Seth Meyers Takes A Closer Look At Future Of Late-Night & ‘SNL’ – Q&A
Seth Meyers has become one of the elder statemen of late-night.
Meyers has been hosting NBC’s Late Night for nearly ten years, starting a week after Jimmy Fallon began his stint helming The Tonight Show. Other than Jimmy Kimmel, who has been on air for over 20 years, the NBC pair’s shows have been on air longer than The Late Show with Stephen Colbert and Last Week Tonight with John Oliver and has seen off the likes of Trevor Noah on The Daily Show, James Corden on The Late Late Show and Samantha Bee on Full Frontal, who all started after him.
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“I was the new guy for two months and a lot of shows have come and gone. It’s been nine years, so it didn’t happen overnight. But there was certainly a boom of how many people were trying this format,” he told Deadline.
But Meyers, who also co-created and exec produces IFC’s Documentary Now!, shows no sign of slowing down; his deal runs through 2025 and he’s still day drinking with the likes of Lizzo, much to his wife’s chagrin.
In fact, he doesn’t like time off and told Deadline that he’d produce even more episodes of Late Night every year if NBC wanted them.
“I hate being off,” he says. “My vacation is doing the show. It is more fun than the beach. It is more fun than skiing. I’m done early enough to see my kids at night so it’s not this thing that takes me away from my family, so there’s no upside to not doing the show. I wish we did more weeks.”
Meyers, who spoke to Deadline before the strike, is a member of the WGA and has been supporting the guild on the picket lines in New York and isn’t trying to find a way to get to back to work, although like all writers, clearly hopes that a deal can be reached with the AMPTP soon.
“As a writer who identifies as a writer, there would be no trying to get around [it]. I wouldn’t be looking for loopholes to figure out how to write [the show],” he said.
Last year was a breakout year for the show; he scored his first Emmy nomination in the main talk-show category and he’ll be hoping that the fact that there are once again five late-nominations this year, without the worry of losing to John Oliver, that he can secure another nod.
Meyers, a West Ham United fan, whose team won a European title earlier this month, spoke to Deadline about the changes in late-night and the future of the genre as well as his thoughts on being touted as a potential successor to Saturday Night Live boss Lorne Michaels, should he ever step down (“It is not a job for me”).
DEADLINE: How’s the last twelve months been for you? There’s been a lot of change in late-night with James Corden and Trevor Noah leaving, Full Frontal with Samantha Bee being canceled and Desus & Mero stopping, but you just seem to be getting on with the show.
SETH MEYERS: I wouldn’t say there’s been any massive changes for us. We are in this post-pandemic world, where we get to focus on the show the way we did before the pandemic, which was just trying to incrementally increase the quality of an average show, because it’s a moving train. You can never make massive adjustments in real time. Everybody who works on the show gets a little better every week.
DEADLINE: What do you make of your timeslot rival James Corden being replaced by @midnight?
MEYERS: As someone who’s lucky enough to have one of these shows, I certainly would be happier seeing somebody else getting the chance to have one, knowing what an incredible gift it’s been to me. It is a little sad to me that they’re not trying to find, not the next James Corden, but another choice that’s as outside the box and interesting as James Corden. I also hope credit is paid for one how unique a choice [James] was and to how well he executed on the idea that he would bring something different to late-night.
If [@midnight] had been a news forward 12:30am show that probably wouldn’t be an ideal outcome for us but the good news is it won’t matter insofar as how we approach our show. It certainly has a curiosity.
DEADLINE: Would that have any impact on late-night guests?
MEYERS: It’s going to be a real nice open field for our friend Jimmy Kimmel. I’ll tell you that much. In the end, the biggest problem we’re up against is we’re the third New York show with guests, so I don’t know how much James leaving helps us there. We also don’t feel like we have a problem booking guests and guests in this day and age, especially for us, don’t move the needle much. Any A-lister should just do Fallon, and help our lead in. That would be better for us.
DEADLINE: Do you think late-night has a future over the next 10/15 years?
MEYERS: Oh, yeah. The cultural conversation is more spread out now than it’s ever been and people have more avenues to niche entertainment than they’ve ever had or can cater to their own slice of interest. But I do still feel like the late-night shows are a big part of the culture or conversation with regards to what it feels like these days. I’m glad I got into it when I did, I wouldn’t want to be 25 right now, with my long-term goal one day getting one of these shows.
DEADLINE: Has there ever been a conversation about moving the timeslot? I always figured the show could stay on at 12:30am but perhaps stream on Peacock earlier in the night.
MEYERS: I know that was discussed back in the day, but it was probably a situation where the affiliates weren’t thrilled. It’s all changing really quickly and there are different options for it.
DEADLINE: Do you think NBC potentially getting out of 10pm is good for late-night?
MEYERS: I more just think it’s bad for TV and ultimately, I would not want a bad thing for TV. If it was better for us, it would only be incrementally. Once you give it away, I think it’s a hard thing to get back.
DEADLINE: How do you feel about having to still talk about President Trump?
MEYERS: If we have to talk about him, I certainly prefer when it’s his legal troubles rather than his inevitable rise. I don’t see a lot of other charismatic choices. I always want to give credit to [A Closer Look writer] Sal Gentile and the work he does… when we talk about Trump, there are elements of look at this goofball, but really, we’re trying to hammer home this deal that the GOP made in 2016 is not an easy deal to get out. This is a 30-year lease.
