The cover of this week’s Time magazine reminded me of the national entertainment event I am most excited to see this year: Seth Meyers’ ascendance as the fourth host of NBC’s Late Night.
True, most of the hype is geared toward current Late Night host Jimmy Fallon becoming the host of the venerable Tonight Show, whose current host Jay Leno is leaving in February … for good, we presume. Fallon seems much better suited for a successful Tonight Show run than Conan O’Brien, whose star-crossed attempt at taking over for Leno was cut short in 2010. But that’s for another post.
The somewhat unknown quantity is Meyers, who has been the head writer for Saturday Night Live and the show’s Weekend Update anchor or co-anchor since 2006. We’re familiar with him, but not as a talk show host.
And really, as a fellow 40-something, he is taking over a show that in many ways came to be to our generation what Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show was to our parents.
David Letterman brought Late Night to NBC in the early 1980s when the airwaves after Tonight were ruled by dry talkers like Tom Snyder, old movies and test patterns. Then, suddenly, there was life after Johnny signed off, on Letterman’s show with features like Stupid Pet Tricks, wacky interviews with guests like sex therapist Dr. Ruth Westheimer and actor Crispin Glover and musical guests like R.E.M.’s first network TV appearance.
Letterman didn’t blow up the late night format but enlivened it and gave the humor a contemporary sensibility. And he made Late Night an institution.
It is somewhat funny that with O’Brien and Fallon’s moves to Tonight, NBC finally is doing what many of us thought it should have done with Letterman in 1992 and given him The Tonight Show when Carson retired. One of the reasons it has always been hard to warm to Leno as the Tonight Show host is the lingering sense that he benefited from Letterman being robbed.
And granted, it was a little tough to warm O’Brien as the Late Night host at first. He seemed to maybe raise the goofiness level too high, but eventually found his pace and established his own identity over more than 15-year run. The only time I have ever seen a late night talk show live was a December 2006 Late Night with Conan O’Brien on which Meyers was actually a guest.
Meyers will now have big shoes to fill as Fallon, 39, has really made Late Night his own in a relatively brief five-year run. It has been a reign that has overshadowed his lead-in, Late Night mastering the viral clip that has put Fallon’s antics in front of millions who don’t stay up until 12:35 a.m. or DVR the show.
Where Meyers will take Late Night, we really don’t know. But he will inherit an important mantle, particularly to people from our generation.
