After five months off the air, a staple of broadcast television is back. This week marks the return of late night following the conclusion of the WGA strike.
Just like the 2007-2008 writers’ strike, late night shows were the first to be impacted. The day after the WGA announced it was going on strike in May, “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon,” “Late Night with Seth Meyers,” “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert,” “Jimmy Kimmel Live!,” and “Last Week Tonight with John Oliver” all closed up shop. But unlike the strike from over a decade ago, the five biggest hosts in the game decided to work with each other instead of against one another.
Instead of the more icy relationships between late night hosts like David Letterman and Jay Leno during the last strike, Oliver, Colbert, Fallon, Kimmel and Meyers joined forces on a podcast, dubbed “Strike Force Five,” the proceeds of which went to their out-of-work staffs. Not only that, but all five announced their returns at once last Wednesday in a rare joint statement.
TheWrap attended tapings for the return of “Last Week Tonight,” “The Tonight Show,” “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” and “The Late Show.” Each show’s return was rife with excited crowds, nearly giddy hosts and a whole lot of Lauren Boebert jokes. “The Daily Show,” which has yet to tap a new host since Trevor Noah’s exit, is set to return Oct. 16 with another rotating set of guest hosts.
Here are some behind-the-scenes highlights from the return of late night TV:
Oliver and Colbert Hosted Pre-Show Q&As with Audience Members
While security and warm-up comedians typically wrangle the late-night audience prior to the hosts’ grand entrance for their monologue, Oliver and Colbert eased back in with a pre-show Q&A with audience members.
The questions from Oliver’s taping made it clear just how closely his audience has been following him over the summer. When asked if there would be more episodes of “Strike Force Five,” Oliver teased there would be a second half to Fallon’s “absolute atrocity” of a game show. In Episode 5 of the podcast, Fallon tried to host his version of “The Newlywed Game,” but, because his questions were so confusing, the whole ordeal descended into chaos.
The game, which Oliver said made him “genuinely angry,” has been praised by many listeners as one of the best episodes of the podcast. Aside from playfully dunking on Fallon once again, Oliver shared a softer side when asked what the first thing he and his writers did after their return.
Oliver revealed he had been checking in on his writers because his own experience with the 2007-2008 WGA strike taught him how “isolating” strikes could be. He also noted that it both felt like “five years” and “yesterday” since they’d been back.
“It was just nice to see each other,” Oliver said.
Colbert’s Q&A was less focused on the strike, though he was asked about what he did with the downtime. He revealed that he worked on a book he’s writing, fished and hosted Strike Force Five with his other late night hosts. He also said that he missed being with his writing staff and studio audience and is relieved to be back on the air.
He also gave the audience a sneak peek of a projection inside the Ed Sullivan Theater’s dome of his writing staff and himself, which was later used for a commercial break.
Nerves were present and gratitude abounded
As can be expected, nerves flowed throughout the production crew — and sometimes even the hosts — as each late night show taped its return to TV. While there were flubs and mistakes here and there, the overwhelming sentiment was gratitude to be back on set.
At “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” the crowd wrangler admitted he was nervous yet excited, and took a moment to “soak in” being back and hearing audience applause after a five-month break, even noting that he might cry. Warm-up comedian Don Barris was similarly nervous and admitted he was a bit rusty, telling a crowd member who critiqued that he was stalling for time that he didn’t have an audience in his house to practice on.
Before the show started, staff on Kimmel shared warming greetings with one another as Barris greeted EPs with hugs and complimented Lou Wilson on his new hairstyle. Kimmel, however, jumped right back into his gig with no mistakes or flubs.
Similarly, there was a sense of nervous excitement around the first episode of “The Tonight Show” that led to its return swinging from moments of extreme earnestness to outright silliness. One of the best examples of that dichotomy happened when the cameras were off.
During a commercial break that happened halfway through the taping, a visibly moved Fallon walked through the aisle to applause from the audience as he opened up about how “emotional” he was to be back and how “grateful” he is for his show and for his writers returning. Naturally, that somber moment was broken by some banter with The Roots’ drummer and frontman, Questlove.
After Fallon told a story about how he popped a bag of popcorn just to make his office smell more normal during his five months away, Questlove joked that he should have microwaved fish. The riff led to Fallon and Questlove improvising a song on the spot that hinged on the lyric “No fish in the break room.” By the time John Mayer chimed in with a verse about sardines to the tune of Dolly Parton’s “Jolene,” The Roots had fully joined the song.
At Colbert, warm-up comedian Paul Mercurio got the crowd fired up, cracking jokes with various audience members both on stage and in the orchestra section of the Ed Sullivan theater. He was immediately followed by the Late Show Band led by musical guest Louis Cato, who performed for the crowd as they awaited Colbert.
Once Colbert arrived, he greeted every single band member and a few audience members. After taking several questions from the audience, he went straight into the monologue. He managed to make it through with only one flub: getting tongue-tied twice in a row pronouncing J. Robert Oppenheimer. He shrugged it off by joking that his writers purposely gave him a complicated name to read in his first night back.
