learning from late-night television

at this moment, i am open to inquiries about seth meyers

Something changed inside my brain when I attended a live taping of Late Night with Seth Meyers.

Before this year, I had never really sat through a full episode of a late-night talk show. I consumed these shows through clips on YouTube, which included digestible five to fifteen-minute interviews with celebrities and listening to middle-aged white men in suits laugh their way through preplanned segments.

As a young kid, I loved listening to the stories these celebrities would tell and never thought much about the hosts of the shows themselves. They had been vessels for storytelling, a direct funnel for learning more about my favorite shows and movies.

Then, I walked into a Studio 8G and watched an episode of late-night television being produced right before my eyes. Then, I started staying up until 12:37 am to catch the start of new episodes of Late Night with Seth Meyers and waking up every morning to watch the tail-end of it after falling asleep with my phone in hand.

waiting for the seth meyers taping!!

I understand the irony of falling in love with late-night TV right when CBS canceled Stephen Colbert’s show, and the future of this long-beloved, established entertainment institution seems more uncertain than ever, especially with claims of dying relevance in the digital age and the waning right to critical political commentary in comedy.

I know what it’s like waiting for the end. There’s a comfort in a determined fate.

As I finish up my last year of college, I’ve been thinking a lot about my future after college—not just in terms of my career and surviving the real world, but also about my friendships. During my several conversations, meals, and campus encounters with people at my college over the first two weeks back, I found myself obsessing over the practice of listening.

In these conversations, I found that I often drove the conversations with curiosity, asking follow-up questions about people’s stories and prodding about other parts of their lives. Reciprocation was frequently rare, which didn’t help, as I was still trying to shrink so deeply into myself in hopes of making sure I took up just the right amount of space to exist.

Almost unconsciously, I started treating every encounter like a late-night talk show interview where I was the host, just happy to hear what everyone else had to say, and on the rare occasion, got to inject a bit of my personality in the process.

seth and dua, besties for life

Of course, I know late-night talk shows are meticulously manufactured and pre-planned. But somehow, watching a conversation unfold in the confines of a studio set with giant cameras, knowing that the magic of editing can always salvage any mishaps, is strangely comforting. The idea of a pre-planned interaction that happens so smoothly is a romantic one in my eyes (Yes, I have watched The Rehearsal already).

Recently, I had an interaction with a friend who said something very hurtful to me. At the moment, I completely froze up and went quiet before quickly withdrawing from the situation. I felt like I had failed the interaction, and that this unforeseen third option in the equation—my emotional inconvenience—ruined the facade of the storytelling and listening equation that had fit so perfectly in my mind.

Over the summer, another intern at my workplace asked why I wasn’t advocating for myself at work. She said I needed to figure out how to set boundaries, to make sure that I wasn’t getting taken advantage of. I told her I didn’t know how to do that.

After I had a solid cry about what had happened with the friend, I retreated into my room to catch the new episode of Late Night and watched Seth Meyers crack jokes with America Ferrera. While I found myself hating how I felt like an outsider in my life and my friendships, I oddly loved being an outsider to their conversation, to watch it happen with no personal stakes.

But most importantly, I yearned for the comfort of conversation within the constructs of late-night talk shows that I knew I wouldn’t get in real life. I yearned for community, something that I had struggled with throughout college, thanks to my complicated relationship with the sports team I used to be on. I yearned to find a sense of self through the pixels on my screen that ended my nights and started my days.

mac tonight’s feature on corrections

There’s a dedicated fanbase for a weekly segment that Seth Meyers does called Corrections, in which he builds elaborate inside jokes based on commenters’ self-righteous corrections. The commenters are a community called Jackals, named after their voracious, unrelenting nature.

Meyers has a love-hate relationship, often denouncing the fan art they send of his greatest fear, the nightmarish Mac Tonight McDonald’s mascot. It’s a mutually-destructive relationship on both sides, and it’s a delicate dance, almost like a conversation but through the cold war medium of YouTube comments.

I’m fascinated by this balance that seems like a stark comparison to the cut-and-dry nature of Meyers’ usual interviews. In Corrections, he isn’t afraid to try bold jokes and put on elaborate bits that he usually wouldn’t do during things like A Closer Look. He isn’t scared to get a little rowdy with the Jackals because, at the end of the day, they can’t survive without each another.

At the end of the day, Meyers made the choice to step outside of the confines of late-night talk show television to create this new two-way street, a very special kind of understanding that isn’t as easily replicable as the interview formula.

He revels in his mistakes instead of running from them. And that’s exactly what makes it special.