Night Owls Rejoice! Late Night returns on Monday! A joint decision from Jimmy Fallon, Jimmy Kimmel, Seth Myers, and Stephen Colbert has the funnymen returning home to late-night television.
The WGA strike is over, meaning that scribes can get back to what they do best: writing and creating. Just hours after the writer’s strike ended, the hosts wasted no time announcing they would return as early as next week.
Late Night TV Is Back: Jimmy Fallon, Jimmy Kimmel, Seth Myers and Stephen Colbert Return After WGA Strike!
It’s a relief for the night owls who need to hear a fresh monologue and a hearty laugh before drifting off to sleep every weekday night.
As for Bill Mahr, his show Real Time with Bill Mahr will return this Friday, and Last Week with John Oliver will return on Sunday.
Saturday Night Live should return on October 7 or October 14. There is a lot of excitement about the much-anticipated return of late night.
The one caveat: the hosts will have difficulty booking guests. Per SAG-AFTRA rules, they can’t have actors come onto their shows to promote new projects.
However, they can certainly have non-celebrity guests on their shows. They can invite authors, sports players, and even other talk show hosts onto their show.
Strike Force Five
During the strike, Fallon, Kimmel, Myers, Colbert, and Oliver joined forces to form Strike Force Five, a podcast series they developed to help their out-of-work staff on their respective shows.
Of course, it also served as a creative outlet for the comedians, who were all used to joking and riffing five nights a week.
The podcast show was born thanks to Colbert and his idea to get the four significant hosts together to discuss the strike. His thought was that the late-night hosts should play nice with each other and play off of each other, and his idea worked.
What was interesting to listeners was that the five hosts were actually all friends with each other. They had great chemistry; in each episode, they would engage in witty back-and-forth banter.
They would discuss the strike and anything and everything they could not talk about on their late-night shows due to the strike.
Back to Work
On September 13, Colbert, Fallon, and Kimmel announced they would perform together in a live show. The show was called “Strike Force Three” on September 23.
Unfortunately, Kimmel tested positive for COVID-19, so the show was canceled. The hosts were very gracious about it and gave everyone a full refund.
Rescheduling was a possibility at the time, but they are all returning to hosting duties effective immediately.
Other shows, including situation comedies and scripted dramas, will return after the studios and actors strike a deal.
The WGA won big time this time, with improvements in every area in which they made demands. They achieved fair pay, residuals for streaming shows, and provisions regarding using artificial intelligence.
The strike lasted for 148 days, from May 2 to September 27. The current strike was five days shy of the writer’s strike of 1988, which lasted for 153 days.
It just goes to show that if you want respect, it is essential to stick to your guns, and you can come out a winner.
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