A Sexy Good Hang

This post is not about Noah Wyle being named the 2026 PEOPLE Magazine Sexiest Man Alive which, as already noted in today’s site open, is a pretty safe, predictable choice that frankly is a bit of a letdown after the way they nailed it last year with Jonathan Bailey.

For my full piece on Noah and who it should have been this year, I’ve written a new essay about it at The Squawk. What we’re discussing here, then, is not the SMA but the way it was rolled out, and how it was announced – because it is another example of the way media is shifting… or, rather, how it has shifted.

Over the last decade-plus, the Sexiest Man Alive has been revealed on a network late night talk show – either Jimmy Kimmel Live!, or The Tonight Show, or the now-defunct The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. This year, however, for the first time ever, PEOPLE’s Sexiest Man Alive is making his debut on a podcast: Amy Poehler’s Good Hang.

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Obviously Good Hang isn’t just any pod. Amy was a celebrity going into Good Hang and she’s probably become an even bigger celebrity now that the show is going on two years and it’s been one after another of her celebrity friends and other stars who are coming to a safe place for a good hang. Which is what late night network talk shows used to be until people stopped watching linear television.

PEOPLE’s decision to unveil the Sexiest Man Alive is a sign of the times but I wouldn’t necessarily say it’s innovation. PEOPLE is a legacy brand with a Gen X and Millennial audience. Podcasts like Good Hang are the new legacy media, now regular stops on a press tour when a film or a series or a book or a magazine cover are meant to be promoted – not unlike the chicken pods and SmartLess. So is it really that the nucleus of the status quo has been displaced, or more that the status quo just… expanded, a power reach to take over more territory.

This is an idea Sarah’s been unpacking here at LaineyGossip for a while now. Famous people doing podcasts squeezed out non-famous people doing podcasts and completely corporatised the platform. YouTube too. There have been more and more famous people doing newsletters this year. More and more famous people are doing newsletters and the newsletter space will inevitably change too. Maybe in five years, the Sexiest Man Alive will be announced on Substack. That might be a step too far because, well, at least right now, newsletters are supposed to be read. And in the future, the definition of “reading” might be scrolling through a series of grammatically incorrect memes.