This has been a hard pill to swallow for the fans of late-night entertainment. NBC has decided to cut off on a day of the week for the ‘Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon‘, leaving only four nights for new episodes of it.
This decision is due to economic reasons as nowadays audiences have moved away from watching television in linear fashion and move on to streaming devices where they can watch pretty much whatever they want on demand.
Just like other networks, the idea at least to start this new era of broadcasting late shows, is to have new episodes on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday and air repeats on Fridays.
This is not the only network doing it
We have seen this in the past and now the ‘Tonight Show’ will join CBS’ ‘The Late Show with Stephen Colbert,’ ABC’s ‘Jimmy Kimmel Live,’ NBC’s ‘Late Night with Seth Meyers’ and Comedy Central’s ‘The Daily Show’ are already on a four-originals-per-week schedule.
According to reports, NBC has examined the costs of the late-night programing for them, as they have decided this along with the fact that producing television shows for the 1:30am hour and later is just not worth it anymore
All of the networks have tested the same waters in recent years and all of them have decided that it is time to stay competitive against other mobile and on demand options that the audience has.