Seth Meyers had seven weeks of news to catch up on Monday night—so much so that one segment wasn’t enough.
Returning to Late Night after the show’s longest planned hiatus ever, Meyers stretched an extra-long edition of “A Closer Look” across the show’s first two acts, running more than 21 minutes and covering a summer’s worth of Donald Trump news.
Meyers had previewed the supersized segment earlier Monday, telling TheWrap that he was working his way through a roughly 50-page “A Closer Look” script for his first show back.
After briefly pretending that “nothing happened” during his absence, Meyers tore through a long list of developments from the past two months before turning his attention more fully to Trump’s ban of CNN, MS NOW, and Politico from the White House press pool and the president’s plans for a triumphal arch in Washington that he says would house drones, snipers, and ammunition.
It’s not the first time Meyers has dedicated an unusually large chunk of Late Night to “A Closer Look.” When the show returned from the writers strike in October 2023, he memorably devoted nearly the entire episode to the segment.
As Meyers explained to TheWrap earlier Monday, the show’s unusually long summer hiatus this year was by design. The goal, he said, is to move Late Night closer to an SNL-style schedule, taking more time off during the summer in exchange for fewer interruptions during the fall, winter, and spring.
Watch Monday night’s supersized “A Closer Look” above.
