Jimmy Kimmel Jokes About Late-Night's Demise After Fallon Gets Fridays Off

By Andrew Sanford | Celebrity | September 9, 2024 |

By Andrew Sanford | Celebrity | September 9, 2024 |

There is a thought experiment called Schrödinger’s Cat. You take a box, put a cat in it, add some poison, and close the box. It’s probably best to make the poison look like something the cat will want to eat. Then, you wait as long as a physicist from the 1930s would deem appropriate. The idea is that the cat is alive and dead until you open the box. It exists in a perpetual state of living death. If that sounds similar to the state of late-night comedy shows, it means you’ve been reading my past pieces!

Late-night talk shows have been on a steady decline for well over a decade. The cause of the format’s demise will be debated for years to come. But it’s safe to say that the success of streaming, particularly YouTube, helped kickstart things. Once it became clear that people wouldn’t need to stay up until 11:30 to watch their favorite hosts, the writing was on the wall. Since then, late-night has been facing a slow death, where it is both doomed and still going strong. In the last year, that has changed.

First, CBS decided to replace James Corden’s show with the game show After Midnight. The famed spot once made popular by David Letterman has moved on. Then, NBC announced that Late Night with Seth Meyers would no longer include a house band. Bands are as big a part of late-night comedy as the hosts. But, NBC likely needs to cut costs for what is a flailing medium. Then, it was announced that The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon would no longer put out new shows on Friday nights.

This change feels monumental. While other networks moved away from Friday night shows some time ago, it was comforting that The Tonight Show remained strong. It is, arguably, the show with the most history. Despite people’s feelings toward Fallon (justified or otherwise), there is some prestige to the show he hosts. Now, it has become more of a canary in a coal mine, alerting us to danger ahead (but with hashtags).

Jimmy Kimmel claims that he and his fellow hosts have taken the news in stride. “As a group, we have a text chain of all the late-night hosts and we sent all of our congratulations to Jimmy Fallon for getting Friday off,” Kimmel explained backstage at the Creative Arts Emmys. “There is no future for late-night,” the host continued to laughter. He’s not wrong. Late-night is staring down the end of its current form, but it is still hanging on. But we all know what’s coming, it will just depend on when the executives decide to lift the lid on the box.