After nearly two months off the air, Late Night with Seth Meyers returns tonight—and now Meyers is explaining why the show disappeared for so long.
In a new interview with TheWrap, Meyers revealed that the seven-week hiatus—the longest planned break in the show’s history—was intentional, part of an effort to shift Late Night toward a more Saturday Night Live-style schedule that keeps the show on the air more consistently during the busier fall, winter, and spring months.
“There’s a nice consistency to our show when it’s rolling, and we want to be able to provide that as much as we can, as much as is in our control, to our audience,” Meyers told TheWrap.
“Obviously we’re not going to go straight through, but if we can find our way into that SNL schedule that relies on summers off to make sure that when more people are watching TV, we’re on with better regularity, we’re going to do that.”
Meyers acknowledged that the break was unusually long for Late Night. Outside of the 2023 writers strike, he said, the show had never been dark for this long.
“A seven-week break was very out of the ordinary for us,” he said, adding that the atmosphere at 30 Rock on Monday morning suggested everyone was “chomping at the bit to get back.”
Meyers did not vanish entirely. During the hiatus, he and A Closer Look head writer Sal Gentile launched the A Closer Look Out of Office podcast, giving them an outlet for stories they might otherwise have covered on the show.
According to Meyers, that was partly about reassuring viewers that the extended vacation wasn’t exactly his idea of a good time.
“We’ve always really wanted to let people know that we would rather be doing the show than not,” he told TheWrap. “And if it were in our hands, there would be more weeks on the air for us.”
Meyers said he and Gentile initially figured their summer show might run about 20 minutes each week. Instead, episodes routinely stretched toward an hour, and some drew more than a million YouTube views.
For now, though, he’s back where he’d rather be. Meyers told TheWrap that he was reviewing a roughly 50-page “A Closer Look” script for tonight’s return, which will also see him sit down with Kelly Clarkson in her first talk show appearance since signing off her own show earlier this month.
Late Night airs weeknights at 12:37 a.m. ET/PT on NBC and streams the following day on Peacock.
