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Looks like it took a 36-year-old comic actor from a small British town no one has heard of to bring back the oldest of old-school American TV talk show traditions.

That's how television fans with long memories may feel after watching James Corden's winning debut Monday as the new host of CBS' The Late Late Show — a program once known for its eagerness to dismantle old talk show formulas under previous host Craig Ferguson.

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Reggie Watts, left, and James Corden tape the opening sequence for "The Late Late Show with James Corden." Neil Jacobs/AP hide caption

itoggle caption Neil Jacobs/AP

Reggie Watts, left, and James Corden tape the opening sequence for "The Late Late Show with James Corden."

Neil Jacobs/AP

Instead, Corden pivoted back to stuff we've seen on chat shows since the 1950s: a live band, led by a tuxedo jacket-wearing Reggie Watts; an introduction of celebrity guests as they exit their dressing rooms, bringing everyone out to trade banter at the same time; a skit with guest Tom Hanks featuring the two re-enacting his entire film career in hastily-thrown on wigs, beards and makeup; and a pre-taped bit with a cavalcade of stars explaining how he somehow wound up with a U.S. TV show, starring ex-Tonight Show host Jay Leno as an abusive, Whiplash-style mentor.

Stitched together with Corden's considerable charm and gee-whiz sincerity – he repeated in his monologue Monday a line he told me in January, "believe me, however shocked you are that I am doing this job, you will never be as shocked as I am" – Monday's show was exactly the unexpectedly entertaining romp you would want at the end of a very long broadcast day.

It was also a coming-out of sorts for Corden, a British celebrity who us Yanks mostly know as the pudgy guy from Into the Woods. But he's also a Tony-award winning actor who co-created a popular sitcom in England, Gavin & Stacey, and built his fame across the pond in a series of TV jobs that included hosting awards shows and sports talk shows.

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The audience didn't get much of that backstory Monday from Corden, who nevertheless introduced himself to viewers in the same way Jimmy Fallon did when he took over the Tonight Show. Instead, Corden talked about his wife and young kids, introducing his parents in the audience and joking that his mom liked Los Angeles so much that she was getting a boob job and eating kale.

But in a debut that nodded to talk show tradition, the new Late Late Show also checked all the boxes necessary for success in today's Internet-fueled late night TV climate.

The filmed piece with Leno, featuring a who's who of guest stars looking for a Willy Wonka-style golden ticket to host the show, highlighted boldfaced names like Meryl Streep, Chris Rock, Billy Crystal and CBS chairman Les Moonves. (am I the only one who thinks Leno is way funnier and more interesting as an ex-Tonight Show host than he was in the actual job?)

James Corden shows how he got 'Late Late Show' hosting job Willy Wonka-style.

That much star power was sure to spark viral video play the next day – as was the bit with Tom Hanks, featuring the two running through the coolest lines from all his movies, whipping on wigs, makeup and, in the case of Castaway, the scraggliest fake beard on late-night TV.

It helps that competitors like Fallon on NBC and Jimmy Kimmel on ABC have shown celebrities how much fun it can be to play on late-night TV. Getting Hanks to plop on a cowboy hat and spout lines from Toy Story has to be easier after Barack Obama broke the Internet reading Kimmel's mean tweets and slow jamming the news with Fallon.

Speaking of headline-grabbing moments, Corden also got guest Mila Kunis to admit she had married longtime boyfriend Ashton Kutcher, in an exchange that felt like something you might see on Graham Norton's British chat show. But Corden was a bit too wired Monday to really put his guests at ease; like many talk show hosts, he may find talking up guests on the couch the most challenging part of the gig.

Corden's Late Late Show debut gave audiences a glimpse of good times to come. Bandleader Watts, one of the most inventive and musical comedic voices from the podcast-turned-TV show Comedy Bang! Bang!, mostly showed off his awesome vocal chops in Monday's show, though he did contribute a deliberately awkward Question of the Day for Hanks that felt cribbed from his Bang! Bang! days. I'm hoping he gets a little more space to shine in shows to come.

As I've written before, success in talk show TV-land largely comes down to two things: the format of the show and the way in which the host inhabits that format. Monday's debut showed Corden has a well-tuned format that showcases his charm and talent. He's just got to figure out what he wants to do with it.

