Mailbag for May 15, 2026

The hypocrisy of looking youthful, what's next for guys like Kimmel and Colbert once they’re done with late night, horny C dramas, and the side by side careers of Adria Arjona and Eiza Gonzalez

(Kevin Parry/ Matt Baron/BEI/ Andrew H. Walker/ Jim Ruymen/UPI/Shutterstock)

Dear Squawkers,

A few weeks ago, I mentioned that I am doing a 30-day skincare journey with The Ordinary (almost done now and really happy with how my skin is improving). Meanwhile, in The Squawk chats, we regularly have conversations about beauty, skincare, aging, and the beauty industrial complex. It’s a tricky topic for me, as a woman in my 40s who loves playing with skincare, because at the same time, I also don’t want to contribute to social expectations that women never age and always look like sexy babies, yet I am part of the problem! I am an advanced skincare user, and yet I am also resolved to aging “normally”, whatever that means in the 21^st century when even the non-invasive options can knock years off your face (I have had broadband light therapy and a laser treatment in the past). I do see the hypocrisy inherent in the system.

I also like to play with makeup. On daily basis, I don’t wear any, especially since switching to work-from-home post-pandemic, but I love to play with makeup the way some people have knitting hobbies. Like I will just spend a few hours in front of my mirror, trying different looks, even if I have no intention of wearing them out. This means I spend some time watching makeup tutorials online, looking for new things to try. While watching a video about blush placement by the fashion and makeup influencer Bonnie RzM, she said something that I have not stopped thinking about since. Toward the end of the video Bonnie says, “You should ask yourself what youthful means to you.”

Is it to look like a young person? Is it to participate in the trends the youth are creating, to be on trend like them? Or is it to look and/or feel good for your age?

For me, “youthful” means feeling good, being healthy and active and mobile—watching my parents develop mobility issues is really driving home the importance of maintaining physical fitness in middle age—and “looking good for my age”. Like it DOES feel good when people are surprised by my age, I won’t lie.

But at the same time, I am letting my hair go grey, I’m not going to do things like Botox (too scared, frankly), and I know eventually I will lose the fight with gravity and time and develop wrinkles. That’s okay. My aging lodestar is Michelle Pfeiffer, who has obviously had work done, but at the same time, she HAS aged. She just looks great for her age. I’m not going to look as good as her, but I will do what I can to preserve what I’ve got, and I will accept my wrinkles with grace. Eventually. Sometime later, lol.

Michelle Pfeiffer attends Paramount’s ‘The Madison’ Series Premiere in NYC on March 9, 2026 (Andrew H. Walker/Shutterstock)

So, Squawkers, my question for you is, what does youthful mean to you? And how far are you willing to go to feel and look it?

Onto the mailbag!

Question from Kristin:

What do you think is next for guys like Kimmel and Colbert once they’re done with late night talk shows? YouTube? Podcasts? I know Colbert is going to write a LoTR script, but I honestly can’t see someone like Jimmy Fallon doing something like that (he’ll probably end up as a game show host, and I can see Kimmel still hosting Who wants to be a millionaire). I worry about what will happen with John Oliver once the Ellisons get their hands on HBO. Obviously, networks fund their writing (and for Oliver, research) staffs, so unless they get backers it’s not like they can run to YouTube to keep going on. Does Prime or Netflix or Apple come in to offer them something? Do they even want to continue in this type of role? Part of the reason I love to watch Seth Meyers and Oliver and even Colbert is the insightfulness of their commentary and the way they dig into real topics (Oliver’s piece on non-lethal force actually being pretty deadly has stuck with me long after I watched it). What does the future look like for Strike Force Four (I refuse to count Jimmy Fallon in this - he’ll be fine; he always seems to fail up)?

Sarah’s answer:

I do like that we’ve collectively agreed to just not worry about Jimmy Fallon. He’ll be fine! Cockroaches always survive!

The obvious blueprint for a late-night host post-retirement is Conan O’Brien, who retired his talk show on his terms and moved into podcasting full-time (and hosting, he’s hosting his third Oscars in a row next year). Podcasting is definitely an option for any retiring late-night host.

Seth Meyers is already working on this, with his Family Trips podcast, co-hosted with his brother, Josh, and Seth also continues to nurture a standup career. Despite speculation, I don’t think he’ll go back to SNL when he’s done with late-night. I think he’s too much of a wife guy and family man, he won’t want those hours, especially since Late Night has the best hours in the business, they’re routinely home at a decent hour during the work week. I cannot see Seth giving up the work-life balance he has achieved.

John Oliver also continues to do standup—he and Seth co-host a monthly show at the Beacon Theatre in New York—so he might just go back to doing more comedy whenever his show ends. Like you, Kristin, I am worried about what will happen to Last Week Tonight when the Ellison takeover is complete. Surely, David Ellison knows how catastrophically bad it would look to interfere with John Oliver, but I also don’t think he cares. We will just have to wait and see.

As for Jimmy Kimmel, I can see him going in Stephen Colbert’s direction and moving into producing full-time, especially as he works with his wife, writer and producer Molly McNearney. I would not be the least bit shocked if they opened a true production shingle and started making movies and TV with their famous friends.

Stephen Colbert and Jimmy Kimmel onstage during the 71st annual Primetime Emmy Awards at the Microsoft Theater in downtown Los Angeles on Sunday, September 22, 2019 ( Jim Ruymen/UPI/Shutterstock)

What I don’t really see for any of them is going onto another topical/talk show on a different network/platform. Jon Stewart already tried with The Problem with Jon Stewart. They put out 20 episodes across two seasons and then the show was cancelled. Granted, this was Apple TV+, which can claim few true breakout hits. Not many people are watching Apple TV+ on the regular. But the talk format is dying, I think as these shows wind down, the hosts move onto other projects, and don’t try to repeat their previous success elsewhere. Jon Stewart already showed how hard that is.

