NBC Cut the Number of Weekly Episodes of "The Tonight Show"

Turns out cutting the budget for Seth Meyers’s house band was just the beginning. NBC has more changes on the way for its late-night lineup — and if you’ve been used to watching new episodes of The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon five nights a week, we have some bad news for you.

Writing at Variety, Brian Steinberg reports that NBC will take a page from ABC’s and CBS’s playbooks and shift The Tonight Show‘s production to four new episodes per week, down from its current schedule of running a new episode every night. As Steinberg explained, The Tonight Show had previously filmed two episodes on Thursdays so as to have a new episode each weeknight; that practice will, evidently, come to an end.

The Tonight Show will still air episodes five nights a week, but the Friday episode will be a repeat airing of a previous show.

Last year, Steinberg charted out the decline of late-night television advertising revenue between 2018 and 2022. The short version is the money to be made from that space — while still substantial — is significantly less than it once was. It’s part of a larger trend of broadcast television losing viewers — as well as late-night shows no longer having little to compete with in terms of viewers.

Why Jimmy Fallon’s “Tonight Show” Ratings Plummet in Times of Crisis

Fallon hit an all-time low for “Tonight Show” viewership on Monday

This doesn’t necessarily mean the end of variety show-style programming on television; after all, Netflix and John Mulaney’s Everybody’s in L.A. was both buzzed-about and critically acclaimed. And as Variety‘s reporting on the changes coming to The Tonight Show points out, Fallon himself has other projects in the works besides his late-night gig. But the network’s decision is one sign among many that we’re in a time of change for broadcast television, and this is unlikely to be the last big shift on the horizon.