A year and a half ago, Late Night with Seth Meyers was doing great. Five years into its run, the NBC series had found a comfortable and successful groove as Seth Meyers and his team leaned hard into tackling politics and current events and had launched recurring segments like “A Closer Look” and “Jokes Seth Can’t Tell” that lit up YouTube every morning. What nobody on staff knew at the time, however, was that Late Night had not yet found its full form, and that a pandemic that forced Meyers to record shows from his attic would evolve Late Night even further, allowing the show to more completely embrace a goofy interior that was always there.

And for Amber Ruffin, the evolution was twofold. Not only did she continue to shine on Late Night – both in comedy segments and in emotionally raw moments like when she opened each show in the wake of George Floyd’s murder – but she successfully created and launched her own weekly late night series, The Amber Ruffin Show, without an audience to workshop what was and wasn’t funny.

Indeed, for both Meyers and Ruffin, the loss of a live in-studio audience resulted in a net gain, as the removal of that “safety net” was more the removal of a stopgap that had, in some ways, tempered the sillier side of both. And as Meyers moved back into his Late Night studio sans audience and The Amber Ruffin Show launched with Ruffin and her charismatic companion Tarik Davis alone onstage, both flourished. In short, if you think the late night talk show format is pretty standard across the board, you haven’t been watching Late Night or The Amber Ruffin Show.

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I recently got the opportunity to chat with both Meyers and Ruffin for half an hour about the experience of making both shows over the last year (you can watch the full conversation in the video at the top of this article), and while neither flat-out said they never want audiences back, it was clear that they’re having a blast in their current formats. “The earliest we’d have audiences back is September,” Meyers said, while noting that removing that in-studio audience has allowed them to make Late Night more serialized in a way:

“I do think it has allowed us to build this weird cinematic universe of characters on our show… I think the audience who came to our show, most of them knew our show, most of them liked our show, probably very few of them watched it every night.”

Indeed, Meyers acknowledged that he’s always felt the most important audience to their show is the one who watches at home every night, and the lack of an audience has allowed them to play directly to that crowd:

“I think people who watch at home there’s a higher percentage chance that they’re tuning in with regularity, and weirdly that’s always been the most important audience and so I feel more connected to them than ever before, almost as a benefit. I feel like removing that proxy audience that came every night has made it like a direct path to the people at home.”

Meyers also admitted that one major benefit of having an audience is when you’re first launching a show, expressing amazement at how successfully Ruffin has been able to get The Amber Ruffin Show off the ground without one. But for her part, Ruffin always saw it as a benefit. “I never, ever for one second felt like, ‘Oh I’m doing a bad job’ or ‘Oh I chose a bad joke,’” Ruffin revealed. “Because no one’s there to not laugh! The only people who have to think it’s funny is you, and that’s it… It’s a laser focus of doofiness, and you really learn your boundaries – and that there aren’t any.”

“We have sort of imposed these boundaries on ourselves based on what I think the structures of these shows have been for years,” Meyers said. “And then for a terrible reason we got to explore what those boundaries were and at least there’s fun in that.” He went on to note that right now, he feels Late Night is in peak form:

“I do feel like this is the purest version of what I think is funny that I’ve ever done on the show before, and I would have told you two years ago, ‘This is the purest version,’ but you take out an audience and you find ways to perform to no one and it’s amazing how liberating it is.”

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Image via Peacock

Ruffin says creating the structure for The Amber Ruffin Show was an organic process, as they knew they wanted to start with a monologue and end with someone saying goodnight, but everything else in between was fair game. It’s that fluid structure that allowed for a segment called “How Did We Get Here,” which began as a one-off but has quickly become a highlight of the show as Ruffin delves into a particular topic of Black history. And the origin story of this segment begins on Twitter, of all places:

“There’s this guy Michael Harriot on Twitter who will write these threads about history, and it’s always some stuff you had no idea about, and it’s always Black history and it’s always great because the way it feels learning about Black history is it’s so special. It’s a part of you that you didn’t know existed but you could feel it.”

