For delivering incisive comedy at the speed of news
FIVE HOURS BEFORE TAPING ON A recent Thursday, the eighth-floor offices at 30 Rockefeller Center are a hive of focused activity. In the bullpenlike space that most of the 16 writers for NBC’s Late Night With Seth Meyers share, jokes about a woman arrested for handing out pot cookies at a St. Patrick’s Day parade (“Police became suspicious when nobody got into a fistfight”) and a “two strike” proposal for sexual harassment on New York City public transportation (“Two?!”) are tapped into iMacs without hair-rending or tears. Down the hall in his corner office, Seth Meyers reads through a segment, making minor adjustments. For followers of latenight TV mythology, accustomed to tales of brutal production schedules and hosts’ hurricanelike mood swings, this all might seem a little tame. “I think the pace of SNL and what it puts the staff through is really important for that show,” says Meyers, who arrived at Late Night after eight years as SNL’s head writer. “What we’re doing here doesn’t have to have that kind of pace. The realization was really big for us.”
Four nights a week for the past five years, the 45-year-old Meyers has entered a chilly studio down the hall at 6:30 p.m., encapsulated the news of the day, exposed its breathtaking weirdness, and skewered its deserving main characters—all with precision and steadiness. Fellow network-TV hosts Jimmy Fallon, Jimmy Kimmel, and time-slot rival James Corden use headlines to tee up punch lines in their monologues, but they soon move on to lighter, celeb-driven bits. , by contrast, continues probing with its heterogenous mix of guests (a recent episode featured both Kamala Harris and Henry Winkler) and hilariously barbed segments written and performed by a diverse staff. Meyers consistently wins its 12:35 a.m. time slot in both general ratings and the 18-to-49 demo, earning an average of 1.8 million viewers in its current season. For networks facing increasingly fragmented audiences, these late-night programming slates have become uniquely valuable because they reliably bring in younger viewers. “When I started, there were all these articles saying, ‘Do we need late-night shows?’” Meyers says. “Right now, nobody’s asking that question.”
