When Greg Gutfeld turned up on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon earlier this month, the results looked like a blast from late night’s past. The Fox News host’s Tonight Show debut gave Fallon his best numbers in years, a rare recent instance when a single guest booking delivered a measurable ratings spike.
Seven days before that, Stephen Colbert‘s Late Show also saw a healthy ratings boost when Kamala Harris dropped by for her first televised interview since losing the 2024 election.
For longtime watchers of late night, it felt like the old days, when the biggest battlefield in the late-night wars was the guest couch. If you could land the night’s hottest movie star or chart-topping musician before your rival, you won.
Nobody played that game harder than Helen Kushnick during her short-lived reign as Jay Leno‘s executive producer on The Tonight Show. Kushnick reportedly warned celebrities: appear with Leno exclusively, or risk being frozen out of the number-one show in late night Though Kushnick’s strong-armed tactics ultimately led to her dismissal, they reflected the reality of the time: bookings mattered because viewers tuned in based on who was sitting next to the host.
That world is gone. These days, almost nobody stays up late just to catch an interview. If something interesting happens, it’ll be clipped, posted, and sorted through a social algorithm before the sun comes up. The “celebrity bump” that once fueled nightly ratings has been all but erased.
Pretty much the only the reliable driver of late night ratings spikes today is what airs before the shows. If a network has NFL football or the NBA playoffs leading into late night, the numbers swell. That’s always been true, but with fewer viewers watching linear TV overall, the carryover matters more than ever.
If there is an analog to the “celebrity bump” for modern late night, it’s politics. Colbert’s highest-rated regular episode of 2024 was his pre-election interview with Kamala Harris in October, while NBC aired a live primetime Seth Meyers special the night after the Trump-Harris debate in September that drew more viewers than ABC and CBS combined. For late night today, politics is what generates appointment viewing.
That doesn’t mean celebrity guests don’t matter at all. They matter differently. A big-name movie star may not move Nielsen ratings the way once did, but a clever sketch or viral moment with that guest can rack up millions of views online and keep the show circulating on TikTok, Instagram, or YouTube for days. The couch has shifted from being a nightly ratings weapon to a tool for creating digital content that lives well beyond 11:35 p.m.
Which brings us back to Gutfeld. His appearance worked in part because it was an old-school event—a star of the political media world crossing into a mainstream entertainment space for the first time. That kind of collision still has the power to draw a crowd.
For Fallon, the Gutfeld spike was a gift. For late night as a whole, it was a reminder that star power doesn’t rule anymore—moments do.
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