The Summer of Fallon? NBC Has Its Best Chance in Years to Catch Up

It’s officially summer, time to sail with the wind behind you.

That’s pretty much the scenario set up for Jimmy Fallon, the resident host of NBC’s Tonight Show. With Stephen Colbert gone, the 11:35 network late-night competition is down to just Fallon and one other serious contender: Jimmy Kimmel.

And starting this week, the field is even more wide open because Kimmel is beginning his usual two-month summer break.

For the next eight weeks, Fallon will be facing off against a lineup of guest hosts on Kimmel’s show and the fire-sale occupant of CBS’s former Colbert slot, Comics Unleashed with Byron Allen.

This is what is known as a growth opportunity.

Fallon could use it. For most weeks in recent years, he has trailed both Colbert and Kimmel in conventional ratings measures, though he has always competed well across digital viewing platforms.

But The Tonight Show is still the franchise in late-night television, the ultimate television brand with a staggering 72-year history. Tonight has led the late-night competition for all but a few of those years. And historically, when it didn’t, NBC regarded it as something close to an existential crisis.

Hence the panic in 2009, when Conan O’Brien didn’t get out of the blocks like Usain Bolt.

But NBC has appeared largely undisturbed as Fallon’s Tonight has settled into third place in that traditional ratings contest.

The network did make some financial adjustments a couple years back, notably cutting the weekly output of original Tonight editions to four and dropping Fridays, as the other shows had already done.

But The Tonight Show was not otherwise affected. The show has remained big and brassy, packed with the hottest current names—Taylor Swift, the cast of Stranger Things, BTS—and featuring the best, and surely most expensive, band in late night: The Roots.

No rumors have been planted in the media about the network’s patience wearing thin, unhappy affiliates making noise, or other potential host names being floated by agents and managers. All of those things happened during past periods of drama surrounding Tonight Show hosts.

Of course, times have changed—massively. Viewing habits have splintered; profits in late night have shriveled. Network-level concern about late night is way down, illustrated best by CBS flat-out abandoning its own three-decade-old franchise, The Late Show, and selling off the hour like a landlord with a distressed property.

So maybe NBC is OK with not “winning” the way it used to.

But with a late-night reset in progress and Fallon’s main competitor taking the summer off, the next two months feel like the kind of opening NBC and Fallon would be incentivized to embrace.

The host sent a clear signal that he’s going for it last week when he built an entire show around Knicks mania, bringing on the whole New York home team in the wake of its first NBA championship in half a century. It worked; the show’s numbers got a bounce.

NBC made sure to celebrate that success, as well as Fallon’s gains since CBS’s Colbert defenestration, by sending out upbeat press notices:

Total viewers were up 27 percent from a regular Monday with that Knicks fest, and up 14 percent since May 25—the first week post-Colbert. There were similar boosts among younger viewers.

The message was unambiguous: Check this out. Our Jimmy has started to sweep up some former Colbert viewers.

That was to be expected, though more expected still were the significantly larger gains for the other Jimmy, whose audience has risen 47 percent.

Still, it was good news for Fallon and NBC.

What the disparity in improvement underscores is the tonal separation between Fallon, Colbert and Kimmel. The political urgency the latter two brought to late night has made them news-headline figures as well as entertainers, thanks to the unabashed efforts by the Trump administration to force them off the air. It has also made their audiences more naturally aligned.

Fallon has consciously steered his show toward broader entertainment, which plays to his wide range of skills: singing, impressions and sketch performance. But after an initial run of great success at Tonight, that approach has not resonated as strongly or consistently as the edgier, politically supercharged material on the other shows.

The challenge now facing NBC’s Jimmy is this: What does he make of a potential summer romance with some suddenly available viewers?

He’s going to make Trump jokes. He always has, often accompanied by his Trump impression. What separates him from Kimmel and Colbert is the absence of a harshly critical point of view. Fallon goes for broader jokes about Trump, with no animus attached.

Example: On a recent show, he did a monologue run tying NBA team names to things involving Trump. It included lines like:

“His cankles are so big you can’t tell where his ‘Cavs’ end and his feet begin.”

And: “He got his blood drawn, took a stress test and ‘Piston’ a cup.”

Last week, Fallon did jokes about Trump flying home from Europe and insisting, like a baby, that he needed to see Toy Story 5.

The first ones had some bite; the latter was innocuous. Neither was likely to rile Trump or his cabal much.

The question is: What do the wandering Colbert fans want to see? And can Fallon give it to them?

Fallon proved early in his Tonight tenure that he could win viewers with his energy and personality. Then Trump’s shadow fell over late night, and lightheartedness started to sound discordant.

It ignited negativity toward Fallon. It didn’t help his effort to turn things around when he faced tough criticism last week for hosting UFC fighter Conor McGregor, who was found liable in a civil rape case.

When likability is one of your calling cards, things like that don’t help.

Can Fallon turn the momentum around? If he can, it will have to be on his own terms. Jimmy is who he is. He would not be believed as a Kimmel-style political satirist.

Fallon is only the sixth man (still no woman) to host Tonight, and he is in his 12th year doing it. If there’s a revival story to be written, Jimmy Fallon will have to write it himself.

He has his best chance to start work on it this week.

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