Seth Meyers on how the pandemic changed Late Night for the "formerly sane" people who watch

Entertainment Weekly

"Sal Gentile, who writes 'A Closer Look,' made a really good observation about what happened to our show, which is we used to be a sane show for sane people in a crazy world," says Meyers. "And then we became crazy people. We were a show by and for the formerly sane. Look, if nothing had gone wrong in the world and we decided to do the show from my attic and my in-laws' house, and with a talking painting, I think that we would have been rejected, correctly, by an audience. But weirdly I feel as though we showed our work. Each step of the way made sense only because of the previous step we had taken. A lot of the things happened because the audience pointed them out. I mean, it's a million years ago now, but we did an incredibly ponderous bit about The Thorn Birds because a bunch of people on Twitter and YouTube noted that I had The Thorn Birds in the bookshelf behind me, and how that is a book that every bookshelf from anybody who grew up in the '70s had in their house. There was this weird feedback loop with the audience. That's part of why we doubled down so hard on the sea captain when so many people hated it. We didn't ignore that they hated us. We talked to them about how they were wrong." ALSO: Seth Meyers and Amber Ruffin discuss prioritizing the home audience.