Ruffin continued, saying she reached out to Harriot and the rest, well, is history:

“So those pieces were always so cool and I thought, ‘Maybe we could do something like that on the show?’ and then the first one he wrote just blew my mind and then he was like, ‘I got these for days,’ so he wrote more and we loved them and then we quickly had more than we had shows for and we were like, ‘Well maybe this is a every show thing,’ and for now it is, who knows what’s gonna happen.”

Indeed, “How Did We Get Here” relishes in uncovering the truth of a topic at hand that people may be overlooking as the topic takes off on cable news and social media, whether it’s Critical Race Theory or the filibuster.

“Our show loves to tell the truth,” Ruffin said during our interview. “When people are saying crazy things about Black people, I love to say, ‘Oh, well here are some receipts for that ass.’ So 'How Did We Get Here' is just a beautiful way to do that, and now it’s become its own thing.”

Our conversation also touched on the decision to open Late Night with Ruffin telling stories about her encounters with the police following the murder of George Floyd, which Ruffin says began with her trying to write a sketch only to find that Floyd’s tragic death had sparked an entire revolution in two and a half days. “In that time it went from, ‘Oh man here’s another horrible thing’ to ‘The world must change.’”

Meyers acknowledged that they put a burden on Ruffin in asking her to take point in those shows, but said she was able to navigate a tricky tone perfectly:

“There are certain things that happen on our show where we always think this will come across so much better if it’s an authentic point of view from, depending on the story, from Amber from Jenny [Hagel] from Karen [Chee] from people who are far more connected to it than I am. And it’s a burden we put on someone like Amber at a time like that to say, ‘Hey this awful thing happened, do you mind handling it for us?’ and yet she came to us with, as she said the tone was hard to hit and it was perfect.”

Of course Late Night has always been political, and Meyers talked about how the visibility of the show’s writers makes it so that when they appear to tackle tough current events, it doesn’t feel out of place.

During the interview, we also discussed the evolution of “A Closer Look” since Trump left office, the origin story of “Jokes Seth Can’t Tell,” and even Documentary Now Season 4 (Meyers says they hope to start filming this fall). It’s a wide-ranging, often entertaining (on their side, not mine) interview that digs into the evolution of what I feel are two of the best late night shows running right now. It’s abundantly clear that the mix of silliness and smarts that makes Late Night and The Amber Ruffin Show both so compelling is no accident.

In summing up this pretty radical shift, Meyers says that Sal Gentile, a Late Night writer and head writer of “A Closer Look,” distilled the show’s evolution this way:

“He always felt like our show was a sane show for sane people and then we all went crazy at the same time, and so now it’s formerly sane people who are crazy doing a show for formerly sane people who are now crazy.”

Ruffin concurred, putting her admiration for Late Night with Seth Meyers even more succinctly: “It got crazy and never went back.”

Watch the interview in full above, and below is a rundown of topics that were discussed. Late Night with Seth Meyers airs weeknights at 12:30pm ET/PT on NBC and new episodes of The Amber Ruffin Show are released every Friday on Peacock.

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Image via NBC
  • Will they ever stop ragging on Scollins?
  • What was it like for Amber to create and launch The Amber Ruffin Show during a pandemic?
  • The benefits of not having an audience, and how it’s resulted in “the purest form” of Late Night.
  • How Late Night evolved after moving to Seth’s attic, and then into the studio without an audience.
  • Does Seth want to bring audiences back?
  • How did Ruffin settle on the structure for The Amber Ruffin Show?
  • Was there ever any pushback to “A Closer Look?” And how has “A Closer Look” changed since Trump left office?
  • Seth tells a funny story about running into Christine Baranski and his mom asking her about the recurring gag Cicada Cicada.
  • The origin of “How Did We Get Here” on The Amber Ruffin Show.
  • The decision to hand the opening of Late Night over to Amber every night for seven straight shows following George Floyd’s murder.
  • How does Ruffin juggle her responsibilities between Late Night and The Amber Ruffin Show?
  • What’s the origin of “Jokes Seth Can’t Tell?”
  • A detour into Rachel Dolezal as a source of comedy, and how the staff ordered Amber a Cameo from Dolezal.
  • Documentary Now Season 4 update. Meyers says the plan is to start filming in the fall.
  • What is their favorite thing about each other’s show?