The program evolved into its final format in 2001 under the title Late Friday, removing the music and feature segments and becoming dedicated solely to showcasing new stand-up comedy talent.

Upon doing this, The Midnight Special was canceled and replaced by the Canadian-import sketch comedy program SCTV, which turned out to be a placeholder on NBC's late Friday night/early Saturday morning schedule for a two-year period.

As such, while at SNL, a show that had just gotten back on its feet after some years of decline due to break-out cast members such as Eddie Murphy and Joe Piscopo, Ebersol decided that he would attempt another Friday night music-based program and, instead of simply reviving The Midnight Special, his idea grew into what would become Friday Night Videos, which would replace SCTV in 1983; that show ran for one more year on the pay cable channel Cinemax in the U.S. before discontinuing production in 1984.

Two videos were played back-to-back, and viewers across the country, with the exception of the West Coast (where the program was seen on tape delay), could call in and vote for one of them, using nationwide 900 numbers for a small per-call fee.

To increase the number of voters, FNV started to offer free T-shirts every fifteen seconds during the time period when viewers called to register their votes.

In early 1990, NBC sporadically ran a Saturday morning edition of FNV for viewers who missed the show hours earlier because of its late-night timeslot.

This occurred probably because the novelty of the video fad had begun to wear off and the preferences of FNV's target audience of teens and young adults moved at the same time toward newer, more aggressive genres such as grunge, hardcore rap, and what became indie rock.

These were forms that NBC was reluctant to put on FNV broadcasts due to perceived lack of commercial appeal (i.e., except for grunge, little or no radio airplay) and potential obscenity issues in the videos.

In January 1994, after years of falling ratings and seemingly becoming more and more insignificant in the wake of the cable television boom that allowed more households to have access to MTV, the show was retooled in an attempt to stay relevant.

For the host segments after 1998, Sever would be seated or standing in front of the projection videoscreen on stage left of The Tonight Show with Jay Leno set, near the guest's entrance.

Late Friday continued to air until Last Call with Carson Daly was expanded to five nights a week in May 2002; that show had just begun in January of that year as a Monday-Thursday (Tuesday-Friday mornings) strip at 1:30 a.m. Eastern.