Great Job, Internet!: Steve Harvey is the original don of daytime in silly short film

The Memo dramatizes an already dramatic message to the staff of Steve Harvey that leaked back in 2017.

By Mary Kate Carr | October 9, 2025 | 4:55pm

Image courtesy of Lamar+Nik

Aux News Great Job, Internet!

Great Job, Internet!: Steve Harvey is the original don of daytime in silly short film

Years before toxic workplace allegations against Ellen DeGeneres hit the mainstream, there was the memo. In contrast to the largely anonymous second-hand accounts that staffers were expected to avoid looking DeGeneres in the eye, Steve Harvey just came right out and told his employees to leave him alone. “I promise you I will not entertain you in the hallway, and do not attempt to walk with me. If you’re reading this, yes, I mean you,” he said in a memo to staff of his eponymous daytime television show, leaked in 2017. “Everyone, do not take offense to the new way of doing business. It is for the good of my personal life and enjoyment.”

All of this is dramatized in the new short film appropriately titled The Memo. Aaron Coleman plays Steve Harvey puffing on a cigar and clacking away on a typewriter in black-and-white like he’s in Citizen Kane. His staffers, meanwhile, innocently plan a birthday party for him complete with a Steve look-a-like cake—”They even got the glimmer in his eye,” one staffer says fondly. But is that a cheerful glimmer, or a menacing one? If you’re familiar with the memo, you can imagine how the rest goes down. After all, Harvey hates being “ambushed.”