Late Night With Seth Meyers has been on a roll lately including landing Meyers his first Primetime Emmy nomination last year in the TV Talk Show category. It wasn’t his first dance with Emmy, as he now has a total of 29 nominations including several for writing (including a win for co-penning a Saturday Night Live song), but now has moved clearly into the big leagues.
Even a year later, Meyers couldn’t hide his pleasure after his NBC late-night series finally landed its first Emmy nom in that lineup.
“I mean, I kept saying to people, I’m embarrassed how happy it made me mostly because I’d spent so many years saying you know, this stuff doesn’t really matter,” he said during a panel conversation at Deadline’s Contenders Television: Documentary + Unscripted event. “Then you give it perspective, but you know, I have so much respect for the other people in the category and the category itself. And, you know, for us, it was the first time our producing team got one, and they have so much to do with the quality of these shows. It was a really cool thing to share with them.”
Meyers is dealing with the changing landscape of late-night and now, after the exit earlier in the week of James Corden from the time sector. Late Night remains the only traditional network talk show (at the moment at least) in the late-late-night game. He enjoys it.
“I love getting to do it every day. You know, I did those SNL years where you’re aiming for one show a week and that makes you really tense because you realize you only have one chance to get it right,” he said. “It’s fun to have a show every evening where you get to be a little bit looser with it. You don’t live and die with every monologue joke. I mean, probably a year into doing late-night I told more monologue jokes than the entirety of my years behind the Weekend Update desk.
“I think when you’re doing a show, especially like mine at 12:37 at night, people want to watch a host who’s relaxed who’s not living and dying with every punch line and that’s what the amount of shows we get to do provides.”
Check back Monday for the panel video.
