‘Tonight Show’ Scales Back to Four Episodes a Week, Repeats on Friday
The Tonight Show will scale back to four new episodes a week, with Jimmy Fallon joining his fellow late-night hosts by airing repeats on Fridays.
While Stephen Colbert’s The Late Show, Jimmy Kimmel Live and Late Night With Seth Meyers had all stopped producing new episodes for Friday nights in recent years, The Tonight Show remained the outlier, airing five nights of fresh content (although Fallon’s Friday episodes were often taped on Thursdays).
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However, after 60 years of five-nights-a-week episodes, The Tonight Show will now move to Mondays to Thursdays only, with Friday night reserved for repeat episodes, Variety reports, citing recent cost-cutting moves in the cord-cutting era by NBC that has so far included subtracting Seth Meyers’ house band and eliminating a late-night program in the 1:35am slot entirely.
“It’s the reality of broadcast and a shrinking market — streaming eating into this, and YouTube eating into that,” Meyers’ 8G Band keyboardist and associate musical director Eli Janney said in June. “Streaming is not making money, either. So budgets everywhere have been cut and cut and cut.”
(CBS, similarly, replaced James Corden’s late-night program with the game show After Midnight.)
While The Tonight Show aired new episodes this past week, Friday’s program was a repeat, a trend that began when Fallon’s show aired this summer. However, Fallon and the Tonight Show aren’t going anywhere for the next four years at least, as the host renewed his contract with NBC this summer to remain at the Tonight Show helm until 2028,
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