Inside Late Night with Mark Malkoff - LateNight LastNight: Sept. 22, 2025

Episode Date: September 23, 2025

Welcome to LateNight LastNight, your daily recap on everything important that happened in Late Night TV the previous evening. Host Jon Schneider takes you through the biggest storylines from The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, Late Night with Seth Meyers, Jimmy Kimmel Live!, and The Daily Show.Today's show: September 22nd, 2025

From lightnider.com, it's Lightnight Last Night with John Schneider. And now, here's John. Yes, hello, everybody, and welcome to the first official edition of Late Night Last Night here on September 23rd, 2025. My name is John Schneider. I am a podcast producer here at Late Nighter and the host of the Saturday Night Network that you may know me from if you are a fan of Saturday Night Live coverage. I'm so excited to begin this journey with you where we will be talking about everything that happened in late night television the night before. There's a lot going on in late night TV. Of course, I'm sure if you've been checking out the news, you know some of the storylines that we'll be covering here. But every single day we have late night shows that are happening on TV. TV, and I want to help you find out what happened on late night. I know there's a lot of clips

that surface online. Not everybody can go and watch all of the shows as they air. So we're going to do the work for you. We're going to watch the shows and tell you what we see and what you should know from late night TV the night before. So this podcast here, our first one that we're doing, will be a little bit more introductory. We're going to talk about the things that we saw last night on Monday, September 22nd. And I'll fill you in. Like maybe you've been out of late night TV for a little bit and you want to jump back in and you want to know what shows are on, what people are talking about how these shows work. So we'll get to all of that over these first few shows. So you feel completely comfortable. And then we're going to talk through everything on the weekdays about

what happened in late night TV. So very excited to be here with you. Of course, we want to make this an interactive experience for all fans of late night TV. So I'll do this show live most weekdays around lunchtime. So sometime between like 1130 Eastern to 1 p.m. Eastern as we get prepared for these shows. We'll always put that we're going to be going live. And then you can join us in our live chat on YouTube. So you need to subscribe to the late-nighter podcast network or late-nighter YouTube channel to find all of our shows as we go live. We, of course, have other content on here, including our amazing interview podcast series that we have with Mark Malkoff. Inside Late Night with Mark Malkoff, it's an amazing podcast where he talks to late-night personalities past

and present about everything from the world of late night. And then I will be hosting some round tables once a month with some late night TV experts here on the late nighter channel to talk through some of the major storylines and more of the big picture stuff that's happening in late night. So without further ado, let's get to what we saw last night on late night TV. And every day I'll be putting up a graphic here to show you which of the guests were on late night and what was happening so we can talk through these things together. So we're going to be talking about five main shows here on late night last. night. First, we'll have the Daily Show, which is on Comedy Central. It's rotating panels of

hosts, or rotating hosts every single day. Typically, John Stewart will host on Monday, and then we'll have different daily show correspondence hosts the show throughout the week. Of course, there is Jimmy Kimmel Show on ABC, which we will get to in a moment, and I guess if you've been living under a rock, you don't know what's happening over there, but there's a lot of things that are happening with Kimmel's show, which is set to be returning tonight, September 23rd. So that is definitely a storyline that came up last night on late night. We have Stephen Colbert's show, which is entering its final season now on CBS. So there will be a lot of coverage of Stephen's show being around for the last 10 years. He just celebrated his 10-year anniversary on his show on CBS, the late show,

after taking over for Letterman. So he will have a lot of fun things to say throughout the year that we'll get to cover. And then we have our two NBC shows, which so far seem to be doing pretty well for themselves. They're not getting in too much trouble over there on NBC. But we got the Tonight Show starring Jimmy Fallon. That show airs at the same time as Colbert and typically Kimmel. And then we also have Late Night with Seth Myers, which is our last show that airs after midnight. Of course, we had literally the show after midnight airing on CBS prior to this. We had Corden once upon a time as well on CBS. But the last show remaining that's really, really late night is late night with Seth Myers, which we will talk about as well.

