Nightly talk shows including The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Kimmel Live! and The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, are set to go dark starting on Tuesday after writers agreed to strike.
Late Night with Seth Meyers and The Daily Show, which had correspondent Dulcé Sloan host this week, also will be hit, while such weekly shows as Saturday Night Live, Real Time with Bill Maher and Last Week Tonight with John Oliver will be similarly impacted, though final decisions on those shows are expected to come later in the week.
The Late Show, Jimmy Kimmel Live!, The Tonight Show, Late Night and The Daily Show are all expected to pivot to re-runs.
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Colbert was set to have Priyanka Chopra Jonas and Chita Rivera on Tuesday’s show, with Chris Hayes, Zach Cherry, Michael J. Fox and Shonda Rhimes lined up for later in the week. Fallon was set with Ken Jeong and Emma Chamberlain on Tuesday, with the likes of Jennifer Lopez, JJ Watt, Elle Fanning and Bowen Yang among guests for later in the week. Kimmel was welcoming Dr. Phil, Gina Rodriguez and The Pixies on Tuesday, with Melissa McCarthy, Will Poulter, Ricky Gervais, Anthony Carrigan and Smashing Pumpkins set for later in the week. The Daily Show was set to welcome authors Vashti Harrison and Jason Reynolds and former NFL All-Pro Brandon Marshall.
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Seth Meyers, speaking on Late Night this afternoon, said: “I love writing. I love writing for TV. I love writing this show. I love that we get to come in with an idea for what we want to do every day and we get to work on it all afternoon and then I have the pleasure of coming out here. No one is entitled to a job in show business. But for those people who have a job, they are entitled to fair compensation. They are entitled to make a living. I think it’s a very reasonable demand that’s being set out by the guild. And I support those demands.”
Pete Davidson, whose Peacock comedy series Bupkis starts this week, was set for his SNL return on May 6. We hear that there are a number of possibilities for the Lorne Michaels-created show if there is a strike and that a decision is set to be made closer to showtime.
Speaking on The Tonight Show, Davidson joked that he was taking it personally. “It sucks because it just feeds my weird story I have in my head, like, of course that would happen to me.”
Two of the nightly hosts, Kimmel and Colbert, went through this situation in 2007-08, the latter as the host of The Colbert Report. Meyers was at Saturday Night Live during the last strike, and Oliver was on The Daily Show. Maher’s Real Time was also hit, with its season finale replaced by a rerun.
One of the issues in this year’s negotiation between the writers guild and the studios is also, in fact, surrounding late-night shows on streaming. As it stands, writers who work on “comedy variety programs made for new media,” such as Peacock’s The Amber Ruffin Show, do not qualify for MBA minimums, something the WGA has been fighting for.
Late-night showrunners have told Deadline that they will stay in touch with each other as the strike progresses to give a unified approach to the situation, something that didn’t happen in ’07-’08.
“I have been and will continue to talk to the other shows to see what they’re up to,” one showrunner said. “We’ve got to support the writers — our writers are amazing. That said, the rest of the staff is amazing, and I don’t want to see anybody lose their jobs or lose a paycheck. What’s the happy medium there? Figuring that out, it’s not been easy.”
One SNL star told Deadline: “We have to think about our crew too. I absolutely support the writers, and I want the writers to get what they deserve and need, but I don’t want our crew to be out of work. We can’t make this art without each other.”