Late night’s post-Late Show era begins in earnest tonight, with all of the major shows back in originals for the first time since Stephen Colbert‘s May 21 finale—and one of them already bending the week’s usual rules.
The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon and The Daily Show return tonight after a one-week break, while Late Night with Seth Meyers is back after two weeks away. ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel Live!—which kept the lights on last week—is also new this week, though not on its usual Monday-through-Thursday schedule: the show will air a repeat Thursday night and a rare new Friday episode following ABC’s coverage of Game 2 of the NBA Finals.
CBS’s 11:35 p.m. replacement, Comics Unleashed with Byron Allen, is the outlier this week, with repeats airing Monday through Thursday and its only new first-run half-hour slated for Friday.
Kimmel’s Friday episode will tape Thursday, the same day ABC is scheduled to air a repeat in the show’s usual slot. Kimmel has made similar scheduling moves in past years during NBA Finals week, when ABC’s basketball coverage gives the network a larger-than-usual late-night lead-in.
The move stands out more than it once did. Fridays have been largely dark for broadcast late night since The Tonight Show stopped producing regular Friday originals in 2024, shifting to a Monday-through-Thursday production schedule.
There have been exceptions. Fallon aired an atypical new Friday episode May 22 following NBC’s coverage of Game 3 of the NBA Western Conference Finals, after airing a repeat opposite Colbert’s Late Show finale a night earlier. And since occupying the old Late Show slot, Comics Unleashed has aired first-run half-hour episodes in its 11:35 p.m. slot the last two Fridays.
Kimmel’s show has long had a special relationship with the NBA Finals, including its 15-year run of primetime Jimmy Kimmel Live: Game Night specials, which ended after the Finals start time moved up to 8:30 p.m. ET.
Kimmel’s scheduled guests Friday night are Johnny Knoxville and Inde Navarrette.
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