Late-Night Stars Hold Out Hope As Writers Strike Looms
22.04.2023 - 00:11
/ deadline.com
The late-night television sector will be the first to get hit if there’s a writers’ strike and its stars are bracing themselves for impact.
The nightly talkshows – The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Kimmel Live!, The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, Late Night with Seth Meyers and The Daily Show as well as Saturday Night Live – will be among the first high-profile shows dealing with the fallout of a strike if the WGA and the AMPTP can’t reach an agreement by May 1.
Kimmel and Colbert, who previously hosted Comedy Central’s The Colbert Report, will remember first-hand what happened last time there was a writers’ strike in 2007/08, while Meyers was on Saturday Night Live during that period.
While Jay Leno, who hosted The Tonight Show, Conan O’Brien, who led Late Night, The Late Show’s David Letterman, The Late Late Show’s Craig Ferguson and Carson Daly, who hosted NBC’s Last Call, are no longer in position, and The Daily Show’s Jon Stewart has a different kind of show, there are many people still working on these shows that also remember the chaos that ensued towards the end of 2007.
James Corden will be thanking his lucky stars that his last night on The Late Late Show is April 27 and not a week later.
“As someone who identifies as a writer, there would be no trying to get around [a strike]. I wouldn’t be looking for loopholes to figure out how to write,” one late-night host told Deadline.
This comment won’t seem strange to those who remember that David Letterman and Craig Ferguson were able to bring their writers back to their shows before Leno, O’Brien, Kimmel, Stewart and Colbert.
Leno, Letterman, Kimmel and O’Brien all returned to the air on January 2, 2008, after nearly two months off air. They were