Late Night with Seth Meyers may be celebrating its tenth anniversary this year, but fans hoping for a big prime time clip show like The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon’s recent tenth anniversary special are in for a disappointment.
As he shares in a new interview with Vanity Fair, Meyers doesn’t think his show “clips well” (which is debatable), but moreover, he says he finds it “very uncomfortable” to re-watch early episodes of the when he wore a suit, delivered a fidgety standing monologue, and the show’s original set resembled what Alec Baldwin described as “a sushi restaurant in Burbank.”
When he has watched back clips from those days, Meyers says it “feels like a fever dream,” adding that all he sees is “suits, and weird hands, and tiny chairs, and a weird desk.”
“It was probably the most scared and uncomfortable I was,” he says. “I felt scared and uncomfortable my first year at SNL, but I just wasn’t on camera that much.”
Meyers went on to say that he hasn’t watched back many of his early shows, because “it’s just not something I like doing. It’s like how people don’t have giant framed photos of themselves from when they were 13.”
Instead, Meyers says he’s content to have marked his show’s tenth anniversary earlier this year with a return visit from his very first two guests–Amy Poehler and Joe Biden.
That visit famously led to another moment that Meyers would later describe as uncomfortable, when he joined President Biden for an after-show ice cream cone downstairs in Rockefeller Plaza and the President participated in an informal press conference with the White House Press Corps.
Meyers and crew are currently on a two-week break from Late Night. The show is set to return with new episodes next Monday June 3rd.
