latenight

The sketch comedy series has set Oct. 3 for its season premiere, once again airing live across the country at 11:30 p.m. ET/8:30 p.m. PT. NBC says the show will return to its home base in Rockefeller Center’s Studio 8H to kick off the season. The premiere will mark the first in-studio edition of SNL in nearly seven months.

Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Fallon and Jimmy Kimmel may skewer President Donald Trump on their late night shows, but that doesn’t stop his campaign from advertising on them. Trump commercials have appeared more than three times as often as his Democratic rival on all three talk shows since Joe Biden’s campaign began his first general election ad buys on June 19, according to data from Advertising Analytics. The Trump campaign has also spent twice as much as Biden on morning news shows

The Late Show With Stephen Colbert music producer Giovanni Cianci has been fired from the CBS latenight show after being accused of sexual harassment. Cianci’s exit comes after L.A.-based musician Paige Stark posted a screenshot on Instagram in which she detailed a 2010 incident with Cianci.

If NBC and Lorne Michaels have their way, NBC’s Saturday Night Live this fall could move from being produced from cast members’ homes to being made the old-fashioned way — “from New York.” Michaels and his team are making plans to bring the show back to NBC’s Manhattan studios for the venerable late-night program’s 46th season, according to two people familiar with the matter

NBC’s The Tonight Show returned to the studio tonight with Jimmy Fallon kicking off with an emotional message to viewers. Fallon, sitting on a stool in the middle of the studio, rather than behind the traditional desk, and dressed in a sweater and sneakers rather that his usual suit, said that “any type of normalcy feels great” during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The latenight host also says waiting to say something about the impersonation “was a mistake.”

It has become a ritual — a somewhat inexplicable one, as TBS’s Conan O’Brien noted — for these comics to come on the air after acts of terrorism, school shootings or other national traumas to try to make sense of them for their audiences. “Today feels very different,” O’Brien said Monday night. “It doesn’t feel right to talk about my feelings of sadness and anger. That truly feels inadequate and somehow wrong.”

After 14 years at the helm of Jimmy Kimmel Live! and a 25-year career in late-night, Jill Leiderman is stepping down as executive producer of the Jimmy Kimmel-headlined ABC talk show. She will be succeeded in the job by Sharon Hoffman, former executive producer of Entertainment Tonight and CBS Evening News‘ weekend edition.

The pickup comes as the 1:35 a.m. show finishes airing its first season, all of which was filmed in the fourth quarter of 2019. Singh, a YouTuber with some 36 million followers across social media channels, is currently the only woman hosting a late night show on the broadcast networks. She’s also the first bisexual woman of color to front a late night series.

News anchors, talk show hosts and reality stars now moonlight as their own camera operators and lighting technicians. Producers accustomed to reacting to footage in person must now jump through extra communication hoops. But even with the occasional error or sacrifice in camera quality, programs have largely been able to pull it off.

Comedy Central’s latenight franchise will go from a half-hour to 45 minutes each night starting Monday. The expansion is the first in the show’s 24-year history. The change comes as the show has found an increased audience and a number of high-profile bookings during the coronavirus pandemic.

Some latenight hosts have, in recent days, taken their shows to a front porch, back patio or basement. Samantha Bee lit out for the woods behind her home. The host says she is doing what she can to “keep it moving and trying to maintain some continuity” in a surreal moment. Now, with jury-rigged productions that hinge on writers and producers working from home, and a little skill with smartphone cameras and uploading and downloading video, the latenight hosts hope to keep viewers sheltering at home entertained.

With most of the TV industry shutting down production because of the COVID-19 emergency, Conan O’Brien will be making new episodes of his TBS show from his home. Conan will be shot on an iPhone and the comic will interview guests via video chat. “The quality of my work will not go down because technically that’s not possible,” O’Brien said.

Even though all the nation’s wee-hours programs are taking a production hiatus due to America’s coronavirus crisis, Conan O’Brien, Jimmy Fallon, Jimmy Kimmel, Stephen Colbert, David Spade and Trevor Noah are putting out monologues, jokes and sketches that — for the most part — aren’t being seen on TV. Only Colbert’s new segments have been incorporated into CBS’s broadcast of The Late Show, where they are being grafted onto repeat segments from earlier shows.

Reruns of Jimmy Kimmel Live will be pushed back a half-hour in the coming week as ABC seeks to give a bigger platform to Nightline episodes focused on the coronavirus pandemic. ABC said Sunday that Kimmel repeats will shift to the 12:05 a.m. slot starting Tuesday through Friday as Nightline goes all-in on coverage of the latest in the coronavirus pandemic.

ViacomCBS’s Pop TV basic cable network will carry exclusive next-day encores of CBS’s The Late Show With Stephen Colbert, the most watched program in latenight. Starting next Tuesday, Feb, 25, the previous night’s episode of The Late Show will air on Pop at 9 a.m. ET/PT.

After learning of the plan to offer The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon and Late Night with Seth Meyers to streaming customers prior to their broadcast airtimes, NBC affiliates have been in talks with the network and they say the two sides “are working toward a plan that is good for NBCU and provides affiliates the opportunity to meaningfully participate in this business.”

A politics pivot for The Tonight Show doesn’t pay off as the network swaps showrunners and observers say “let Jimmy be Jimmy.”

With the news of a three-year extension for Stephen Colbert, his CBS Late Show with Stephen Colbert continues this season where it left off a year ago — easily leading all broadcast TV latenight shows in total viewers. Through three weeks, Late Show (11:35 p.m.) is averaging 3.3 million Nielsen viewers — outpacing competitors The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon (1.89 million) and ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel Live (1.84 million).

CBS announced Thursday that Colbert has signed a new contract that will keep him as the Late Show host through at least August 2023. His current pact was set to expire next August.

NBC’s The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, CBS’s The Late Show With Stephen Colbert and ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel Live are running behind fall 2019 in the early going.

Katie Hockmeyer has been named executive vice president of late night programming at NBC Entertainment. She will report to NBC Entertainment co-chairmen George Cheeks and Paul Telegdy, where she will work on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, Late Night with Seth Meyers, Saturday Night Live and newly launched latenight addition, A Little Late with Lilly Singh. Hockmeyer will guide programming strategy and be the network liaison for all things latenight at NBC, according to the company.

When NBC’s A Little Late With Lilly Singh debuts tonight, she doesn’t plan to dwell on the late-night staple of politics and is only the second woman of color to host a nightly show on a major network since former VH1 VJ Cynthia Garrett was in charge of NBC’s “Later” for a year — two decades ago.