Though it likely went unnoticed by all but the most eagle-eyed of viewers, The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon changed the way it opens its show this week.
Both Monday and Tuesday night’s episodes of the NBC late-night show were preceded by a short tease with clips from the upcoming episode before jumping into the show’s usual opening.
Although common among daytime TV talk shows—here’s a recent example from The Kelly Clarkson Show—Fallon’s Tonight Show is the first of the major late-night talk shows to introduce a pre-show tease. (The show employs similar teases when Fallon throws to commercial breaks later in the show.)
Why a pre-show tease and why now?
By definition, a tease is designed to keep viewers tuned in. With a show’s end being the most natural point for viewers to tune out, recent years have seen networks experiment with various ways to keep viewers watching, including elminating commercial breaks between shows, and shortening (or removing) opening credit sequences.
Given The Tonight Show‘s third-place finish in last year’s ratings race among the 11:35pm late-night talk shows, it makes sense that producers would tinker with its format—especially since clips from the show regularly outperform its competitors on social media. The thinking would seem to be: we know people like Fallon’s bits online, maybe if we give them a taste of them at the top of the show they’ll be more likely to stay tuned.
At this point, Fallon’s pre-show tease appears to be experimental. Monday’s version was 10 seconds long, Tuesday’s was 30 seconds, and Wednesday’s show had no opening tease at all.
Time will tell where this all lands, but with the show’s minute-by-minute ratings likely being monitored to see what (if anything) makes an impact, we wouldn’t be surprised to see more experiments in the weeks and months ahead.
Fallon needs more than an opening tease. CBS beats NBC in primetime ratings, so they need to show those clips as commercials during the day
Those specific clips would lead me to change the channel. This man is 50 and it feels like he’s hosting a show for Nickelodeon. His schtick is stale, timeless to the point where there’s no urgency to tune in, and his interviews are downright awful.
Not a fan of the change. They also stopped some good bits. Tonight Show Hashtag