It's not the kind of show that will transform late night TV, at least not yet.

But for the third white guy named James hosting a talk show on network television, it wasn't bad.

Move over, cooking shows. In Korea, the big food fad is eating shows, or mukbang. Korean viewers are so glued to watching strangers binge-eating that the live-streamers consuming calories in front of webcams are becoming minor celebrities in Korean culture.

Rachel Ahn, who goes by "Aebong-ee" on her broadcasts, is kind of a big deal in the mukbang world. In fact, when we went to meet her, she wore a mask for fear fans would recognize her on the street.

Every weeknight at 9 p.m., Ahn sits down with enough food to feed a family of six. The night we visit, it was spicy noodles, spicy shrimp, steamed dumplings, fried dumplings and another platter of even spicier noodles, called fire zha jiang myeon.

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She carefully displays the platters so they all fit in the frame, turns up lights and her mic and when she goes live, about 200 of her fans are already chatting in a box next to her video stream. As she begins tearing into the food, the number of simultaneous viewers swells above 1,000.

The demands on Ahn and other mukbang stars like her are high — she can't just eat, she must eat ferociously. As she devours noodles, loud slurping is a must. Audiences offer feedback on a livestream, asking how spicy the noodles are, suggesting she move dumplings closer to the camera or do a dance in excitement. The stream continues for three hours, every night.

Korean mukbang star Aebong-ee demonstrates her eating prowess with some American classics, like crinkle cut fries and ice cream.

This fad hasn't just made Ahn a brand, it makes her a living.

"In the beginning I earned nearly nothing. It started out really slow, but now I'm earning more than my salary at my actual job," she says.

For eating lots, and eating loudly, the audience rewards mukbang jockeys with virtual balloons that can be converted into cash. On the night we visit, in the first half-hour of her three-hour netcast, Ahn collected the equivalent of $200.

She and other prolific Korean eaters now have fan clubs, thanks to their copious consumption.

Ahn's fan club manager, Min Bo-ram, moderates the chat room during the nightly mukbangs, helping Ahn rise to the ranks of the 100 most-popular hosts. She tells NPR she won't stop until "Aebong-ee" is ranked No. 1 among the estimated 3,000 mukbang broadcast jockeys in South Korea.

The tech company supporting this trend is Afreeca TV, which provides the platform these broadcasters use to stream their live eating, and the cash converter that gets them paid. Even the Afreeca's managers are surprised this particular trend took off.

At dinnertime hours, 45,000 Korean viewers watch mukbang at the same time, a three-fold growth since this emerged in 2013. The top-ranked stars make as much as $10,000 a month, and that's not counting sponsorships from food and drink brands.

But what compels so many Koreans to tune in?

For Ahn, she explains that her mostly female fan base gets to eat vicariously through her.

"Viewers who watch my mukbang are on a diet," she says. "So you call this a sort of gratification through others."

Afreeca's digital media manager, Hahn Yeh Seul, suspects the growth of Koreans living alone gives mukbang a boost, since there's a sense of community in coming together at a dinner table, even if it's only virtually.

Kyung Kim, professor of East Asian studies at University of California-Irvine, suggests the audience hunger for mukbang is a yearning for something besides connection — it's a desire for something real.

"Eating is something one activity that is strongly identified as being natural, and spontaneous," Kim says. "You think about K pop or K drama [and] they're very artificial, they're all about makeup and plastic surgeries. And a lot of people find this — mukbang — to be the exact opposite of all the things right now Korean popular culture really stands for."

You could argue whether eating two extra-large pizzas in one sitting, or a punch bowl full of ramen, is really natural. But Korean viewers? They can't look away.

For behind-the-scenes with Aebong-ee, check out our new East Asia tumblr.

Hae Ryun Kang contributed to this story.

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mukbang

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March Madness is college basketball's annual shining moment, and few schools have shone as bright or as long as the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. The Tar Heels have been in 18 Final Fours and won the national championship five times, most recently in 2009.

But today, UNC's athletics are also known for something else entirely: a massive academic fraud scheme. In Cheated: The UNC Scandal, the Education of Athletes, and the Future of Big-Time College Sports, UNC history professor Jay Smith and Mary Willingham, who worked with UNC's athletes for as a learning specialist, detail the scheme and attempts to cover it up.

