Within minutes of stepping onto the Warner Bros. lot of The Jennifer Hudson show, this THR reporter stumbles upon an impromptu rehearsal in a hallway that’s instantly recognizable from social media. “Do you want to watch the spirit tunnel?” asks a staffer. That would be a resounding yes for witnessing in person the now-not-so-secret weapon behind the success and longevity of the show: Instead of walk-on music, guests are greeted with a sing-on of a surprise tune performed by the staff, who create a Soul Train-style runway, or “spirit tunnel,” for guests to walk through.
The guests for the pretaped episode are Bowen Yang, Lily Gladstone, Kelly Marie Tran and Han Gi-Chan, and the daytime talk show’s staff has remixed the lyrics of Jagged Edge’s “Let’s Get Married” to incorporate the title of their new rom-com, The Wedding Banquet. As this reporter narrowly escapes being caught on camera as not knowing the words — a transgression I’m told will get you called out in comments on TikTok and Instagram, where the recordings routinely go viral — I’m given a glimpse into the spirit tunnel group chat, a hub for lyrics and sometimes audio notes that are dropped throughout the day. With three daily show tapings, the staff has to quickly learn no fewer than six songs for any given shift — three to summon their “mistress of joy,” host Jennifer Hudson, and three for each show’s guests.
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“Nowhere in my 40 years have I seen anything like these young ladies and what they do; they’ve created something that has broken through,” says executive producer Andy Lassner of associate producer Alexis Powell, producer Angie Green and talent booker Paige Matthews, the brain trust behind the musical numbers that undoubtedly have helped The Jennifer Hudson Show reach its 500-episode milestone three seasons after its debut on Sept. 12, 2022.
“In talk shows, you’re now competing with not just daytime talk, you’re competing with the internet and streaming and everything. All you want to do is break through — and they’ve created pop culture,” says Lassner.
The tunnels first began in the show’s second season as a way to hype up Hudson, who initially had her own mini-ritual with the staff before tapings. “I would come in with a boom box like, ‘We need to wake this place up,’ ” recalls Hudson. “Then, all of a sudden, I would come out the door and they’re all lined up singing. I said we need to show this to the world so people can understand the energy that the spirit tunnel holds and the Happy Place,” she says, referring to the set’s unofficial name.
Audiences and celebrity guests quickly caught on; the minute-long clips of stars being cheered onto the set stage have become nearly instant internet sensations, with no sign of viewer fatigue in sight. In the show’s third season, social media followers are up 135 percent from September to April, and impressions have increased 872 percent to 5.18 billion across platforms.
“Angela Bassett, Gwen Stefani, Tia Mowry, all of the ones that initially took off, they were surprised,” says Matthews. “Now talent knows that they’re going to get a spirit tunnel, but before they didn’t know, so coming around the corner, it truly was a shock and a ‘wow’ factor. Now it’s more like they know the tunnel’s coming, but they don’t know what song.”
Matthews is sure not to share too many details with talent teams ahead of tapings. “We don’t want to make it feel like it’s staged; it’s very organic,” she adds. “When we book a guest now, of course it comes up in conversation, but it’s not something that we want to make talent feel like is a job. It’s to show love and give love and to give talent their flowers. That’s the goal all the time.”
So far, The Pitt star Noah Wyle is the only guest who has publicly fessed up to passing on the spirit tunnel — he explained his reasoning with a hilarious story about a childhood bar mitzvah breakdancing trauma during his appearance on the show in March — but there have been others.
“We don’t come for people who don’t want to do the spirit tunnel,” says Matthews, who references the snarky comments Wyle received when he was assumed to be the first guest to say no to the experience. “He by all means was not.”
Adds Lassner: “There’s no pressure. Some people will just walk right through. Some people will dance. Some people will say to their publicist, ‘I’m excited to do the show, but I’m really excited to start with the spirit tunnel.’ “
Country singer Maren Morris, the guest for the show’s 500th episode, which airs May 7, falls in the former camp, choosing to simply walk down the line when staff sang a rendition of her hit single, “The Middle.” “I just know I can’t dance, so I’m not going to attempt it, even for a viral moment,” she says with a laugh. “But I told my team, ‘Don’t tell me what they’re doing. I truly want to be surprised,’ and it was so fun. I loved it.”
On the flip side, there are A-listers who know the exact right moves to do, like former first lady Michelle Obama and actor Aaron Pierre, whose rhythmic stroll, one of the most viewed, has turned the staff’s “That’s Mufasa” chant into a song DJs now play in clubs. For Obama, her spirit tunnel song was Stevie Wonder’s “I Wish,” with a lyric change: “Michelle Obama’s walking, we can’t let her go. Such a classy lady, we just love her so. We’ve got Michelle Obama at the Happy Place.”
Says Hudson: “That’s the most beautiful part, seeing how it’s taken to the whole world. I went to a basketball game, and I saw a herd of people dressed in uniform. I was like, ‘Oh, they’re going to the court. What are they getting ready to do?’ They were forming a spirit tunnel for me. I’ve been at hotels where the staff has come down and I’m like, ‘Oh my God, they’re about to give me a tunnel.’ The fact that we have the world singing, that means we’re spreading joy. And that’s what the theme of this season is about, choosing joy.”
Equally impressive is the way the staff manages to execute what has become a key part of their production amid their other responsibilities, with everyone from producers to wardrobe, security, coordinators and the like joining in the festivities.
“Our job here is to produce a talk show first and foremost,” says Lassner. “Without the talk show, we have nothing to do spirit tunnels for — it’s all toward that. So what’s incredible about it is you’re talking to three young women who have full-time jobs at the show that can’t be paused. They’re all integral parts of this program every day, 170 episodes” per season.
With no dedicated meetings concerning the social media segment that gets mapped out on the fly via email and text as talent is confirmed and random inspiration comes to group members, Powell says of the tunnels, “It’s our favorite part of the day because we all work in different departments and we all come from different backgrounds, so when we get together, it’s our time to really work with everyone and be creative.”
In its 2024-25 season, The Jennifer Hudson Show has achieved the third-highest total unique viewership in the talk genre with 45.5 million viewers, trailing only Live With Kelly & Mark and The Kelly Clarkson Show in total audience. Many guests over the years have made personal connections with Hudson during her career — personal highlights for the entertainer who in 2022 achieved EGOT status — including Magic Johnson and the cast of the 2023 musical drama The Color Purple. With a fourth-season renewal announced in February, producers are taking an if-ain’t- broke-don’t-fix-it approach to the next go-round, feeling like they’ve found their stride after a few bouts of segment trial-and-error in the early seasons.
“We were here from the beginning, and we didn’t know what we had, but we knew she was magic,” says Lassner of Hudson. “We had come off of doing The Ellen DeGeneres Show for 19 years in the same studio, and all of a sudden, it’s like now we’re doing The Jennifer Hudson Show, and it was all so fast. But we quickly realized, ‘Oh, this woman is the real deal. She’s not just about joy. She wants everyone to feel it.’ ” Hudson concurs: “I want this to be a safe place and space for us all to come. It’s a place of joy, it’s a place of community where everyone, no matter what’s going on in the world, can come here and get a piece of peace.”
And what about dubbing the show the Happy Place? “It’s a real place. I hear it from the guests, I hear it from the audience, I hear it from strangers who are like, ‘Oh my God, I want to experience it,’ ” says Hudson. “It’s a place where everybody is welcome, and it’s all love. All I want to do is celebrate you, love on you and let you know that you’re at home.”
This story appeared in the May 7 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.
