Like millions of others, Seth Meyers was up into the wee hours of Saturday morning watching House Republicans fail at the very first task they had: to name a Speaker of the House. While it was a terrible week for American democracy, it turned out to be a great week for C-SPAN. At one point, according to The New York Times, more than 1.2 million people were watching the typically hella-boring news network’s YouTube livestream of the Capitol shenanigans. The network also received a record number of downloads to its mobile app and was even a trending topic on Twitter. For Meyers, it basically became the politically aware adult’s version of porn.
“By the way, this all unfolded into the late hours of Friday night and into Saturday morning,” Meyers explained of the tense few moments in which House Republicans finally managed to come to a majority consensus and name Kevin McCarthy as SOTH. “Generally speaking, that is not the sign of a healthy democracy. Nothing good happens after midnight on a Friday. If you’re that old and you’re up after midnight on a Friday, you’re probably drunk and buying something real dumb off QVC.”
But like so many of us, Meyers could not look away at the chaos we were witnessing in real time. Which, in some ways, he thinks might just show his age. As he explained:
When I was a kid and I was up late watching TV, it used to be stuff like horror movies or Cinemax or, let’s be honest, Taxicab Confessions. Oh yeah, baby! Give me 20 minutes of an Eastern European couple in weird disco outfits coming down from cocaine and hitting on a bemused cab driver! It wasn’t much, but before the internet? It was the closest you could get to porn without finding a Penthouse Forum in the woods behind the school.
Now things are so insane that if I’m up late watching TV, it’s not softcore porn — it’s C-SPAN! Because that sh*t has been hardcore! If you were watching C-SPAN as all this unfolded, you got to see some intense and surreal images from a night that was unprecedented in American political history.
You can watch the full clip above.
