Late Night with Seth Meyers might be at its best without an audience

UPROXX

The pandemic-infused changes to Late Night "have been for the better," says Mike Ryan in a profile of Meyers. "It’s, now, less a structured late night talk show, and more a madcap hour featuring Seth Meyers and a carnival full of jokes from Amber Ruffin and Jeff Wright; a fake recap of a television show called Tiny Secret Whispers; weird off-camera characters Meyers just has full conversations with; yelling at his cue card guy, Wally; yelling at his writer Mike Scollins about jokes he doesn’t like; Al Pacino impressions; Werner Herzog impressions; Meyers’s new fake musical, Cicada Cicada; and, well, a lot of Meyers laughing. He’s almost now the late night equivalent of Mister Rogers (this is now a show that features talking inanimate objects, like paintings and craft-works) only with Meyers as sort of a playfully reluctant host to all this whimsy, but, by the end, can’t resist. Right now, it’s not a show easily comparable to any other iteration of Late Night, or any other talk show, really. And in the seven years Meyers has been hosting Late Night, I’ve never seen him happier." Asked if this is the best version of Late Night, Meyers says, nodding to his executive producer Mike Shoemaker: “Well, we certainly are aware it’s the most natural version of the show we’ve ever done. Wouldn’t you agree with that?” Shoemaker adds: “Yeah. Definitely, yes. I don’t even know if it’s natural, it’s certainly not labored. We don’t have to work hard to fit it into this box. It doesn’t take much of that. So in that sense, it is very natural.” Meyers responds: "I mean, when I look back at this show and the sort of different acts it’s had, I think the first 18 months was probably the most we ever tried to fit it into a box, and what we thought a late night show was. And then we found our way via ‘A Closer Look,’ certainly, into doing the show we most wanted to do. But, now … I guess I thought we were doing the show we most wanted to do, but it wasn’t the show, so I was wrong. This is the show we’ve most wanted to do for sure."