One night after setting a 30-year late-start record, The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon nearly broke it again.
Tuesday night’s broadcast began at 2:00 a.m. ET—just eight minutes shy of Monday’s record-setting 2:08 a.m. start—after NBC’s NBA Playoffs coverage once again ran long.
As LateNighter has reported, Monday’s delay marked the latest start for The Tonight Show since at least 1991, after a Timberwolves–Nuggets playoff game pushed the show well past its scheduled 1:30 a.m. ET start time. Tuesday followed a similar pattern, with the night’s second game—Game 2 of a first-round series between the Los Angeles Lakers and Houston Rockets—running 30 minutes past its scheduled end time.
Late Night with Seth Meyers followed The Tonight Show at 3:02 a.m. ET. Both shows aired new episodes.
Sports and news delays have historically been a point of contention for late-night shows, memorably leading to a high-profile clash in 1992 when a speech by Ronald Reagan at the Republican National Convention in Houston ran long. Faced with the delay, Jay Leno’s then-manager and executive producer, Helen Kushnick, ordered The Tonight Show‘s waiting studio audience to leave, forcing NBC to air a rerun instead of a scheduled live broadcast.
In the modern era, NBC has tended to air original late-night episodes regardless of how far sports coverage pushes the schedule into the early morning. That approach stands in contrast to CBS and the top-rated Late Show with Stephen Colbert, which in recent years has aired repeats when sports coverage causes planned delays—as it did Thursday, April 9, when CBS aired highlights from the Masters Tournament, pushing The Late Show to a 15-minute delay.
With no further NBA Playoffs doubleheaders scheduled this week, NBC’s late-night lineup is set to return to its usual schedule tonight.
well nice here about this I will say es on rugler no delays