General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 202611 min read

Larry King Now

Larry King Now was an American web-based talk show hosted by Larry King, produced by the digital network Ora TV and carried on Hulu from its launch on July 17, 2012. It continued the interview format of King's long-running CNN program Larry King Live, in a shorter, on-demand format, and ran through 2019.¹^•²

Key fact	Detail
Premiere	July 17, 2012, on Hulu under a multi-year deal between Ora TV and Hulu¹
Producer	Ora TV, a production company co-founded in March 2012 by Larry King and Mexican business magnate Carlos Slim¹
Format	A talk-oriented web series generally 30 minutes long, compared with the hour-long Larry King Live, with flexibility to run shorter or longer depending on the guest³
Run	First aired July 17, 2012; status listed as Ended, with the most recent episode dated July 24, 2019²
Recognition	Nominated for a 2014 News Emmy for Outstanding News Discussion and Analysis, and for Daytime Emmy Awards as host and show⁴^•⁵
Host	Larry King (November 19, 1933 – January 23, 2021), who had hosted Larry King Live on CNN for 25 years⁶

Spoilers

Plot

Season 1 (2012)

Beverly Hills, summer 2012. Larry King has been off CNN for a year and a half. Instead of a network he has a deal with Ora TV, a new digital company financed by the Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim Helú, and a distribution arrangement with Hulu. The first episodes are taped, improbably, in the "trophy room" of King's own house, the shelves of awards visible behind him, before production moves to a proper studio in Glendale.¹⁶^•¹⁷

The first guest is Seth MacFarlane, and the episode sets the template. Most of it is the standard King interrogation: short questions, no preparation flaunted, genuine curiosity. Then the ending, something no one ever saw on Larry King Live. MacFarlane stands King at a pad and teaches him to draw Stewie, the maniacal baby from Family Guy, a cartooning lesson included free of charge with the interview.¹⁸^•¹⁹ From there the guests come fast, four tapings a week for Monday through Thursday release: Meghan McCain, Matthew McConaughey, Betty White, Oliver Stone.¹⁶^•¹⁷

The rhythm is the one King perfected over twenty-five years on cable. A politician gets the blunt question a press corps would soften. An actor gets asked what his mother thinks of him. A newsmaker gets the question everyone else was too polite to ask, delivered in that nasal Brooklyn cadence with no follow-up threat attached. Because the show is only about half an hour and streams free on Hulu from 3 p.m. ET, there is nowhere for a guest to hide in a long anecdote. King, who famously never prepared deeply, lets the guest steer while he keeps pulling the conversation back to the human being underneath the publicist's talking points.¹⁶

The signature pleasure, repeated hundreds of times across the run, is watching a very famous person relax. King does not ambush, does not do "gotcha," and does not care about going viral. Hulu's executive Fred Forssell said it plainly at launch: the point was not broadening the audience but working with an icon who "makes guests comfortable" and gets to hard-hitting subjects in a way that produces "interesting TV" rather than a clip.²⁰ That comfort is the show's engine. Mike Tyson talks like a philosopher. The Dalai Lama laughs. Betty White treats King like an old friend, because by now he is one.

Seasons 2 through 8 (2013 to 2020)

The show settles into its long middle age and the guest list keeps escalating. The 2013 season alone runs fifty episodes and puts King across from Oprah Winfrey, Celine Dion, Jeff Bridges, Rob Lowe, Mike Tyson, the Dalai Lama, Robert De Niro, and Morgan Freeman, a roster that would have looked like a sweeps month on CNN assembled here as an ordinary week.²¹ The show also expands beyond traditional celebrities. TV Guide's pitch is King interviewing "today's most fascinating celebrities, world leaders and internet stars as only Larry King can," and the internet stars are the genuinely new element: YouTubers and viral personalities getting the same unironic, uncondescending half hour that De Niro gets.²²

Along the way the show leaves Hulu for Ora TV's own distribution, and the episodes pile up: 187 of them in the 2012 to 2013 span alone, 549 across the full run.²² The format never changes and never needs to. King gets older, the suspenders stay, the questions stay short. The run closes in 2020, with King still opening every interview the way he opened his first radio interview in 1957: what happened, and how did it feel?

The highlight of the series is the very first episode, because it announces the whole experiment. Seth MacFarlane sits with King for a normal, pleasant Q&A, and then, at the end, the show does the thing that made critics sit up: MacFarlane teaches the 78-year-old broadcaster to draw Stewie Griffin, pencil in hand, on camera. It is a small, silly segment, and that is the point. On CNN, the interview was the sacred object and the clock was the enemy. Here, the interview is allowed to breathe into a drawing lesson, and Entertainment Weekly singled it out as "something we never would have seen on Larry King Live."¹⁹ It tells you in ten minutes what the show is for: the same Larry King, unshackled from the network clock, willing to look foolish on camera because the guest asked him to.

