Nickelodeon's general manager, Geraldine Laybourne, was asked by MTV Networks President Bob Pittman to develop programming for the vacated time slot.

The transition to a 24-hour broadcast for Nickelodeon took place in June, with some cable providers substituting the primetime schedule of other niche-interest networks onto the channel space.

[3][4] After being presented with over 200 episodes of The Donna Reed Show (a 1950s sitcom which Laybourne despised), Goodman and Seibert conceived the idea of the "first oldies TV network."

As Nick at Nite grew, it would add to its library of shows expanding out to rerun sketch comedy, such as episodes from the early seasons of SNL as well as the Canadian series SCTV.

In March 2004, Nielsen began splitting up Nick at Nite and Nickelodeon in its primetime and total daytime ratings reports, due to the different programming, advertisers and target audiences between the two services; this caused controversy among executives of some cable channels who believed that this move manipulated the ratings, given that Nick at Nite's broadcast day takes up only a fraction of Nickelodeon's programming schedule.

[5] For the channel's 20th anniversary celebration in June 2005, TV Land aired an episode from almost every series that had appeared on Nick at Nite.

Nick at Nite's lineup presently includes reruns of syndicated comedy series from the early 1990s to mid-2010s and movie broadcasts.

Due to its dependence on sitcom reruns whose cable syndication rights are limited to a daypart (a certain part of the day) owing to contracts with studios and/or distributors (for instance, Paramount holds the exclusive cable nighttime rights to run Friends, airing it on both Nick at Nite and Comedy Central, while TBS holds exclusive daytime rights to said series), Nick at Nite has no video on demand service or Paramount+ presence (formerly its past original series were usually combined within Nickelodeon's video-on-demand section) and its website features no video content.

The early success with classic television series, as well as the eventual shift away from series made prior to 1985, eventually led to the creation of digital broadcast networks similar to Nick at Nite's original format such as the Retro Television Network, Antenna TV and MeTV (which have featured many shows formerly seen on Nick at Nite).

For about a year-and-a-half prior to the September 28, 2009 rebrand, Nick at Nite aired marathons of programming from midnight to 5:00 a.m. Eastern Time.

Some of the movies Nick at Nite has broadcast in recent years have included the Back to the Future trilogy, Ferris Bueller's Day Off, Baby's Day Out, Pretty in Pink, National Lampoon's Vacation, Ghostbusters (and its sequel Ghostbusters II), Jurassic Park, The Nutty Professor, Legally Blonde, The Princess Diaries, and The Parent Trap.

Film broadcasts have become more common on Nick at Nite since fall 2012, often airing on a near-weekly basis, typically on Sunday evenings.

On December 5, 1987, the channel ran a contest called the Do It Yourself Sitcom Special, which was billed as the first time that real people ever had their own television shows.

The series aired on Fridays as part of ABC's TGIF lineup, with the episode being "rerun" on Nick at Nite in primetime on the following Sunday.

On August 17, 2009, Nick at Nite debuted a new animated stop-motion series called Glenn Martin DDS, which ran for two seasons.

As the Nick at Nite "oldies" format was adapted from radio, they suggested the multi-hour (sometimes multi-day) marathon might also work with television programming.

With the passing years, the summer blocks shifted to include series recently added to Nick at Nite's program library.

In summer of 2008, Nick at Nite aired a marathon called Battle of the Sexes, which featured episodes of their regular programs that engaged conflict between men and women.

On June 17, 2019, Nick at Nite aired a simulcast of the 2019 MTV Movie & TV Awards for the first time, along with many of its sister networks.

Occasionally, episodes of Rugrats and SpongeBob SquarePants have aired regularly or as marathons during Nick at Nite special events in the 1990s and 2000s.

On June 17, 2019, Nick at Nite aired a simulcast of the 2019 MTV Movie & TV Awards for the first time, along with many of its sister networks.

The group – which included Scott Webb, Jim Levi, Dave Potorti, Jay Newell, Will McRobb, and Tom Hill – was guided towards creating a series of internal campaigns to emphasize the seeming paradox of a contemporary network setting that programmed reruns from the 1960s and earlier.

In one such ID, the first chord of The Beatles' "A Hard Day's Night" would be heard strummed, as a man began to hang up a Nick at Nite logo and common living room objects such as a chair and a television set.

A popular take-off of the Michelob Light commercial, "The Nite Belongs to Nick" ran for a short period of time before being discontinued due to copyright issues.

Beginning as only some of the night's shows and their airtimes being listed as music played over an on-screen graphic, this simple concept would be revised and re-revised many times over.

Curious Pictures created six more IDs for Nick at Nite featuring "Logobelly" in April 1998 with Toonz and 3D Studio Max software.

Nick at Nite received a rebrand in January 1999 (which was used until March 2001) produced by Scott Stowell and Chip Wass (who previously designed a set of CGI IDs for the network in 1996).

In March 2001, in an effort to cash-in on the reality-TV boom, Nick at Nite underwent an extensive rebrand with the new theme of "Unreality", with IDs and bumpers featuring clips from actual events then going to clips from TV shows inspiring the events and then ending with the Nick at Nite logo and slogan "100% Sitcoms, 100% Unreality".

In 2004, TV Land began to incorporate sitcoms from the 1980s and 1990s; reality shows and weekly movie presentations were added as the decade progressed.

While in 2017 its original programming efforts were made up of multi-camera sitcoms such as Younger and Teachers targeted towards a female Generation X audience, in late 2018, the former moved to Paramount Network and the latter was canceled.