Will Late-Night TV Work on YouTube?

There’s a desk.There’s a band.

There’s an opening monologue.There are interviews, musical guests and sketches and games.The new show, “Outside Tonight,” shares a lot with traditional late-night television.

But the overlap basically stops there.For starters, full episodes of “Outside Tonight” are on YouTube, not a broadcast network or a subscription streaming service like Netflix.Next, it’s hosted and created by a 26-year-old digital native whose claim to fame comes from the internet, not from a connection to “Saturday Night Live” or “The Daily Show.”There’s no media company bankrolling it, and the budget is a very small fraction of a typical late-night show, which can balloon to well over $100 million.

It’s filmed outside, as the name suggests, and new episodes appear weekly.And yet Julian Shapiro-Barnum, the host and creator of the show, believes those contrasts will help save late night.“Outside Tonight” is the latest attempt to ignite a spark in a genre that has fallen into an existential crisis and is in need of new ideas.

Ratings and advertising revenue have plummeted, and so has the number of late-night series on broadcast, cable and streaming.CBS left the business after it canceled Stephen Colbert’s “Late Show,” citing financial losses that the network said had reached $40 million last year.

Whenever Jimmy Kimmel decides to hang it up — he has been talking about it for years — ABC may get out of the business, too.“Is it cocky to say that ‘Outside Tonight’ is saving late night?” Mr.Shapiro-Barnum asked in his opening monologue of the first episode of the show, which premiered in mid-June.

“Definitely.Is it true? I don’t know.

But I know for sure it is fun to say.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscri...