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Seth Meyers starts every episode of Late Night with Seth Meyers sitting down behind a desk. And it’s a simple desk. It’s brown and plain and there are some tchotchkes bunched to one side. But from that perch, Meyers has turned Late Night into a subversive, ground-breaking hit — and it’s all thanks to how he tackles the news from behind that desk. In the last few months, Meyers has seen his star rise on YouTube, a platform ruled by quirky beauty vloggers and cute animal fails. Somehow, against all odds, Seth Meyers has found a way to make smart comedy go viral.
Meyers is gaining traction for one segment in particular: A Closer Look. The segment runs about six to eleven minutes and uses a combination of wry humor and total clarity to cut through the bullshit that taints much of current news culture. Meyers never gets hysterical; he just gets righteously snarkier. New York Magazine recently did a cover story on Late Night that focused almost entirely on the creation of A Closer Look. The segment’s secret weapon? Its first draft comes from former cable news writer Sal Gentile. It’s then punched up by Meyers, Mike Shoemaker, Alex Baze, and Jenny Hagel — all seasoned comedy writers who know how to wring a joke out of anything from constitutional law to an outright catastrophe.
A CLOSE LOOK at A CLOSER LOOK
Like Jon Stewart and The Daily Show before him, Meyers and his team are getting praise for delivering the news in a way that’s fun and digestible — but that also comes with a distinctly liberal-leaning slant. Meyers isn’t worried that they are editorializing too much. He told Decider, “We don’t look down our nose at cable news. In a lot of cases, they’re doing the reporting that’s helping inform our work. And we are making no effort to hide where we stand on issues. Comedy is best with a point of view and it would be silly to spend all that time talking about something we care about while leaving out what we think about it.”
When asked if he has a particular favorite edition of A Closer Look, Meyers said, “We did a Planned Parenthood Closer Look early on. It didn’t have the most laughs of anything we’ve done but we heard a lot of nice things about it afterwards. That opened our eyes to how the audience had patience for longer form stuff as long as it had some substance to it.” That’s precisely what makes A Closer Look’s popularity so surprising. In the last five years, the late night landscape has been overrun with cutesy sing-a-long segments and mindless celebrity fun. A Closer Look is just Seth Meyers at a desk talking to the camera about the most heady topics of the day.
The segment has always been a jewel in Meyers’ late night crown, but lately it’s gotten downright “buzzy.” That word sometimes means “empty hype,” but there are actual metrics that show how popular A Closer Look has gotten. You can track it all on YouTube.
YOUTUBE vs THE GOOD OLD BOOB TUBE
Visit Late Night‘s YouTube page right now and you’ll see that the show’s most popular clips are almost always A Closer Look (unless, of course, Jon Snow comes over for dinner or Jennifer Lawrence is in studio to flirt). A Closer Look has also jumped in popularity in the last few months. Segments that aired around the election now clock at about 3 million overall streams on YouTube alone (not counting other platforms like Facebook or NBC.com). Just since January 20, they’ve usually reached anywhere between an estimated 1.7 to 3.8 million views. Late Night’s best overnight ratings to date this season are in the 1.6 range. That means that way more people are watching A Closer Look on YouTube than are tuning into the show.
So what matters more to Meyers and his team? Traditional overnights or YouTube clicks? “Here’s a total cop out answer: I value both,” he said. “I really appreciate the audience that joins us every night at 12:35 and watches our whole show but I’m also thankful that people take the time the next day to watch A Closer Look. Although I’m most in debt to anyone who watches it on those little screens at the gas pumps.”
Yes, the Saturday Night Live alum is finally finding his moment via viral clips you can watch on your phone. His success is even more impressive when you consider that he drags behind his competitors in YouTube subscriber numbers. To give you a better idea of why this is a big deal — and an ironic sign of huge success — Late Night’s primary rival, The Late Late Show with James Corden has just under ten times more YouTube subscribers (Corden’s 9.5 million to Meyers’ 1 million). Yet, when it comes to recent individual streams, Meyers’ A Closer Look segment has been handily outperforming all but the most viral of Corden’s content. In the last week, the most popular upload from Corden has been Front Man Battle w/ Queen + Adam Lambert. Yesterday afternoon, it had around 1.8 million views. One A Closer Look from last Friday had around 2.6 million views. Based on subscriber count alone, that doesn’t make sense. Ten times the amount of eyeballs should be on Corden’s clips — but people are suddenly watching and sharing A Closer Look.
When you compare The Late Late Show‘s YouTube metrics with Late Night‘s another pattern emerges. Corden’s Carpool Karaoke might be an online juggernaut, but most of those clips are at least a year old. The segment itself started years ago and has already graduated to spin-off status. The same thing is true of The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon and Jimmy Kimmel Live‘s most popular bits (i.e. Celebrity Rap Battle and Celebrities Read Mean Tweets). Nothing new has been hitting with the same intensity as any one of Meyers’ recent desk pieces. Viewership for Late Night‘s Closer Look segments from the last three months haven’t just been growing in comparison to what Meyers has done, but also with regards to the overall late night field. Something is changing in the world of late night comedy. People are getting more excited about clarity than they are about celebrity.
LATE NIGHT’S NEW LEADERS
See, Seth Meyers isn’t the only late night host whose online popularity has grown lately. Much like Late Night, The Daily Show with Trevor Noah has seen a massive uptick in online views since Donald Trump won the election and took office — in fact, his might be the still untold post-election success story. To date, Noah’s most popular YouTube clip is still his very first one (vowing to carry on Jon Stewart’s work), but that’s closely followed by his electric interview with rising conservative star Tomi Lahren and then by all of his recent monologues. I mean that. All of them. Noah’s recent desk pieces are typically averaging about twice the amount of YouTube views as any random A Closer Look has. The Daily Show is also consistently trending on Hulu above the late night competition. (Which makes Viacom CEO Bob Bakish’s recent decision to rip The Daily Show away from next day streaming services all the more stymying.)
The shift in the late night landscape doesn’t stop online, though. In the old school overnight ratings game, The Late Show With Stephen Colbert has been steadily gaining ground and has been repeatedly overtaking The Tonight Show for the past few weeks. Variety warns that it’s too soon to call this a massive seasonal trend, but these three shows all share one thing in common: They choose political insight over celebrity slumber party games. It’s hard to not see a correlation between late night comedy and current world events. Even Jimmy Fallon, the giggling rapscallion who mussed up Trump’s hair, is trying his hand at harder political commentary. (Though his recent sketch — which casts Fallon as an inept Trump spinning a wheel to determine the fates of millions — struck me as a wee bit out of touch for tense times like these.)
Fallon, Corden, and Kimmel might have been the feel-good, uber-popular late night hosts of the Obama Age, but Donald Trump’s early reign of unease appears to be pushing audiences away from straight up escapism and back to thoughtful, cathartic political comedy. In fact, the lines between politics and comedy are becoming all the more blurred. Last month, news that a White House intelligence briefing had given President Obama and then-President Elect Trump a dossier alleging that Russia had compromising information on Trump coincided in real time with Kellyanne Conway’s sit-down with Seth Meyers. The interview brought Meyers praise for his ability to do what so few reporters had hitherto done — call Conway out on her penchant for pivoting.
You can expect to see more moments like the one with Conway in the future. Meyers said, “We’ve always tried to have a healthy amount of political/news guests but they’re more interesting now more than ever. And with Kellyanne Conway I enjoyed having a spirited, respectful conversation with someone I disagreed with. I’d like to do more of that moving forward.”
For Late Night with Seth Meyers “moving forward” is starting to look more and more like moving on up. And Meyers doesn’t have to leave his desk to do it.
