This Picture Is Why I'm Nervous About Seth Meyers on 'Late Night'
I like Seth Meyers. I love Late Night. I really want them to be two great tastes that taste great together. But I’m a little nervous.
Of course, low expectations have worked out pretty well for the show’s previous hosts. In 1982, David Letterman was starting completely from scratch, for the few viewers still awake to watch before VCRs became a thing. Conan O'Brien’s on-camera anonymity made him an immediate underdog when he premiered back in 1993. And when Jimmy Fallon took over in 2009, most people only knew him as the guy who cracked himself up all the time on Saturday Night Live.
In each of those cases, the kinks got worked out, the nerves eventually calmed, and they each settled into their own distinctive Late Night personality. They won us over.
My concern with Seth Meyers, I think, is the impression that he’s already got this in the bag. The Time cover wants to be asking, “What’s that charming little scamp Seth Meyers got up his sleeve?” But to me it reads more like Seth Meyers thinking, “Aren’t I a charming little scamp?”
And don’t get me wrong: That exact attitude is what works so well for him on SNL. When he’s making fun of politicians or weird news stories or a crazy character at the desk, the incredulous “REALLY?!?” tone of his reactions makes sense. But when he’s interviewing real people night in and night out, at some point he needs to downshift into being a genuine, likable person and not just the smartest guy in the room.
That may all be part of the plan and we just don’t know it yet. NBC certainly has a bad track record when it comes to PR around its late-night transitions. It just seems like we’re awfully down to the wire here, with the February 24 premiere less than eight weeks away and the Time article still sketchy on the details. Meyers says he’s still figuring out music for the show; Jimmy Fallon announced The Roots as his band a full three months out. Fallon spent almost a year before his first show touring comedy clubs and honing his stand-up chops; Meyers plans to stay at SNL until roughly three weeks before he moves desks.
Are NBC late night launches just on autopilot at this point, especially with Lorne Michaels having overseen nearly all of them? Maybe. Even comparing the coverage of the new hosts over the years, you see the same themes:
What Meyers won’t do is reinvent the format. There will be a monologue, a desk, celebrities–all while the competition has become more numerous and varied. But there are worse things in a host than a level of familiarity. “These kinds of jobs are the definition of overexposed,” Michaels says. “It needs to be somebody you want to spend a lot of time with.”
New Jersey Star-Ledger | May 13, 2008
The press conference was light on details about plans for the new Late Night. “I’m not going to reinvent the wheel with the talk show format” was the closest Fallon came to describing any vision for the show.
Later, after Michaels noted that hosting a talk show leads to such overexposure that you can’t expect to find work after you’re done, Fallon told his old SNL boss, “You started my career; you might as well end it.”
Not directly related to the above themes, but fascinating nonetheless. This is Conan talking to Bryant Gumbel the week after being hired. Equal parts charming and terrifying, in that I remember this interview so clearly and now, god, it looks like it’s from 50 years ago. Was the Today show always this quiet?
But mostly it’s striking how sincere and straightforward Conan comes off here. During all the Leno mess in 2010 (and this clip provides some eerie foreshadowing of Leno being kind of a dick to Conan), Conan said he hates cynicism, that it’s his least favorite quality. Here you can see how so much of his appeal (then and now) is his innate awe at the prospect of being on television.
Right now, there’s something a little too cool, a little too smooth about Seth Meyers to give us the sense that we’re rooting for him in that same way. We kinda like seeing these guys work for it, and everything about this transition so far has had a “This is a total no-brainer” vibe that has the potential to be a huge turnoff if it spills into the show itself. Hosting Late Night might be right in Seth Meyers’ wheelhouse, but it’ll be a hell of a lot more interesting if he pushes himself outside his comfort zone.