooklyn-based small-batch hot sauce shop. The sauce lineup changes each season, but a mainstay is the brutal Da’ Bomb Beyond Insanity, a turning point in almost every interview. The final wing exceeds two million on the Scoville scale.
Or maybe it’s the unchanging basic set: an all-black liminal space akin to the Looney Tunes void.
The set was “a byproduct of our undoing,” Evans said, but it has been a boon to the show. Though it’s often shot in New York or Los Angeles, “we can set it up anywhere,” Evans said, like when they traveled to Hawaii to interview Kevin Hart or London for Idris Elba. “The program restrictions became a superpower,” Schonberger said.
Schonberger and Evans said cable networks and other platforms have expressed interest in buying the “Hot Ones” brand, but have prioritized their control over it, staying on YouTube and expanding their reach by creating and selling hot sauces (first conceived as as a souvenir for superfans, then expanded exponentially to meet demand). They have collaborated with shake shack, reeboks and Champion sportswear. And in 2021, Hot Ones began selling chicken nuggets in Walmart’s frozen aisles.
And while “Hot Ones” wasn’t created with social media in mind, it is “made for it,” Schonberger said, with each wing having its own two- to three-minute segment designed to have a beginning, middle, and end. Then come the reaction GIFs and compilations, racking up millions of views on TikTok, along with videos of fans trying the sauces.
“We continue to focus on making everything the best it can be and having faith that once it’s out in the world,” Schonberger said, “it belongs on the internet, and they’re going to find a way to have fun. with it and amplify it.” For the duo, who are no doubt stubborn about their vision, the future will look a lot like the present.
“I don’t really have these plans or aspirations of world domination. I think I’m happier being a duke or a baron in my little corner of the internet,” said Evans, who has eaten thousands of wings on screen. “Hopefully I can hold this for as long as my stomach will allow me.”
