Seth Meyers is thrilled to be back. After five months off the air due to the writers’ strike, “Late Night with Seth Meyers” returned on Oct. 2 and the host told TheWrap he and the staff fell back into their groove immediately — with an added pep in their step.
“I don’t recommend going through things like a pandemic or a writers’ strike for the purposes of appreciating your job more,” he said. “You should just do it independent of those massive disruptions. But that is a thing they serve to provide, which is a real appreciation for getting to come in to work every day.”
Meyers said there’s an “eagerness” in the staff’s attitude post-strike, bolstered by the fact that he and his writers all feel the work stoppage was worth the gains they received.
“It helps that the writers, myself included, all feel as though the strike was worth it,” he said. “That the gains were considerable enough to have been equal to the sacrifice that was made. So there’s just a nice energy.”
But it’s not as if Meyers was sitting idle all summer. In addition to launching a podcast with his brother Josh Meyers called “Family Trips,” in late August, in an unprecedented move, Meyers teamed up with fellow late night hosts Jimmy Kimmel, Jimmy Fallon, Stephen Colbert and John Oliver for a 12-episode podcast called “Strike Force Five,” the proceeds of which went to pay the staffs of their shows while the strike was still ongoing.
The camaraderie of all the hosts – who had been texting throughout the strike – stood in stark contrast to the previous regime of late night figures who were, to put it nicely, less friendly to one another. And while Meyers acknowledged the first few episodes of their podcast “felt a little like work,” as they navigated the particulars of five people used to hosting their own shows deferring to one another, he pointed to Episode 5 – in which Fallon failed miserably at hosting a version of “The Newlywed Game” that devolved into a dunk session full of laughs and one-liners — as the game-changer.
“I think we’ve been aware for a long time that this era was not the other era,” Meyers allowed. “So it wasn’t as though we needed a podcast to appreciate that we live in a warmer time insofar as how talk show hosts interact.”
Read on for our full interview with Meyers on his return to “Late Night,” how the show navigates a situation like the Israel-Hamas war, getting back to “Corrections” and whether “Strike Force Five” might return.
TheWrap: How are you feeling? Do you guys feel settled yet?
Meyers: Yeah, it’s really sweet and nice how quickly we’re back in the groove. We made the first day purposely harder than it used to be by doing an hour-long Closer Look, and by getting over that hump, Tuesday just felt like business as usual and it’s continued to be with the added element of just everybody being a little bit happier. I don’t recommend going through things like a pandemic or a writers’ strike for the purposes of appreciating your job more. You should just do it independent of those massive disruptions. But that is a thing they serve to provide, which is a real appreciation for getting to come in to work every day.
I know you talked about the pandemic being transformative for the show. I don’t expect the strike was the same, but does anything feel different? Did you guys come back with any kind of fresh perspective on anything that has changed the show?
I just think there’s an eagerness. All the writers who were not working for five months wanted to be writing, and I think that was even more true for the writers of this show. So there’s just a real energy. It helps that the writers, myself included, all feel as though the strike was worth it. That the gains were considerable enough to have been equal to the sacrifice that was made. So there’s just a nice energy. People always, starting with me, like coming into this office every day, and you just feel it probably with a 10% kicker, which is nice.
Was there a text chain over the summer where you were getting out some of those jokes that just couldn’t hold in?
I would say that I highly recommend if you just gotta send out a lot of jokes, start a podcast. Or start two podcasts. Because in the podcast format, you realize the jokes really weren’t that good (laughs). And you benefit from having a writing staff and ultimately no one needs to hear your topical jokes.
I have wildly enjoyed both podcasts. How was this summer for you personally?
The silver lining is I’ve got kids that are of the age where they would rather have me around than not, so I did not feel unappreciated or unloved or unwanted, and it was a good summer with the kids. I sort of scrambled to get away and do some standup where I could. I find that that is restorative and scratches an itch you miss without the show. The highlight of my summer was doing the Beacon with John Oliver and our old friend Brooks Wheelan, the three of us getting to do three nights in a row where I get to sleep in my own bed and do work with a couple of guys I really respect. It was a blast. There were enough things like that where it wasn’t as though I was stuck in some deep dark hole. It was more just chomping at the bit to get back with the people I most like spending time with.
As a “Strike Force Five” enthusiast, was that show as therapeutic for you as it was for the listeners?
It got there. You have five guys who are very used to making all the decisions, so it took us a while to figure out who would have the conch at any given moment. I will sing it from the mountaintops from now until the end of time: Episode 5 changed the game (laughs). We all realized at that moment the thing that we enjoyed the most was also likely the thing the audience would enjoy the most, which was, we’re all friends independently but in a weird way we were figuring out how to be a friend group, and I think Episode 5 was the launch pad for that. Whereas the first couple of episodes, it’s not that I thought they were bad, they just felt a little like work. I think all of us realized that it would also feel like work to listen to if that was our approach, so once it became looser and once it became a little bit more about laughing at one another, teasing each other, then it was a better podcast.
