WFAN's Chris Oliviero in no rush to anoint permanent overnight host

The makeover to WFAN’s program schedule that began with Craig Carton’s return on Jan. 5 is not yet complete.

The station has not yet named a permanent overnight host. And people have noticed.

“So it's funny,” Chris Oliviero, the chief business officer and New York market president for WFAN’s parent company Audacy, told Newsday in a recent interview. “I think I hurt Craig's feelings when I said recently that we got more reaction for not naming an overnight host than for him. I said it tongue in cheek, obviously.

“But what I wanted to communicate was people are so passionate about this radio station, the fact that we did not announce a permanent overnight host got a lot of attention. To me, I was kind of like, ‘Oh, it was just a mention in passing in a press release. Maybe the last paragraph. No one's going to ask anything.’ Guess what? We got a ton of questions on it. Which I love because, again, it's a metric of passion. People care about all 24 hours in the day.”

WFAN has a rich tradition of overnight hosts, from Steve Somers “schmoozing S-P-O-R-T-S” to Jody McDonald reading boxscores on the air to Tony Paige telling boxing stories to Joe Benigno’s legendary 3 a.m. Jets rant to John Jastremski’s high-energy patter to Sal Licata's passion. The most recent occupant of the wee hours chair, Chris McMonigle, is now the co-host of “The Carton Show,” with all the pressure — and lifestyle benefits — of moving to afternoon drive.

“It’s going to be a heck of a lot easier to find sleep now,” McMonigle told Newsday last month. “I was pretty much a zombie.”

The station has been using fill-ins such as Al Cintron, Gordon Damer and Pete Hoffman to work the overnight following Tommy Lugauer’s “After Hours” show, which wraps up either at midnight or 2 a.m. depending on whether WFAN has live games at night.

Two things you can count on, Oliviero said, is WFAN will always be “live and local” in the overnight hours. And that eventually he will name a new permanent overnight host.

“If you put FAN on now at 3 o'clock in the morning, you're going to have a live local overnight host,” he said. “What we haven't done is declared a permanent full-time host. So you're hearing a few various people those shifts after Tommy Lugauer’s shift ends. Depending on the time, sometimes it's midnight, sometimes it's 2 a.m. But the commitment to live and local overnights is there. We will see if and when — and it's a question of when, it's not a question of if — it's a question of when we feel we have found the right person to do that permanently.”

The overnight shift is a different animal, and not just because of what it does to the sleep patterns of the hosts. There are fewer ads to break up the calls. Late last year, WFAN did away with 20/20 sports updates except for the “Boomer and Gio” morning show, so the hosts are expected to talk . . . and talk . . . and talk between the calls.

That’s how veterans such as Somers and Benigno honed their craft to the point where they were eventually moved to more plum non-overnight shifts.

Sometimes, the hosts will let their eclectic bunch of regular callers have a lot more airtime than they might get calling into a daytime show.

“The overnight callers are all over the lot,” Paige told Newsday in 2018. “It’s like having a Thanksgiving party and there’s the aunt you always like to see and there’s the uncle that it’s, ‘Oh, God, he’s here again.’ But you welcome him in.”