Late-night talk shows have been a tentpole of the American TV landscape for decades. So much work goes into each broadcast, and it’s super interesting to learn what actually goes on off-camera.
Here are 31 interesting behind-the-scenes facts about late-night talk shows:
1.
Despite its name, Jimmy Kimmel Live hasn’t actually been live since 2004. Per Vulture, the show stopped broadcasting live after censors weren’t able to bleep actor Thomas Jane’s “fuck” in time.
2.
Speaking to Variety at Sundance in 2016, Chelsea Handler revealed that Justin Bieber was the worst celebrity she ever interviewed on Chelsea Lately. She said, “He was trying to flirt with me, and it was so uncomfortable. Like, that was his schtick. He’d come on and flirt with you.”
3.
Joan Rivers told The Hollywood Reporter that she was rejected from The Tonight Show seven times before she was finally brought on as a “funny girl writer” (though, unlike many of her male peers, she never got to perform stand-up on the show). She worked alongside Johnny Carson for 18 years, until she was finally offered her own show. She said, “The first person I called was Johnny, and he hung up on me — and never, ever spoke to me again. And then denied that I called him…I think he really felt because I was a woman that I just was his. That I wouldn’t leave him. I know this sounds very warped…He didn’t like that as a woman, I went up against him.”
According to Time, Jay Leno upheld the ban during his tenure “out of respect for Johnny,” but Jimmy Fallon finally broke it when she appeared on his premiere episode and was later on as a guest in 2014.
4.
Per CBS, in 2009, Conan O’Brien replaced Jay Leno as the host of The Tonight Show, but less than a year later, Conan quit following NBC’s announcement that his show would be pushed to later in the night to open up the prime-time spot for the new The Jay Leno Show. Conan got a $32 million settlement, but he was legally prohibited from going on TV, doing interviews, or criticizing NBC for some time afterwards.
Conan told 60 Minutes, “That first day that I woke up and was no longer the host of The Tonight Show, I remember the first thought I had is, ‘I am not shaving.’ And that was my small victory, you know. ‘Okay, so I lost The Tonight Show, but I’ll show them. I’ll stop shaving.” …This year has been, is still incomprehensible to me. The amount of stuff that’s happened in my life in the last year is…it’s gonna take me a long time to process it.”
Since touring was allowed under his contract, he reunited with his former staff and embarked on the Legally Prohibited from Being Funny on Television Tour. He continued, “I went through some stuff. And I got very depressed at times. It was like a marriage breaking up suddenly, violently, quickly. And I was just trying to figure out what happened. When we started putting this tour together, I started to feel better almost immediately. And then there is almost no better antidote to what I’ve just been through than to do this every night.”
5.
Conan received an outpouring of support and sympathy from the public following his The Tonight Show debacle. On a 2024 epsiode of his podcast Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend, he revealed he also got a call from Robin Williams. He said, “I was lucky enough to have some great interactions with Robin Williams before he passed. One of the most memorable examples to me is when I went through my whole Tonight Show debacle. Finally, the show is done, and I don’t know if I have a career anymore. What am I gonna do next? I’m lying on the floor in the living room of my house, and my phone rings, and I pick it up, and it’s Robin Williams. I don’t even know how he got my phone number. ‘How are you holding up, chief?’ And he said, you know, ‘You’re gonna be fine, you’re gonna be great.'”
Both of them were into bike riding, so Robin sent him to a local bike shop to pick up a rental he’d set up for him. Conan continued, “And I said, ‘What?’ And he said, ‘No, no, no, just head on down there. Ride around, you’ll feel better.’ And I went down, and it was a Colnago, which is a very nice bike. And he said, ‘I told him to paint it in all these crazy Irish colors.’ I get down there, and it’s the ugliest — I mean, it was just greens and shamrocks and everything. And he was like, ‘You’re going to like that bike, chief. Don’t worry about it.’ …I thanked [Robin] many, many times. I just couldn’t believe that he was thinking about me.”
6.
John Oliver met his wife, Kate Norley, while he was working as the Senior British Correspondent for The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. According to the Daily Beast, while filming at the 2008 Republican National Convention, he got caught in a restricted area. A group of veterans — including Kate, who’s a US Army combat medic — helped the comedian and his crew hide from security. John and Kate then exchanged emails and became friends. They got married in 2011.
7.
