Jason Kelce is coming to conquer late-night TV, on his own terms.
They Call It Late Night with Jason Kelce premieres January 3 on ESPN, and the former Philadelphia Eagles star, 37, came to the table with one very specific request for the show.
“‘I want to have a live band with horns,’” NFL Films’ vice president Keith Cossrow recalled Kelce telling him in a story published in The Hollywood Reporter on Tuesday, December 3. “‘It’s got to have a horn section. And I want to shoot it in Philly, and I want you guys to produce it.’ We were like, ‘We’re in, we’ll figure this out.’ I got goosebumps.”
NFL Films — who co-produced Kelce, the 2023 Prime Video documentary about the football star’s road to retirement — will produce the late-night show, which will air on five consecutive Friday evenings.
Everything to Know About Jason Kelce’s Late-Night Show
“[He said], ‘No matter where I go, there’s one thing I want to do. I want to make a late-night show,’” Cossrow added. “‘I grew up watching Conan [O’Brien] and [David] Letterman, and they’re my heroes, and I love what Bill Maher does with the panel on Friday nights on HBO, and I want to have a late-night show about sports, and I want to do it once a week.’”
Cossrow said Kelce — who also cohosts the mega-popular “New Heights” podcast with his brother, Travis Kelce, and works as an analyst for ESPN’s Monday Night Countdown — has been inspired by other A-list athletes who have carved out their own niches.
“I think he looked at what Peyton’s [Manning] done and what LeBron [James] has done, and what some other people have done, and I think that’s the model a lot of guys want to follow now,” Cossrow explained. “They want to build their own entity and be able to produce their own content and have ownership of it.”
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Ross Ketover, senior executive at NFL Films, called the endeavor “scary and nerve-racking,” admitting the show is “totally high-wire for us without a net.”
He added, “Comedy is hard, sports and comedy is hard, us doing essentially a live studio show is something very new and exciting, but Jason is just a force of nature, and we’re so excited to be in business with him.”
The first four episodes of They Call It Late Night with Jason Kelce — which will be filmed in front of a live audience from Union Transfer in Philadelphia — premiere at 1 a.m. ET (so, technically early Saturday morning on the east coast) on ESPN.
The show’s final episode will premiere at 1:30 a.m. ET on Feb. 1, the weekend before the Super Bowl.
