First on LateNighter: Tuesday night’s NBA Tip-Off doubleheader on NBC wreaked havoc on the network’s late-night lineup, pushing The Tonight Show to its latest start time since Jimmy Fallon took over the desk in 2014.
The night’s second game between the Golden State Warriors and the Los Angeles Lakers was already scheduled to push Fallon well past his usual slot, with The Tonight Show slated for 1:05 a.m. ET instead of its standard 11:35 p.m. start. But when NBC’s coverage of the game ran more than 20 minutes late, Fallon didn’t hit the air until 1:29 a.m. (Late Night with Seth Meyers, in turn, followed at 2:31 a.m.)
It marked the second time in recent memory that NBC Sports coverage has pushed the network’s late-night block deep into the early morning. In early September, a third-quarter weather delay during the NFL Kickoff game set Fallon back to 1:12 a.m. ET—more than an hour later than planned.
Last month’s delay set a new record for Fallon, but Tuesday night broke it.
In fact, only once in the past thirty years has The Tonight Show aired later—and that was by just one minute. On September 5, 2013, Jay Leno’s Tonight Show was delayed until 1:30 a.m. after an NFL Kickoff game between the Baltimore Ravens and Denver Broncos was interrupted by lightning.
It remains to be seen how many viewers stayed up past 1 a.m. to watch The Tonight Show Tuesday night, but even at that hour, major sports lead-ins remain one of the few dependable ways to deliver a ratings boost.
The episode’s performance will be closely watched, both as a measure of Fallon’s ability to capitalize on an NBA lead-in and as a test of how late viewers are willing to stay up for network late night in 2025. Tuesday night’s Nielsen numbers are expected mid-day Thursday.
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The less people see of Fuckface Fallon embarrassing himself, the better for everyone!
Should be like that every night
“It remains to be seen how many viewers stayed up past 1 a.m. to watch The Tonight Show Tuesday night, but even at that hour, major sports lead-ins remain one of the few dependable ways to deliver a ratings boost.”
That would be more believable if there wasn’t 35 minutes of local news standing in the way. I’m guessing the majority of live viewers of both Fallon and Meyers last night were in the Mountain, Pacific, Alaska, and Hawaii time zones.
Serious question: What would NBC do if this was to happen with overrun from college football on a Saturday night when a new episode of SNL is scheduled? Do they start at 11:30 for the studio audience?
it happened on SNL this past week, albeit just by 12 mins:
https://latenighter.com/news/programming-alert-snl-to-begin-12-minutes-late/
in season 47, SNL was delayed by over an hour.
in both cases they waited and went live. in the 80s there was one episode (Roseanna Arquette hosted) that was so delayed by a world series game that they taped it and aired it couple weeks later.
my local NBC station actually left Set Meyers in the middle of his show for an infomercial