Screenshot: Armchair Expert
Seth Meyers doesn’t have any immediate plans to leave Late Night behind, but that doesn’t mean he’s not preparing for life without it.
In a new episode of Dax Shepard and Monica Padman’s Armchair Expert podcast, Meyers reflected on the tenuous future of late-night televison and how he’s proactively expanded his career beyond the daypart. (It appears the interview was recorded prior to the news of CBS cancelling The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.)
Meyers has been active with several side projects, including two standup specials (Lobby Baby, Dad Man Walking) and two podcasts (Family Trips with the Meyers Brothers, The Lonely Island and Seth Meyers Podcast) produced independently of Late Night. Part of the impetus for those projects, Meyers said on Armchair Expert, was making sure he has other creative irons in the fire.
“Do you have the fear that this is going to end tomorrow still?” Shepard asked of Meyers’ NBC show, now in its eleventh year.
“ Yeah, I do,” said Meyers. “I mean, only because it is such a time we’re living in as far as the entertainment industry… I shifted from fearing that I wouldn’t be good enough, and now my fear is weirdly more outside of my control, which is just at some point the ecosystem might not support it.”
“ I guess that’s better than thinking it’s your fault, but it is weird to not feel any control over it,” he added.
Meyers went on to describe his strategy is to “just show up and do the work… That’s the only part they’re paying you to do. It’s the only part you’re good at. All the other problems, we have people that are as good at that as you are at the thing you do and don’t mess around with it.”
“I sometimes take stock of, ‘Oh, this isn’t the best time to be doing what I’m doing,’” Meyers admitted, “but at least I got in.”
Asked by Padman how he would feel about Late Night ending, Meyers described his drive to stay creatively fulfilled.
“ I would worry about myself, like mental health-wise, but I put a lot of thought into like diversifying my skillset,” he explained. “ Certainly, financially I could have been fine just doing the show for the last eleven years, but then it was like, ‘Oh, you know what? I feel like there’s something to trying to build a stand-up career… trying to do other things.’”
“It’s more like trying to find something that makes you as happy as Late Night‘s making you,” he continued. “It’s not just to have busy work or anything. There’s no one entity that can take everything away at once—and I think that’s the scariest situation to be in.”
To that end, Meyers recalled Late Night being on shaky ground during its early years. “Whatever time we’re living in now, I’ve had lower points in the body of the show,” he said. “Early on in the show, we had some NBC executives actually say to us, like, ‘We’re very worried about how the show’s going to go’… with no real instruction as to how to get out of it.”
Of all his creative endeavors, Meyers says he still loves hosting Late Night the most. “There’s a real family element to it… I have a showbiz job that feels like home… It’s the most comfortable place. I have an office that I’ve been in for a long time. They just take such good care of me.”
Last year, Meyers renewed his deal to host Late Night through 2028, and has said he intends to keep hosting the show for as long as NBC will have him. Just last week, he surpassed David Letterman as the show’s second longest-serving host in terms of calendar days.