(Reuters) - Jimmy Fallon has returned to the television studio for his "Tonight Show," becoming the first late-night host to get back to something approaching normal production in almost four months.
Fallon appeared from NBC's New York studio on Monday for a show in which camera operators wore masks, there was no audience, and house band the Roots played in a socially distanced space.
"Any type of normalcy feels great. So hopefully we can put a smile on your face for an hour and let you sit back and relax,"Fallon told the audience at home before breaking into a satirical ditty, "It's Beginning to Look a Bit like Normal."
"New York is really open now that you're doing your show again," said Fallon's first guest, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, who appeared remotely.
New York was the epicenter of the disease in the United States and last month began to emerge from a strict lockdown.
Television and film production was shut down nationwide in mid-March and is just starting to resume tentatively under strict guidelines aimed at containing the coronavirus. Fallon and other late-night TV hosts have been mostly filming short segments from their homes for months.
Conan O'Brien last week began broadcasting some of his late-night talk shows from an empty Los Angeles comedy club.
Soap opera "The Bold and the Beautiful" on CBS began filming new episodes last month in Los Angeles, and filmmaker Tyler Perry is shooting two of his series for the BET network at his vast studio complex in Atlanta, Georgia.
Bradley Bell, executive producer of "The Bold and the Beautiful," told the Hollywood Reporter last month that actors on the daytime show remain at least 8 feet apart and camera tricks are used in editing to make them look closer together.
As for romantic scenes, the partners of some of the actors are used as stand-ins for the screen love interests in an effort to contain the spread of the virus, Bell said.
(Reporting by Jill Serjeant in Los Angeles; Editing by Matthew Lewis)
