NBC Studios

NBC Studios at 3000 W Alameda Ave is one of the most active television production facilities in the country, taping multiple shows throughout the week. The studio complex is closed to general visitors, but free tickets for tapings of shows including The Tonight Show and other NBC productions are available through the NBC website and third-party ticket services — this is worth checking before your visit, as tickets go quickly.

On taping days, audience members queue outside the studio from early afternoon. The experience of watching a live taping — the warm-up comedian, the re-takes, the moment when the band strikes up — is something that is hard to replicate anywhere but Los Angeles. Even if you don't score taping tickets, walking Alameda Avenue gives you a sense of the industrial scale of television production in Burbank.

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NBC's Burbank facility has been one of American television's most important production centres since the 1950s. The Tonight Show has been taped here (with interruptions) since Johnny Carson moved it from New York in 1972. Jay Leno, Conan O'Brien, Jay Leno again, and Jimmy Fallon all hosted from Burbank before NBC moved The Tonight Show back to New York in 2014 — a relocation that Burbank has not entirely forgiven.