Jimmy Fallon and Seth Meyers on Monday evening start several weeks of late-night broadcasts aimed at reaching summer audiences, one of TV’s smallest pools of viewership. And yet, the two hosts have a giant opportunity ahead of them.
Fallon will launch NBC’s “Tonight Show” on Monday without any regular competitors — a throwback to the days when Johnny Carson hosted the show before some media companies enlisted Arsenio Hall or Joan Rivers to try and knock him off his wee-hours throne. Jimmy Kimmel is on summer vacation, and his ABC program will rely on guest hosts for the next several weeks. Stephen Colbert is in exile, and CBS is no longer competing in late night, though it has leased two hours in the time slot to entrepreneur Byron Allen. Meyers, likewise, has no direct rival for his “Late Night” at 12:30 a.m.
Little wonder, then, that NBC has in recent weeks unveiled great bookings for both shows. Before Fallon and Meyers took an early-summer break, their programs both featured members of the New York Knicks after the team powered through to victory in the NBA Finals. Starting Monday, both late-night showcases will benefit from guests who star in “The Odyssey,” the Christopher Nolan film that opens later this week (and is distributed by the company that employs Fallon and Meyers, NBCUniversal).
Whether these efforts bolster NBC’s position after the late local news remains to be seen. Late-night TV, after all, has been suffering, with audiences moving away from watching TV programs at specific times of day. Ad spending on late-night television shows fell to $209 million in 2025, according to data from Guideline, a tracker of ad spending, down from $519.7 million in 2017 — a drop-off of nearly 60%.
And Kimmel’s show has taken a greater share of audience since CBS canceled Colbert’s show in May. “We could see about 15% of Colbert’s ad dollars go toward Fallon,” says Sean Wright, chief insights and analytics officer at Guideline, but even that is not guaranteed. “It used to be that late night was its own budget item, and you would just chase ratings to reallocate spend. But post-COVID, once a late-night dollar is lost, it goes off broadcast. It is more likely that the money gets reinvested into YouTube, Facebook, Instagram and TikTok.”
NBC may have bigger goals than just winning the summer. Both Fallon and Meyers are currently tied to contracts that end in 2028, while Kimmel recently signed a surprising one-year deal with Disney that will keep him on his after-hours roost though 2027. What’s more, NBC has grown fond in recent years of celebrating big anniversaries for some of its most durable properties, including “Saturday Night Live.” “Tonight” will turn 75 in 2029 — and if NBC wants to celebrate the occasion with the current host in tow, it will presumably have to extend Fallon’s employment pact.
NBCUniversal declined to make executives or producers available for comment.
But NBC has proven adept at finding new ways to pull advertisers into late-night’s orbit. NBC wooed Allstate, T-Mobile and several other big-spending advertisers to bolster the recently completed 50th season of “Saturday Night Live.” The network has put Fallon to work in areas outside “Tonight.” He produces and hosts a portfolio of game shows, including the soon-to-launch contests series based on the popular New York Times game Wordle, which will be led by Savannah Guthrie. Last season, NBC put Fallon at the center of a program called “On Brand” that had him trying to help market popular products. Meanwhile, several of Meyers’ signature sketches, including “A Closer Look” and the online-only “Corrections,” are part of the social-media sphere.
Perhaps NBC is trying to find new ways to monetize late night because a host of others are, too. Fox Sports has during its World Cup telecasts nodded to the idea of a bespoke late-night program, with a “pop up” show led by former CBS host James Corden. In one segment, Corden challenged Norwegian soccer player Erling Haaland to a portrait paint-off.
Meanwhile, Julian Shapiro-Barnum, who has hosted a social-media series in the past, has launched “Outside Tonight,” an online-only emulation of a linear late-night program made for watching on YouTube. In one six-and-a-half minute segment, the host had “an honest and uncomfortable conversation” with three people who have dated and rejected him. None of his clips or full episodes appear to have generated more than 90,000 views.
Such experiments bear scrutiny, says Stephanie Dolan, a principal at Deloitte who oversees the consultant’s entertainment sector advisory practice. “Late night is not disappearing. What’s really happening here is the legacy network version of the late-night show is just being replaced,” she says. “The audience, the economics, and the cultural conversation have moved from an appointment viewing at 11:35 p.m. to the always-on multiplatform content ecosystem.”
Key is making late-night humor and commentary available at all times of the day. “Younger consumers aren’t necessarily rejecting the fact that it’s great to watch somebody who’s funny or hear the commentary of the talking heads or listen to interviews. All of those are still very interesting and culturally relevant forms of content,” says Dolan. But people will increasingly turn to programming that “feels more personable, personal. portable and authentic.”
NBC is mindful of these new rules. And intriguingly, the company is applying them to older late-night content. NBC and David Letterman’s production company, Worldwide Pants, recently struck a deal that will make clips from 6,000 episodes of CBS’ “The Late Show with David Letterman” and NBC’s “Late Night with David Letterman” produced between 1982 and 2015 available via YouTube, Facebook and other digital venues. The companies are working with Merzigo, a tech company that operates digital distribution channels and that has also teamed up with Hearst, Banijay, ITV and Fremantle, among others.
One thing many of these digital upstarts lack, of course, is a regular roost on broadcast TV. Jimmy Fallon and Seth Meyers don’t. The future of reaching fans of late-night humor may be digital, but there appears to be business to be done on television as well. Succeeding on TV also gives the hosts more help when they inevitably go online. Late-night TV may have less support in linear, but it’s still valuable. As this week demonstrates, Fallon and Meyers aren’t going to be shy about grabbing whatever they can.