They tell NPR's Robert Siegel how the scheme worked and how many participating faculty members explain their involvement.

Cheated

The UNC Scandal, the Education of Athletes, and the Future of Big-Time College Sports

by Jay M. Smith and Mary Willingham

Hardcover, 280 pages | purchase

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TitleCheatedSubtitleThe UNC Scandal, the Education of Athletes, and the Future of Big-Time College SportsAuthorJay M. Smith and Mary Willingham

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Read an excerpt

Interview Highlights

On how the scheme worked

Mary Willingham: Students were steered, or enrolled, by academic counselors — academic advisors that worked in the Athletic Department — to a lot of "paper classes" that were offered in the African-American Studies Department. And we traced the history of this system back, in the book, to the fall of 1988. I worked in the Academic Support Program for Student-Athletes from 2003 to 2010 and I became aware of this system shortly after I arrived. ...

We told athletes to [go] to the African-American Studies Department, to the office manager, and get a prompt. And they would then go to the library or, with our assistance, just cut and paste from online material, or we would put something up on the screen that they would copy. And then they would just turn it in. No one really ever read them. They were always graded A or B.

On a course in which the professor only considered test questions the student answered – so if a student only answered 11 questions out of 20, he was graded out of 11

Willingham: That was in our School of Ed, of all departments. [In] the School of Education, we had a gentleman who taught a class — it was about public schools and about public education and about education here in North Carolina. So ironic. Many, many athletes over the years took this class because it only met one night a week for three hours. Many of them slept through it or left at the break. And then there was just one test at the end and you really only had to answer the questions that you knew or you thought you knew. And you would get a C or a B or an A. It depended on if he liked you or not. You know, you needed to make nice with him, too. It was ridiculous.

Jay Smith: Basketball players in particular are rumored to have done yard work for this professor, to have had dinner at his house. He was very, very chummy with the athletes. That phenomenon of the "friendly faculty" member is universal. Every campus has some. And they represent curricular weak spots — soft spots that will be taken advantage of systematically.

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Report Says UNC Grade-Boosting Scandal Involved Fake Classes

On the common feeling among "friendly faculty" that they're helping student-athletes get through a doubly difficult college experience

Willingham: I worked with a lot of people, and I actually felt that way for a long time myself. I felt like at least I was, you know, giving the opportunity to these young men to come to college and have some sort of a college experience and play their sport, which they were happy doing. So yes, I understand the sentiment. I understand the feelings. But I'm a mother. I have three kids and I wouldn't want anyone to treat them the way that these young men — and the way that I participated in this system of fraud — I wouldn't want my kids to be treated this way.

On the difference between what happened at UNC and the easy classes any student might take

Willingham: The difference is that we needed to keep players eligible. These students ... their transcripts are littered with other pass-through classes in drama, in geology, in philosophy. Not just, you know, like maybe you or I where we had some of those classes but we still had a major and got a decent education. The NCAA and its member institutions are promising these athletes a world-class education and that's not what they're getting at all. Not even close.

On how much the Chapel Hill academic community knew about the scheme

Smith: There were varying levels of awareness. I mean, there were plenty of academics — the majority, I would say, across the campus — who knew nothing at all. But there were plenty others in and around that department who had administrative contact with that department in one way or another, who had to have been aware in one way or another. And some administrators, some deans, surely had to have suspected that something was amiss. But it was more convenient to look the other way.

On what sets the UNC scheme apart from what other universities have done to keep their athletes playing

Smith: We're No. 1 ... let's get that straight: UNC is No. 1. But these pressures are applied to university faculties all over the country — faculties and administrators — because it's the same game being played. What I think sets off the UNC case, in addition to being such a long-running scandal — 20 years plus — is that our administrative leadership has been exceptionally reluctant to admit the meta-cause, the basic cause of all of the fraud, which is the need to keep athletes eligible. They just won't talk about it. ...

The current system is a mandate for fraud. It basically requires fraud and make-believe games.

Read an excerpt of Cheated

If you're trying out for a job in sales, the person who judges your pitch may not be a person — it could be a computer. Job recruitment is the newest frontier in automated labor, where algorithms are choosing who's the right fit to sell fast food or handle angry cable customers. And algorithms are deciding by sizing up the human voice.