So let's see what happened last night on late night TV as we talked through everything from the Daily Show last night where John Stewart hosts on Mondays typically. But actually, this is his second time in just a few days hosting the show. He actually hosted on Thursday because of everything that was happening with Jimmy Kimmel. So in case you don't know, Jimmy Kimmel did return from summer break. He did host the show. Jimmy Come Alive last week and he did make some comments. We won't get

political on this show. This is not the type of show that we're going to do that on but he basically made some comments about the assassin of Charlie Kirk and wasn't well received by a lot of people and then ultimately there was pressure on ABC and ABC affiliates to suspend that show

which did go through and now it does seem like Kimmel will be returning tonight at least for some of the affiliates they'll be showing Kimmel's show so of course for all of the latest news on everything that's happening with Kimmel, you can go over to late-nighter to check that out. But over here, for the Daily Show, we had John Stewart hosting on Thursday, and what I thought was like an absolutely brilliant performance from John Stewart last Thursday.

If you haven't checked out the Daily Show and you're just dipping your toe in the pool, go back to John Stewart's performance last Thursday, where he set up the show as if he was living in a dictatorship, he had a completely gold set, was cowtowing to everything that anyone might come down on him on for saying it was an amazing performance from John Stewart that we saw last week. And I was very excited to see how he would follow that up last night. So last night, we do get a lot of great stuff from John Stewart, who is going to be talking again about Kimmel. It was announced shortly before these late night shows started to tape that Kimmel would be coming back. So that was a big theme of what we saw last night, where John Stewart is going to

open the show. He's going to introduce his guest for the night. That was Jacinda Arden. She's the former vice president of New Zealand. And he's going to say a really good joke, in my opinion, of what for Jacinda Arden. Find out why she forced their ABC affiliate to pull flight of the concordes. She did that. Yes. So she's talking about, obviously, he's referring to the fact that she used to have a very large political role in New Zealand. So he has some great back and forth there. Typically for the Daily Show, he will do a very long monologue to start, and then they'll introduce one guest. We got some really good lines in that one.

He starts off basically talking about Trump's opinions on Tylenol, which was a pretty big subject over the last couple of days. And then Stewart will make a reference to Kimmel coming up next where he says, I'll tell you, Jimmy Kimmel's flying high like Advil today. Yeah, Jimmy Kimmel's flying high like Advil today. Just great stuff there from Stewart. making a good reference. He also says a really good line here where he talks about the, basically the pressure that people were putting on ABC to bring back Kimmel, which was a huge talking point over the last couple days. Obviously, over 400 celebrities signed a petition.

A lot of celebrities were putting out that they were canceling their Hulu subscriptions and other Disney-related properties. So he says this over here. That campaign that you all launched pretending that you were going to cancel Hulu while secretly racing through four seasons of only murders in the building. That really worked. Congratulations. Yeah, that's good stuff there from Stewart, talking about a little bit of the hypocrisy of like what people are canceling, still watching some shows, Disney-related shows and Marvel stuff,

but everything that people are threatening to cancel with Disney. And certainly that might have had an effect. there. I think another really interesting theme we saw in late night last night was the talking about what Ted Cruz had to say about Kimmel being canceled and Brendan Carr and his, you know, working at the FCC and everything that he did. And I thought all of the late night shows did a really good job talking about what Ted Cruz said. He's often like a talking point for the late night posts to just go after. But in this case, he actually went down or got, when, at the FCC chairman to the point where the late night hosts almost felt confused as to like,

do they praise Ted Cruz? How do they go about this? So I thought Stuart had a pretty good line here talking about that. So you can get on board with that and say, I'm with that, or you can join the rest of us and fight like hell for this constitutional. Yeah. So that was his actually, that was Stewart's ending line there. So just getting the show all to put together here. But that was Stewart's ending line as he ended his monologue, which is really inspirational. I thought really great, but he did make some great jokes towards Ted Cruz as well, where Ted sort of like used a kind of like a weird accent, and some of the other late night shows will address that. But Stewart ultimately took a really different tact with this monologue than he did last

