The Tonight Show With Jimmy Fallon is cutting its regular Friday show, Variety reports. The show will now move to four original episodes per week, which has become standard in the late-night market, with its Friday episodes now being replaced with a rerun.
The move comes amidst widespread cuts in budgets for network late-night, as the various networks struggle to bring down costs across their portfolios. The Tonight Show was already an outlier for running five new nights of content per week, with Friday nights famously being a dead zone for TV broadcast; it joins its primary rivals, The Late Show With Stephen Colbert and Jimmy Kimmel Live!, in making the move to a Monday-Thursday schedule. Earlier this year, NBC announced it was cutting the house band from Late Night With Seth Meyers in an apparent cost-cutting measure. Network TV has gotten increasingly budget conscious over the last couple of years, slashing casts and episode orders for long-running existing shows in a reported effort to keep costs down.
The Tonight Show, of course, carries added weight in the world of late-night, having been an institution on NBC's schedule since the 1950s. The series has occasionally entertained less orthodox production arrangements—including having Ernie Kovacs split weekly hosting duties with Steve Allen in the 1950s, and Johnny Carson bringing on guest hosts to helm the show multiple times a month from the 1980s onward—but the show itself has always produced five installments every single week. The change this week represents a pretty clear shifting moments for the fates and fortunes of late-night.
For his own part, Fallon will presumably stay busy: He continues to serve as a producer on NBC game shows like That's My Jam and Password, and reportedly has a new holiday album out this year.
