Seth Meyers is the host of Late Night With Seth Meyers on NBC. The questions and answers below have been edited and condensed.
Q: At a time when there's so much change taking place in late night, you seem supportive of its traditional elements. Do you think of yourself as a monologue guy?
A: I do like telling a monologue. My favorite part of it is when it comes a little bit undone, because that wasn't the freedom you had at (Saturday Night Live's) "Weekend Update." When a joke went wrong at "Weekend Update," your responsibility was to move on to the next joke. Whereas the longer you do this, the more you realize the monologue is a way to warm up the night that is coming after. In the last three months, there's been an effort to do more remote pieces, more filmed pieces, using guests for things. When we started, we tried really hard not to do things other shows were doing. And I think we came to the realization that you can do similar things. Your writing staff and your own sensibility are going to take it in ways that other people wouldn't.
Q: When do you decide to work a comedy sketch into an evening's lineup?
A: It's always just good ideas that motivate things. When our writer Seth Reiss had an idea for the Sorkin piece, for example, my initial comment on that was, I feel like there have been too many Sorkin pieces. Which then put him back to the drawing board of writing a piece about how many Sorkin pieces there have been. Because of how that went, that inspires writers: The Lena Dunham Girls sketch, or the Jon Snow sketch. You constantly have an ear to the ground at your own show to see what's working. The stuff that works leads you down different roads.
Q: What do you make of the recent hand-wringing about whether these comedic elements are somehow antithetical to what late night shows are supposed to do?
A: The hand-wringing all cancels itself out. People say these shows are too conventional, and then they say they're not honoring the legacies of these shows and this isn't what they're supposed to be. If you are someone who wants to watch comedy at this hour, you have so many different choices for what you want. This idea that anyone is taking it away from what it's supposed to be, I don't really buy into.
Q: How do you set the tone for a late night show if you expect it won't necessarily be watched late at night?
A: If you come into work and you ask somebody what they did, the stories of what happened last night are more fun than the stories of what happened yesterday afternoon. We want to do things that you can do at 12:30 at night that you can't do at other times. We tape at 6:30 (p.m.), so it already begins with a lie. (laughs)
Style on 05/19/2015