This article is going to win a Pulitzer Prize.
So said Seth Meyers. To camera. On YouTube.
As the first reporter to witness a taping of “Corrections,” a YouTube-only series in which Meyers playfully addresses corrections from “Late Night” YouTube commenters that has morphed into a beloved and, at times, delightfully unhinged show all its own, the host opted to make me part of that episode’s narrative.
“Integrity matters, today more than ever, because today a reporter has come to ‘Corrections.’ Yes, the national news is finally waking up to the fact that something special is happening here,” Meyers said while sipping a cocktail.
The belly laughs from the staff in attendance drilled down the inside joke nature of “Corrections,” which is taped with an audience made up only of writers, producers and crew members from Meyers’ show. But since its inception during the pandemic, that inside-joke nature has amassed a loyal following and encouraged Meyers to commit to this bit as hard as he possibly can – revealing what he says is maybe the “truest version” of himself.
“The reality is, I do get to be both sides of myself, because I am genuinely a nice, friendly person, but I’m also easily frustrated,” Meyers told me during a backstage interview after the taping. “I will put the nice, authentic version of myself in the show, and then I will put the frustrated, authentic version of myself in ‘Corrections.’”
Meyers confessed that his friend Pete Gross, who he’s known since they were both 18, once told him that “Corrections” is where he most sees the guy he’s known since they were freshmen in college.
It all started during COVID. Meyers and his team were back in their studio at 30 Rock, but were taping the show without an audience. Devoid of thunderous applause from a crowd full of tourists, Meyers found himself trying to find ways to make his crew laugh while taping the show. But he also waded into the YouTube comments of “Late Night” for the first time. “Reading it, I just realized people love it or they hate it, but the funniest thing to me was really pedantic, tiny corrections,” he recalled.
That was in the back of his mind when he stumbled upon a commenter pointing out that his use of the word “Legos” was incorrect – the plural of “Legos” is actually “Lego bricks.” He asked his executive producer and longtime creative partner Mike Shoemaker if they could record a short video of him addressing the correction and put it online. It was only three minutes long, but even in that first installment the delight on Meyers’ face when his staff starts cracking up is palpable.
“The crew was one of the most essential parts of getting through those COVID shows. Because while I understood that we were doing stuff that people at home were enjoying, it was so fun to surprise them, and then ‘Corrections’ just grew into this thing that became like a super inside joke for everyone,” he explained with a laugh.
As “Corrections” has continued, Meyers has grown more performatively frustrated with his YouTube commenters – dubbed “jackals” – while the commenters continue performatively pointing out pedantic corrections to his show. The fans are feeding Meyers comedic material, and he in turn delights in crafting a comedy piece that can be more serialized, more insular and devoid of politics each week, instead burning his writers or producers or crew by name to big laughs. “Corrections” is, to quote Meyers, “for the real ones.”
It is also, despite being on YouTube, where Meyers really channels his “Late Night” predecessors. “Corrections” feels like a cross between the dry, acerbic nature of David Letterman and the unadulterated silliness of Conan O’Brien, filtered through Meyers’ penchant for a painstakingly crafted turn of phrase.
Indeed, Meyers writes every episode of “Corrections” by himself, and part of the thrill is surprising the entire crew with the material each week – including Shoemaker.
“It’s the only thing I’ve ever done in the entirety of my comedy career that I haven’t run by Shoemaker. It’s almost a reward for him, which is like, ‘I know I f–king bother you with every little thing I’ve ever done — literally I’ll show him texts to people and be like ‘Before I send this will you sign off?’” Meyers laughed.
The hardest part of putting “Corrections” together is scrolling through every comment – which Meyers does. He starts by combing the comments of the previous Thursday’s A Closer Look segment, then he moves on to the previous week’s “Corrections” which he said bears the most fruit. “That’s where the jackals most populate, so oftentimes they’ll say something that will help you build a story,” he explained.
He speaks with the show’s director or props when he needs something special that week, which has ranged from a rigged lineup of puppets that could explode in tune with “Pop Goes the Weasel!” to a three-ringed circus to a full-sized costume of Mac Tonight, the McDonald’s character from the 1980s. And he’s gotten increasingly unhinged with some of the show’s bits — one episode saw him rushing through because he “had to be somewhere,” while another found someone who was clearly not Meyers performing “Corrections” wearing a Bane mask while Meyers did voiceover insisting he was actually there. Basically, what Christopher Nolan is to heady dramas, Seth Meyers is to intricate comedy mythology.
Through it all, the jackals have followed, and in the process have built a movingly supportive community in the unlikeliest of places: YouTube comments. Meyers reads every comment on the “Corrections” videos and has found that they’re frequently full of encouraging, positive messages between strangers.
“Truly one of the nicest things in the world is when people say, like, ‘I’m going through a really hard time,’ and it makes me happy the amount of people who will jump in and be like, ‘Hey, I’m really sorry you’re going through that.’ It’s a very hard thing in this day and age to pull off a supportive online community, but it’s great.”
Witnessing Meyers perform “Corrections” in person, it was striking to see how passionate he is about nailing what amounts to a one-man show. Despite the lack of a studio audience or looky-loos, there was no chit-chatting with his crew before cameras rolled. The usual suspects took their seats – Shoemaker, writer Seth Reiss, “A Closer Look” head writer/producer Sal Gentile, Buck over at the camera – and when Meyers came out, he went straight to the desk, put his head down and got ready to perform.
He acknowledged backstage that while he loves “Late Night,” on Thursdays when they tape “Corrections” afterwards, his NBC show feels like “a pre-show” to the main event.
“This might be my favorite thing I’ve ever done, like genuinely. I think part of the reason isn’t what I’m doing, it’s that the physical audience are my favorite people,” he said. “I think that part of it makes it so special, which I think is what people who watch it and like it realize, like, ‘Oh, he’s not trying to make me laugh, he’s trying to make these people laugh.’ I think the affection everybody who works on the show has for each other comes across.”
That night in early May, a recurring gag about my presence in the audience and a physical duck-duck-goose punchline had the crowd roaring. The silliness was a reprieve from the more serious news of the day, some of which Meyers covered on “Late Night” less than an hour earlier. But for 14 minutes, Meyers put on a little show he prepared for his close friends.
When I told Meyers that “Corrections” felt a bit like his own “Pee-wee’s Playhouse,” he returned to the show’s origins.
“The show really did become sort of ‘Pee-wee’s Playhouse’ during COVID. The most connected I ever felt to my audience was COVID, because I realized I’m doing a show into an iPad, and most people are watching it online,” he said. “So that happened for the worst possible reason, but it was something special, and what if we do something that isn’t about something awful that’s happening, but is about that connection?”
