LATE NIGHT

Lilly Singh Will Be the Only Female Late-Night Host of the Big Four TV Networks

Lilly Singh will host A Little Late With Lilly Singh on NBC this September.


The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon - Season 6
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Late-night television will reach a milestone this fall, when the YouTuber Lilly Singh hosts her own nightly talk show.

Keeping the big news in the NBC late-night family, Singh used her March 14 appearance on The Tonight Show With Jimmy Fallon to announce that she would be taking over for Carson Daly in the 1:35 a.m. block.

Daly hosted MTV’s Total Request Live from 1998 to 2003. While TRL continued to air on the network until 2008 (and was revived in 2017), Daly moved to NBC to host Last Call With Carson Daly for nearly 17 years and 2,000 episodes. Once the popular web entertainer takes over for Daly, the show will be renamed A Little Late With Lilly Singh.

“I’m so excited because I truly get to create a show from scratch. I get to make it inclusive. I get to create comedy segments and interview people, and really create something that I believe in,” Singh told Fallon. Per Variety, the nightly series will, of course, feature in-studio interviews, but to prevent things from going stale, the show will also branch out to include a pretaped comedy sketch element, a plus for Singh, who has succeeded with the popular YouTube channel “IISuperwomanII,” which made her famous in the first place. “It’s kind of like my YouTube channel, but now I have more than three staff members,” the future late-night host joked.

Of the Big Four broadcast networks—NBC, ABC, CBS, and Fox—NBC will be the only one with a woman in the hosts’s chair once Singh’s show premieres, in September. Singh took a moment during her Tonight Show appearance to pay homage to the few women who have had hosting gigs before her (Cynthia Garrett took on the same NBC late-night time slot as Singh in 1999, when she became the first black woman to host a network late-night show, called Later With Cynthia Garrett). “A huge shout-out to the women who have been before me and who are currently in the space, because I couldn’t have done it without them paving the path,” Singh said. “I do think it’s a little awesome for an Indian Canadian woman also to be on a late-night show, so I’m super humbled,” she went on.

It looks like Mindy Kaling’s take on what it would look like for a woman to be a late-night talk show host in a sea of male-fronted shows isn’t too far-fetched after all.

Related: Late Night Trailer: Emma Thompson and Mindy Kaling Team Up to Shake Up the Landscape of Late-Night TV