Amelia Dimoldenberg, the British comedian who turned an awkward fried-chicken-shop interview format into one of YouTube's most recognizable talk shows, said on Sept. 3 that Chicken Shop Date will end after twelve years, with a short run of farewell episodes still to come.
The news arrived on Instagram, where Dimoldenberg posted a carousel that opened with an image of a napkin reading "All good dates must come to an end." In the caption, she traced the show back to its beginnings as a teenage lark: "When I was 17 I had a fantastic idea that I might meet the love of my life on a date in a chicken shop. I've spent my entire twenties sitting across from the most incredible people, people I'd always dreamt of meeting."
She went on to describe the decision as bittersweet rather than sudden. "I never thought I'd stop Chicken Shop Date, I thought maybe it would be a part of me forever, and in some way it always will, but I feel like it's now time to move on from this adventure and onto a new one," she wrote, adding that she wanted to mark the occasion with "a few final dates… coming very soon." She did not name guests or set a date for the last episode.
From a magazine column to a cultural fixture
The series grew out of a column Dimoldenberg wrote for a youth magazine, and she filmed the first installment — with the rapper Ghetts — in March 2014, when it drew just over a thousand views in its opening fortnight, according to a chronology of the show's episodes. By this June it had logged 115 installments, its guest list stretching from Cher, Billie Eilish and SZA to Paul McCartney, who sat down with Dimoldenberg in May, and Andrew Garfield, whose long-delayed appearance became one of the format's most-replayed episodes after a string of viral red-carpet exchanges between the two. The show won the Indie Series prize at the 2021 Streamy Awards, cited for its "gleeful subversion of the classic late-night talk-show format," and became the flagship product of Dimoldenberg's own production company, Dimz Inc.
Chicken Shop Date belongs to a wave of internet-native interview shows — alongside Sean Evans's Hot Ones, whose circuit Dimoldenberg has also crossed — that spent the past decade rewriting how celebrities are profiled, trading the polished junket sit-down for a premise built on discomfort and proximity. Dimoldenberg's version leaned on deadpan flirtation and small-talk non-sequiturs rather than hot sauce, but the underlying appeal was similar: a controlled setting that reliably produced unscripted, quotable moments a traditional press tour rarely does.
What comes next
Dimoldenberg has already been building past the show. Deadline reported in August that she is developing a young-adult drama for the BBC that she has described as her version of "Skins," though the broadcaster has not yet given it a formal green light. She is also writing and is set to star in a romantic comedy for Amazon MGM's Orion Pictures, playing a by-the-book journalist whose life unravels after a routine celebrity interview turns into something more — a premise not far removed from the show she is retiring.
Coverage of the announcement was swift and largely elegiac. Variety and the Hollywood Reporter both framed the closure as the end of a defining format of the YouTube talk-show era rather than a falling-off in popularity, noting that Dimoldenberg is stepping away from the series on her own terms while it is still drawing high-profile guests.
For now, the show continues to post new episodes as normal, and Dimoldenberg has given no indication of exactly how many dates remain or who her final guests will be. What is clear is that, after twelve years of asking celebrities to eat chicken and answer questions they didn't expect, she is closing the till by choice.