Thursday, where last Thursday he was like all about making this huge, you know, scene of countowing to what the future of late night TV might look like. And this time, it was much more of a regular monologue, which like I said, just ended with that sort of inspirational quote there. He's going to go on to interview Jacinda Arden, and they have a good back and forth where Jacinda talks a little bit about what it means to, like, she has a memoir right now, what it means to have power in a country. Even if it's something that's hard, even if it's something that you know might not be popular,

just doing the right thing. So doing the right thing. I think that becomes a big theme, and you'll go if you go to the Daily Show YouTube channel you'll see that's the big promo for the interview doing the right thing and a lot of articles have been written about what she said and talking about doing the right thing so clearly that was a very interesting night there at the daily show to see how john stewart was going to follow up what he did last week over at kimmel so you'll see on this graphic here he was scheduled to have glen powell on his show was suspended last night scheduled to come back tonight i think

there's some conflicting reports of like will powell reschedule will powell be on so we'll see what guests in what he has to say tonight. Obviously, tonight is a huge night in late nights that will cover tomorrow. Then let's move over to Colbert. Colbert, obviously, a great friend of Kimmel. Some of the recent late night storylines include the fact that Kimmel was really campaigning for Stephen Colbert to get an Emmy. I believe he put out a billboard for him. Like, they're great friends and the late night TV hosts in this era tend to be very close to each other. So Stephen Colbert is going to have Scarlett Johansson and Senator Mark Kelly on this show. He will open up his his late night show talking about his Emmys and how happy he is that Colbert or happy he is

that Kimmel is coming back. He'll say our long national late nightmare is finally over. And now that Jimmy's not being canceled, I get to enjoy this again as he will hold up an Emmy, which I think was a really, really good clip that we got from him. So I'll try and play a little bit of that. Once more, I am the only martyr in late nights. Wait, unless CBS, you want to announce anything? Ah?

Yeah, good stuff there from Colbert. Just a really, really strong monologue there. It's going to talk about how Google searches for cancel Hulu and cancel Disney Plus spiked again talking about how people pushed to get Kimmel back on the air. Great bits about the Australian broadcasting company that a lot of people were confusing, which one was the real ABC and them getting harassed as well. If you go back to the monologue, also talks about what Ted Cruz had to say. He said he sounded a lot like De Niro, doing a De Niro impression almost.

And again, Seth is going to talk about this. John Stewart talked about this. This was a big theme in late nights. He ultimately will say, welcome back, Jimmy, long may you wave. And then there's a good bit here about the rapture that a pastor recently said that the rapture is coming. So he has a pretty good joke here about that. because a lot of folks are pretty excited about how the rapture and end of the world are coming tomorrow, September 23rd. Ooh, tough break, Kimmel.

Yeah, good stuff there, again, from Cole Bear. And then eventually he's going to get into a different subject, which I think is another political moments that a lot of people were talking about last night. But essentially Trump recently wrote on Truth Social that Attorney General Pam Bondi has not been coming down on his political enemies. Seth is going to talk about a lot of this and a lot of this in a closer look last night, his major segments that he does almost every day. But Colbert is going to talk about this as well a lot.

So that was a big subject and talking point. He's going to bring out Scarlett Johansson last night. And Scarlett Johansson has been on the show. This will be her fifth time here on the show. But there's a really cute moment that they have together when Scarlet comes out talking about how she was actually on the second show that Colbert ever did. The first time I was on the show, I feel like it was. your second show. It was my second show.

How was it? We eventually figured it out. You were great. You were great. Here you are. Yeah, he's going to show her a picture of them together in their second show, which I think is going to be something we're going to see a lot this year from Colbert. A lot of memories going back. We saw some stuff in the 10-year anniversary show that he did or he talked a little bit about a 10-year anniversary. But a nice moment there for Scarlett, who's coming on. She's the new director. She's the director of the new movie, Eleanor the Great.

So she's there promoting that. She's going to talk about the passing of Robert Redford as well and how she worked with him when she was younger and how influential that he was on her and then her ultimately becoming a director for this movie that's coming out later this week. Stephen tends to have on a lot more political figures, I would say, than some of the other late night hosts.

Seth does this as well sometimes, but Colbert often will have a guest that's in the political sphere. And he's going to have Senator Mark Kelly on last night. He's a Democratic senator from Arizona. It's his second time on the show. And he's going to talk a lot about the president and what he said to Attorney General Bondi and all of that. So there's a good interview there if you want to get some perspective on Mark Kelly in him coming on the show. I thought he was a pretty solid interview.

