Late Night With Seth Meyers Dropping Live Band

Meyers' band will not be returning live as the show is being "revamped" to save money.

By Russ Burlingame

Late Night With Seth Meyers' house musicians, The 8G Band, will not return when the NBC series starts its twelfth season in September, according to a new report. Keyboard player Eli Janney blames budget cuts for the move, which will kill the fan-favorite interactions between Meyers and occasional drummer Fred Armisen. The change has apparently been in the works for a while, with Eli saying there have been talks going on in the background throughout the eleventh season. Per Eli, the change will be part of a broader "revamp" of Late Night.

Meyers took over Late Night in 2014, when Jimmy Fallon left the show to take over The Tonight Show. Originally created by David Letterman, the series was also the longtime home of Conan O'Brien. After more than a decade on Late Night, Meyers is the presumpitive successor to Fallon on Tonight (although there's a history of that not working out as expected).

"They had been trying to work it out for months, but in the end NBC was adamant about where they wanted the budget to go," Eli told Vulture.

Meyers' contract currently lasts through 2025, which may raise some questions if things doni't improve at NBC between now and then. Late night shows in general are suffering in the ratings, as are most live television broadcasts -- although the historical dominance of The Tonight Show certainly makes NBC a safer home, relatively speaking, than most other networks. The series is produced by Saturday Night Live creator Lorne Michaels, who has recruited every post-Letterman host from the SNL ranks.

The final episodes with the band have not been filmed yet, and it appears the show has plans to acknowledge the change on air and celebrate the band's contribution. Of all the shows on late night television, Late Night has one of the most important musical legacies, with Letterman's interactions with Paul Schaffer, O'Brien's relationship with Max Weinberg, and Fallon's dynamic with The Roots all having distinct feels that helped shape the show.

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"I know that we'll have Fred drumming with us for the last week, and there'll be a little bit of a celebration, I'm sure," Eli told Vulture. "There's been a bunch of ideas floated, but nothing has been written in stone yet. It's also just a sad day for Late Night, because it's been going for over 40 years now. But, sadly, it's the reality of broadcast and a shrinking market — streaming eating into this, and YouTube eating into that. Streaming is not making money, either. So budgets everywhere have been cut and cut and cut. I liken it to a Spotify moment in music, where suddenly it's like, Nobody wants to pay for music. Music gets devalued."

Late Night With Seth Meyers airs on NBC at 12:37 a.m. ET/PT.

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