Similarly, Conan O’Brien met his wife, Liza Powel O’Brien, while filming a segment for Late Night. According to Today, in 2000, he shot a sketch at Foote, Cone & Belding, the advertising agency where Liza worked as a senior copywriter. On The Light Podcast, Conan said, “We end up talking in the lobby, and she said everything a woman is not supposed to say, leading off with, ‘Yeah, I saw my gynecologist recently, and my gynecologist said I need to start having children in the next two to three years, if I really want them to be healthy.’ And me, rather than be panicked, I’m thinking, ‘Yes, you should have children. Your children should be my children.'” They were married two years later.
8.
According to The Hollywood Reporter, when NBC was replacing Last Call with Carson Daly with a new show, only two celebs were in serious consideration — Chrissy Tiegen, who ultimately passed, and Lilly Singh, who had a massive YouTube audience. At first, Lilly was unsure about taking the gig, but with the advice and encouragement of Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson and Hasan Minhaj, she went on to host A Little Late.
9.
Per THR, since she wanted to keep doing YouTube and pursue other projects, Lilly Singh negotiated so that she could block-shoot the entire first season. She told Deadline, “We thought we were so smart, we’d bank this evergreen content, we can air it whenever, it will always make sense. And then a literal global pandemic hit, and I was the only show that had a live audience. Literally every day in season one, I would get a million tweets that say, ‘Why do you have a live audience?’ and ‘Why are you not wearing a mask?’. I filmed those episodes back in 2019 when the only people wearing masks were robbers and Jim Carrey.”
10.
According to Vulture, Jimmy Kimmel Live planned to serve its studio audience free alcohol. However, that decision was swiftly reversed after the premiere because a woman vomited.
11.
The Tonight Show, the longest-running late-night show, debuted in 1954. It was originally hosted by Steve Allen. He told Late Night with David Letterman, “The show was an enormous hit during its first year in which, I repeat, it was a local program. It was a smash, and because it was a smash, the NBC people said, ‘We must put this fine program on the network.’ So I said, ‘Fine. Who’s gonna stop you?’ And they said, ‘However, we think we should make a few changes.’ And I said, ‘Changes in a hit?’ And they said, ‘Yes.'”
He continued, “I said, ‘What do you have in mind?’ ‘Cause you should always keep your mind open. Now, the show was 90 minutes of rip-roaring comedy, right? And that’s why they wanted to put it on the network. So they said, ‘Well, we thought a nice weather report.'” He said that, after a few weeks, “they finally got embarrassed and stopped” including the weather report.
12.
Per the Washington Post, after Johnny Carson’s retirement in 1992, an “epic late-night war” began when Jay Leno took over The Tonight Show — a role David Letterman had expected was his. Many people thought the “throne” rightfully belonged to Letterman, but Leno had a “secret deal” with NBC. Per People, in The Story of Late Night, Rick Ludwin, the then–vice president of NBC, said, “Jay Leno had just signed a new deal that guaranteed Jay The Tonight Show, whenever Johnny [Carson] stepped down.”
He also said that dealing with Letterman had become “bothersome and draining” because he was “unnecessarily rude” to NBC staff. This behavior was a contributing factor in his final decision to choose Leno. Letterman also had a reputation for mocking NBC execs on air, and he even once smashed a crystal decanter that the president of NBC had gifted him. However, according to Jason Zinoman, who wrote the biography Letterman: The Last Giant of Late Night, Carson would’ve preferred Letterman to Leno.
After his retirement, Carson visited Late Night and asked Letterman, “How pissed off are you?” Then, The Tonight Show and Late Night began a ratings war. While viewers preferred Leno, critics preferred Letterman. Carson visited Late Night a second time, but he never appeared on The Tonight Show. A year later, Letterman left Late Night and started hosting Late Show with David Letterman on CBS. Leno handed The Tonight Show over to Jimmy Fallon in 2014, and Letterman ended Late Show in 2015.
In 2019, Leno cleared the air on Watch What Happens Live with Andy Cohen. He said, “The idea that we hate each other is — the media makes a big thing about it. I am a huge fan…I’d watch him and go, ‘Oh man, how do you put those sentences together?’ And he’d watch me and go, ‘How can you be so confident on stage?’ So I think we sort of took from each other a little bit.”
13.
When Jimmy Fallon took over The Tonight Show, production returned to 30 Rock in NYC. At the same time, Seth Meyers took over Late Night, meaning both shows would shoot in the same building. According to the New York Times, NBC was concerned about sound bleed because Jimmy’s studio is directly above Seth’s. So, to solve the issue, The Tonight Show films at 5 p.m., and Late Night films at 6:30 p.m.