I'll skip forward to Seth Myers a show because a lot of the subject matter that we had here between Colbert and the Daily Show also was what Seth was talking about on his show. He's going to talk a lot about Trump and Bondi. there's a really funny moment here where, you know, with the Trump Bondi stuff where he's encouraging Bondi, obviously, to get rid of some of his political enemies, he's going to talk about cue card Wally. And if you're a fan of Saturday Night Live, you know Wally or if you watch Seth Myers a show, he's a big personality there. He's the one who holds up the key cards for Seth Myers. So he has a fun bit back and forth with Wally here. So I'm excited to play this one here for you. Just watch how works. Hey Wally. You're fired. Damn it! And, of course, you know, you won't see this visually here, but if you do go to the clip, you'll see that Wally's holding up a sign that says,

I quit before he had a chance to fire him. So we'll continue on with that clip. All right, fine. You're hired again. Now, put the car down where you can't reach it. So he puts the car down, can't see it. Here we go. We're going to try some things again.

you're fired and he puts up another card that says too slow I quit and there's a great back and forth where he says damn it so good stuff there with Seth who's able to keep it light with Wally there during his monologue and closer look then at the end he's going to talk about Ted Cruz and a little bit more says he sort of sounds like a Russian mob boss as he's going on to talk about what he said about FCC chairman. Then Jake Tapper is going to come on as his main guest here tonight. Tapper has been on the show so many times. One of the most frequent guests on Seth Myers. He's been there 17 times on late night with Seth Myers. Tapper was also on Colbert last week. So he's like a go-to guest to talk about big things that are happening

in the world. And clearly they were going to be talking about, I mean, besides being great friends, they were going to be talking about stuff that happened with Kimmel. So he's there to promote his new book, but he's going to say how he feels really that this whole thing went down with Kimmel. So here we go. And I thought it was pretty much the most direct infringement by the government on free speech that I've seen in my lifetime. Yeah. Yeah, which is like a big statement to say there from Tapper. And it totally makes sense.

I mean, clearly he's tapped into what's happening and feels like this is a huge thing that's going on there. They have a really good conversation, some references to the alone the island in Seth Meyer's podcast. that Seth and the Lonely Island do. Seth is also going to talk about how he was recently on, or Jake Tapper was recently on, who wants to be a millionaire with Jimmy Kimmel and Caitlin Collins. And Seth, I thought, had a really good line for this. Sage, like, you think Jimmy Kimmel has the right to free speech,

but he should be off the air because his questions are too hard. Yeah, because they just talked about how Jake Tapper wasn't able, whether they only made, like, I think, like $36,000 on who wants to be a millionaire. So good stuff there. The other guest on Late Night with Seth Myers was Jay. She was from the band A Little Mix that got together on the X Factor UK many years ago, and Jade is becoming a solo artist. And I think it was her first late night interview.

She comes out and she's going to talk about how super nervous and that she didn't think anybody would know who she was, so she's surprised that the audience is cheering for her. It's really endearing. So you should definitely go and check that one out. Then we're going to move over to the Tonight Show starring Jimmy Fallon. So not too much Kimmel talk here. this is more, they'll do some pop culture stuff, a lot of talk in the monologue on Fallon

last night about Taylor Swift's new album that's coming out soon. We get this bit that he often does with Tariq, his MC, who he goes back and forth about items that were recalled. So we get one of those recall bits last night. He's going to sit down at the desk and he's going to talk about his new show that's coming out, Fallon, called On Brand. That's his show where it's a business reality competition show. So that's going to be coming out next week on NBC. He does a lot of promo for that. And I'm sure you're going to see some stuff over at late nighter about what Jimmy's doing with on brand. His main guest for the night is Sean Penn, who is only appearing for a second time

on The Tonight Show starring Jimmy Fallon. His last time was June 17th, 2020, so sort of in the middle of those like COVID quarantine episodes. But Sean Penn, a really good get for Fallon to get on here. He's promoting his new movie, one battle after another. And he does talk a lot about the movie. There's one moment that I think is kind of important here, where he's going to talk about how basically

he went into his dressing room and then he found something like a message for the FCC so I'll play that for you get this over with it'll be fast no take your time but I found this in the dressing room and I just thought

