Farewell to ‘Strike Force Five,’ Late Night’s Winning Podcast Experiment

I’ll miss Jimmy Fallon most of all.

Not because Fallon is going anywhere. In fact, he’s right back where he started from—once again hosting The Tonight Show on NBC, now that the writers strike is officially over. But what I’ve learned over the past two months is that Fallon’s talk show doesn’t actually play to his strengths. In an ideal world, he wouldn’t spend his evenings giggling at warmed-over movie star anecdotes or slow-jamming the news. (Do they even do “Slow Jam the News” anymore?) Really, he’s a born fifth banana whose blunders are the ideal scaffolding for savage jokes lobbed by the likes of Stephen Colbert, John Oliver, Seth Meyers, and Jimmy Kimmel.

Those four, along with Fallon, are the hosts of Strike Force Five, a Hail Mary podcast from the industry’s five principal late-night hosts that wrapped its 12-episode run Tuesday—weeks after the merciful conclusion of the work stoppage that prompted them to collaborate in the first place. (Proceeds from the podcast, sponsored primarily by brands headed by George Clooney and Ryan Reynolds, went to late-night staff members affected by the strike.)

The end of the writers strike is undoubtedly a net good, for both the writers themselves and Hollywood more broadly. But I can’t help wishing it didn’t have to mean the end of Strike Force Five, a shaggy, surprisingly compelling project that allowed five men who have collectively appeared on television for, oh, one billion hours to show sides of themselves that don’t always make it to air. 

Just a few years ago, the pandemic forced the network late-night hosts (and Oliver, their one major cable equivalent) to innovate, turning their backyards and attics into ersatz studios and enlisting their families to pitch in as guests and band members. It was a tough time to live through, but it injected some new life into a staid format. Strike Force Five did something similar on a much smaller scale, unshackling everyone (except, again, Oliver) from the strictures of the “monologue, video bit, guest one, guest two” format, as well as the network standards that forbid them from swearing. They’re free to swap war stories, trade self-deprecating insults, and marvel at weird personal anecdotes, like how Colbert’s mother briefly dated Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza. 

All five of these straight white fathers have been comfortably ensconced at their current shows for about a decade. More weirdly, all of them but Meyers admit in the podcast’s first episode that they harbored childhood dreams of joining the clergy. (“I said to my dad, ‘I want to be a vicar when I grow up,’ and he said, ‘No, you just want people to listen to you,’” says Oliver, drawing wry noises of recognition from his cohosts.) But alike as they are, Strike Force’s off-the-cuff nature allowed each to take on a specific role: Kimmel as the straight-shooting leader, Colbert as the wise elder statesman (and grade-A Wife Guy), Meyers as the frazzled family man, Oliver as the aloof outsider.