Characters

Larry King (himself) is the host, the format, and the entire premise. Seventy-eight years old at launch, he brings the style he built on radio and CNN: no notes, short questions, no ego about his own opinions, and an almost pathological curiosity about people. He tapes four episodes a week and treats a YouTube star and a movie legend with identical interest.¹⁶

Wendy Walker (herself) is the executive producer, rejoining King after years as the senior producer of Larry King Live, which is why the show feels like the old program's soul in a new body.¹⁶

The guests are the co-stars, rotating weekly: actors, musicians, politicians, athletes, and internet personalities, from Seth MacFarlane and Betty White at the start to Oprah Winfrey, Mike Tyson, Robert De Niro, and the Dalai Lama as the run goes on.²¹

Sequels, spin-offs, and adaptations

Larry King Now was the flagship of a multi-year, multi-show partnership between Ora TV and Hulu, deliberately launched with little fanfare as the first element of that deal.²³ Ora TV later produced other King projects, including the interview program PoliticKing with Larry King, extending the same conversational franchise across the digital network.

Origins

King left his nightly CNN program in 2010 after 25 years, and in March 2012 he co-founded Ora TV, a production company, with the Mexican business magnate Carlos Slim. The company signed a multi-year exclusive deal with Hulu to carry King's new talk-oriented web series, Larry King Now, beginning July 17.¹

The move to the internet came earlier than Ora TV's executives had planned. The network had originally intended to launch in the fall of 2012, but King said he wanted to "get into the political mix" ahead of the summer's Democratic and Republican national conventions, so the show marked the startup of the network in the summer instead.³ King, who was 78 at the launch, said he missed the nightly show, and that the night the death of Osama bin Laden was announced, when CNN cut to live coverage and his taped special could not air, was when it hit him hardest.⁷^•³

Format and distribution

The show kept much of the old program's shape. King retained much of his Larry King Live production staff, and the format was similar to the CNN show, with the same suspendered host asking succinct questions of guests such as Seth MacFarlane, Oliver Stone, and Matthew McConaughey.³^•⁷ The main change was length and timing: episodes generally ran 30 minutes instead of an hour, and fresh episodes were posted online at about 5 or 6 p.m. rather than airing at a fixed 9 p.m. broadcast hour, although viewers could watch whenever they wanted.³

Guests ranged across the same mix King had always covered. Season 1 alone included the Family Guy creator Seth MacFarlane, comedian George Lopez, actress Susan Sarandon, former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani, and actor Edward Norton, in episodes running roughly 21 to 26 minutes.⁸ According to the show's own description, King hosted all kinds of newsmakers, including not only heads of state and stars from entertainment, pop culture, and sports but also ordinary individuals who were working to change the world or found themselves in the middle of the day's major headlines.⁸

Distribution widened beyond Hulu. The show was carried on Ora TV's own site, on Hulu, and on the Russian state-funded RT network, and TV Insider lists its run as Hulu/RT America from 2012 to 2018.⁴^•⁹ Later, episodes could be found on Hulu, Amazon, and YouTube, and the series was also made available free on Pluto TV, which lists five seasons.⁵^•⁸

Ora TV also produced a current-affairs companion series, PoliticKING with Larry King, which launched on RT a year after Larry King Now debuted.⁴^•¹⁰

Output and recognition

The show ran at a high volume. TheTVDB records eight seasons, with Season 1 covering July 2012 to June 2013 at 187 episodes and subsequent seasons of roughly 140 to 181 episodes each through 2018; Season 7 (July 2018 to April 2019) lists 9 episodes and Season 8 one episode.² Streaming listings count the series at 8 seasons with a 25-minute runtime.¹¹

Awards. In 2014, Larry King Now earned a News Emmy nomination for Outstanding News Discussion and Analysis, recognized for an episode examining head trauma in the National Football League and competing against conventional TV news shows like PBS NewsHour.⁴ King was later nominated for a pair of Daytime Emmy Awards, as host of the thrice-weekly show and for the show itself in the outstanding informative talk show category; he noted that his was the only digital show in its category.⁵ Counting his post-CNN work, King said he had received seven Emmy nominations and three Webby nominations, winning one Webby, an award for internet shows.¹²

Interview style

The show preserved the interviewing approach King had developed over six decades. He described his method as simple, direct questions: "an interview is an interview. It's basically who, what, where, when and why," whether the guest was a prime minister or an entertainer.¹³ He told the Columbia Journalism Review that simple questions were the best ones, recalling that during the Gulf War he asked war guests every night the same question, "What happened today?", and that a New Yorker piece called his approach "Street Questions."¹⁴ His motto, repeated across interviews, was "I never learned a thing when I was talking."¹³^•¹⁵

The Los Angeles Times television critic Robert Lloyd described King's interviews on the show as favoring sometimes wayward conversation over targeted promotion, conducted from a state of productive ignorance in which King never tried to show off how much he knew and was unafraid to expose what he did not.⁵

Later years

King continued hosting the show into his mid-eighties, working from the web-based Ora TV he had launched with Slim, and remained active there until his death. He died on January 23, 2021, in Los Angeles at age 87, several weeks after testing positive for COVID-19.⁹^•⁶ Ora Media, his production company, said in a statement that across 63 years and the platforms of radio, television, and digital media, his many thousands of interviews stood as a testament to his talent as a broadcaster.¹⁰

After the show ended, episodes remained available on streaming services: as of 2026, the series could be streamed on Amazon Prime Video, Pluto TV, Amazon Prime Video Free with Ads, and Xumo Play, and purchased as a download on Amazon Video.¹¹

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Series and fictional screen worlds › Unscripted, reality, and web-native series › Web-native and streaming-original series › Early English-language web series (1997–mid 2010s)

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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