Jimmy Kimmel, Stephen Colbert and other late-night hosts launch 'Strike Force Five' podcast

2024-12-25 10:31:49 source: category:News

Five unemployed late-night hosts have joined forces to help their shows' employees during Hollywood's dual strikes by writers and actors.

Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Fallon, Jimmy Kimmel, Seth Meyers and John Oliver are launching a podcast called "Strike Force Five," which premieres Wednesday. The Spotify podcast will be available "everywhere you get your podcasts," an announcement says, and run for at least 12 episodes, a representative confirmed to USA TODAY.

Shows such as “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon" and "The Late Show With Stephen Colbert" have been on pause since the Writers Guild of America went on strike in May, because they depend on writers to produce shows the same day they air.

The five men started meeting over Zoom to discuss the work stoppage and ended up having "a series of hilarious and compelling conversations," according to Tuesday's announcement. Now they're bringing these chats to the new podcast.

All proceeds the hosts receive from the project "will go to out-of-work staff from the hosts’ respective shows."

How Jimmy Fallon, Seth Meyers and others have been supporting their writers

The late-night hosts, whose shows would have been on hiatus during the summer months anyway, have been doing their part to support their staff. Some of them temporarily padded the employees' paychecks out of their own pockets, sending food trucks to strike rallies and joining writers on the picket line.

"I want to see a fair deal as soon as possible. It is absolutely appalling that they are not negotiating right now," Oliver told Deadline at a comedy writers picket line outside 30 Rockefeller Plaza in July. "The fact that they are not around a table right now is absolutely disgusting.”

In April, Seth Meyers weighed in on the impact of a work stoppage days before the WGA went on strike.

“If a writers' strike happens, that would shut down production on a great many shows. And I've been through this before in 2007-2008; there was a very long strike while I was working at 'SNL.' It was really miserable," he said during a corrections segment of his show.

He went on: "And It doesn’t just affect the writers. It affects all the incredible non-writing staff on these shows. And it would really be a miserable thing for people to have to go through, especially considering we’re on the heels of that awful pandemic that affected, obviously, not just show business, but all of us.”

Hollywood writers are on strike:All the ways it's impacting your favorite shows

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