Tonight at 12:37a Seth Meyers takes over
Late Night on NBC, and recently at the NBC TCA Winter Press Day he talked to us about how he found out he got the job. Well, he didn’t exactly realize he would be hosting the show when he first got the call. You see, when I asked him how it all happened, he told me, “I might not be the right person to answer you.” Then he explained, “I was on the road, doing a show, in like Iowa, I was staying in a weird hotel, and Lorne (Michaels) called me because it had been printed that I was a frontrunner for this job.” Then he added, “I don’t know if any of you have had the chance to speak to Lorne Michaels, but he has a way of being cryptic and cyclical, and by the time I got off the phone, it took another month for me to realize, he told me I should do this.”
So how has he been prepping for tonight’s premiere episode? Leading up to the debut, he has been sitting down with the writers (who for most of them this is their first late night job) and getting to know them as they get to know him. They have also been doing two weeks of practice shows getting ready for the big night. Then he added this about all of the preparation he’s been doing, “Knowing by the way that after the first show it will just go into the garbage and we’ll start over.”
You see this is advice he got from his boss, Lorne Michaels, who told him, “Everyone thinks the preparation is about today to the first show, but really it is about the first to the second show because this is a job you do in 23 hours.” He also received some wise words from the man who had the job before him, the biggest advice Jimmy Fallon has given him, “is you just have to be patient with things like this. You won’t know what the show is on the first night, you’ll have a better sense in 6 months, a better sense in a year. So just try to approach it with the same integrity week in and week out.”
And guests with integrity would be his ideal gets. When I asked who he would like to book on the show, he told me, “Hillary Clinton would be great. I would love the sort of people that are big political players who have a lot of influence of what is going on in the world.” Then he concluded that thought with, “But we are sort of open to everybody.”
So is he nervous about tonight? A month ago he said, “He is “51% excited for the show and 49% nervous.” I am sure those numbers have stayed the same and I also am sure he will do a great job tonight, and tomorrow when we see a completely different show, and so on.
Even though he has known about this job for as long as it takes to make a baby, you are not prepared for that child until it is born and then parenting changes every day. That is how I think Late Night will be for him, but after he changes a few diapers and downs a few bottles, he will have this whole late night thing figured out. I know I will be watching him grow from an infant to a toddler to a teen and eventually someone who is old enough to stay up and watch his show.
