A Brief-ish Guide To Paramount+-Relevant Late Night Returns

 

On Monday, September 25, the Writers Guild Of America clinched a tentative agreement with the AMPTP that ended their strike after what would be 148 days by the ratification two days later. Writing assignments resumed, and late night talk was the first thing that returned to production. HBO's Real Time with Bill Maher was first specifically, followed by Last Week Tonight with John Oliver Sunday.

Tonight, all four network shows return. You may recall that CBS's The Late Late Show ended its run on the last full week of shows before the strike happened, but The Late Show with Stephen Colbert returns at its normal time, streaming live on the higher plans and next-day available to all on Paramount+. During the strike, he, Fallon, Kimmel, Meyers, and Oliver did a podcast to keep their staffs paid. Strike Force 5 was able to release nine of its twelve episodes before reaching the strike's end.

“Their mission complete, the founding members of Strike Force 5 will return to their network television shows this Monday 10/2 and one of them to premium cable on 10/1,” the late-night hosts wrote. “Of course, in a greater sense, the Strike Force 5 will never end because Strike Force 5 is not a place, Strike Force 5 is not a people, Strike Force 5 is barely a podcast, nay Strike Force 5 is an idea. An idea five men could talk on top of each other for 12 episodes and maybe somebody would listen. As we say goodbye, we would like to thank all those somebodies, truly, you were the heroes. We were mostly the heroes, but you were in there, too. We want to thank the entire Strike Force 5 team, our wives, our special guests and apologize to Conan O’Brien, who agreed to do the pod but Stephen forgot to send him any possible dates and the strike ended.”

To ease on guest-booking while SAG-AFTRA continues to strike and thus member guests can't promote struck film and television projects, it seems the show is taking just one guest for talk instead of two, along with a musical guest. Monday welcomes Neil deGrasse Tyson, with a performance by the show's bandleader Louis Cato. Tuesday he welcomes Daily Show and Strike Force 5 colleague Oliver, with Boygenius as musical guest. Wednesday sees CNN's Anderson Cooper stop by, and Japanese Breakfast will perform. On Thursday, Bob Odenkirk will be the guest. Musical guest info for Thursday has not been provided, and whether Friday will be new is unknown.

Speaking of The Daily Show, the pencils went down having spent the year employing guest hosts following the departure of Trevor Noah from the Comedy Central series at the end of last year, which airs at 11 PM and streams next day on P+ as well. The network has announced it will return on October 16 and continue to use guest hosts for the rest of 2023. It is expected that a permanent host will be named by the end of the year in time for them to take the desk in early 2024. It is unknown if they will be rescheduling Dulce Sloan's week, or that of fellow correspondents Michael Kosta, Ronny Chieng, and Lewis Black, which would be easy to do. Those they don't already have a hold on already who were known to have been scheduled, former correspondent Michelle Wolf and guests Charlamagne tha God and Desus Nice, haven't been confirmed to have their places kept.

Sources: Deadline, The Wrap, Variety