(Photo by HBO, NBC, Telepictures/Warner Bros. Entertainment, CBS, TBS)

Fall 2018 TV Survey: Favorite Talk-Show Hosts

Who really is TV’s host with the most? We decided to find out with our 2018 Fall TV Survey, in which we asked Rotten Tomatoes fans, “Which current talk-show host is your favorite?”

The most popular choice was Last Week Tonight host and Daily Show alum, John Oliver, with 12.99 percent of the vote, but only by a whisker; The Tonight Show’s Jimmy Fallon was only 0.01 percent behind with 12.98 percent of respondents naming him their fave. The full list of hosts, ranked by popularity, is below.

Ellen DeGeneres, who placed third overall among Rotten Tomatoes fans, was the clear favorite among women, with 17.2 percent of female respondents picking her as their favorite (5.79 percent of male respondents cast their vote for the current queen of daytime). DeGeneres was also the favorite of the over-55 set. There were big gender divides, too, for Oliver and Conan O’Brien (almost three times as many men as women picked the TBS host); meanwhile, Stephen Colbert of The Late Show and Jimmy Kimmel of Live! had similar numbers for both men and women.

In fifth place, the write-in vote was overwhelmingly “none of the above,” “I hate talk shows,” and similar sentiments, but BBC host Graham Norton (noted below) otherwise got the most write-in votes.

The result shows that RT fans are in step with the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences; Last Week Tonight With John Oliver has won the Outstanding Variety Talk Series Emmy for the last three years.