I'd get it out of the way it's got brevity I suppose it was to the FCC it's just this so he's gonna pull out something here, which I'll show you on screen if you're watching live on YouTube, he pulls out a little sticker that says suck less to the FCC. So it's sort of like a subtler way to go after them

compared to the other late night shows. But I thought that that was a good moment there from Sean Penn, a great visual that we have here. If you're watching us on our YouTube channel, search late night or where we will be live to cover all of these episodes. So that was Sean Penn. Great get for Fallon there. He also gives a lot of praise to Quest Love's Summer of Soul documentary. We then have Zachary Quinto, who's on to talk about Brilli of Minds, season two, is the seventh time of tonight show. And then Frederick Bachman is the third guest in the chair. So no major games here on Fallon that we see tonight. Typically, the format for Fallon is like they'll do two guests and then maybe some games or they'll do three interviews and interviews and like no games or maybe some short bits back and forth between Jimmy and the guest.

But tonight we're going to get three interviews and a musical guest. Frederick Bachman is the author of the Fallon Book Club. pick that Fallon shows. Most summers, Fallon, we'll pick a book and we'll promote it to his audience. So he does bring the offer, Frederick Bachman on this one. And then we get music from Lange, as well. That's the only specialty actor musical performance that we see on these shows from last night. Sometimes we'll get stand-up comedians. Sometimes we'll get musicians. Back in the day, they would do magicians and animal wranglers and all types of crazy stuff. A little bit tapered down, I guess, in modern times. But here we're

go. We get some music from Lang Lang Lang last night as well. So that's a summary of what happened last night, Monday, September 22nd, 2025. I would say, you know, again, we're working through the format here on late night last night and we want to get your feedback to make sure that you're enjoying the show and you're getting what you want to hear from us. But overall, I would say that the major news stories from last night on late night is that Kimmel is coming back. So he'll be back on the air tonight. And last night, the late night host had an opportunity to address it. And that mostly came through the Daily show, through Colbert, and through Seth

Myers, a little bit. So certainly the Daily Show had the longest bit about that. Colbert's monologue was really strong. They were the ones who really pushed forward this theme and that storyline last night. Seth had a good few moments as well, and then a Jimmy show was just a lot of good guests and a good

time. But overall, I think that the major thing that we are watching is how does everybody react to Kimmel returning now and what will be the response to Kimmel's show coming back on the air, which he is, again, scheduled to be back on the air tonight. Guests to be determined, again, some thought is maybe some of the guests that were canceled during his suspension will be coming back.

But of course, we will talk tomorrow about what we hear from Kimmel when he does return. And then will any of the other late-night shows address Kimmel's return or they sort of like moving on to folks on their own shows, how will, you know, some of the people who spoke out against Kimmel, react to what we see tonight on late night. I think we'll talk about that a little bit tomorrow as well. So as I said, if you are enjoying this, please let me know. This is an interactive experience for me. I want to get some feedback on if you think that there's something else you want to hear from us when covering late nights. I love getting to see our friends in the live chat that have been joining us throughout this show here. And of course,

if you can leave your comments on the YouTube video, we would really appreciate that as well. and we invite you to subscribe to the late-nighter podcast network feed where we will have all of our shows late-night last night and then inside late-night with Mark Malkoff as well, where we have a new interview out today with Wyatt Snack. It is fantastic. It is one of the best interviews I think that Mark Malkoff has ever done. So excited to present that one to you on our late-nighter podcast network feed.

Wyatt used to work at Saturday Night Live, talks a lot about his experience there. got into like an incredible fight in the hallway that he's going to talk about on that one. He talks about his experience working at the Daily Show in the late 2000s and then what it was like to leave the show and maybe his relationship with John Stewart. So that one, that's like I can't miss interview. If you had never heard Wyatt, he's like so amazing to tell stories and hear from. So I definitely encourage you to check that one out.

We got that video up on the YouTube channel here on Late Nighter and it's on the podcast feed available now. So new episodes of Inside Late Night with Mark Malkoff available on Tuesdays throughout the entire fall. And then I'll be here on weekdays to talk through everything late night last night. And then we're looking forward to planning our first official roundtable here on Late Nader to talk about the biggest moments in late night from the last month. So I hope you enjoy. I hope you go check out Late Nider.com for all the latest news in Late Night TV. My name is John Schneider from Late Nider. And we will see you next time, everybody. Have a good one. Thank you.