The consequences of the writers’ strike are starting to hit.
Late night shows, including “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon,” “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert,” “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” and “Late Night With Seth Meyers” will begin immediate reruns, according to several people briefed on the plans.
The Comedy Central program “The Daily Show,” which has no permanent host, is also going out, as are the HBO shows hosted by John Oliver and Bill Maher.
Late Monday night, the East and West chapters of the Writers Guild of America, the unions representing thousands of TV and film writers, announced that talks with the major studios had broken off and they were going on strike.
The writers have said their compensation has stagnated while television production has grown rapidly over the past decade. WGA leaders have said the current system is broken, arguing that “the survival of writing as a profession is at stake in these negotiations”.
The Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, which negotiates on behalf of Hollywood companies, said in a statement that its offer included “generous increases in writers’ compensation.”
Writers will gather on picket lines in New York and Los Angeles starting Tuesday afternoon.
Overnight hosts and their top producers have been holding group calls for the past few weeks to coordinate a response in the event of a strike, according to one of those who knew about the plans.
In contrast to the enmity of the so-called late night wars of the 1990s, the hosts have made a concerted effort to show they are on friendly, if still competitive, terms. When James Corden opted out of “The Late Late Show” last week, it was a recorded fragment which featured Mr. Colbert, Mr. Fallon, Mr. Kimmel, and Mr. Meyers all together.
How long they will stay off the air is an open question. During the last strike, in 2007, night shows went dark before gradually coming back on the air after about two months, even with their writers still at the picket lines. (That strike lasted 100 days.)
Mr. Kimmel, ABC’s late night host, paid his staff out of his own pocket, and he said years later that he had to go back on the air because he had almost used up his savings.
David Letterman, who owned his CBS late night show through his production company Worldwide Pants, made a deal with the Writers Guild of America that allowed his writers back on the show.
The other hosts – whose shows were owned by media companies – weren’t so lucky. Hosts like Mr. Kimmel and Conan O’Brien returned without their writers, valiantly trying to put their shows together without their stock monologues. Mr. O’Brien had to resort to time-consuming gimmicks, such as spinning his wedding ring on his desk, putting a timer on it.
“The Tonight Show” host Jay Leno infuriated WGA officials by writing his own monologue jokes. “A Jew, a Christian and a Muslim walk into a bar,” said Mr. Leno during his opening monologue, which lasted almost 10 minutes. “The Jew says to the Muslim, look, I have no idea what they are saying, because there is a writers’ strike.”
