Seth Meyers Has Dire Prediction for Late-Night Talk Show Fans
Seth Meyers thinks the future of late-night talk shows is looking grim. In an interview with Variety, the longtime Late Night With Seth Meyers host said he’s concerned by the latest trends in the entertainment industry.
Meyers, whose hosted Late Night since 2014, told the outlet, “Unless some major sea change happens, I don’t think there’s going to be a whole new wave of network hosts, in the way there always has been.”
“I feel very fortunate about when I got in – both at SNL and with Late Night,” the 51-year-old added. “But it does bum me out that other people won’t have exactly this opportunity. …If you’re a great lover of the institution of late-night talk shows, there’s probably some sadness in your future.”
Meyers noted that podcasts have “as big of a reach” as late-night shows ever had. “Interesting voices are always going to use the technologies they have at hand to find an audience,” he added. “If you love funny people telling funny jokes and talking to people in interesting ways, that’s always going to be available.”
Meyers’ comments come months after fellow late-night host Jimmy Kimmel spoke out on the Politickin’ podcast to make a similar prediction about the late-night landscape.
“It used to be Johnny Carson was the only thing on at 11:30 and so everybody watched,” Kimmel said. “But now there are so many options, and maybe even more significantly, the fact that people are able to easily watch your monologue online the next day, it really cancels out the need to watch it when it's on the air. And once people stop watching it when it's on the air, networks are gonna stop paying for it to be made.”
Kimmel has already revealed plans to take the summer off for the fifth year in a row. Deadline reported that Anthony Anderson, Nicole Byer, Chris Distefano, Kumail Nanjiani, Fortune Feimster, Alan Cumming and Jelly Roll would all be guest hosting Jimmy Kimmel Live! this summer.
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