Late Night with Seth Meyers is breaking from its usual schedule next week to produce a rare Friday night episode—the show’s first new Friday episode since 2017.
The episode, airing Friday Oct. 10, is set to feature Rose Byrne, former MLB player Sean Casey & MLB Network analyst Mark DeRosa, and comedian Caleb Hearon. It’s being taped on Wednesday and held for Friday broadcast.
NBC did not immediately explain the scheduling move. Given that the taping falls on the same day as the show’s Taylor Swift Tay/KOVER special, our best guess is that Byrne, Casey, DeRosa, and Hearon had been scheduled for Wednesday’s show prior to Swift’s booking; rather than bumping them entirely, Meyers and team opted to tape the planned episode to air on Friday instead. (Again, that’s just a theory.)
The adjustment comes just before Late Night heads into a scheduled one-week break starting Monday Oct. 13.
While the Friday broadcast itself is unusual, the mechanics behind it are not. Recording multiple shows in a single day has been standard practice for Late Night since September 2024, when the show began taping two episodes most Mondays—one for that evening’s broadcast, and one to air Tuesday night.
Like all of the other major late-night talk shows, Late Night typically airs repeats on Friday nights. Next week will mark only the ninth time in the show’s eleven-year history that the show has produced a new Friday night episode, and the first time since 2015 that it’s aired five new episodes in a single week.
Kimmel’s doing a new show tonight (3), to make up for the show he wasn’t allowed to do Monday. Possibly because they’d paid for four shows in advance, and couldn’t get a refund.,
That Monday was the previous week, right before his return. He did a full five episodes in Brooklyn, probably to get the most use out of both the theater space that had been leased and the set that had been built for the show.
You’re right about my getting Monday wrong. My main point was that it’s unusual for Kimmel to do a Friday night, too. Or any of the major talk shows.
If I ran a talk show, I’d make a point of running a new show when the others are off (holidays excepted), in an effort to pick up some of their audience.
For all my fellow Corrections Jackals, I’m guessing that will mean that next week’s Corrections will still take place on Thursday, since they’re usually done on the last taping day of the week regardless of air date. Monday and Tuesday’s episodes will tape on Monday, Wednesday and Friday’s eps will tape on Wednesday, and Thursday’s episode will round out the week on Thursday, with Corrections taped shortly after the audience is cleared from the studio. This also means that the Tuesday and Friday episodes will probably not have a “Closer Look” segment, since those are based on the most recent news. I look forward to seeing what segments will be in their place.
So until then, thrive in my absence.