Late Night won’t be Weekend Update rehash
SNL alumnus preps for new NBC hosting gig
Seth Meyers is a former head writer of Saturday Night Live and co-hosted its news parody segment Weekend Update from 2008 until Feb. 1, 2014. His SNL impersonations over the years included Ryan Seacrest, Prince Charles, Sean Penn, Tom Cruise, Donald Trump Jr. and Anderson Cooper.
You probably know this, though. What you might not know is that he’s also a savvy poker player. He won the third season of Bravo’s Celebrity Poker Showdown and donated his winnings to Boston’s The Jimmy Fund to support the battle against pediatric cancer.
He also penned a one-off Spider-Man comic, The Short Halloween, with his then-SNL castmate Bill Hader. Meyers is an avid fan of the Boston Red Sox and Celtics. The Bruins, not so much.
His new late-night talk show Late Night with Seth Meyers bows Monday on CTV and NBC. Here are the funnyman’s answers to some of the questions he faced when he met with journalists at the Television Critics Association tour earlier this year in Pasadena, Calif.
Q: Will you try to do a version of Weekend Update?
A: Well, you know, I’m drawn to the idea of making jokes about current news.
One of the things that was tricky about Weekend Update is often we would write really good jokes Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday that, by Saturday, were stale. Or someone else had done a version of it by then. So we’re excited to get out there every night and do topical jokes about that day’s news.
I don’t think we’ll try to do a version of Weekend Update, though. There will be elements of our show that will steal a little from it, but not our own version. I don’t know if ‘steal’ is the right word. ‘Reminiscent,’ yeah. Q: Who are your first guests? A: Well, we have offers out to Will Smith and U2 but, based on Jimmy (Fallon)’s first-week guest list, I got a bad feeling.
No, our first guest is going to be Amy Poehler. She’s basically Bono’s common-law wife, you know, based on the Golden Globes.
As far as guests go, moving forward, we want it to be not just creative people in showbiz but also authors, politicians, athletes. We don’t want to commit too hard to the sort of guest list we’re going to have but hopefully we can get interesting people not
only that the audience knows but that the audience can get to know.
Q: One of the things Jimmy Fallon did with Late Night was break new bands that maybe other people hadn’t heard before. What are some of the lesserknown, out-of-the-way bands you would like to book for the show?
A: Oh, boy. Well, I should admit that I’m not the same kind of music aficionado that Jimmy is. But I respect that this real estate has long been used to break bands. So, in hiring a music booker, we looked for someone who knows more about music than we do.
One of the things that Mike (Shoemaker) and I feel we’re good at is knowing what we’re not experts in, so we’ve tried to
surround ourselves with people we trust in those areas.
Q: How much in the show will be taped, as opposed to live before a studio audience?
A: The show lends itself to taped pieces. We’re approaching it the same way we approached Weekend Update. That’s the creative DNA we hope to bring to Late Night. We’re going to have fictional people, characters, but we’re going to approach it in a way that they have a completely separate area, so that when you see them there you know it’s not supposed to be a real person.
Q: You didn’t do many interviews at SNL. How are you preparing for Late Night?
A: We did test shows, of course. But I think that’s one area where, historically, anyone who’s taken over a talk show has had to learn simply by doing, more than anything else. ...
Q: How different is your Late Night likely to be from Jimmy Fallon’s Late Night, and the shows that David Letterman and Conan O’Brien did?
A: We have a lot of respect for the three people who’ve done it already. We’re not trying to deconstruct the model. But certainly in the desk pieces, in the written pieces, that’s where you define yourself and separate yourself from the others. We’re going to have a monologue. We’re going to have, obviously, guests, music, strand-up comedy. I think the biggest way you define yourself is in those two or three acts before you bring your first guest out. There’s so much time to fill, and I often found that at SNL, the more time you have, the more creative ideas come out of it.
Q: What have you learned most from watching other talk shows?
A: When you watch these shows, you realize that, really, the biggest difference isn’t the host. It’s how you handle different guests. Usually, when I go on a talk show as a guest, I put a lot of work into the stories. As a writer and standup artist, you know where your laughs are. For me, the best hosts are the ones that go out of the way to help you facilitate your own story. ...