Seth Meyers Delivers Appointment TV With Corrections

If the first rule of the Internet is to never read the comments, then Seth Meyers has been gleefully breaking that rule for years. This week, Meyers celebrates his 10th anniversary as the host of NBC’s Late Night talk show, airing at 12:37 A.M. ET on weeknights. Though that large milestone is pretty impressive — Meyers is only a few hundred shows away from surpassing David Letterman’s NBC-era tenure — there’s another one coming up.

Granted, Meyers may consider this somewhat smaller marker of time a bit more dubious. Yes, it’s all well and good that he’s hosted nearly 1,500 episodes of stellar late-night television, blending biting political commentary on the day’s news with a loopy house style of comedy. But Seth Meyers is also approaching his 100th episode of the web series titled Corrections, in which he acknowledges mistakes he or the show itself may have made in the past week. That said, there is simultaneously so much more and so much less going on in Corrections, making it perhaps the series’s masterstroke, especially since it began morphing during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Late Night With Seth Meyers was already a nightly highlight well before the early days of 2020. The series’s recurring segments run the gamut from skewering his writing staff’s monologue work in “Surprise Inspection,” to Meyers’ playful self-awareness of his being a straight white guy in “Jokes Seth Can’t Tell,” wherein show writers Amber Ruffin and Jenny Hagel deliver the punchlines to jokes that may sound tone-deaf coming from him. (A slightly less frequent, but no less funny segment is “Second Chance Theatre,” in which Meyers and some of his Saturday Night Live alums perform sketches that were nixed before ever airing.)

But one of the key markers of success for any late-night host is their ability to adapt and improvise in the moment. Sometimes, it comes down to how well you can play off a monologue one-liner that may not have gotten the reaction you wanted or expected. Meyers is unquestionably very good at riffing on jokes that either don’t land the way he wants them to, or just don’t land at all. But although many of his fellow late-night hosts had to adapt to pandemic-era conditions, from Jimmy Kimmel doing Zoom interviews to John Oliver delivering lengthy diatribes in a white void for more than six months, Meyers went to the extreme. Even after he returned to his studio at 30 Rock, Meyers left behind some of the standard vagaries of hosting a TV show, such as wearing a suit and tie in favor of comfortable sweaters or button-down shirts that lend a more laid-back air to the proceedings.

There is nothing more laid-back, though, than the delightful and daffy Corrections. Meyers and his fellow members of the Strike Force Five podcast have long since welcomed back audiences to their daily (or weekly) grind, but Corrections remains studio audience-free. That doesn’t mean Meyers is doing Corrections to an audience of none. Just as Late Night With Seth Meyers has gradually turned many of the crew members (not just the writers) into on-screen characters, the same is true of Corrections. Often the only person on camera is Meyers, but he cheerfully references everyone from his cue-card guy Wally, to a pair of security guards who Meyers has described as being like Statler and Waldorf, to his executive producer Mikey the Shoe (aka Mike Shoemaker).

On one hand, Corrections is very much an of-the-moment show; even when the show goes on a hiatus for one or two weeks, Meyers returns to primarily reference fairly recent episodes. But the word “primarily” is doing a bit of work there. As any of the regularly watching jackals – the name Meyers has bestowed upon frequent commenters and correctors – knows, there’s often a Russian nesting doll’s worth of inside jokes or callbacks. Sometimes, the running gags are simply watching Meyers balance his seeming enjoyment of riffing on miscues that may have happened in a given episode (often extremely, pedantically tiny ones) and a potential sense of impatience with exactly how nitpicky the commenters can be.

Though each episode of Corrections is very funny, an installment from just after the actors’ and writers’ strikes ended may well be a recent high point. Meyers can’t contain his frustration after having to clarify that there’s no such thing as seagulls, the ankle bone isn’t a bone but a joint with three separate bones, and that peanuts aren’t nuts. “It’s fun doing a show for you!” he sing-song snaps at one point, to a lot of well-deserved laughs.

So much of what makes Corrections special is its interiority. Though Late Night With Seth Meyers has a wider tent (even accounting for the Daily Show-esque “A Closer Look” segment that centers most weekly episodes), Corrections is an in-joke to the max. Part of the inside joke is wondering where the sly tongue-in-cheek nature ends and sincerity begins. (Sometimes that’s not exactly a puzzle, though. Right before the WGA strike began, Meyers ended the last Corrections with a genuine call of support for his writing staff and all writers. Another recent example came when he briefly but kindly eulogized Matthew Perry after the actor’s untimely passing.) Arguably not all the in-jokes make sense if you start watching with some of the most recent installments — to the point that one of the actual in-jokes is Meyers sarcastically pointing out that people probably have to start with Episode 1 if they want to be truly in on the gag, which would mean hours and hours of YouTubing.

Of course, the fun of Corrections is also what makes it hard to really put into words, equivalent to how explaining a joke probably robs it of any of its initial humor. It’s easy enough to describe some of the gags and running bits on Corrections, from the terrifying presence of Mac Tonight (who surely everyone remembers as being a McDonalds’ mascot in the late 1980s) to visual gags at the ends of episodes as Meyers holds an index card with a message written facing the camera to dad-joke style one-liners. (In the episode linked above, when Meyers shares that seagulls are apparently called herring gulls, he dryly states “That’s not what I’m herring.”) But even the extended 50th-episode celebration, with recorded greetings from guest stars as goofily random as Nathan Lane, Werner Herzog, and ice-cream mavens Ben and Jerry, is hard to explain as much as experience. (“You’re gonna want to leave, and then catch up,” Meyers states at the outset of that installment to any curious newbies.)

Corrections has, as Meyers often notes, been nominated for two Emmys in Short Form Comedy, Drama, or Variety Series. (In the spirit of the show itself, it’s worth noting that this writer nearly added a hyphen in “Short Form,” but that would be incorrect based on how the Creative Arts Emmys names that category.) And it has, naturally, lost both of those Emmys, to James Corden’s Carpool Karaoke: The Series. Late Night With Seth Meyers is long overdue for an Emmy or two (having only recently gained nominations for Outstanding Talk Series), but arguably Corrections should remain Emmy-free, proudly and defiantly. A show as daffy as this, as simple to describe yet complex to experience, is too good for awards.

Its loosey-goosey nature may almost defy description, but its pleasures remain as clear and as consistent now as when Meyers started up this series. As it approaches 100 episodes, Meyers has suggested the opposite of doing a celebrity spectacular, instead implying he might stop the web show at that century mark. Though he has indeed been serious a couple times during Corrections, any true jackal can only hope that Seth Meyers is as willing to debase himself for Corrections for at least a hundred more installments.

Josh Spiegel is a writer and critic who lives in Phoenix with his wife, two sons, and far too many cats. Follow him on Bluesky at @mousterpiece.