Seduction is woven into the relationship between interviewer and subject. To get someone to open up, you need to build trust, ask nosy questions, charm, prod. It’s a delicate dance.
The internet hit “Chicken Shop Date” takes this idea and runs with it. Its host, the flamboyantly unimpressed British comedian Amelia Dimoldenberg, invites celebrities with something to promote out on a date. Part of the joke is that the encounter takes place in the least romantic of places, brightly lit fast-food joints. Yet over the past decade, she has consistently produced entertainingly charged conversations.
In tightly edited meet-cutes with Jack Harlow or Jennifer Lawrence or, most recently (and famously), Andrew Garfield, Dimoldenberg has done more than anyone to resuscitate the dying art of talk-show flirtation.
Network late-night hosts today are all scrupulously respectable married men (along with an introverted single woman, Taylor Tomlinson). They are more likely to stare into the eyes of a beautiful actress and gush about her movie than chat her up. Popular podcasters like Joe Rogan or Andrew Schulz are just as sexless, more comfortable with amiable banter among straight dudes than awkward tension with the opposite sex.
It wasn’t always so. Johnny Carson and Angie Dickinson once dated, and you could tell when she went on his show. Faced with a beautiful actress, Craig Ferguson tended to rip up his notes and put his Scottish accent to work, bantering lasciviously. My favorite romantic comedies as a kid were not at the movies, but on “Late Night with David Letterman.” Letterman was not above cheap leering, but more than his predecessors, he sought formidable counterparts for flirty comic repartee. An on-air prank call to the office across the street from his studio led to a riveting monthly segment with a sharp-witted book publicist, Meg Parsont, that went on for years and came off like a courtship from some bizarro-world reality TV show.
Dimoldenberg belongs to this tradition but also breaks from it. She is a casually arch woman on the internet, not a besuited man on television, and pushes the performance of romance (and comedy) further. She asks some standard questions (“Snog, marry, avoid?”), but she seeks out chaos, awkwardness and a certain prickly playfulness.
There’s a screwball-comedy energy to her face-offs, though unlike those classic movies, silence plays a bigger role then anxious chatter. With a lopsided grin, she is comfortable in stillness, playing hard to get. Her flirting has an English sensibility that is a bit alien to us, somehow getting chillier as it heats up.
She leans on a two-step process of suggestive flattery alternating with gentle insult, confessing then withholding. Dimoldenberg quickly shifts the power dynamic, taking the stars down a peg, then buttering them up.
When she tells Billie Eilish that the pop star is making her nervous, Eilish seems surprised and asks if that is true. The host responds: “No. Just trying to flirt.” She lavishes affection, then laughs it off as a game. When Matty Healy asks for a kiss, she refuses. When Jack Harlow makes a pretentious statement about his love for free libraries on the street, she shoots back: “Can you read?”
Dimoldenberg has a gift for teasing, softening insults with a laugh, hardening praise with a face devoid of emotion. Despite the aggressive flirtation, there’s something prim about these chats. It doesn’t tend to get raunchy. They are as comic as they are sexual, dramatizing the ridiculous overheated moments of the crush and silly side of the battle of the sexes. Our recent election tells us we have a vast gender divide. This show doesn’t deny that. It domesticates it, reminds us of the fun in difference.
Garfield’s recent appearance was among the most successful and scrutinized of the episodes, a breakthrough for “Chicken Shop Date.” It’s not just because the two seemed to have chemistry. A fan of the show, he had arrived ready to deploy her moves, teasing and insulting and flattering, but also adding some of his own, an actorly vulnerability. He tells her he feels manipulated and she says, “Good.” He says he’s scared of what their encounter will turn into and questions the role of the cameras.
This punctures her deadpan, but she has the advantage of the edit. And she knows that playing hard to get is also a great tactic with her audience. When she asks him if he kisses on the first date, he pauses and she cuts before he answers. She ends by saying let’s be friends. Will they?
Part of the fun is that her herky-jerky flirting keeps you guessing.
Good flirtation can suspend your disbelief. It’s why Sydney Sweeney and Glen Powell leaned into it promoting their romantic comedy “Anyone but You.” What makes “Chicken Shop” work is that its host commits completely. At her best, the series evokes the sparkling sparring matches between Letterman and Teri Garr in the 1980s and early ’90s.
As a kid, I never missed an appearance, in part because she was beautiful and hilarious, but also their teasing banter was a titillating window into a strange adult world I wanted to know more about. Is learning to flirt from David Letterman ideal? No, but honestly, it could be worse.
After Garr died last month, I rewatched nearly 10 hours of her Letterman appearances. They hold up. The two make for a perfect opposites-attract story: The tightly wound Indiana boy meets a quirky blonde from a showbiz family and becomes undone. She was initially a bigger star than he was, and you can tell. “You’re one of my all-time favorite friends,” Letterman says to her, before anxiety creeps up. “We’re friends, more or less,” he adds. “Mostly less,” she responds.
Letterman always introduced Garr with a chortling lilt in his voice (“A talented actress, an engrossing conversationalist and one fine babe”), but more than almost any other guest, she inspired him to drop the sarcasm. In several episodes, he asked her to remain after her segment in the same jarringly forward way: “I’d like you to stay for the rest of the night.”
For a talk show, of course, that just means another half-hour or so. But still.
Garr also brought out Letterman’s brooding masochistic side, which is to say, his real offscreen self. When she pokes fun at him, he asks her to do more. “I’m full of self-loathing these days,” he says.
In one episode they argue over whether doing nude scenes is exploitative. The next year, for a bit, he begs her to take a shower in his office. She resists, then agrees, ending the show in a towel in the shower. “I hate you,” she tells him, before the credits roll.
The next time she comes on, he is apologetic, describing his request as sexist. For Letterman fans, it was bizarre to see this snarky talk show transform into a psychosexual soap opera. As the host, Letterman had the power, but what made their chemistry work was that Garr seemed to be in command, pushing the conversation. She spits out innuendo (“I am so willing” she randomly yells at one point) but also stymies him with a withering squint. She talks about other hosts to make him jealous and tells him she only does his show for the free plane tickets.
As relationships can, it soured. With Letterman becoming increasingly famous, he grew crankier, less willing to play. When he moved to CBS, Garr appeared less often. In his final decade, she returned after receiving a multiple sclerosis diagnosis and again after she had a brain aneurysm. These are poignant encounters, nostalgic, grateful, a touch melancholy. Letterman is more patient, but still flirty enough to poke fun at her husband. What comes through is that both appreciated what they had, whatever it was.
In one of her last appearances, an older, more precise Garr said people would come up and ask if they were secretly married. Letterman looked tickled by the idea, saying that would be great. Garr agreed, with a condition: “We never see each other,” she said, considering it. “The perfect marriage.”
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