NBC News Overnight was the brainchild of NBC News president Reuven Frank, who conceived the show as inexpensive overnight programming after Late Night with David Letterman (Mondays-Thursdays) or SCTV Network (Fridays; later Friday Night Videos).
[1] Appealing to an eclectic audience of college students, nursing mothers, and late shift workers, the show broke the conventional "lowest common denominator" style of most news programs and injected humor into an otherwise seemingly boring medium, while providing news analysis of a kind usually unseen on other major-network newscasts.
In 1984, NBC flagship WNBC-TV in New York began carrying a syndicated revival of its former daytime game show Jeopardy!
NBC eventually resumed programming the 1:30/12:30 time slot when it debuted Later in 1988, which has been succeeded in the 21st century by Last Call and A Little Late.
NBC eventually surrendered the time slot back to its affiliates in 2021, following the end of A Little Late's run.
Thereafter, NBC stations ran either paid programming, Early Today or local morning newscasts in Nightside's timeslots.