On Monday night’s Late Night with Seth Meyers, Meyers told a joke during his desk monologue that went, “A man in London legally changed his name to ‘Bacon Double Cheeseburger.’ Apparently he was embarrassed by his real name, ‘Bacon Leslie Cheeseburger.’”
The joke bombed. Hard.
After, Meyers smiled to himself, and before moving on, told a story about how the writer of that joke thought the joke would bomb, but Meyers promised it would do well. Meyers was so confident the joke would flourish, he bet the writer $20 that the joke wouldn’t bomb. The explanation was funny. The live audience seemed confused, but it played well on television. This is night and day from a year ago, when Meyers could barely contain the strained look on his face when a joke would bomb. Today, on Late Night with Seth Meyers’ two-year anniversary, Meyers knows how to be a late night talk show host and Late Night looks very little like the show I wrote about a year ago.
I can’t quite figure out why so many writers like to declare Late Night with Seth Meyers a secret. Just earlier this week, The Daily Dot did a pretty glowing piece about the show that was titled “Seth Meyers is getting late-night right—and no one is watching.” To borrow a catchphrase from Seth Meyers, “Really?!?!” Basically the point of that piece is that the show isn’t “buzzy.” But after a cavalcade of “Seth sits down” thinkpieces and many, many declarations that Meyers is hosting the best late night show on television, to paraphrase Paul McCartney, “How buzzy do you have to be?”
And that’s not even looking at the ratings, which are more comparable to Stephen Colbert’s ratings (a show on an hour before Late Night) than they are to its direct competition, The Late Late Show with James Corden. Even in 2016, yes, ratings still matter and Late Night is doing very well. Does Late Night have as many viral hits as The Tonight Show? No, but this is almost by design…
People like to make a big deal about the fact that there are no feuds in late night television any longer. The bitterness between Jay Leno and David Letterman doesn’t really exist today: because, at least publicly, Jimmy Fallon, Jimmy Kimmel and Stephen Colbert all seem to get along well enough. I guess this makes sense because the three of them don’t have a lot in common – unlike Leno and Letterman, who were both star stand-ups at LA’s famed The Comedy Store and could judge how their own careers were going by observing the other’s successes. These rivalries seem to form when there are more similarities than differences: Fallon was a star on SNL; Colbert was a product of Chicago’s Second City, then The Daily Show; Kimmel started on radio. There’s no real overlap here.
Seth Meyers and Jimmy Fallon? That’s a different story.
Both Fallon and Meyers come from the same “Weekend Update” background. (And even though Meyers is nine months older than Fallon, they only overlapped on SNL for three of Meyers’ 13 seasons.) And, yes, when Meyers took the show, he knew he’d never really get to compete with Fallon for guests (sometimes they do share guests), but that doesn’t mean it’s not annoying. Especially in this time-shifted world we live in where everything does kind of seem like its own entity, not “following” anything really – and this is something that has changed even more in the two years since Meyers has been hosting Late Night.
When’s the last time Fallon has appeared on Late Night or Meyers has appeared on The Tonight Show? Their shows are taped in the same building only two floors from each other. And they don’t tape at the same time: Fallon tapes at 5 p.m. and Meyers tapes at 6:30 p.m., yet, we never see any fun and friendly cameos. (Think how many times Stewart was on Colbert’s show and they weren’t even in the same building.) I’m not suggesting there’s a feud, but there’s for sure a competition … and that makes Late Night with Seth Meyers better.
Over the last year, Seth Meyers has, shrewdly, gone out of his way to make sure Late Night looks nothing like The Tonight Show, and there’s a huge market for that right now. (I want to be clear: Jimmy Fallon is very, very good at what Jimmy Fallon does. It’s impossible to argue with his ratings.) With Jon Stewart gone (and Trevor Noah struggling), and John Oliver and Samantha Bee’s shows only airing once a week, there was a prime opening for a “daily” comedy show that centered on current events and politics. A lesser host might just think, “Let’s just do what Fallon is doing because what they are getting a lot of attention.” Late Night is smart to carve its own path. This new iteration of the show is still relatively young, the viral clips will come (and are coming), but the show is just now hitting a stride.
A year ago, Meyers’ show, structurally, looked a lot like The Tonight Show even though I suspect he didn’t think it did. Last year I didn’t really enjoy writing a piece on its one-year anniversary because I’ve been an admirer of Meyers’ work for a long time and, even though the pieces felt in place, Late Night wasn’t capitalizing on them. It felt stagnant. Even though I balanced the praise and criticism, I know it came off as negative.
It made too much sense for Meyers to start his show behind the desk, a format he’s been comfortable with for 10 years now. A year ago I wrote, “why Meyers doesn’t start the show from behind his desk instead of doing a traditional monologue is beyond me; I am not a television producer, so I mean that literally.” I mention this because if I’m suggesting that, of course this was something the people at Late Night were already thinking about. And there are reasons it didn’t happen sooner. (Direct comparisons to a still-Jon-Stewart-helmed The Daily Show being one of them.)
Two years in, Late Night with Seth Meyers is in a good spot in that it’s found its voice. (Though, I can’t help but think that, with the new format, Late Night might benefit from being a 30-minute show instead of a 60-minute show.) But, deep down, I guess what I’m trying to say is that I hope Jimmy Fallon and Seth Meyers don’t start hanging out socially. I like that there’s at least something that looks like a competition here – because that’s the kind of thing that makes people better. And we are the ones who get to reap the rewards of Late Night with Seth Meyers hitting its stride and having a host who now feels confident enough to knows how to react to Bacon Leslie Cheeseburger.
Mike Ryan lives in New York City and has written for The Huffington Post, Wired, Vanity Fair and New York magazine. He is senior entertainment writer at Uproxx. You can contact him directly on Twitter.
