Photo: The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon/Youtube
At the top of the year, let’s look at the network shows’ first guests of 2026. It says something about who the hosts want to be and the aura they want to project. Seth Meyers featured Kristen Stewart as his first guest of the year, highlighting his cool factor and appeal in the lesbian community. Jimmy Fallon had Sadie Sink, cementing The Tonight Show’s place as the center of what monoculture is left to be had. Stephen Colbert welcomed Ethan Hawke, someone he’s had on eight previous times. As The Late Show constructs its swan song, Colbert is thinking longitudinally. And also theatrically; The Late Show is where you go when you want to hear someone talk about their time treading the boards, and Hawke is going to give you that. Finally, Jimmy Kimmel was joined by Ben Affleck as his first guest, crowning Kimmel as Thee Hollywood Insider — with running gags between him and Affleck/Matt Damon, and with similar experiences to Affleck at the Critics Choice Awards.
It’s interesting that Kimmel has become the established act within late night, because he still very much sees himself as the everyman. He may have been employing Bryan Cranston’s daughter as a PA back in the day, and be cutting it up with Affleck now, but he’s still the guy who can best perform outrage at the yuckiness our government has become. Kimmel’s Thursday-night monologue about Renee Nicole Good did that thing Kimmel does best of all late-night hosts: He was affected by the news. Nobody can tear up or provide catharsis for a similarly choked-up audience like Kimmel. This is the function of late night in 2026: to help you feel like you’re not going crazy. Here’s who else helped us stay sane this first week of 2026 in late-night TV.
Kimmel reasserted his place as the most pugnacious of the late-night hosts during his first week back. On Monday, he took the cognitive quiz Trump has been boasting about acing lo these many months. One assumes it’s taken this long to find a neurologist who will get silly about a serious exam designed to find the fine line between normal aging and the big uh-oh of dementia. But there’s something very useful about laying plain how easy this test should be for the leader of the free world, and how anyone who boasts about crushing it has, in many aspects, failed it in a brand-new way.
The award for Guy Who Gets It for 2025 (awarded in the first month of 2026) goes to John Oliver. He gets the importance, the drama, and the way that comedy and tragedy exist a whisper apart in The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City. Oliver has gone on many a show to big up his favorite Bravo franchise, but having him sit opposite ascending queen of that show, Angie K, is brilliant booking on WWHL’s part. You need someone scrappy and quippy yet not evil to sit opposite Oliver. This isn’t the Mary Cosby/Ziwe link-up, you know? Oliver is never more eloquent than when he’s explaining the dramaturgy of RHOSLC, so getting into the play-within-a-play Angie staged is perfect fodder for him.
Ronny Chieng made/ruined his interview with Freakonomics co-author Stephen J. Dubner with his first question: “I read this book in college and it changed the way I saw the world,” he said. “Why is everything in this wrong?” Dubner anxiously laughed for what felt like a full minute after that bombshell of a Q. It’s a great but also terrible opener for a scientist. The hope of science is that everything you thought you knew is 100 percent fucked after ten years of serious inquiry; “onward and upward” should be the motto. But that doesn’t sell books, necessarily. Chieng appealed to the scientist in Dubner while absolutely owning the pop scientist, and that’s a gorgeous move for an interviewer.
Colbert will, if possible, always make a celeb circle back to their Chicago theater days. And most famous people who got their start in Chicago theater love nothing more than talking about it. Tracy Letts is one such person, but his Chicago anecdote paints Colbert as a cad. Colbert and Letts look back fondly on how it took three meetings (and one threat of violence) for the Strangers With Candy star to remember meeting the Bug auteur. But once Letts stuck, he stuck!
The Tonight Show is really willing to grapple with the emotional, horny, thorny fandom of Heated Rivalry. Tuesday night’s sketch underscored the grunting physicality of the show and the reality that the most popular thing in media right now foregrounds fucking and sucking. Wednesday’s bit, where Tariq and Fallon yelled at each other about the emotional notes of the show, points to the high drama and nuance of the aforementioned fucking and sucking. I can’t stop thinking about a world where a deathless Johnny Carson has to make Heated Rivalry jokes. Would it be what finally killed him? Could be funny if it did. The point of a monoculturally focused program like The Tonight Show is to highlight how the monoculture has moved. More gay sex jokes on the side of gay sex, please.