There was a hole in Seth Meyers’s office at “Saturday Night Live” for seven years.
A sketch he’d written was cut for someone else’s piece, and in a fit of what Meyers described as “door-slamming petulance,” he threw the dressing room entrance open so hard that the door handle went through the wall. Michael Shoemaker, a producer on the show who has become perhaps Meyers’s closest professional partner, refused to get the crater fixed.
“I want you to see it every day,” Meyers recalled Shoemaker telling him. “I want you to remember how small of a thing it was.”
Shoemaker said his response to Meyers’s tantrum was a little simpler: “Stop it,” he told him. Then Shoemaker quoted Meyers’s father, whom he had gotten to know: “When something goes wrong, you have to think, what is it that you did that you could have done better?”
Aggravated pettiness might seem at odds with the persona Meyers has crafted over more than two decades on television: 13 years on “S.N.L.,” with the final eight as an anchor of Weekend Update, followed by a decade as the comedically precise but genial host of “Late Night With Seth Meyers.” He struck a similarly charming note in 2019 in his first stand-up special, “Lobby Baby,” about the birth of his second child in the unexpected location the title suggests.
However, when Meyers’s new HBO special, “Dad Man Walking,” premieres on Saturday, the idea that he could be an antagonist — even if only of the most benign and humorous type — might make more sense. It’s about parenting, specifically the reality that “good parents have moments where they really hate what their kids are doing,” Meyers said. And while the broadly cantankerous tone of the special seems like a departure, it actually reflects a facet of Meyers that has always been there.
“Dad Man Walking” is the latest example of Meyers finding a way to channel the testier, less flattering aspects of his personality in more productive ways. And while he has occasionally struggled to control such impulses in the past — see: the hole-in-the-wall story — he now knows how to manage them and make them work for him. In this case, they fueled both the material for “Dad Man Walking” and the somewhat spiteful reason to make the special in the first place.
“I do these specials to prove a thing that nobody has ever asked me to prove,” he said over omelets last month in Manhattan’s West Village neighborhood. “That I can also do stand-up, because I don’t think people see me as one.”
A quarter century as a popular on-air personality at NBC is as close to a tenured position as you can get in the entertainment industry. Given that, “it’s sometimes fun to be driven by a very irrational ‘nobody believed in me,’” Meyers said.
His desire to invalidate his imaginary detractors was one reason (the other being the writers’ strike) for beginning a residency with John Oliver last year at the Beacon Theater in Manhattan. Meyers developed the material that became “Dad Man Walking” during the monthly performances — the residency is scheduled to continue into 2025 — though he had to overcome initial nervousness about how it would be received.
“John is everything you expect him to be if you love him on ‘Last Week Tonight,’” Meyers said. “And I’m worried that I’m not going out as the Seth they know from ‘Late Night.’” That meant showing audiences a part of what Meyers called the “little bit of [expletive] in me.”
Oliver was already aware of this facet of Meyers, on display during the late-night group podcast, “Strike Force Five,” which they hosted during the Hollywood strike to raise money for out-of-work staffers. Alongside Jimmy Kimmel (the show’s de facto leader), Stephen Colbert (the father figure) and Jimmy Fallon (the butt of many jokes), Oliver and Meyers were the group cut-ups, chiming in with one-liners.
“He comes across as kind of a really nice, polite, friendly boy, but he has a really sharp sense of humor that he can bring out whenever he wants to,” Oliver said. “It’s like playing tennis with a friend, right? You can think you’re having a nice rally, banging the ball back and forth, and then next thing you know, he’s just smashed the [expletive] out of everyone. It’s like, ‘Oh, you could have done that at any time, huh?’”
If the comedy special’s aura of exasperation is unfamiliar to “Late Night” fans, it would be less so to Meyers’s three children. He recounted a car ride during which he was “getting into it” with his middle child (and lobby baby), Axel, who was “being impossible.” Ash, his oldest child, turned to his friend and delightedly said, “Oh watch, my dad’s about to lose it.”
Meyers loses it many times in “Dad Man Walking.” (Another proposed title was “White Man Walking,” after a joke in the special about crossing the street with his blond sons, but the special’s director, Neal Brennan, told him that would be “catastrophic.”)
Meyers’s grievances with his children range from the practical to the picayune — for example, he hates the way they roll dice. (“We’re in a breakfast nook, not the craps table at the Bellagio,” he imagines saying to them.) He also focuses on the differences between him and his wife, Alexi Ashe, when it comes to parenting. Meyers said Ashe, who reviews and is welcome to veto jokes that pertain to her, told him: “I don’t care how mean you make me sound, as long as you always make me right.” He obliges, describing the version of himself depicted in the special as “the home dope.”
