Well, it looks like the winds of change are blowing at NBC, and they’re not exactly a gentle breeze. In a move that sends a ripple through the foundation of late-night TV as we know it, The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon is being scaled back from five nights a week to four. That’s right, folks—Friday nights will now feature reruns, meaning we get one less dose of Fallon’s slapstick antics. Try not to shed too many tears.
This announcement comes hot on the heels of NBC axing the house band from Late Night with Seth Meyers—another casualty of budget cuts. Apparently, the struggle is real over at the liberal bastion of late-night television. But honestly, who’s surprised? Late-night TV has been circling the drain for years, and now it’s finally getting squeezed by the very forces it helped champion: streaming and YouTube.
Late-night viewership has been steadily plummeting, and networks are scrambling to save some cash. Meyers’ associate musical director, Eli Janney, likened the budget-slashing to a “Spotify moment,” bemoaning the fact that nobody wants to pay for content anymore. Hey Eli, maybe the problem isn’t that people don’t want to pay—it’s that they don’t want to watch. When your show is more focused on political preaching than actual comedy, it’s no wonder the ratings are tanking.
“Sadly, it’s the reality of broadcast and a shrinking market – streaming eating into this, and YouTube eating into that,” Janney said in June of the budget cuts.
“Streaming is not making money, either. So budgets everywhere have been cut and cut and cut. I liken it to a Spotify moment in music, where suddenly it’s like, nobody wants to pay for music. Music gets devalued.”
NBC Pulls Back ‘Tonight Show’ to Four Nights Per Week https://t.co/Z26FICb4mM
— Variety (@Variety) September 6, 2024
Yet, somehow Fallon’s show has been renewed through 2028. Yep, despite cutting down his workload, Fallon’s sticking around, likely because NBC can’t afford to rock the boat too much. After all, who else are they going to get to play charades with celebrities and giggle uncontrollably at his own jokes? Fallon, who took over from Jay Leno in 2014, has since padded his résumé with NBC game shows like Password and That’s My Jam. You know, because if you can’t win over viewers with humor, why not give away some cash?
The reality is that late-night comedy has devolved into a parade of predictable, politically one-sided commentary, where comedy seems to take a backseat to virtue signaling. With Fallon, Meyers, Kimmel, Colbert, and whoever else still clinging to the format, they’ve all reduced themselves to parroting the same tired talking points. Now, with the shrinking audience and budget cuts forcing their hand, it seems NBC is finally waking up to the fact that fewer and fewer people are tuning in.
NBC Pulls Back ‘Tonight Show’ to Four Nights Per Week https://t.co/Z26FICb4mM
— Variety (@Variety) September 6, 2024
But hey, don’t worry. You can still catch new episodes of The Tonight Show—just not on Fridays anymore. It’s almost poetic, isn’t it? The kings of liberal late-night are slowly being dethroned, not by rival networks, but by their own audience’s dwindling interest.
