On his first “Late Night with Seth Meyers” Monday, and with only a fraction of the hype that greeted “The Tonight Show starring Jimmy Fallon” the week before, the former “Saturday Night Live” head writer and longtime Weekend Update anchor, was raring to go.
Released from sliding screens (and not a curtain, his stab at change), the toothy Meyers had so much material in his monologue he could have done the full hour. It was as if he and his writers had been amassing stuff nonstop for weeks except that most of it was topical. It’s at this, of course, that Meyers excels: crafting the set ups and executing the perfectly economic punchline is the science he’s been perfecting all these years.
It’s a brilliant craft, too, with each word carefully chosen and served with the right emphasis. Meyers is also unflappable: smiling because he’s amused at these funny things, too, and never flustered when a rare joke fails (in fact, he seemed delighted to learn which jokes did bomb, for future reference).
Meyers is a big contrast to his predecessor in the slot, Fallon, who always seemed most uncomfortable in the stand up part and never stayed there long. Meyers, for his part, looked like some of his monologue was cut because it went long.
His main problem is his tone, honed once more after years as a fake anchor. He shouts the set up lines as if he’s doing an exaggerated Headline News. Maybe he would be more comfortable doing it behind an anchor desk. His biggest problem will be in toning it down and being more conversational.
Once he sat at his hosts’ desk — a hilariously flimsy and unsubstantial thing that looked like it was picked up at Staples that afternoon — he began trying a whole new set of skills: real host, not a fake one. So a bit about a flat tire seemed the most difficult thing he did all night (and in a part of the show where he was thanking everyone else, he didn’t thank the Connecticut stranger who volunteered to change their tire).
Rather than go for the huge name as first guest (Fallon, disastrously, went for De Niro on his first “Late Night”), Meyers went for comfort food: his old pal and co-anchor Amy Poehler, whom she reported, he talks to every day. Friends don’t make the best interviews — they laugh too hard at inside stuff nobody else gets, and there wasn’t a whole lot to get out of Amy (though she broke the news that “Broad City,” which she produces, will get a second season on Comedy Central).
For a time, they even seemed to do some improv. Amy pretended she was a difficult guest and Seth kept aiming odd questions at her (“So: You were in Rome?”). From this we could see the process where “SNL” skits are made. It was the same when Seth tried to banter with Fred Armisen at the bandstand.
Armisen’s 8G band kind of thrashed through commercials — a kind of amateurish aggregation following the blast of The Roots. But he made up some weird thing about a new History Channel show he had.
Meyers had tried to interview a number of fake guests as part of Weekend Update (among them, Armisen himself in several incarnations), so this might have been a taste of how he’ll use that.
The Vice President of the United States is the kind of prestige one may not want on his first night as talk show host (secret service for one were messing things up). But Meyers — aided by Poehler who had Joe Biden on her “Parks & Recreaction” previously) mostly just gushed and poked the gentlest fun at him using pictures of Biden mugging at the State of the Union or driving a train (It’s interesting that after all the technological innovations of late night talk shows, they still use those big hand-held cards with pictures on them).
Most hosts would have one serious question for the vice president, but Meyers did not, though he did start to mention their shared love of trains and the obligatory 2016 running decision (nothing yet). Meyers may have been cognizant that one serious issue might imperil any talk show approaching 1 a.m. but still, why have him on there at all if you don’t engage him on something? (A show-and-tell on a future butt of jokes?).
Biden didn’t stick around for the band – a duo named A Great Big World whose songs have been used on “Glee” and “The Voice.” Odd choice, but this may be where the battleground between Fallon and Meyers may be waged in the future. On two shows shot in the same building, which show will likely get the hotter act that happens to be in New York City? Can Meyers carve out a weird corner of upcoming bands the way Fallon did if Fallon is still doing so?
For now, Meyers is delivering one of the sharpest, brightest monologues on TV, but doing so in the middle of the night, brightening up the late night landscape like some post-midnight aurora borealis.