‘Chicken Shop Date’ and the Art of Talk-Show Flirtation

Seduction is woven into the relationship between interviewer and subject. To get someone to open up, you need to build trust, ask nosy questions, charm, prod. It’s a delicate dance.

The internet hit “Chicken Shop Date” takes this idea and runs with it. Its host, the flamboyantly unimpressed British comedian Amelia Dimoldenberg, invites celebrities with something to promote out on a date. Part of the joke is that the encounter takes place in the least romantic of places, brightly lit fast-food joints. Yet over the past decade, she has consistently produced entertainingly charged conversations.

In tightly edited meet-cutes with Jack Harlow or Jennifer Lawrence or, most recently (and famously), Andrew Garfield, Dimoldenberg has done more than anyone to resuscitate the dying art of talk-show flirtation.

Network late-night hosts today are all scrupulously respectable married men (along with an introverted single woman, Taylor Tomlinson). They are more likely to stare into the eyes of a beautiful actress and gush about her movie than chat her up. Popular podcasters like Joe Rogan or Andrew Schulz are just as sexless, more comfortable with amiable banter among straight dudes than awkward tension with the opposite sex.

It wasn’t always so. Johnny Carson and Angie Dickinson once dated, and you could tell when she went on his show. Faced with a beautiful actress, Craig Ferguson tended to rip up his notes and put his Scottish accent to work, bantering lasciviously. My favorite romantic comedies as a kid were not at the movies, but on “Late Night with David Letterman.” Letterman was not above cheap leering, but more than his predecessors, he sought formidable counterparts for flirty comic repartee. An on-air prank call to the office across the street from his studio led to a riveting monthly segment with a sharp-witted book publicist, Meg Parsont, that went on for years and came off like a courtship from some bizarro-world reality TV show.

Dimoldenberg belongs to this tradition but also breaks from it. She is a casually arch woman on the internet, not a besuited man on television, and pushes the performance of romance (and comedy) further. She asks some standard questions (“Snog, marry, avoid?”), but she seeks out chaos, awkwardness and a certain prickly playfulness.