14.
Before their filmed interview segments, guests often do a pre-interview. On Late Night with Seth Meyers, Jerry Seinfeld explained, “Here’s how a talk show works. It looks like he and I are chatting, right? ‘Oh, I see you went on vacation. I heard you went on vacation.’ Well, where did he hear that? His producer told him, ‘Jerry has a joke about his vacation.’ It’s all totally phony. And then I do the ‘my vacation’ bit about the plumbing in Cabo San Lucas, and, ‘It was a nightmare! Oh my God, yeah. Luckily, the nachos…’ And that’s great, and that’s fine when you’re a new young comic or you’re an actor or actress with nothing.”
15.
Guests are often booked months in advance. Haleigh Raff, who’s in charge of the Late Night with Seth Meyers talent department, told Backstage, “My team meets daily to discuss who is in town, what movies are coming out, what shows are coming on. Right now [mid-February], I’m booking June. We think about an A-list star and go into a second guest that’s a sports star or an actor, and then we go into the third guest that is a standup, author, or musical act.”
However, the host’s preferences are also taken into account. She continued, “You know what your host likes and what works with them. We noticed that Seth really enjoys talking to authors, so we made that part of the show. The SNL talent works well because it’s like family. He has a great time. What are Seth’s favorite shows? The movies he likes? We have to play to the country but also to what he’s interested in because it plays very strong.”
16.
Publicist Steve Honig told Us Weekly that, before one of his clients appears on a talk show, he asks “for a general sense of what questions are going to be asked” so they can have “an opportunity to put thought into their answers.” He also said that whether certain sensitive topics will be discussed is “usually worked out in advance.” He added, “[Producers’] willingness to not ask certain questions is usually based on how much they want the guest to [appear].”
17.
On Watch What Happens Live with Andy Cohen, Jimmy Fallon revealed that his most awkward interview was the one he had with his very first Late Night guest — Robert De Niro. Jimmy said, “In real life, he doesn’t even talk much…He came on, and he was Robert De Niro — just one-word answers and nodding. Like, ‘Yep. Yep. Nope.'”
18.
Broadway Open House, which premiered on NBC in 1950, is widely regarded as the first late-night show. According to Slate, the show was devised as a way for Anchor Hocking, a glassware company, to strengthen its ties with beer breweries and keep them packaging their products in glass. The company wanted to sponsor a nightly show on NBC and offer “local cut-in announcements plugging the beers according to the appropriate distribution.” The resulting show was a “low-budget revue” that aired from 11 p.m. to 12 a.m. every weeknight. Initially, it was supposed to be hosted by prop comic Don “Creesh” Hornsby, but after his untimely death from polio only a week before the show’s premiere, he was replaced by Jerry Lester and Morey Amsterdam on alternating nights (though Morey was replaced by guest hosts a few months later).
19.
The first late-night talk show was actually The Faye Emerson Show, hosted by actor Faye Emerson. It premiered in CBS’s East Coast markets in 1949 then went nationwide the following year. The 15-minute show aired at 10:45 p.m. Maureen Mauk, the author of Politics Is Everybody’s Business: Resurrecting Faye Emerson, America’s Forgotten First Lady of Television, told Deadline that, at the time, Faye’s show was considered radical because she covered politics as well as celebrity guests.
The author said, “Then the very next day might be clowns. They would do a very simple show about the circus and have some founders from the circus come in. She had one with Doris Lilly and Arthur Little, Jr. about how to marry a millionaire, some famous boxers, and then she would bring on the representatives from the women’s Air Force and the women’s Army Brigade. She had a really great mix of a lot of different types of people.”
20.
Unlike many currently airing late-night shows, Everybody’s Live with John Mulaney is actually broadcast live. John told CBS Sunday Morning, ” It’s a fun feeling to know that, hopefully, a lot of people are watching. And it’s live globally with no delay, and you could really damage your career.”
21.
During an onstage interview at the 2012 Montclair Film Festival, Jon Stewart said that Hugh Grant was his worst The Daily Show guest because of his constant complaining. He said, “He’s giving everyone shit the whole time, and he’s a big pain in the ass.” Jon also said that Hugh complained about the clip his publicist chose to promote the movie Did You Hear About the Morgans?, calling it “a terrible clip.” The host felt he should “make a better fucking movie” and said he’d “never” have the actor back on his show.
In response, Hugh tweeted, “Turns out my inner crab got the better of me with TV producer in 09. Unforgivable. J Stewart correct to give me kicking.”
