Why, why, CBS, why? John Mayer is the last person who should be hosting a talk show

CBS is reportedly nearing a deal with Mayer to host a talk and performance show. Rachel Brodsky asks, why is Mayer, of all people, in contention for a national TV hosting gig?

Mayer on stage in September 2019 (AFP via Getty Images)

When John Mayer showed up to perform alongside Maren Morris at the 2021 Grammys, his presence felt random at best, off-putting at worst. The 43-year-old guitarist and pop singer, best known for mealy-mouthed Y2K hits like “No Such Thing”, “Your Body Is a Wonderland”, and “Why Georgia”, looked out of place next to the immaculately made-up Morris, like an ogling uncle requesting a dance with the bride at a wedding.

Well, it turns out that CBS, which airs the Grammys, is now reportedly nearing a deal with Mayer to host a talk and performance show on its streaming network, Paramount Plus. According to Variety, a programme styled after BBC’s Later With Jools Holland “has been pitched to prospective broadcast partners as a series featuring performance segments as well as interviews with musicians, artists and other cultural figures in a setting designed to look like an after-hours club for musicians”. The premise sounds nice and all, but it seems like producers aren’t reading the room. (After-hours clubs can be poorly lit.)

Forgive me for stating the obvious: why is Mayer, of all people, in contention for a national TV hosting gig? By all accounts, he’s a middling songwriter who hasn’t had a hit in years and whose main shot at relevancy is being called out on TikTok for how badly he treated his famous ex-girlfriends. He has a well-documented history of saying the worst possible things about women in the press, so much so that entire timelines have been written around the subject. The man is a walking PR oopsie, and yet major corporations like CBS are intent on giving him chance after chance.

We’re currently in the middle of a major societal reckoning around how we think about gender, fame, and power. This tectonic shift arguably started with the downfall of Harvey Weinstein and the #MeToo movement, but the monumental impact of Framing Britney Spears added a new layer to the conversation, forcing us to rethink the ugly ways men and the media profit from – and experience no repercussions for hurting – famous women. John Mayer, who shot to pop star fame in the 2000s, is very much a part of that conversation.

In the documentary’s aftermath, a social media-dragged Justin Timberlake wrote a public apology for giving salacious interviews about Spears in the 2000s, adding to the media whirlwind about her. For his part, Mayer gave a recent interview to Andy Cohen about how he “almost cried five times” watching Framing Britney Spears, but his moment of self-awareness immediately backfired, with social media users pointing out the many, many ways he is directly responsible for helping craft negative narratives around famous women.

On TikTok, a fan read excerpts from Jessica Simpson’s 2020 memoir, Open Book, where she claimed that Mayer constantly patronised her when they dated in the 2000s. “He would tell me that my true self is so much greater than the person I was settling on being,” she wrote. “Like there was some great woman inside me waiting to come out, and I had to hurry up and find her because he wanted to love that woman, not me.

“I constantly worried that I wasn’t smart enough for him,” Simpson continued. “I was so afraid of disappointing him that I couldn’t even text him without having someone check my grammar and spelling.”

Maren Morris and John Mayer perform at the 2021 Grammys (Getty Images for The Recording A)

In 2010, Mayer famously referred to Simpson as “sexual napalm” in a raunchy interview with Playboy, which Simpson wrote “floored and embarrassed” her.

Other social-media users referenced Mayer’s prior relationship with Taylor Swift, whom he dated briefly in 2009; it is widely believed that he is the subject of Swift’s 2010 song “Dear John”. In an interview with Rolling Stone, Mayer complained he’d felt “humiliated” by the song, which fans later pointed out fed into a “crazy ex” narrative around Swift. (For the majority of her career, Swift has faced harsh media judgement for referencing public relationships in her songs.)

And this isn’t even the extent of it: in that same Playboy interview, Mayer compared his genitals to a white supremacist and used  the “n”-word. He’s said lewd things in public about his sexual experiences with exes Jennifer Love Hewitt and Jennifer Aniston, both of whom have had to contend with their own patriarchal media narratives.

Mayer on stage with former partner Taylor Swift in 2009 (Getty Images)

Even as recently as 2018, Mayer said he was hesitant to call himself a feminist (“a single phrase is being co-opted than the actual ideal it attempts to present”), opting to overintellectualise the term rather than, oh I don’t know, use his platform to help de-stigmatise it.

Now, it’s not as if Mayer hasn’t done TV hosting gigs before: in addition to having his own Current Mood show on Instagram Live, Mayer has filled in as guest host on CBS’s The Late Late Show and appeared on the final episode of Late Night with Conan O’Brien. He’s also popular on TikTok, where his videos have garnered more than 140 million views.

Maybe the C-suite types at CBS feel Mayer’s career musicianship and social media fluency make him the perfect TV host, sure to draw in viewers from multiple generations. But this isn’t about whether or not Mayer’s up to the task of hosting. This is about not appearing tone deaf as you move to lock someone in to a likely multiple-year hosting contract when they’re already on semi-shaky ground with the very audience you’re hoping to attract.