A new era in late night television commenced on Monday, with NBC’s “Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon” easily keeping the program on top of the ratings heap.
Taking advantage of NBC’s dominance in primetime courtesy of its coverage of the Winter Olympics — and starting 30 minutes later than usual because of it — Fallon’s debut as host averaged a 7.1 overnight household rating/20 share, according to Nielsen. This put it about 80% higher than the combined overnight Monday rating for the programs hosted by Jimmy Kimmel on ABC and David Letterman on CBS.
Coincidentally, the 7.1 is the same overnight score that NBC saw for its post-Jay Leno “Tonight Show” host the first time, as Conan O’Brien premiered to that rating in June 2009.
While no one expected Fallon to approach the huge 9.2/22 that Jay Leno logged with his recent “Tonight” swansong (at the more advantageous start time of 11:35 p.m.), Monday’s premiere-night rating is well above the previous high for Fallon as host of “Late Night” (4.8/13) and is slightly more than double what Leno averaged in his penultimate week of Jan. 27-31 (3.5/9). The season-to-date average in the metered-market overnight rating for “Tonight” is 2.9.
That 4.8 “Late Night” overnight rating for Fallon translated to about 6.6 million viewers in the nationals, so something in the vicinity of 9 million to 10 million viewers is likely for his “Tonight Show” premiere. Preliminary total-viewer estimates are expected to be issued later today by Nielsen.
Monday’s premiere, featuring Will Smith, U2 and celebrity cameos including Stephen Colbert, Robert De Niro and Tina Fey, marked the return of “The Tonight Show” to New York City, where it originated in 1954.