The strike was addressed front and center
The now-resolved writers’ strike was anything but an elephant in the room, as the late night hosts addressed the work stoppage upfront, and mentioned the “Strike Force Five” podcast as a major activity during the dispute. Kimmel even joked the “Strike Force Five” crew ordered merch for the podcast the day the WGA and AMPTP came to a tentative agreement and started off his guest section by asking Arnold Schwarzenegger — who was the California governor during the 2007-2008 strike — his ideas for expediting the negotiation process.
Fallon wasted no time in addressing the resolution of the WGA strike, using it to pivot to a joke about how he was “more excited than a guy seeing ‘Beetlejuice’ with Lauren Boebert.”
The “Tonight Show” host also wove references to the WGA strike throughout his show. Whenever a joke or stunt wouldn’t go over quite as planned, such as when his “Bono in the sphere” joke led to a Bono lookalike coming onstage in an inflatable hamster ball, Fallon quipped, “I should mention that not all the writers are back.”
Colbert kicked off his show with a cold open that featured him being notified that the strike is over via a dolphin after pretending to be fishing in the ocean on a rowboat.
“How did they solve the AI issue?,” he asked, which was followed with an answer in the form of squeaks.
“Oh, artificial intelligence can be used but it can’t be credited as a writer or be a source of literary material?,” he added. “Makes sense. Why did that take 5 months?”
Similarly, the host said in his opening monologue that the Late Show had been off the air for “154 indictments” and that it felt good to be back because after the first few months of the strike, his wife Evelyn “refused to keep chanting my name.”
“Thanks to the picket lines, my writers got fresh air and sunshine and they do not care for that,” he added. “Now they are back safely in their joke holes doing what they do best – making my prompter word screen full of good and haha!”
But as was expected, no other host TheWrap watched addressed the strike quite like John Oliver. Though all late night hosts expressed their relief about the strike’s conclusion and gratitude to the WGA, only the HBO host opened up about his anger over the fact the strike had to happen at all.
“While I’m happy they eventually got a fair deal and immensely proud of what our union accomplished, but I’m also furious that it took the studios 148 days to achieve a deal that they could have offered on day f—ing one,” Oliver said in a strike-focused segment.
Lots and lots of Trump
The late night hosts admitted Donald Trump’s several indictments and arrests that happened over the course of the strike would have provided fantastic material for them, with Kimmel joking that he almost crossed the picket line when Trump self-reported his weight at 215 pounds.
Kimmel declared that late night was back in full swing by showing a text from a writer’s mom who requested the show not discuss Trump. Given Schwarzenegger’s body building expertise, Kimmel asked him about Trump’s self-reported weight and whether he thought with it was accurate, to which Schwarzenegger estimated Trump weighed about 100 more pounds than he reported.
Oliver, Colbert and Fallon also took swings at Trump’s multiple indictments, with Fallon saying that the former president has “resting mugshot face.” Colbert said Trump’s mugshot looked like “one anger-glazed ham” and admitted he could never quite match it himself. Instead, he showed a picture of his writer Ariel Dumas’ attempt.
He also mocked Trump’s appearance on the campaign trail in which the former president said he would prefer to die by electrocution.
“So in summary, would you rather me be your next president or have a butt where your mouth is and a mouth where your butt is and then have to eat a bug with your mouth butt,” he joked while impersonating Trump. “Trick question, I will take electrocution.”
Speeding through the last 5 months
Instead of letting the past five months of enticing content go to waste, the late night hosts sped through major pop culture and political moments in their own respective styles.
Seth Meyers devoted an entire hour to his “A Closer Look” segment, with writer Sal Gentile turning in an 80-page draft that covered the political topics of the last five months.
Colbert covered topics including the Canadian wildfires, Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg trying to set up a cage match, the White House finding cocaine and admitting aliens are real, Lauren Boebert getting kicked out of “Beetlejuice,” Travis Kelce and Taylor Swift’s romance, the indictments of Trump and Bob Menendez and more.
For Kimmel, the host brought relevance to past events by literally inserted himself and his crew into videos of memorable incidents from over the summer, including Kimmel making an appearance in Trump’s Mar-a-Lago bathroom that is filled with classified documents and Kimmel’s security guard, Guillermo Rodriguez, showing up in the theatre that Lauren Boebert was kicked out of after vaping excessively.
For Fallon, that naturally meant a collaboration with The Roots. As the late night host pretended to play the ukulele and sang about the last five months of news, he periodically paused to let a different clip complete his rhyme.
And for Oliver, that meant speed-running through multiple mini-monologues about the biggest topics over the past several months from King Charles taking the throne and the Boston cop slide to My Pillow’s Mike Lindell yelling about his non-lumpy pillows and the Boston cop slide. But true to form, there was one snippet of news Oliver could not stop referencing: Lauren Boebert getting kicked out of “Beetlejuice.” In the late night host’s quick roundup, Boebert was mentioned three times.
