Television

'The Tonight Show', 'Last Week Tonight', And More Late Night Shows Returning Soon, Albeit In Altered Forms

Late Night shows returning
By Ben Pearson/

The coronavirus has significantly impacted the productions of practically every film and TV show in Hollywood, but as the saying goes, "the show must go on." Late night shows are taking that saying to heart: while many productions remain temporarily shuttered, shows like The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon, Jimmy Kimmel Live, Full Frontal with Samantha Bee, Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, and more are finding ways to work through this crisis to keep you entertained during this bizarre, awful stretch of world history.

Late Night Shows Returning Soon (Or Are Back Already)

Let's start off with what you can watch tonight. As you can see from the tweet above, Jimmy Kimmel will be speaking with the presumed Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden on a special quarantined video that will be released to the show's YouTube page, and new episodes of the show itself will be coming back to television starting next week. Deadline says guests will include Samuel L. Jackson, Jennifer Aniston, Jeff Tweedy, Grouplove and more. (Presumably, they'll all be calling in remotely.)

The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon will continue to air hybrid episodes consisting of the host interviewing celebrities remotely (Alec Baldwin tonight and Tina Fey tomorrow night), mixed with throwback segments of previously-aired episodes. The Daily Show with Trevor Noah is already of the curve, so to speak, having been producing remote episodes this week, while Full Frontal with Samantha Bee returned from its hiatus with a remote episode last night.

John Oliver hosted a shortened episode of Last Week Tonight on March 15, but the show will be returning to HBO this Sunday, March 29. Starting Monday, March 30, you'll be able to see new episodes of The Late Show With Stephen Colbert produced remotely by the host and his team, as well as new episodes of Conan filmed on an iPhone. And finally, a new shot-from-home episode of Real Time with Bill Maher will return to HBO on Friday, April 3.

And speaking of late night, let's wrap this up with a shout-out to the king of late night television, Johnny Carson. Starting on April 1, Shout Factory TV (which you can find on ShoutFactoryTV.com, Roku, Amazon Fire, Apple TV, and Android apps) will be making classic episodes of The Johnny Carson Show available to stream for the first time. Weirdly, its official marketing indicates that they'll be showing a "collection of episodes from The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson's historic run", but The Johnny Carson Show actually aired a decade before Johnny began his legendary run on The Tonight Show, so I guess we'll have to wait and see if all 39 episodes of that short-lived series are included in this deal, too.

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