DEADLINE: Sal really puts a shift in with those A Closer Look monologues.
MEYERS: We built these really strong bones for what A Closer Look was with a beginning, middle and end. We used to have an esoteric thing maybe at the end of the show but because the bones are so strong, that esoteric thing that lives within the body of A Closer Look now. We also take these weird tangents that don’t have anything to do with the news, whether it’s a weird conversation with Wally [Feresten], or it’s some observation about why phones have compasses and it’s great. You can only do it over time. [The audience] knows you’re coming back, so they can enjoy it.
DEADLINE: It’s fun to try and figure out which esoteric clips you’ll call back to.
MEYERS: I know. I feel like we should have a real time guessing game. If the show was live, we would. We do shows at 6:30pm and we used to have rehearsal, but now we do the show at 4pm and there’s no rehearsal for A Closer Look so because of that, most nights I’m seeing the clips for the first time.
DEADLINE: That’s clear because you often break.
MEYERS: I break or I’ll comment on it in a way that wasn’t written. I would have written it if I had taken the time to watch it, but I didn’t watch it. It also feels a little bit more like an improv game. Sometimes, I’ll make an observation about the clip, but then it also doesn’t work so I know to take a breath so sound can cut out my whole improvisation, like this is where I ate shit. But the other thing is how often we just leave in the fuckups. We leave in it and things that we would have cut out 1,000% [before]. The most genuine I’m being is how I react to a fuckup, there’s no artifice to it. The great thing is that I’ve been doing the show long enough that, in the first two or three years of the show, a fuckup would have genuinely made me angry. Now I see it as an opportunity. I’m not mad. I know for a fact nobody at my show has mailed it in.
DEADLINE: What do you make of the Emmy changes? At least you won’t get beaten by Last Week Tonight with John Oliver if you’re nominated.
MEYERS: How about that? It’s going to be very, very interesting to see. I like that the answer to how does somebody beat John Oliver is you just move him elsewhere. There’s no reason to think he or SNL was going to lose either of those categories and I do think the Emmys is better if there’s some competition.
DEADLINE: Have you spoken to Lorne about it?
MEYERS: I haven’t. That’s a good question. It’ll be one of those two and that’s almost as interesting as who wins the [late-night] category.
DEADLINE: Talking of SNL, how do you feel about your name constantly coming up as a potential successor to Lorne?
MEYERS: I’m very flattered. First of all, you have to remember, I still can’t believe I was on SNL and then I can’t believe that I got to be head writer and I got to host Weekend Update. Of everything I’ve ever had in my [career], I’m proud of nothing more than being head writer. That will always be the most important thing I’ve done. To hear my name in this conversation is another thing that’s so lovely and flattering. With that said, it is not a job for me. I really think everybody underestimates the idea that Lorne Michaels might just be irreplaceable.
DEADLINE: Lorne has recently said both that he would retire with season 50 and that he wouldn’t retire with season 50. I guess there’s a worry that without Lorne, the show goes away.
MEYERS: I don’t think that’s the craziest thing in the world to imagine. You can learn how to do things, but you can’t learn taste. It’s really easy to underestimate that. The people who love that show the most, don’t agree with every choice Lorne’s made, but there is a consistency to the taste and tone of that show that I don’t think another person could replicate. I also think every host walks in that place and trusts him because he’s an icon and if you take over for an icon, you don’t get to be an icon.
DEADLINE: You also don’t want to be the person who screws up SNL, right?
MEYERS: Whoever goes after the person who replaces in there, that’s the job. They should do a favor and just go to monster.com and hire somebody with no background in TV. Let them do it for six months and have the entertainment press fucking put them on a spit. Tell that person coming in that you’re just here to take the heat and you’ll get a golden parachute. They should get someone’s who not in TV because after they’ll never work in TV again.
DEADLINE: Let’s talk about Corrections. You let your fans, otherwise known as Jackals, decided which episode to submit.
MEYERS: They kept voting for episode 69 but I don’t think we’re going to listen to them. But part of Corrections is that there are no rules to Corrections. [Ed note: NBC submitted episode 66 below]
DEADLINE: I didn’t realize that you took some episodes of Corrections down from YouTube because of the music rights.
MEYERS: I didn’t either. Somebody said where’s episode 40? They were like, ‘Oh, you put in [Eminem’s] Stan’.
DEADLINE: Corrections has been nominated a couple of times.
MEYERS: We need them to move Carpool Karaoke to the category with John Oliver and SNL. If I’m really looking a gift horse in the mouth, it would be nice for the writers to get nominated, which they were last year. I think Carpool Karaoke is a lock, but that’s not the real problem, the real problem is [Tim Robinson’s] I Think You Should Leave deserves it, even more than Corrections. A lot of my politicking for Corrections is tongue in cheek but I do want to make it clear that I think you should vote for I Think You Should Leave.
DEADLINE: Talking of Corrections, are the Jackals the people who watch Corrections or are they only the ones who comment on YouTube?
MEYERS: Good question that I don’t know where I fully fall. I would say the Jackals are those who comment, but I think that it’s a pretty good catch all for the group. As far as this doesn’t really matter at all, I’m still going to try to get to the bottom of this.
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