Fun
Frisky
Nostalgic
Intense
Adventurous
Choked Up
Curious
Romantic
Weird
If there’s anyone who proves that in 2016 there are multiple avenues to break into Hollywood, it’s Jeffery Self. He was a cult YouTube star before “YouTube Star” became a thing that could make you an actual millionaire. He turned that cult notoriety into the Logo sketch show Jeffery and Cole Caserole before RuPaul made Logo nice and lucrative. He’s appeared on 30 Rock as Liz Lemon’s recently out-of-the-closet cousin Randy, he wrote and starred in the gay horror movie You’re Killing Me, he hosts the Scream after-show for MTV, he’s turned his social media presence into a kind of constantly-evolving audition reel, he podcasts, he’s an author. Jeffery Self is going to get to you, Hollywood. One way or another.
Which brings us to Jeffery Live, Self’s new DIY talk show streaming live every Sunday on Facebook Live. If you’re on that entertainment-industry hustle, each new piece of media technology offers a new avenue for success, and Self is a firm believer in taking advantage of that.
“I had jumped into the YouTube game really early on, like in 2007,” Self told us in a phone interview last week. “I started doing videos with my friend Cole Escola, and that led to our Logo show. But at the same time, looking back, I am consistently so bitter and annoyed at how much it exploded after we stopped doing it. Watching the Youtube bubble really really grow, and watching all of a sudden these people who are making Youtube videos become millionaires was really, really, really frustrating, and I am really annoyed. I’ve been so bitter about that for years, so the minute I saw Facebook Live happening, I definitely thought, ‘Oh my God I have to jump on this before someone else does.”
And so we have Jeffery Live, an endlessly charming and thoroughly do-it-yourself talk show that generally begins with Self sitting on his bed in his home in Los Angeles. But this isn’t merely some solitary YouTuber turning the camera on himself. Jeffery Live has all sorts of moving parts, from guests to games to sidekick Brendan Scannell (“if he’s not being filmed, he’s in his crate”) lurking just off-camera, ready to jump in with an assist or some banter. It’s like if your funniest friends invited you over on a Sunday morning to be a fly on the wall while they joked around and put on a show.
The flexibility of Facebook Live is a perfect outlet for something like Jeffery Live, since half the fun is the vibe that feels like you’re all in the same room together. It also gives you an appreciation for the hustle that goes into modern-day stardom. Say what you will about YouTubers, but they find every angle and avenue, and they are relentless in the self-promotion necessary to keep audiences’ attention. One of the most sneakily smart aspects of Jeffery Live is the way that little home-made chyrons will float up into the screen with guests’ Twitter handles and URLs for viewers to check out. There’s a way to do budget with wit, and Jeffery Live has found it.
So why a talk show? “I have wanted to do a talk show for a very long time. That’s sort of the main thing I want to do. It’s always felt completely repulsive and self-indulgent to say I want to have my own talk show, but at the same time I think you have to be completely repulsive and self-indulgent to have a talk show, so … And luckily for me, I’m both! So it works.”
“I’m obsessed with watching talk shows,” Self confessed. “But, I mean we’re all obsessed.” It’s exactly this kind of sense that we’re all in this together, steeped in pop culture from the day we’re born, that gives Jeffery Live the clubhouse vibe that makes it so fun. “I haven’t been doing this for long,” he said, “but I think it’s really good, I find it really relieving and really enjoyable when you have a guest who isn’t just sitting there waiting to be asked questions, but ready to play tennis and bounce it back and forth.” Self’s guests so far have included film/TV/Broadway star Alan Cumming, recently out winter-Olympian Gus Kenworthy, and Modern Family star Jesse Tyler Ferguson. This Sunday, he welcomes Younger star Nico Tortorella.
It certainly must be mentioned that Jeffery Live brings a gay sensibility to a genre that has forever been dominated by straight white men. All due respect to Andy Cohen’s Watch What Happens Live on Bravo, which has been holding it down for gayness on talk shows for years now, the sameness of all the current late-night hosts on network TV has been lamented for a while now. It takes a kamikaze attack on the format from places like Facebook Live to shake it up. Self brings up other alt-talk shows like Adult Swim’s The Eric Andre Show and The Chris Gethard Show on Fusion, which have been showing how diverse, expansive, and bizarre the talk-show format can be.
“I can sit down and enjoy an episode of James Corden just as much as I can enjoy an episode of Eric André’s show, which are so totally different,” Self said. “And maybe I might lean a little more toward something like Eric André, but like I still enjoy what the mainstream is doing as well. There’s, I think, room for both. The hope is that there’s the attention put upon both as well though. Obviously we see ‘Carpool Karaoke’ everywhere, but how many people know who Eric André or Chris Gethard are? Obviously, there’s a divide there, and I guess marketing budgets and all that BS, but I think there’s definitely room for both, for sure.”
The gay sensibility that Self brings to his show is so lived-in that it feels almost beside the point to highlight it. But it’s important to remember that while we all grew up in a monoculture — four networks, basic cable, maybe HBO — we all took different things from it. It’s the difference between being inspired by David Letterman and being inspired by Amy Sedaris and Teri Garr on Letterman.
“You look at old Teri Garr interviews on Letterman, and she’s so there,” Self said. “She’s coming ready to play, but she’s also not coming with anything really prewritten, or anything she is aggressively trying to push into the interview. [She’s] just sort of there and playing the game and rolling with it. It’s such a joy to watch.”
“Look at daytime too,” he continued. “I mean The Rosie O’Donnell Show was so special and so unique and silly and so fun, but also still smart and still interviewing intelligent people, promoting books. The first time I ever heard who Sandra Bernhard was, was on that show, and she was promoting an off-Broadway one-woman show. She had John Cameron Mitchell on promoting Hedwig off-Broadway. I am always saying that Rosie O’Donnell is my hero, but every gay guy is always saying that, it sounds cliché at this point. If there’s any one show I’d want to emulate, it would be hers. I think, frankly, half of the reason I moved to New York City was because of that show. That show definitely made New York City seem like the most special place in the world.”
In the end, talent is one thing but timing another. “My biggest fear is that I will have jumped on it too early.” Self muses, his eye typically on the big-picture prize. “And that three years from now [Facebook Live] will be the way YouTube is now, where people are making so much money and having these amazing things happen for them. And I’ll be the guy who was like, ‘I was on Facebook Live before, you know…'”
