Amelia Dimoldenberg ends "Chicken Shop Date" after 12 years and a billion views

Amelia Dimoldenberg, the British interviewer who turned fried-chicken shops into an unlikely stage for celebrity culture, said Thursday that she is ending "Chicken Shop Date," the YouTube series she has hosted since she was a teenager, after twelve years. In a statement posted to social media, Dimoldenberg said a "few final dates" are still to come before the show closes for good, though she did not name a last guest or set a closing date.

The exit, by the numbers

The series has run since 2014, publishing well over a hundred episodes on Dimoldenberg's YouTube channel, which has grown to more than 3.3 million subscribers and, according to figures cited by Wikipedia and multiple outlets covering the announcement, has drawn upward of a billion views across its run. Dimoldenberg, now 32, built the show through her own production company, Dimz Inc., keeping ownership of the format rather than selling it to a television network or streamer. Individual episodes have historically been produced on budgets in the low thousands of dollars, a fraction of a traditional talk-show segment, and the show carried no title sponsor, a choice Dimoldenberg has described as central to keeping the format credible with guests. In 2021, the series won the Indie Series prize at the 11th Streamy Awards, the industry's own honors for online video.

From a teenage magazine assignment to a red-carpet fixture

Dimoldenberg has said the idea began when she was 17, writing for a youth publication and interviewing figures from London's grime scene; she set those conversations in chicken shops because, she has said, she thought she might one day meet "the love of my life" in one. The first filmed episode, with the rapper Ghetts, ran in March 2014. The format stayed constant for over a decade: an unglamorous plastic-booth setting, a flirtatious and deliberately awkward tone, and guests ranging from musicians to actors to, on occasion, puppets. A 2021 episode with the rapper Jack Harlow drew wide attention for its role-reversal dynamic, and a 2024 sit-down with Andrew Garfield became one of the show's most-watched installments, helped along by a running, publicly teased rapport between the two dating back to earlier red-carpet encounters. Paul McCartney, Billie Eilish, Cher, Sabrina Carpenter and Idris Elba have all sat across from Dimoldenberg in the same setting, part of a guest list that Deadline noted spans music, film and television.

The show's rise tracked a broader shift in how celebrities promote film and music releases, away from network late-night couches and toward shorter, internet-native interview formats that can be clipped and shared across platforms. "Chicken Shop Date" was an early and unusually durable example of that shift, predating a wave of similar interview-as-content formats that later proliferated across YouTube and podcast platforms as traditional late-night ratings continued to erode. Unlike many of those later entrants, the show never carried a network deal or syndication arrangement; every episode has lived on Dimoldenberg's own channel since the beginning.

The most immediate effect of the closure falls on Dimoldenberg's small production operation and on the publicists and label representatives who had come to treat an appearance on the show as a reliable, low-friction stop on a press tour, distinct from a scripted late-night booking. For a segment of the entertainment publicity industry, the show's end removes a venue that offered faster turnaround and a younger, internet-native audience than most television alternatives. Variety's report on the announcement noted that a "Chicken Shop Date" appearance had become something of a rite of passage for artists breaking into wider public awareness, meaning its closure also removes a recurring marker of that career stage across music and film. Fans who followed the series since adolescence, many of them now in their twenties themselves, are losing a franchise they treated as appointment viewing despite its irregular release schedule.

What she is saying

Dimoldenberg framed the decision as a personal turning point rather than a response to declining audience interest. In the statement announcing the closure, she wrote that the show had shaped her adult life and that she now feels ready to move past it.

"I never thought I'd stop Chicken Shop Date, I thought maybe it would be a part of me forever, and in some way it always will, but I feel like it's now time to move on from this adventure and onto a new one," Dimoldenberg wrote.

She added that she wanted "to celebrate everything Chicken Shop Date has been" with a short run of additional episodes before any final farewell, describing the show elsewhere in the post as "my very own romcom." She has not said whether the format, or the Dimz Inc. brand built around it, will continue in any form under a different host or premise.

What happens next

Dimoldenberg's near-term plans point toward film and television rather than a return to a regular YouTube schedule. In February, Amazon MGM Studios' Orion Pictures label said she would star in and produce an untitled romantic comedy, playing a journalist whose carefully planned life unravels after a celebrity interview turns into a romance — a premise that echoes the show she is now closing. That project, being produced with Gloria Sanchez Productions, the company behind "Booksmart" and "Will & Harper," from a script by Sarah Heyward, remains in development with no cast beyond Dimoldenberg or release date announced. She has also worked as a red-carpet correspondent at the past three Academy Awards ceremonies and took a cameo role in "The Devil Wears Prada 2," signaling that her post-"Chicken Shop Date" work will lean toward mainstream film and television rather than another web series.

No date has been set for the final episode, and Dimoldenberg has not said how many installments remain or who the last guests will be. For now, the show continues to post on its existing schedule while she works through what she has called its closing chapter.