Let's take a voice you know: Al Pacino. Think back to how he sounds in The Godfather, Devil's Advocate, Scarface or this recent interview on Charlie Rose.

The actor speaks with different accents, different emotions, different ages — and his range is stunning. But in every version, Pacino's voice has a biological, inescapable fact.

"His tone of voice generates engagement, emotional engagement with audiences," says Luis Salazar, CEO of Jobaline. "It doesn't matter if you're screaming or not. That voice is engaging for the average American."

Years and years of scientific studies and focus groups have dissected the human voice and categorized the key emotions of the person speaking.

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Jobaline has taken that research and fed it into algorithms that interpret how a voice makes others feel and cross-checks its judgment with real human listeners. It's a departure from other data science. With facial recognition, for example, algorithms sift through your smile, your brow, to decide your mood.

"We're not analyzing how the speaker feels," Salazar says. "That's irrelevant."

Regardless of whether you're happy, sad or cracking jokes, your voice has a hidden, complicated architecture with an intrinsic signature — much like a fingerprint. And through trial and error, the algorithms can get better at predicting how things like energy and fundamental frequency impact others — be they people watching a movie, or cancer patients calling a help line.

Through machine learning and multiple feedback loops, it keeps answering and homing in on Salazar's question: "What is the emotion that that voice is going to generate on the listener?"

SUBMIT YOUR VOICE

Do you have a voice for radio? NPR wants to hear it. We're collecting samples from listeners. We'll choose the best voice — based on a secret equation — and put it on air!

HOW TO SUBMIT:

1.) Go into a quiet room and launch a voice memo app on your smartphone.

2.) Hold the phone 1 foot away from your mouth, begin a recording and read this sentence: "I'm **FULL NAME** and this week on All Tech Considered, The Voice, public radio style, judged by computers." (Insert your real name.)

3.) Stop recording.

4.) Name the file with your FULL NAME.

5.) Email the file to nprcrowdsource@npr.org, subject line: Voice Submission. In the email, include your full name (it should match the file name) and the best number to reach you.

If we choose your voice, you'll get a call from NPR tech reporter Aarti Shahani.

THE FINE PRINT:

NPR will select several submissions to be sent by NPR to Jobaline, a company that evaluates voices for jobs. Your name will be used in the submission, but no other personally identifiable information will be given to Jobaline. By submitting your voice, you give NPR permission to submit your sample to Jobaline along with your name. You agree that NPR is not responsible for any actions of Jobaline or Jobaline's use of the submission.

Aside from the permissions granted in Paragraph 1, your submission to NPR is governed by our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy.

You grant NPR the right to use your recording for any purpose and in any and all media in perpetuity, and you waive any claims to privacy, publicity or related claims with respect to NPR's use of your submission.

You agree that, if selected in NPR's discretion, your voice may be used on air.

So far, Salazar says, the Jobaline secret formula can pinpoint if a voice is engaging, calming, and/or trustworthy.

Note: It's not a lie detector test. You could be a big liar, but just sound like someone honest.

Use It For Hiring

Big companies pay Jobaline to help them sift through thousands of applications to find the right workers for their hourly jobs. Human recruiters make the final judgment, but the startup determines the small pool that gets human consideration.

Jobaline says it has processed over half a million voices for positions including sales, janitorial staff and call center workers.

"In the hospitality industry, in the retail industry, you want people engaged. The average span of attention is four seconds," Salazar says.

That's very short.

The benefit of computer automation isn't just efficiency or cutting costs. Humans evaluating job candidates can get tired by the time applicant No. 25 comes through the door. Those doing the hiring can discriminate. But algorithms have stamina, and they do not factor in things like age, race, gender or sexual orientation. "That's the beauty of math," Salazar says. "It's blind."

Career Counseling

As a woman who has built a career on talking, I'm curious what the algorithms have to say about me.

My friends say I've got two voices: the inviting, empathetic "Hey how you doing, come on over" voice. And the "Don't mess with me. I'm getting work done" voice.

Salazar ventures to guess the intrinsic quality: "I'll say it's engaging and trustworthy. I don't think it will make the bar for calming. We'll see."

The algorithms agree. They say, with 95 percent certainty, that my voice is engaging to three-quarters of Americans.

So, I'm a good fit for radio.

algorithms

Jobs