NBC shortens The Tonight Show schedule to four nights a week

The Tonight Show is the late night institution. We did a whole ranking of the show's hosts, which spans eighty years. The power of its brand nearly outshines the medium of late night iself. At least, it did. NBC decided to make a huge scheduling decision, indicating that the show is not as big as it used to be.

Variety reported that NBC is shortening the weekly schedule for The Tonight Show. It has ran five nights a week for the duration of Jimmy Fallon's tenure, but it will be shortened to four nights a week. The outlet did not specify when the schedule change would be made, but it did state that the Friday night slot would be filled with Tonight Show reruns.

The Tonight Show will air rerurns on Friday nights

While the decision is surprising within the vacuum of The Tonight Show, it makes sense when looking at the rest of the late night landscape. All of The Tonight Show's peers, including Late Night with Seth Meyers, The Late Show, and Jimmy Kimmel Live, have adopted the four nights a week model.

It's become the model for the modern day talk show, and it's fitting that The Tonight Show, the biggest of them all, would be the last make the adjustment. Some fans may lay the cause of this change at the feet of Jimmy Fallon.

This has become the standard late night model

The Tonight Show host has had a rocky couple of years, especially when the Rolling Stone expose about his allegedly toxic workplace was published in 2023. That said, Fallon has maintained strong ratings for NBC, so it's more than likely due to the late night climate than anything he did.

Fallon is contracted to host The Tonight Show through 2028, though that contract now consists of fewer episodes. The talk show host also reached the impressive milestone of having hosted 1,000 Tonight Show episodes. He's not going anywhere, even though the Friday time slot is.