New Year's Eve with Carson Daly

New Year's Eve with Carson Daly
Format	Variety show
Starring	Carson Daly
Country of origin	United States
Production
Running time	60 minutes per episode with commercials
Broadcast
Original channel	NBC (2003-present)
Picture format	1080i (HDTV)
Original run	December 31, 2003 – present

NBC's New Year's Eve with Carson Daly is a yearly show on NBC. Its first broadcast aired on December 31, 2003 live from Times Square in New York City. It airs live on the East Coast.

It is produced by Universal Media Studios (formerly NBC Studios & NBC Universal Television Studio) and Carson Daly Productions. It features musical guests and celebrity interviews with Carson Daly hosting.

It also airs live in all time zones on CNBC and is tape delayed in each time zone to coincide with midnight on NBC affiliates. Filler programming such as Most Outrageous Moments is aired between late local news and New Year's Eve in markets outside the Eastern Time Zone.

Because exclusive rights to the Times Square concert stage are held by ABC for their New Year's coverage, NBC holds its own concerts on the Rockefeller Plaza outside NBC's New York studios, as well as in Los Angeles. ABC's concerts can occasionally be heard in the background noise on NBC.

History

Prior to 2003, NBC aired special editions of its regular late night programming. The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson was the first to follow this tradition, and Jay Leno continued it when he hosted The Tonight Show with Jay Leno. These shows, intended for the Eastern and Pacific time zones, included New Year's related jokes and a countdown to midnight. Beginning in the mid-1990s, Late Night with Conan O'Brien held a special episode specifically for the Central Time Zone, usually with Chicago-themed props in lieu of a time ball.

However, for New Year's 2003-04, Tonight was given the night off, and Carson Daly (host of NBC's other late night series, Last Call with Carson Daly began hosting his own more conventional coverage. The special has aired annually ever since, even on years that New Year's falls on a weekend, and during the 2007-2008 Writers Guild of America strike. Though the Late Night specials lasted until 2004-05, after three years of weekend New Years and the writers' strike, Late Night never returned to live specials and has aired a repeat after Daly's program ever since.

The special played a very important role in the 2010 Tonight Show conflict. To accommodate New Year's Eve with Carson Daly, NBC inserted a contract clause into Conan O'Brien's contract that allowed The Tonight Show with Conan O'Brien to be postponed to as late as 12:05 a.m. so that specials such as this could be aired. Though this was supposed to only be used for temporary preemptions, NBC attempted to make this permanent by proposing that The Jay Leno Show be cut by a half hour and moved to an 11:35 p.m. to 12:05 a.m. time slot. Ironically, such a move would have left Daly unemployed. O'Brien objected to this stretching of the contract language and left NBC in January 2010.

See also

• Last Call with Carson Daly
• Dick Clark's New Year's Rockin' Eve with Ryan Seacrest

External links

• New Year's Eve with Carson Daly, NBC.com
• Happy Holidays from NBC ('08-'09)
• Happy Holidays from NBC ('09-'10)