Porn Gets Into the Late-Night Talk Show Game With Kinkier Version of ‘The Daily Show’

The COVID-19 pandemic has upended the lives of Americans and people across the world. Schools, restaurants, bars and churches have shuttered. Hospitals are overwhelmed and criminally undersupplied. More than 3,890 people in the U.S. have died at time of writing—surpassing 9/11—with up to 240,000 projected deaths. And those responsibly adhering to social-distancing guidelines are trapped inside, starved of company and diversions.

Enter: Super Horny Fun Time.

Yes, Adult Time, a premium streaming service of XXX content known as the “Netflix of Porn,” has decided to launch its first adult late-night program for loyal subscribers stuck at home. It is, according to Adult Time founder Bree Mills, their decidedly kinkier version of The Daily Show.

“Because we are the Netflix of Porn, we take our cues from mainstream trends. Our goal is to offer the daily talk show as a daily show. It’s our own internal talk show that we’re gonna have—every day, seven days a week,” she tells The Daily Beast. “We’ll invite a regular performer we work with to spend an hour live with our audience. The audience can treat it as an AMA session—“Ask Me Anything”—where they leave questions in advance, and they get a solo show as well, but mostly offer engagement directly.”

By “solo show” she means masturbation scene, and performers will be paid “the same rate” as they would for a solo scene. Mills envision Super Horny Fun Time—a name, she says, that’s a fun play on Borat—as “a hybrid of a late-night interview talk show and a Reddit AMA.” They plan on announcing the guest on their site in advance and opening up the floor for members to leave their AMA questions. Then, a moderator will work with the guest, introducing them and ensuring the show moves along at a brisk pace.

Super Horny Fun Time will be available to all Adult Time subscribers, whether you’re a standard-package user ($19.95/month) or a premium user ($29.95/month). Annual subscriptions can set you back $9.95 a month, which is a few bucks less than Netflix.

“Adult Time’s motto is to do porn differently, so that’s our challenge every time we do a project—global pandemic crisis or not,” says Mills. “We often ask ourselves, how can we take something that’s popular in the mainstream world and create an adult hybrid to make it more universally appealing?”

While porn viewership numbers are up across the industry amid the novel coronavirus pandemic—with Adult Time’s viewership up approximately 10 percent—adult productions are on hold for the foreseeable future, leaving many performers out of work. Adult Time suspended production on March 16 and “encouraged everyone to shift to virtual work.” The company has no shortage of content to air, sitting on 60,000 videos in their catalog, so they initially began manipulating the existing content, curating Top 10 and other lists to drive traffic.

“Then we went back to the drawing board and asked what we could do to create a really strong experience during this time, and to stimulate our industry during this time, which is made up of a majority of independent contractors and gig workers,” explains Mills. “A lot of performers shoot content for themselves anyway, so why can’t we be virtually producing content? We’ve started commissioning projects that will and can be done by performers during this time as a way of still providing them a regular income, and to offer new content to our audience.”

So yes, Adult Time and all of its performers have been practicing social distancing. They even produced and released a PSA featuring some of the biggest performers in the adult industry stressing the importance of social distancing to curb the spread of the virus.

“We decided to be transparent to our customers… and what we saw was such an outpouring of positivity and support from our viewers,” she says, adding, “We really feel that porn’s been a beacon of hope during this time, and if you look at the viewership numbers, it impacts a lot of people.”

In addition to launching a late-night show, Mills is planning to direct a series of new productions via video conferencing. 

“I’m planning on directing a scene next week using Zoom,” she says. “Why can’t we create an office role-play story using video-conferencing software? We can still develop the characters, situation and story, and use this alternative form of video-capture to put something out that’s topical and entertaining.”

Oh, and in addition to her adult spin on office video-conferencing calls, she’s also maybe, possibly interested in helming a porn parody of Netflix’s docuseries-phenomenon Tiger King. “I can’t rule anything out,” she offers, chuckling. “But we’d need to find someone at the level of a ‘Tiger King’ to move forward with that.”

She pauses. “We’re not letting the current circumstances keep us from being creative. We adapt.”