It’s only the third week of January, and it’s been Shannon Sharpe’s best year ever.
Suggested Reading
Just three days into the new year, Sharpe dropped his Club Shay Shay interview with Katt Williams. Nearly three hours of candid (and often venomous) name-dropping made the interview most talked-about piece of media this month. Having netted more than 54 million views, the interview has shown few signs of slowdown.
Even responses to the interview have gone viral: Williams’ verbal victims – including Kevin Hart and Cedric the Entertainer – have clapped back. Dave Chappelle had a few things to say about Williams on stage last week. Other podcasters have tried and failed at capturing the magic by having Williams on as a guest to keep the party going.
In an exclusive interview with The Root, Sharpe said he had no idea what was on his hands as his interview with Williams rolled out: He didn’t get his chance to do his normal introduction, before Williams went off on a half-an-hour invective — the most scathing part of the two hour-46-minute interview.
“I figured he’d go one or two minutes and get right to it,” Sharpe said. “He goes for 30 minutes. Now, I gotta make a decision: Do I cut him off and get back to our normally scheduled programming, or do I let him go? I let him go.”
Sharpe said he went into the interview hoping to get 10 or 15 million views; he at least hoped to top his April 2022 interview with Steve Harvey, which had 8 million views at the time, but has since climbed to 10 million views – no doubt the result of Harvey being one of Williams’ primary targets in the interview.
When Sharpe and Williams wrapped, Sharpe looked over at his producer, Christian “C.J.” Dear, to see him shaking his head.
“I said, ‘What did I say something wrong?” Sharpe said. “He said it was gonna break the internet. I said, ‘You really you think so?’ He said ‘they’re gonnaa be taking about this all of 2024. Shannon, you don’t know what you just did.’”
Dear was right: On day one, the interview had 2.5 million views. The next day, it was at 14 million.
“I called C.J. and he said, ‘Shannon I told you,’” Sharpe said. “I asked him ‘How many views you think it’ll do?’ He said ’50.’ I said ‘50 what? 50 million?!?’”
The interview, which Sharpe said he asked Williams to do a year before it happened, has served as a case study in timing, branding and the ever-evolving means in which we consume content – specifically squashing the “traditional wisdom” that people won’t stay tuned in to long video content.
As such, Sharpe has fielded negative criticism from “traditional” journalists over his lax interviewing style
Sharpe has maintained that he’s not trying to compare himself to a traditional interviewer or journalist, but instead considers himself a “conversationalist.”
“What I found out is if you let people feel comfortable with you, they will share things they probably never shared or they haven’t shared in a very long time,” he said. “So your listener is probably gonna be hearing it for the first time.”
“I’m sure there are a lotta people saying ‘you shoulda did this’ or ‘you shoulda did that,’ but they aren’t mad I let [Williams] go…they’re mad it’s at almost 55 million views and it’s not on their platform.”
Sharpe, who is no stranger to viral moments on television, seems genuinely in awe of the feedback he’s still received for the episode.
“People stop me wherever I am…people you wouldn’t think watch ‘Club Shay Shay,’” he said. “I’m talking about older white men, older white women coming up to say, ‘I just wanna thank you.’”
Sharpe said that he’s only found two other videos on YouTube in an interview format with more views than his Williams interview. But he insists he feels zero pressure to try to replicate its success.
“I tell people I’m not gonna be Michael Jackson. This is my ‘Thriller,’” he said. ‘Off the Wall’ was great, ‘Bad’ was great, but what he wanted was another ‘Thriller.’ That’s an anomaly.”
“I’m gonna do the best work I can and do other great interviews, but I’m not gonna make myself sick trying to hunt down another guest or create another topic that that will do what this did. This happened organically…it was the perfect storm.”
Straight From 
Sign up for our free daily newsletter.