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Late Night Shows Go Dark in First Fallout From Writers’ Strike

The aftermath of the writers’ strike is beginning to roll in.

Late-night shows such as “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon,” “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert,” and “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” “Late Night With Seth Meyers” will begin reruns soon, according to multiple people briefed on the plan.

Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show” will be reruns, as will the HBO show hosted by John Oliver and Bill Maher.

Late Monday night, the Eastern and Western chapters of the Writers Guild of America, labor unions representing thousands of TV and film writers, announced they would go on strike after talks with major studios broke down. .

Despite the rapid growth of television production over the past decade, screenwriters say their pay has stagnated. WGA leaders say the current system is broken and that “this negotiation puts the survival of writing as a profession at stake.”

The Alliance of Film and Television Producers, which is negotiating on behalf of Hollywood companies, said in a statement that its proposal included “a generous increase in compensation for writers.”

Writers will meet at picket lines in New York and Los Angeles starting Tuesday afternoon.

Late night hosts and their top producers have been having group calls in recent weeks to coordinate what to do in the event of a strike, according to one of the people briefed on the plan.

Unlike the so-called Midnight War hostilities of the 1990s, the host nations have made concerted efforts to demonstrate friendly, if still competitive, relations. When James Corden signed off of ‘The Late Late Show’ last week, recorded segment Mr. Colbert, Mr. Fallon, Mr. Kimmel and Mr. Myers all came together.

How long they have been off the air is an open question. The late-night show remained dark during its final strike in 2007, but was gradually put back on the air about two months later, even though the writers were still picketing. (The strike lasted him 100 days.)

Mr. Kimmel, ABC’s late-night host, paid his staff’s salaries out of his own pocket. his savings.

David Letterman, who owned the CBS late-night show through production company Worldwide Pants, struck a deal with the Writers Guild of America to allow the writers to return to the show.

Other hosts whose shows were owned by media companies had no such luck. Mr. O’Brien had to resort to gimmicks to pass the time, such as spinning a wedding ring on his desk. Set a timer in the process.

“The Tonight Show” host Jay Leno infuriated WGA officials by writing his own monologue joke. “Jews, Christians, Muslims walked into the bar,” Leno said in his opening monologue, which lasted nearly 10 minutes. “Jews are telling Muslims that there is a writer’s strike and I don’t know what they are talking about.”

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