With writers and actors on strike much of television has ground to a halt including

late night but if you miss late night hosts a group of them came up with a new gig Jimmy

Kimmel Seth Myers Stephen Colbert John Oliver and Jimmy Fallon recently started the

chat podcast Strike Force Five to raise money to support their staff.

Shortly after it launched, a big story in Rolling Stone

outlined allegations of erratic and aggressive behavior

by Jimmy Fallon and a generally terrible working environment at the Tonight Show.

So now this already unusual project finds itself in an awkward position.

I'm Linda Holmes and on this episode of NPR's Pop Culture Happy Hour, we're talking about Jimmy Fallon and the Strike Force Five podcast.

Joining me today is NPR's TV critic Eric Deggins. Hi Eric Eric, welcome back. Hey, do I get to make the thunder sound effect every

time you say Strike Force Five? I really want to do that.

I mean, I feel like we should. Yeah, if you listen to the podcast, every time anyone says the word

Strike Force Five, there's a sound of thunder crashing, so you can always reliably hear that every time and now I'm

conditioned to hear it. So as we said in the intro, Strike Force Five is a podcast that Jimmy Kimmel,

Stephen Colbert, John Oliver, Seth Myers, and Jimmy Fallon started

together where they all have a big roundtable chat on Zoom. They started it to

raise money to support their staffs that aren't working during the writers and

actor strikes, particularly the writers with regard to these shows. It launched on

August 30th and just a little over a week later Rolling Stone published an

investigation about the working environment at the Tonight Show.

They talked to current and former Tonight Show staff who talked about Jimmy Fallon having outbursts,

simply raiding staffers.

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