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 MondayThis 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.
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