It’s funny you say friend group, because talking to people it felt like you guys fell into grooves of “Oh he’s that friend, and he’s that friend,” and the dynamic became very clear.
Yeah, I think we realized there’s a reason talk shows don’t have five hosts (laughs). I don’t quite know what role I was in “Strike Force Five,” but I do know it’s very different than my role in “Family Trips.” On days where I would do both it was this massive readjustment of, “Wait, hold on, that might be a kind of snarkiness that’s better for the other podcast and I think in this one, I’m supposed to be a little bit softer.” (laughs) Because look, Adam, you’ve said it about me, I contain multitudes. And if you haven’t said I think you should, and I’d like other people to say it too.
As a fan of late night for a long time, this camaraderie kind of collaboration felt unprecedented. The previous regime, I love those guys but they weren’t exactly friends. Did it feel like you guys were doing something different? Was that contrast not lost on you?
I think we’ve been aware for a long time that this era was not the other era. So it wasn’t as though we needed a podcast to appreciate that we live in a warmer time insofar as how talk show hosts interact. The reality is, outside of John here and there and Jimmy in the hallways, I don’t really see the other guys too much, but it’s always nice when I do at things like award shows. It was just sort of necessity bringing it about. I think that independent of the writers strike, and even independent of the fact that we were texting during the writers strike, this would not have happened. Probably independent of Kimmel being friends with Bill Simmons. There were a lot of different things that pushed it towards happening, and one of my big takeaways of the many takeaways I have is that Jimmy Kimmel is not just a host on television, he’s sort of a life host. It’s very, very nice to know people like that because they sort of make your life a lot fuller by the choices they make. So he’s this sort of dude where when he calls up and says, “Hey, we should do this,” no one hesitated. We were pretty quickly into the planning of it.
Again as a late night nerd, it was nice to hear you guys talk shop about each other’s shows but also to hear how each person does it. I’m wondering if there’s anything you learned from your fellow hosts that you plan on using in your show?
It’s interesting because I’ve talked to them in the past and even independently people said, “Oh, we do this thing and we found it’s a real time saver” or “we find that this is creatively great for our group” and historically they haven’t lined up with us. Even though from a wide shot, you can say these shows are all the same, I think when you get granular they are different and especially in process, I think there’s some value to holding on to what makes your show different. When you look at something like A Closer Look, it’s probably pretty irrational of us to lean on Sal Gentile as much as we do, and probably one day we’ll all be born out of how right they were that we’re putting all our eggs in a Sal-shaped basket, but we like that and we like the results, so we’re not trying too hard to mess with the process.
How is Sal doing? That hourlong Closer Look was insane.
Yeah, he’s doing good. He’s very happy to be back. Everybody’s like you, “You work him too hard” and he literally on Tuesday, which is not a Closer Look day, he wrote us late on Monday and was like, “Hey, there’s going to be a House vote, what if I moved my Closer Look from Wednesday to Tuesday?” And Shoemaker very sternly explained to him that we do have other things on our schedule. But he took it very well (laughs).
This is obviously a topical show. How do you navigate covering something like the violence in Israel and Gaza?
Carefully and with as much empathy as you can possibly have. I think that there’s an expectation from our audience — I certainly hope there is — that we try to make serious things funny every night, but it’s very hard to make tragic things funny. So the election of the new Speaker of the House, that’s very serious and will have a lot of real-world implications, that doesn’t at any point feel tragic. Once it’s tragic, you just have to take a step back and realize that’s not what people are coming for. So you say a few things in the beginning and you try to let people know that you take it very seriously and then try to move on, and hopefully they’re not waiting for it.
What was it like to get back to Corrections?
That was weirdly the thing I was most worried about. Because it is I do feel a bit like an island during the writing of Corrections. And that felt a little like being away from stand up for five months, which I try very hard not to do because it’s a muscle that performs better when it gets some reps. But what a gift that two of the people who have the most name recognition in the late night cinematic universe, Wally and Scollins, just decide to stroll in late as I started taping. It was such a was such a delightful reminder of “Oh, Corrections is not meant to be planned.”
Is there a potential for more “Strike Force Five” in the future?
I don’t know. I will say the last one we recorded was the first one we recorded after a night where we all taped our shows, and everybody was more tired. You realize that the joy and the sort of slap-happy nature of “Strike Force Five” is it was our only outlet. I wouldn’t want to press too hard to try to recapture the magic, because it was really cool. I thought it would be more a thing that I looked back on as having been for a good cause, but I do actually think it was a joy to do and it’s lovely to hear from people who enjoyed listening to it.
