Late night got real as audiences and hosts communed over the collective isolation and anxiety of the pandemic.
Last summer, “The Tonight Show” supervising producer Sarah Connell was forced to consider the projectile distance of spit from the end of a wind instrument.
It was far from the raucous proceedings that defined the show pre-pandemic. There was no audience and the interviews were still being done on Zoom. By March, when the show returned to 6B, with a limited audience of 50 people, and finally had in-person guests, they were still adhering to social-distancing protocols. The Roots were at arm’s length of one another and the sofa was several feet from Fallon’s desk.
Many pandemic-necessitated process innovations will remain. Zoom interviews will become scarcer, but are unlikely to go away completely. But the genre’s creative pivot will be the enduring legacy of the pandemic. Audiences and hosts communed over the collective isolation and anxiety of the pandemic. Without the bells and whistles — and conveniences — of a network studio, the shows became looser, a bit recherché.
Noah — who traded a suit and “The Daily Show” anchor desk for a hoodie and a claustrophobic corner in his apartment — is currently on hiatus until September. He’s likely to return to the studio in the fall, but has teased that the show will not look the same as it did before the pandemic. “I might never put on the suit or the shoes…,” he said. “This is who I am.”
The scourge of inevitable technical difficulties also became a source for comedy, such as when Taraji P. Henson’s screen froze as she was demonstrating her meditation ball technique for Fallon with a pair of blue balls. “The one thing you realize very quickly is that just because you’re a celebrity does not mean you have good Wi-Fi,” adds Connell.
For “Desus & Mero”, whose partnership was borne of the more intimate podcast medium, the studio audience was always small and so less of a factor in the room. The duo returned June 20 to the Midtown Manhattan studio they moved into a few weeks before the pandemic sent the hosts to their respective homes. On Sept. 4, they’ll do a live show at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas.
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