Turns out maybe the late-night wars aren’t over—they’ve just gone vertical.
Less than a week after The Daily Show announced plans to produce late-night television’s first microdrama, Jimmy Fallon beat it to the screen.
The first two episodes of Who Billionaire? Me Billionaire debuted during Monday night’s Tonight Show, enlisting John Stamos and one of the burgeoning genre’s most prolific leading men, Kasey Esser, for the vertically filmed soap spoof.
Fallon, creator Delaney Rowe and comedian and Tonight Show writer Rose Kelso rounded out the cast.
“Have you guys seen these microdramas that everyone’s been watching?” Fallon asked as he introduced the project from his desk. “These super-short vertical soap operas that people are watching on their phones?”
He cited such representative titles as The Double Life of My Billionaire Husband and Help, I’m Married to a Billionaire Werewolf before introducing “the very first Tonight Show microdrama.”
The opening installment (below) introduced Esser and Rowe as a wealthy couple awaiting the arrival of their newly engaged friends, played by Fallon and Kelso. Also expected was a mysterious stranger whom Esser’s character had invited home after the man rescued him from the indignity of pumping his own gas.
Episode one ended, naturally, with the doorbell ringing.
“Ooh, it’s short. It’s juicy,” Fallon said afterward, promising viewers they would want to see who was waiting outside.
The answer was Stamos as Doug, a supposedly “down-and-out loser” who arrived carrying a hot dog bun as a housewarming gift.
Asked whether he spent much time golfing, Doug replied, “Well, I used to. But not as a golfer.”
Cue the cliffhanger.
The first two episodes of Who Billionaire? Me Billionaire were immediately posted to TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram, and added to the newly launched microdrama section of the Peacock app.
New installments are set to unfurl throughout the rest of the week.
The new Tonight Show series debuted six days after Comedy Central announced The Daily Show Presents: Two Billionaires Fight to Dominate the Country… And My Heart!, which the network billed as the first microseries from a late-night franchise.
That series, a political soap, will follow Alonka, the daughter of a sleepy president, as tech billionaires Egon Husk and Jiff Davos compete to build an AI replacement for her father—and win her heart.
Comedy Central has yet to announce a premiere date for its series.
Hearing about the rise of microdramas, I think it’s time Quibi’s failure stops being a laughingstock and starts being considered too ahead of the curve
Someone needs to create a microdrama about Quibi. After all, it lost billions!