Late-night talk show host Jimmy Fallon has recently come under fire after news broke out that the non-writing staff of The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon will be put on an “unpaid leave of absence” as the Writers Guild of America strike continues, reported HuffPost. This move will come into effect starting this Friday. “This is our last paid week. Our final paychecks will come in next week,” an anonymous source from NBC told HuffPost.

Fallon had extended his full support for his team while speaking to Variety at the Met Gala on 2 May, but then faced an immediate call-out from the show’s senior photo research coordinator Sarah Kobos, who tweeted that he didn’t even attend the production meeting earlier that day, during which the staff and crew were informed they wouldn’t be paid if the WGA strike continued. Fallon made amends the following morning by getting NBC to pay his team another week’s wages, followed by a third week which would come out of his own pocket. The employees will also continue to have access to healthcare till “mid-September”.

It is reported that Seth Meyers, Stephen Colbert and Jimmy Kimmel will continue to pay staff as the WGA protests for better work conditions and AI restrictions. During the previous WGA strike, which lasted from November 2007 until February 2008, late-night hosts including David Letterman, Jay Leno, and Conan O’Brien reportedly paid the salaries of their non-striking staff out of their own pockets.