Late-night TV shows plan their returns after strike ends

NEW YORK >> TV's late-night hosts planned to return to their evening sketches and monologues by next week, reinstating the flow of topical humor silenced for five months by the newly ended Hollywood's writers strike.

Bill Maher led the charge back to work by announcing early Wednesday that his HBO show “Real Time with Bill Maher” would be back on the air Friday. By mid-morning, the hosts of NBC's “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon” and “Late Night with Seth Meyers,” ABC's “Jimmy Kimmel Live,” and “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert” on CBS had announced they'd also return, all by Monday. “Last Week Tonight” with John Oliver was slated to return to the air Sunday.

Comedy Central's “The Daily Show,” which had been using guest hosts when the strike hit, announced Wednesday that it would return Oct. 16 “with an all-star roster of guest hosts for the remainder of 2023.” The plans for “Saturday Night Live” were not immediately clear.

The strikes have had a “catastrophic” impact on late-night television viewing, according to the research firm Samba TV. Without Colbert, Fallon and Kimmel proving fresh, topical material, the broadcast networks have seen late-night viewership declines of between 40% and 50%, Ashwin Navin, Samba TV co-founder. “It remains to be seen how late night will rebound to its previous relevance,” he said.

Fallon, Meyers, Kimmel, Colbert and Oliver spent the latter part of the strike teaming up for a popular podcast called “Strike Force Five” — named after their personal text chain and with all proceeds benefiting their outof-work writers. On Instagram on Wednesday, they announced “their mission complete.”

Scripted shows will take longer to return, with actors still on strike and no negotiations yet on the horizon.

On Tuesday night, board members from the writers union approved a contract agreement with studios, bringing the industry at least partly back from a historic halt in production that stretched nearly five months.

The three-year agreement with studios, producers and streaming services includes significant wins in the main areas writers had fought for — compensation, length of employment, size of staffs and control of artificial intelligence — matching or nearly equaling what they had sought at the outset of the strike.