22.
A lot of Jimmy Kimmel’s family members work for Jimmy Kimmel Live. According to NPR, his brother is a director, his cousin is a writer, and his late Uncle Frank was a security guard who occasionally appeared on the show until his death in 2011. Jimmy also hired his childhood best friend and his childhood best friend’s dad as members of the house band.
23.
Per Paste Magazine, after two months off air in support of the 2007-2008 WGA strike, Late Night with Conan O’Brien resumed production without its writers. However, in place of scripted segments, Conan goofed around to fill the airtime. His “unwritten version of late night” included giving a tour of his office, going over to MSNBC to irritate Brian Williams, tossing snacks to the audience, ziplining, and bringing on a physics professor from MIT to help him beat his wedding ring-spinning high score.
He also reportedly paid his staff out of pocket during the show’s hiatus. In a statement, he said, “For the past seven weeks of the writers strike, I have been and continue to be an ardent supporter of the WGA and their cause. My career in television started as a WGA member, and my subsequent career as a performer has only been possible because of the creativity and integrity of my writing staff. Since the strike began, I have stayed off the air in support of the striking writers while, at the same time, doing everything I could to take care of the 80 non-writing staff members on Late Night.”
24.
According to Today, Jon Stewart also continued The Daily Show sans writers during the 2007-2008 strike, but he temporarily changed the show’s name to A Daily Show in solidarity. On air, he continuously referenced the strike. On the second episode, he said, “We miss our writers terribly, and we hope they get back here soon.” Later, he joked, “Here’s the problem: Without the writers, any movie reference that I make is going to be from the ’80s.”
25.
Jimmy Kimmel has a long-running fake feud with Matt Damon. Matt told Parade, “The first time I met Jimmy was when I went to do the prime-time show. For a year he’d been saying, ‘My apologies to Matt Damon; we ran out of time.’ So he came backstage, and I asked him what that was about. And he was like, ‘You want to know what happened? I was doing a particularly lame show; I think my guests were a ventriloquist and a guy in a monkey suit. We were wrapping it up, and there was a smattering of applause in the audience. I was having kind of a low moment, and I just said, “My apologies to Matt Damon; we ran out of time.” My producer was right off-camera, and he doubled over laughing. It was just gallows humor. Nobody else got the joke. But it made us laugh, so we started doing it every night. I have no idea why I said you; it could have been anybody.'”
Matt continued, “At any rate, it turned into this thing. So when he did a prime-time thing I went on, and the joke was that he took so long introducing me that by the time I got on, we were out of time. So we got into a fake fight.”
26.
Jimmy Kimmel Live and The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon film on opposite coasts, but for April Fool’s Day 2022, the hosts managed to swap places and guest host each other’s shows. According to THR, to keep the prank a surprise, they only informed a small number of network execs, producers, and writers. They also sent each other’s staff treats (cookies from Kimmel and an ice cream truck from Fallon) from “the other Jimmy.”
27.
A surprising number of famous actors (specifically The Office cast members!) cut their teeth on late-night shows. John Krasinski interned for Late Night with Conan O’Brien in 2000. Appearing on the show as a guest five years later, he told the host, “I had a blast. My job was actually just to hang out backstage with you just before you went on, and you’d run through some monologue jokes.”
28.
When Mindy Kaling was a sophomore in college, she also interned for Late Night with Conan O’Brien. Appearing as a guest on Conan in 2012, she told the host, “I was the worst intern that’s ever worked in the program… I wanted to work there, not to learn how to photocopy things, but to, like, watch you… So I wouldn’t do my things that I was hired to do. I would just kind of, like, follow you around.”
29.
In 1994, Angela Kinsey interned for bandleader Max Weinberg on Late Night with Conan O’Brien. Reading from the journal she kept during her internship, she said, “There are some serious food perks at Conan. I get a free meal with the writers if I stay late, and I had my first bagel! It’s basically bread that looks like a donut.”
30.
In her 20s, Ellie Kemper interned for Late Night with Conan O’Brien. She also appeared in comedy sketches on the show. While working there, she met her husband, Michael Koman, who was a writer. She told Vanity Fair, “I was an old intern, and he was a young writer. There was a part of me that was like, ‘No time for love! I have to focus on my career!'”
31.
And finally, Saturday Night Live alum Vanessa Bayer was a Late Night with Conan O’Brien intern as well. On Conan, she said, “I had the best time here. It was so great.”
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