Jimmy Kimmel is going old school this week.
For the eighth time since 2012, Jimmy Kimmel Live! has packed up its Hollywood production and moved it 2,500 miles east for five episodes from the Brooklyn Academy of Music.
Brooklyn has become a tradition for Kimmel. Taking a late-night show on the road, though, is a tradition that goes back nearly as far as late night itself.
Steve Allen gave late-night television many of the conventions it still follows more than 70 years later: the opening monologue, the host behind a desk, comedy bits, celebrity interviews, and a house band.
He also gave it the road show.
Less than four months after the Tonight show’s very first episode, Allen packed up the production and headed south. Beginning Jan. 10, 1955, Allen broadcast a full week of shows from the Sea Isle Hotel in Miami Beach, setting up his desk poolside and trading the confines of a Manhattan television studio for palm trees and Florida nightlife.
It was an ambitious undertaking for a television industry still in its infancy. NBC reportedly sent more than 60 staffers to Florida and had to contend with the technical challenges of producing live television outdoors, far from the show’s New York home.
It was also just the start. Allen would take Tonight to two more locations that year, broadcasting from Baltimore’s B&O Railroad Museum in February and Niagara Falls later in 1955.
When Allen returned to Miami Beach for another week in January 1956, he went considerably bigger. For one memorable stunt, the show enlisted the U.S. Marines to stage an amphibious landing on the beach. The sight of armed Marines coming ashore reportedly alarmed tourists in nearby hotels who had no idea they were watching a bit for a late-night television show.
Allen’s successor, Jack Paar, would take the idea farther afield, bringing Tonight to Havana in 1959, where he interviewed Fidel Castro, and to West Berlin in 1961, shortly after construction of the Berlin Wall began.
Johnny Carson continued the tradition after taking over the show in 1962, frequently bringing the show to NBC’s studios in Burbank. Eventually, the road trip became permanent: The Tonight Show moved from New York to Burbank in 1972.
And as late night grew into one of television’s most lucrative businesses, the road shows only got bigger.
At the height of their rivalry, David Letterman and Jay Leno swapped coasts several times. Letterman memorably brought his Late Show to London for a week in 1995. Conan O’Brien brought Late Night to Toronto for four shows in 2004, setting up shop in the city’s 1,300-seat Elgin Theatre.
The trips weren’t cheap. Relocating a nightly television production meant transporting hosts, writers, producers, bands, crews, and equipment, then effectively rebuilding the show in another city for a week. But during late night’s boom years, the networks had both the money and the incentive to do it.
A road week could turn an ordinary stretch of shows into an event, with bigger crowds, local guests, location pieces, and the novelty of seeing a familiar show somewhere unfamiliar. Bringing the show to a city could also serve as a weeklong promotional campaign in that market, helping boost local interest and viewership. For franchises generating enormous profits over hundreds of episodes a year, spending more on the occasional road trip could be an investment in keeping the larger enterprise healthy.
The rise of political comedy gave the road show another purpose. The Daily Show and The Colbert Report traveled to political conventions, taking their shows directly to the stories they were covering. In 2009, The Colbert Report went much farther, producing four USO-backed shows from Al-Faw Palace at Camp Victory in Baghdad for an audience of American troops.
But in recent years, the late-night road show has begun to disappear along with much of the largesse that had once sustained it.
In 2026, moving a late-night show across the country for a week feels a bit like an anachronism. Fragmented audiences and shrinking ad revenue have turned late night itself from a cash cow into something closer to an endangered species.
That doesn’t mean late-night shows have stopped traveling altogether. But when they do, the economics can look considerably different.
When Jimmy Fallon took The Tonight Show to Detroit for a one-night road show last year, the trip was produced in partnership with Ford, which is headquartered in nearby Dearborn. The automaker was integrated throughout the episode, which was taped at the Detroit Opera House.
Jimmy Kimmel Live! has also long used sponsorships to help subsidize some of its bigger swings, including previous Brooklyn trips and its outdoor concert stage in Hollywood.
But Kimmel has kept going back to Brooklyn, turning what began as a homecoming into a recurring reminder of a version of late-night television that is increasingly difficult to pull off.
There are still plenty of reasons to do it. Kimmel gets a bigger theater, a New York crowd, local guests, surprise appearances, and an entire city to use as his playground. For one week, everything familiar about the show gets a new backdrop and a little more room to play.
Which, 71 years later, isn’t so different from what Steve Allen was after when he planted his desk beside a Miami Beach hotel pool.
The difference is that Allen was inventing the future of late night. Kimmel is showing that one of its oldest traditions can still feel like an event.
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