It’s hard not to find Chris Hardwick on TV these days.
The Nerdist founder and former host of MTV’s “Singled Out” has hosted “The Walking Dead” after show “Talking Dead” on AMC since 2011 — and hosted the “Breaking Bad” companion “Talking Bad” last summer.
He’s a stand-up comic who’s performed on Comedy Central, turned his Nerdist podcast into a show for BBC America and even dabbles in animation — voicing Craig in Nickelodeon’s “Sanjay and Craig.” And last October, he added hosting the Comedy Central late night show “@midnight” to his resume.
After a successful test run, it will officially premiere its first full season Monday night.
So will the 42-year-old be cutting back on his sizeable list of projects now that “Midnight” is going to a 40-week schedule?
“No, never!” Hardwick tells The Post. “I’m really good at time management. It’s the one thing I really focused on how to do after completely screwing up my 20s … I like doing a bunch of different things so I never get stuck on any one thing for too long.”
“Midnight” employs a game-show format, where a panel of three rotating comedians compete for who has the funniest take on the day’s social media to earn points. As its title suggests, the show is truly a product of the social media age — games can focus on anything from Twitter hashtag wars, emoji sentences, Instagram photobombs and Vine videos.
“It’s a world that I live in anyway, and no one else is really doing it,” says Hardwick, who has more than 2 million Twitter followers. “A lot of networks say we have to do something Internetty but they don’t always get it right or speak the language of the Internets. It’s something that I care about and that I’m passionate about.”
“Midnight” aired after “The Colbert Report” and quickly found an audience during its four-week test, averaging 717,000 total viewers — somewhat unexpected for a new late-night show, given the entrenched habits of viewers at that hour.
“I was totally surprised by that because you just don’t know what people are going to watch,” Hardwick says. “Morning television shows and late-night shows are the hardest audiences to acquire because they really are part of human ritual.”
He credits “Midnight’s” appeal to its dramatic difference from the standard monologue/couch guest/musical performance talk shows on TV at that hour.
Now the challenge for Hardwick and his team is to find a way to turn that initial success into a long-running franchise by testing new things and evolving the show — one idea is celebrity theme episodes, like having on the cast of “Girls” or WWE Superstars. “The great thing about doing a daily show is if something doesn’t work one night you just don’t do it the next night and you try a new thing out,” he says.
So what’s the end game for this king of the nerds?
“I don’t want people to get sick of my stupid face,” cracks Hardwick. While he’s content hosting “Midnight” and “Talking Dead,” he says it would probably be hard to keep doing his BBC America show because of scheduling, though he hopes to continue his relationship with the network. He will continue to do stand-up and is focused on growing Nerdist. But with a real love of working, there’s no keeping Hardwick from continuing to build his empire.
“I feel like Comedy Central could protect the rest of the entertainment business from me,” he quips. “They have a real responsibility to try to contain me from hosting everything.”