Seth Meyers may be on an extended break from NBC’s Late Night, but “A Closer Look” apparently doesn’t believe in summer vacation.
NBC has launched “A Closer Look: Out of Office,” a new video podcast series featuring Meyers and Late Night supervising writer and producer Sal Gentile catching up on the news they’ve missed while the show is on its unprecedented seven-week summer hiatus.
“We’re on a longer hiatus than usual,” Meyers explains in the premiere. “We thought, what if we jumped on and talked about all the stories that we would have talked about if we had our show?”
Gentile, the key writer behind “A Closer Look,” suggested that rather than trying to duplicate the nightly segment’s breakneck news cycle, the pair revisit stories from the previous several weeks that still seemed worth talking about.
That turns the podcast into something of an unbuttoned director’s commentary for “A Closer Look,” with Meyers and Gentile not only covering the news but occasionally discussing how the regular segment might have covered it.
At one point, after President Trump said Jeanine Pirro had “folded like an umbrella,” Meyers and Gentile debate whether “A Closer Look” would have gone for the obvious callback: footage of Trump himself struggling to close an umbrella.
“It would have been irresistible,” Gentile says.
They then proceed to play it anyway.
The episode also covers Trump’s Air Force One catering-cart saga and—at considerable length—the ongoing mess surrounding the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool.
“A Closer Look: Out of Office” is now streaming on Peacock and YouTube, as well as major podcast platforms.
