But we can’t talk about Late Night without talking about Thompson. The Oscar-winning actor turns in a flawless performance, one that modulates effortlessly between the laidback, self-deprecating humour of Katherine’s stand-up – “I’ll need a facelift to play the voice of a wise tree in a Pixar movie,” she says at one point – and the tenderness of her relationship with her ailing husband Walter (John Lithgow).

In any other actor’s hands, Katherine could have been a cliché of sternness and sharp edges. But, like Meryl Streep’s Miranda Priestly, Thompson’s Katherine is lived-in and three-dimensional and complex as hell. Katherine is not perfect – at times she is difficult and downright wrong. But that’s what makes her so compelling. It’s worth noting that, in preparation for the film, Thompson had to draw on female comics throughout history for inspiration because, in 2019, we are still yet to see a woman host a mainstream late night show.

Katherine’s brutal honesty with her staff – Katherine refuses to give a raise to a male staffer about to have a baby because it would be tantamount to “giving a raise to a drug addict” – is because she is acutely aware that the bar is so much higher for women. In order to be a success Katherine, and by extension Molly, have to work that much harder.

Late Night review: this movie is a romantic comedy between a woman and her work