Late Night TV Emerges From the Pandemic With Live Audiences and Less Trump

Last summer, “The Tonight Show” supervising producer Sarah Connell was forced to consider the projectile distance of spit from the end of a wind instrument. Jimmy Fallon was itching to get back into the studio after several months of doing a version of his show from his Hamptons compound. And Connell and her colleagues had to figure out how they could return to Rockefeller Center and adhere to New York’s pandemic socially distanced guidelines. They would tape the show in studio 6A, across the hall from “Tonight’s” home studio, the 200-plus capacity studio 6B. The former home of Megyn Kelly’s daytime talk show, 6A would allow for social distancing between The Roots because some of the house band members could be perched on a balcony above the other musicians. “The horns can’t be too close because there’s spit,” says Connell. “We had to figure out how far apart they would be. We had to think about all of these things that we never had to think about before. We brought The Roots in, but not all of The Roots. And that felt like a huge hurdle, a huge milestone.” It was far from the raucous proceedings that defined the show pre-pandemic. There was

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