Dear Gossips, 

Jimmy Fallon returned to the studio for The Tonight Show last night. They made a point of showing the audience the safety precautions they were taking to make this happen. Everyone first tested negative for COVID-19 and temperature checks were administered upon entering the building, office spaces have been sanitised, people are wearing masks and shields and gloves, and the small crew is maintaining six feet of distance from one another. Obviously there’s no studio audience. 

 

The Tonight Show is filmed in New York which was hit early by coronavirus but has managed to slow the spread and has recently entered phase three. New York’s Governor, Andrew Cuomo, also appeared on The Tonight Show last night. As you know, during the early part of pandemic, Twitter was obsessed with his near-nightly interviews with his brother Chris on CNN. Now he’s joking about his love life with Jimmy. 

 

Of course it wasn’t all comedy. Governor Cuomo addressed the fact that while New York is reopening, other parts of America are actually going back into lockdown. 

Yesterday the Governor of California Gavin Newsom announced more closures across the state including Los Angeles, which means that Hollywood is still on pause. And that will also likely mean that Tenet will be pushed back again, especially when you consider that in New York, where the situation is better, theatres are still not open. 

The point is, not that this is at all a priority, but we are a website that covers entertainments news, it’ll be a while before new content is produced. That said, there is a LOT of content in development and they’re working to get stories and scripts in shape so that as soon as there’s an all-clear they can basically start rolling immediately. But if the United States is trailing behind, it may be content from other countries that goes into production first. And as I mentioned on Show Your Work last week, I wonder if that means those projects will be distributed in places that may not have been as much of an option before coronavirus. Back in May, NBC acquired the Canadian medical drama Transplant, the most-watched Canadian series when it aired in the spring on CTV, in part because it’s a good show but also because the network was looking ahead to fill the gaps in its lineup due to production suspensions. Transplant was renewed for a second season last month. In Canada, it’s currently streaming on Crave (which is owned by Bell Media, where I also work). And if Canada’s reopening plans, which are ahead of America’s, can happen safely so that productions can resume, there may be more Canadian series being showcased south of the border. 

Yours in gossip,

Lainey