It was overstuffed with some awkward introductions and anxiety over first impressions, and because of that sometimes a little boring. ... The premiere is often very fun, especially when Handler’s eye-roll-driven plain-talking sense of humor slips in off the cuff. (At one point she laughs directly into Pitbull’s face.) But it didn’t probe in the way we’ve been sold, and still expect from future episodes.
If Chelsea does anything new, it's the same new thing every show has been forced into, now that stars can skip talk shows and use social media to talk directly to fans.
There was no follow-up. There was no deeper layer. There was just an inexplicable musical guest, on stage talking over a few repeated chords rather than providing a full-out, artistic performance. Why? Well, "Chelsea" is still figuring that out.
Based only on the sample size of two episodes, Chelsea is remarkably unviral. The first episodes have a couple of pretaped sketches that are varying degrees of bad. ... Handler has a lot of celebrity friends, but even her interviews with them were flat.
Perhaps some day Chelsea will inspire a fascinating intellectual discussion about the perils of noisily promising something new on the late-night scene, then delivering the TV equivalent of an ancient burlap grocery sack: a good idea in its infancy, perhaps, but now on the brink of everything imminently falling out of the bottom with a messy splat.
Handler has said she wanted to move away from the jokes she used to make on E!’s Chelsea Lately about banal celebrity culture, and so on Chelsea she makes banal political jokes about politicians.