Brennan said, “He’s good at saying, ‘Don’t get me wrong, I’m also a big problem.’” John Mulaney, who worked with Meyers on “S.N.L.” and remains a close friend, said that when Meyers does material about his marriage, it’s as if he is “almost reveling in tension.”
When I told Mulaney that after seeing this less likable side of Meyers in his standup, I liked him more, he replied, with apparent fondness, “That old trick.” When I later relayed that to Meyers, he went into a spot-on impression of Mulaney, who has talked candidly about his addiction and his personal life in his work.
“Baby,” Meyers said, mimicking Mulaney’s faux-glib showbiz cadence, “I invented that move!”
Meyers is at his most animated when he is impersonating other people. He might embody his father’s anger at him for not wearing his orthodontic headgear as a child, or recreate the awkwardness of getting ice cream with President Biden after an interview and then licking his cone in the background as journalists grilled Biden about the war in Gaza.
Shoemaker, who now produces “Late Night” and is an executive producer on “Dad Man Walking,” said Meyers loves incorporating such performative scenes into his stand-up because “he is a secretly brilliant impressionist.” But not everyone agrees with that assessment.
“Yeaaah, I wouldn’t go that far,” said Lorne Michaels, Meyers’s boss at “S.N.L.” and “Late Night,” sounding very much like Meyers’s impression of him. “But he’s good enough.”
In the exhausting, pressurized environs of “S.N.L.,” creative kvetching is a love language. Andy Samberg, who spent seven years on the show with Meyers, said, “There’s nothing that makes me happier than when Seth is, like, gleefully bothered about something, and he starts rolling.”
When Meyers landed the “Late Night” job in 2014, however, he realized such dishing is counterproductive when you’re the star of the show. He would walk into the writers’ room to gossip, he recalled, and “everybody stops what they’re doing.” He was no longer part of a group, allowed to freely vent, but the leader who had to compartmentalize his feelings — which included profound anxiety about his new gig.
“It didn’t feel like a promotion,” he said. “I was worried it wasn’t going to work.”
Shoemaker said when Meyers came in to “Late Night,” they developed a technique to make the show an anger-less environment. When Meyers feels like he is about to lose it, he and Shoemaker go into an office that in winter overlooks Rockefeller Center’s famous Christmas tree, close the door, and feverishly whisper-rant together. “You want to know what else makes me mad? This [expletive] thing!” Shoemaker yelled sotto voce, demonstrating the tactic. The idea is to give Meyers a way to channel and expel the frustration without subjecting everyone else to it.
“A scared staff is never one that produces the best work,” Meyers said. “Or at least that’s what we’re trying as an experiment, and we’re finding it’s pretty good.”
Others who work on “Late Night” suggest that whatever his initial apprehension about the job, Meyers has created a positive, productive environment — not a given in late-night TV.
“He’s really, really careful with his time, and then the result is, you only ever get the best of him,” said the comedian Amber Ruffin, who writes for and appears on “Late Night” and has had several shows produced by Meyers. “A lot of bosses want the job to be your whole life, but Seth and Shoe” — Shoemaker’s nickname — “want you to be able to have a great life because this is your job.”
“He’s an honorable guy,” Michaels said. Of their own relationship, Michaels added, with his signature monotone emotional register: “I love Seth. Or I care deeply about Seth, or whatever people say now. Definitely, he’s a big part of things for me.”
Meyers has now been the host of “Late Night” for 10 years. He has no plans to leave, but he knows he won’t be an affable host and boss forever. Which is another reason projects like “Dad Man Walking” appeal to him.
“When it’s over, I don’t want to say, ‘What am I going to do now?’” he said of “Late Night.” “I want to be able to say, ‘So I’ll keep doing these things now.’”
For the time being, he will continue the monthly Beacon shows with Oliver and look for new opportunities to expand the “Late Night” footprint. One week in September, he had four shows on NBC within two days, including two episodes of “Late Night”; a stand-alone edition of the show’s boozy “Day Drinking” segment, with the comic Kevin Hart; and an hourlong, post-presidential debate live version of “A Closer Look,” the show’s popular news riff segment.
The live show didn’t go entirely as planned — it was running long, and when Meyers sped up the pace, he misjudged it, going too quickly and ending up with extra time.
“I was visibly angry at myself,” Meyers said of something it’s hard to imagine anyone else noticed, never mind cared about. But his office walls remain hole-free.
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