Determined to Return to Late Night, Busy Philipps Found an Unlikely Ally in QVC

Busy Philipps has heard every variation of the question: “Why aren’t there more women late-night hosts?” and she has every right to be fed up.

With the question and the situation.

One of her ready comments is: “This has to be the dumbest glass ceiling of all time.” To which she adds as an addendum: “Am I wrong?”

But if you really want to experience some full-on hackle-raising, elicit her views on the take that women don’t want late-night jobs because of the demands on personal lifestyle, especially for Moms with young children.

“It’s men who build it up and make it seem like it’s fucking impossible to do these shows,” Philipps says. “It’s not that fucking hard! It’s a late-night show. What are you fucking talking about?”

Philipps can talk the talk because she is back to walking the walk, having returned to a position she clearly loves: hosting a late-night talk show.

She got her first taste seven years ago with Busy Tonight on E!, and she had no intention of walking away after that ended after one season.

“It’s something I like to do,” she says. “I’ve been on those couches as much as anyone, so I feel I understand what it is.”

Armed with that one year of experience, Philipps and her executive producer, Caissie St. Onge, went looking for a new vehicle for Philipps to steer in late night—and wound up in an unexpected driveway.

 “I had been asked by QVC to do some holiday shopping things for them a couple of years ago. While I was doing that I thought, well maybe they should do our talk show.”

The pitch came down to: you’re not doing anything like this and you’re starting up a streaming service.

“They were very open and amenable,” Philipps says.

The result is Busy This Week, a late-night talk show on the streaming service QVC+ that kicked off its second season last week, with a funny and unusually personal chat (more than interview) with one of the closest friends in Philipps’ life, Oscar-winning actor Michelle Williams.

And coming up later this season—on July 23^rd—late-night royalty: David Letterman.

Late night and QVC are not as incongruous as it might sound, Philipps argues. And indeed, the selling aspects of the show are mostly treated glancingly. She and St. Onge wear outfits that they briefly push for sale. Items in the background, like the potted ferns, may get a little “you can buy it for” in the corner of the screen.

How different is that, Philipps asks, from all the product-placement seen on every other late-night entry? “The Bud Lite stage, or whatever,” Philipps says.

She is certainly on solid ground saying late-night shows have always been selling, from Ed McMahon hawking Alpo to all the guests selling their new movie/record/TV show.

Mostly Busy This Week emphasizes the conversation side of late night. Philipps hasn’t been doing a monologue, though she doesn’t rule it out.

She and her guests share a couch, drink wine, and eat assortments of snacks. In that way the show resembles Watch What Happens Live more than it does The Tonight Show. The host of that show, Andy Cohen, has already been a guest.

But the late-night influence extends pretty far. Beyond Letterman, Busy This Week booked Stephen Colbert and his wife Evie McGee Colbert for an especially entertaining holiday season show late last year.

The Colberts did have a product to push, but it was apt: their book on cooking and entertaining. The visit included cocktails and Stephen’s vivid recounting of his ruptured appendix, which led to emergency surgery, but not until after he recorded two pre-Thanksgiving shows in excruciating and scary (but now a bit funny) pain.

That was a show from season one, which also included a Christmas in July show with Tina Fey, whom Philipps has worked with on numerous projects including Girls5Eva, The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, and Busy Tonight, all produced by Fey’s company.

Fey also served as proof of value for QVC. As Philipps describes it, Fey offered to TV shoppers a truly unusual Christmas decoration. “This was a Christmas squirrel that looked like, almost but not quite, a taxidermy squirrel. It was a sort of very bizarre Christmas decoration.”

And how were sales? “I tell you; she sold that thing out. You could not get that Christmas squirrel. It was gone by third week of July.”

The second season will have the same schedule as the first. It will be on for ten shows once a week in spring and early summer, then come back for four weeks around the holidays.

That’s a bit unusual, though getting less so. John Mulaney’s Netflix show is also a weekly, with just 12 episodes planned for this year.

That too is a streaming show, which, given the nature of you-can-watch-anytime, is a departure from the traditional late-night format. (Philipps confesses that neither she nor producer St. Onge has any idea if the show has been on original QVC.) Like other late-night hosts, she points out that people find these shows all over the video landscape.

So there has been a steady late-night skew guest wise—Colbert, Fey, Cohen and, soon, Letterman. Does Busy This Week qualify as a late-night show?

Philipps certainly believes it is. “You try to imbue it with that late-night vibe with the knowledge that everybody watches whenever they feel like it.”

She adds: “The show feels like it lives in late night.”

It also airs in late night. A QVC spokesperson tells LateNighter new episodes premiere on the network’s linear broadcast channel QVC3 at 10pm Wednesday nights—the same time new episodes are released on the free QVC+ and HSN+ TV apps and on QVCPlus.com