Question from Cherie via DM:

Hello! Just started getting into C dramas and my life is better for it! Do you find C dramas have a lot more sexual heat to them? Considering how conservative the country is I was pleasantly surprised that pre-marital sex is a thing there!!

Lainey’s Answer:

I just wrote a post at LaineyGossip about the C-drama invasion this year, so thank you for proving my point about the recent-ish and rapid popularity of Chinese dramas that we’ve observed over the last several months.

Hard for me to answer about C-dramas and sexual heat. Some personal background: when I was growing up watching Hong Kong dramas, obsessively, in the 80s and early 90s, there was very, very little – if any – kissing in modern dramas. At most, like one kiss in a 40–60-episode series. And in period dramas, no kissing at all, whatsoever. The equivalent of a kiss was The Embrace. I used to rewind and replay and rewind and replay those embraces until the VHS tape wore out, that was a satisfying amount of “heat” for my innocent pre-teen heart.

For the most part, through most of the 90s, romance remained modestly portrayed in dramas – but more explicit content could be shown in films, both in Hong Kong and mainland China, like Zhang Yimou’s acclaimed work from that period. Ju Dou is a good example.

Over the last 25 years or so, there’s been a sexual revolution in China, due in part to the fact that pre-marital sex was no longer illegal after 1997…which isn’t that long ago. There was a pretty famous survey that was released in 2014/2015 that revealed that 70% of respondents had had pre-marital sex, up from only 15% in 1989! For those of you who are interested, one of the other factors was the one-child policy (that was amended a few years ago to address population imbalance) because if they were restricting how much people could procreate they then had to relax some rules about fucking for pleasure, and that led to gradual changes in attitudes about sex. This, then, was also reflected in storytelling onscreen in terms of showing intimacy. Basically, more kissing.

But still. Kissing and a bare shoulder are pretty much as far as they go on television. Short dramas might be able to get away with a bare thigh, and BL dramas can push it to some tongue, harder kissing, and a thrust here and there…but in comparison to western media, it’s still considered pretty conservative.

Which is why they spend so much time on the slow burn and building the sexual tension. Western dramas do not linger on a scene with two people just staring at each other, or just breathing in a room together, the way East Asian dramas do – and to great effect. But C and K-dramas have to do this because it’s foreplay, encouraging the viewer to imagine the inner thoughts of the characters in those moments, engorging it with longing, yearning, desire. This is a storytelling technique, necessitated by cultural standards specific to their respective regions, that has become a creative signature.

But I have to say, as an avid C and K-drama watcher, one of the things I try not to think too hard about, because otherwise I’ll be taken out of the fantasy, is that it is implied in most of the more popular dramas that our lovers are virgins, and somehow they never fumble their kisses and if they do end up fucking (off camera), it is suggested that they’re champions at it. This is why I very much appreciated a drama that came out last year called Fated Hearts. They were both generals in their respective armies, nobody was pure and untouched, and they didn’t pretend to be. I mean it’s not like they were sharing their body counts with each other, but nobody went all wide-eyed at a first kiss like it was the very first time. She might have even been more aggressive than him, if memory serves.

Fated Hearts poster

There is major common ground between East and West where romance is concerned, though, even though it might not be delivered in the same way. The more mainstream C and K-dramas don’t allow for much heat, implicit or explicit, outside of the OTP. Not unlike (for the most part) the most mainstream romance novels and films and television shows in the west. And this is a big part of the draw for international audiences increasingly gravitating towards Eastern dramas – the traditional fantasy of The One is universal, no matter where you’re from.

Question from Elizabeth MacLeod:

Let’s do a career compare/contrast and prospectus of Adria Arjona and Eiza Gonzalez – both broke through around the same time in the early/mid-2010s and were up in the same types of roles, but from a birds-eye view of their filmographies and upcoming work it seems Eiza has made a niche for herself as a credible female action star while Adria is a little more versatile being in a mixture of dramas, comedies and some action and worked with a range of auteur/prestige directors. What is your two cents Sarah?

Sarah’s answer:

My two cents is that they look so much alike, it’s an obstacle for both of them. This happens sometimes; another case is Margot Robbie/Samara Weaving (who not only look alike but are also both Australian). It can be disadvantageous to have two actors who look so much alike in the marketplace at the same time. It makes it harder for audiences to figure out who is whom. For reference, here are Adria and Eiza side by side:

You might recognize Adria from films like Triple Frontier, Hitman, and Blink Twice, while Eiza has starred in Baby Driver, Hobbs & Shaw, and Ambulance. Eiza is also in with Guy Ritchie, and she is in this year’s I Love Boosters and Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice (streaming on Hulu and a lot of fun). Adria, meanwhile, has some big stuff coming up next year with Michael B. Jordan’s The Thomas Crown Affair and the Superman sequel, Man of Tomorrow.

They are both working plenty, they are both regularly appearing in solid-to-good projects. Neither actress is hurting in that way. Where I think they’ve been kneecapped a little is that one of them might be a bigger star if the other wasn’t around. In terms of public persona, they’re still entangled, I don’t think the average person really knows they’re two different people, though Adria, with next year’s double whammy of Thomas Crown and Man of Tomorrow might finally get enough mainstream attention to buy some breathing room. Let’s put a pin in this until late 2027 and see where Adria and Eiza stand in relation to one another then.

---

That’s it for this week’s mailbag! As always, thanks for reading and squawking with us!

Just keep squawking,

Sarah and Lainey