Gethard fights against the slick live show format, and strives to make his show "still look messed up."

A. Bisdale/truTV

Henning Santiago: Did you know that you wanted this show to be live? Was the public access show live?

Gethard: The public access show was live, and that's one of the biggest reasons that we went to public access. We had been doing it ["The Chris Gethard Show"] at the UCB, and a friend of mine who took classes there. Who I actually taught for a long time. He told me, "You know I work at the New York public access station, and I think your show would be a great public access show."

And at first I was like, "Man, is public access still around?"

He was telling me, "Dude we have a four camera studio, you can do the whole thing live, we can stream it online, and you can take phone calls."

And the more he told me about it the more I was like, I think this might be the best kept secret in New York. The fact that we could do it live, and the fact that we could take phone calls, and put it out on the internet all really appealed to me. I just had this hunch that if you do something live, people really feel like they have to be there to see it. Live is the thing that defeats the idea that you can watch the best 45 seconds on Reddit the next morning. There's so much more power, it's live so you don't want to be there after the fact, you want to be there when it goes down.

And then the fact that it can be interactive, that we take phone calls, and that it was uncensored, that we could just throw it up there and see what happens, that was all the stuff that really appealed to me.

On our former network, on Fusion it wasn't live, and I think the show really lost something. I'm really proud of what we did but it felt like there was a certain life to it that had been diminished. I think truTV saw that, and they actually suggested doing it live again, which I was astounded by because it's not a safe thing to do on any show, let alone with us. We barely know what we're doing, so I really commend them for allowing this to happen.

Henning Santiago: Yeah, it's hard for me to think of any shows that are really live anymore. Save for like SNL, and some news?

Gethard: Yeah, it's news, its sports, and I think Andy Cohen, right? I think that's one of our big battles this year, and one of the things we've really been pushing for is that we've been doing this more and more, and we're better at it, and it made me realize, we have to work harder at it and make sure things still look messed up. That we have to get ambitious enough with our ideas that they fall apart and the edges fray on TV.

That's another thing I don't understand about live TV like "SNL." I have so many friends who worked there, I was a guest writer there, I really have so much respect - I don't want this to sound like I'm talking bad about it. But I feel like one of the things that astounds me is that that show doesn't feel live. I feel like one of the accomplishments of it is that it's so slick that things barely ever go wrong, and to me I'm like no I want to run in the opposite direction.