Her eponymous late-night show may be behind her, but Amber Ruffin has no regrets.
The comedian and Late Night with Seth Meyers staple looked back on The Amber Ruffin Show in a recent interview with Vulture, calling the entire experience “a dream.”
“It was the most fun I’ll probably ever have. Live or die, it was exactly what I wanted. Every minute of that sh*t was exactly the dream,” Ruffin said.
“It was so cool to work with people capable of reaching into my brain and taking out the sparkliest, funnest things and then presenting them to America,” she added. “The fact that I got to do that still will make me catch my breath.”
After becoming a regular on Meyers’ show (which she has been a part of since its launch), Ruffin landed her own weekly late-night-style show on Peacock in 2020. Taped in Meyers’ studio on Fridays, the show was forced to get on its feet without a live audience as a result of the COVID pandemic. After two more seasons, NBC effectively canceled the series in 2023, claiming it would return for specials that have so far yet to materialize.
Ruffin joked about the show’s end on a recent edition of Late Night’s “Amber Says What” segment. “You buy tickets to a Lauryn Hill concert, and that sh*t’s gonna be like The Amber Ruffin Show,” she joked. “Quietly and unceremoniously canceled.”
Even so, it sounds like Ruffin isn’t spending much time looking back on how things could have been different for the program. Asked whether the show would have had a better chance at success on broadcast television rather than a streaming platform, she couldn’t say for sure.
“I have no idea,” she replied. “I mean, sh*t, I’d love to know… I do think it is hard on streaming because you don’t come to streaming to find out what happened today. You specifically go to streaming to get away from today.”
It’s no surprise that Ruffin is looking forward lately. The comedian’s slate is jam-packed. She is a captain on CNN’s new comedy panel show Have I Got News For You, she recently staged a new musical project, and she continues to run a production company under NBCUniversal alongside her “Jokes Seth Can’t Tell” co-star (and fellow Late Night writer) Jenny Hagel.
Ruffin could probably draw from her experience running The Amber Ruffin Show in these new endeavors. In the Vulture piece, she reflected on one of her biggest takeaways from having her own show: the importance of working with people she enjoyed.
“Being someone’s boss is really easy when you love all those people. I loved all those people,” she said. “I realized, ‘Oh, mean bosses and bad bosses just don’t like the people they work with.’ Whereas I would’ve punched a baby for any one of those motherf**kers.”
