After nine years of hosting Weekend Update on “Saturday Night Live” and a year and a half doing monologues on every episode of NBC's “Late Night With Seth Meyers,” Meyers has decided he likes the Update format better and has ditched his monologue in favor of a format that better resembles “The Daily Show.”
Meyers initiated the format on Monday without warning and now says the switch is likely permanent.
“We always planned to use the last two weeks of the summer to try out new things, and last night felt good so we’ll stick with it,” Meyers said.
“The idea was to try it for a couple weeks, and if it was a disaster we’d go back,” he said. “We didn’t think it was definitely permanent,” he said, “so we didn’t want to make a big announcement.”
Gone with Johnny Carson are the days when chatshow hosts would simply spew jokes for 10 minutes at the start of every show. With the ascendance of “The Daily Show,” David Letterman, Jay Leno, Jimmy Kimmel and Jimmy Fallon all came to pepper their monologues with clips and graphics. Meyers, however, is the first broadcast talk-show host to do it from a seated position.
