Jimmy Fallon has spent most of the summer as the sole torchbearer for late-night on broadcast television.
The Tonight Show host has been palling around with Katseye, trying on QVC wigs, starting his own microdrama, interviewing almost everyone involved in The Odyssey and making fun of the President.
He has, essentially, held down the fort of late-night all by himself. Jimmy Kimmel has been on his annual summer holiday and Seth Meyers has been largely off since the middle of June and will return at the end of September. Stephen Colbert, of course, is off writing a Lord of the Rings movie after being unceremoniously axed by CBS.
Meyers was off between June 18 and July 13, returning for two weeks before departing on July 30 and will eventually be back on September 21. This is much longer than recent breaks; last year he was off between July 18 and August 12 as well as the last week of August and in 2024 he was off the last two weeks of August (although admittedly it was an election year, which may have played into things).
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“We got a break coming up. I wish we didn’t. We like being here with you guys, but we’ll be back, we’ll be refreshed,” he said on an episode of his YouTube series Corrections.
“We’re about to take a very long hiatus and when we take very long hiatuses, one of the things that people say is that we’re going to miss so much. Because of that, we, through back channels, reached out to the White House and he agreed he’s not going to be weird. Until we get back,” he joked.
Kimmel has been taking the summers off since 2020, having baked in the idea to his contract with ABC. His show has been guest hosted by the likes of Anthony Anderson, Colman Domingo, Ike Barinholtz and Tiffany Haddish with Rosie O’Donnell filling his seat this week.
This long summer break is also interesting given that it coincides with Emmy voting season. Only John Oliver is on air this week as voting starts tomorrow so voters won’t be swayed by the latest monologue from Kimmel or Stewart as they choose who will win Outstanding Variety Series (although given the current rules, all five nominees – The Daily Show, Jimmy Kimmel Live!, Last Week Tonight, The Late Show and Saturday Night Live – could win an award in September).
Late-night hosts taking time off during the doldrums of summer is not a concern, in itself, but this year’s broadcast line-up feels like a harbinger. Many believe that the storied Tonight Show will be the last late-night franchise on air – Fallon is currently signed up to host through 2028, much like Meyers – but the cancelation of The Late Show, CBS deciding to move away from late-night altogether and the likelihood of Kimmel leaving sooner rather than later makes it feel like a sign of things to come.
The fact that Last Week Tonight’s John Oliver only signed up for a one-year deal, rather than his traditional three years, is also a worry, although that says more about the state of his employer, Warner Bros. Discovery, which is in a complicated corporate takeover situation, than the state of late-night comedy.
Yes, there’s still The Daily Show but the Comedy Central show is itself is on a longer hiatus than last year, essentially taking all of August off, returning on September 8, and Andy Cohen’s Bravo talker Watch What Happens Live is still a thriving spot for reality gossip.
Ad spending on linear late-night shows is clearly continuing to fall; ad intelligence agency Guideline noted that spend went from $439M in 2018 to $221M in 2024.
The narrative is that late-night is being replaced by YouTube shows.
Trevor Noah and Conan O’Brien are prospering with the former Daily Show host having nearly 5M subscribers on the Google-owned platform and the former Tonight Show has nearly 10M subs for his Team Coco channel.
But the new breed of “late-night” shows on YouTube such as Julian Shapiro Barnum’s Outside Tonight and Ben Gleib’s Good Night are struggling to break through. Some of Barnum’s Outside Tonight episodes are receiving hundreds thousand viewers, but the channel has fewer than 8,000 subscribers, while many clips of Good Night get only a few hundred views.
Fallon hasn’t addressed the fact that he’s largely alone on late-night island this summer, but he did recently tell USA Today that he feels some responsibility to carry the genre into the next generation
“The idea of it is that it’s just someone that you can talk to that’s there for you, that you can laugh, and you can know what’s going on in pop culture in the world,” he said. “I think that’s just needed.”
