Lindsey Graham’s sudden death Saturday brought an unexpected end to one of Late Night with Seth Meyers’ longest-running supporting characters: the South Carolina senator’s perpetually disappointed live-in grandmother, Mee-Maw.
Entirely a creation of Meyers and his writers, Mee-Maw turned the host’s Graham impression into a serialized Southern melodrama. Whenever Graham appeared in the news, Meyers would slip into an exaggerated drawl and launch into another chapter of their seemingly endless feud—usually involving biscuits, a one-horse town, Graham’s dreams of making something of himself and a grandmother determined to keep him humble.
The joke worked in part because it had almost nothing to do with Graham’s actual biography. Meyers simply took the senator’s accent and theatrical speaking style and built an increasingly elaborate Tennessee Williams-flavored family history around them. Over time, the impression became less about Graham’s latest political pronouncement than about checking in on the ongoing domestic drama back home.
The show kept adding to the mythology, with Graham alternately defending Mee-Maw’s biscuits, rebelling against her authority and insisting that he was destined for something bigger than their small Southern town. No matter how far the story wandered, Mee-Maw was always waiting to cut him back down to size.
Watch a compilation of some of Mee-Maw’s greatest hits at the top of this post.
