After Midnight may be off CBS’s late-night schedule, but Paramount apparently hasn’t given up on the format.
A new version of the comedy panel game show debuted last month on ZDFneo under the title Neo Social Club, marking the format’s first official international adaptation.
For fans ofAfter Midnight (itself based on Comedy Central’s earlier late-night series @midnight), Neo Social Club will look instantly familiar—almost eerily so. The oversized smartphone screen is there. So are the Jeopardy!-style host and panelist podiums.
There are some changes. Hosting duties fall to Laura Larsson, a podcaster and digital creator rather than a stand-up comic. But like Taylor Tomlinson, Larsson doles out points not for correct answers but for originality, rewarding the quickest, funniest reactions over anything resembling accuracy.
The tone tracks, too. In the premiere episode, the night’s “winner” walked away with a ThighMaster as their prize—very much in keeping with the original show’s irreverent sensibilities.
There are some key differences between Neo Social Club and its American predecessor. Instead of airing nightly, the German version runs weekly—and at 10:15 p.m., well before midnight, which may explain the rebrand.
The guest mix is also different.
Where After Midnight leaned heavily on stand-up comics, Neo Social Club pulls more from the world of digital creators and multi-platform entertainers, with early episodes featuring a mix of YouTubers, social media personalities, actors with online followings, and comedy performers who straddle both traditional and digital media.
The transatlantic late-night borrowing isn’t without precedent. German host Harald Schmidt famously modeled his late-night show on David Letterman’s Late Show, aping not only the format but the show’s early ’90s look, as well—right down to the original’s red linoleum floor. Schmidt’s show, however, was produced without formal involvement from Letterman or CBS.
Neo Social Club, by contrast, comes directly from Paramount Global Content Distribution, which sold the format to ZDFneo.
The series has been ordered for an initial eight-episode run. Whether it continues beyond that remains to be seen, but early signs are promising: just weeks after launch, the show’s Instagram account has already amassed more than 125,000 followers—a sizable audience out of the gate.
For comparison, that’s nearly ten times the Instagram following of Comics Unleashed, the Byron Allen series that replaced After Midnight on CBS’s late-night lineup last fall.
Watch full first episode of Neo Social Club below:
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