Seth Meyers Has Finally Found A World Where Late-Night Talk Shows Are Thriving

Warning: Contains spoilers for the latest episode of Digman!, “Jack And Rose.”

Late-night talk shows are down bad. 

It’s been almost three years since The Daily Show’s last permanent host, Trevor Noah, left the show, and Comedy Central still hasn’t replaced him with an anchor who works all four days each week. The Tonight Show cut 20 percent of its weekly programming last fall. Taylor Tomlinson’s exit from After Midnight this spring convinced CBS to cancel the show rather than replace her. But the loudest death knell for comedic late-night talk shows sounded less than two weeks ago, when CBS abruptly fired host Stephen Colbert and canceled The Late Show. Now, not only do we have to spend the next 10 months in Colbert’s lame-duck era until the show actually ends in May; we also have to hear every idiot’s opinion about it — from Jay Leno to Piers Morgan to Donald Trump. 

How nice then to escape into a fictional world where late-night shows are doing great. Thanks, Digman!

In case you turn your TV off immediately after South Park, let me be the first to tell you: Digman! is its lead-out on Comedy Central. Mostly, it revolves around the titular Rip Digman (voice of Andy Samberg), an archeologist forever trying to climb out of the career hole the death of his wife Bella (Melissa Fumero) left him in. You might well wonder why someone in the field of archeology would be so concerned about his public image: Isn’t he mainly in the low-profile world of academia, or out on expeditions? And he is, but Digman! posits a world slightly different from our own, where archeologists — their job title abbreviated to “arky” — are major celebrities whose standings are regularly ranked on ArkyTV. 

In this week’s episode, Rip and his assistant, Saltine (Mitra Jouhari), have been hired by the Lusitania Museum, languishing in the shadow of the Titanic Museum — literally, since it’s across the street. The museum’s director has tried to raise the Lusitania’s profile by getting a big-budget movie made about it; he asks Rip and Saltine to find the Lusitania’s version of Jack and Rose, the doomed protagonists of the movie Titanic. It turns out the Lusitania DOES have its own version of Jack and Rose: The very ones who were on the Titanic in the movie, because they were real, and they caused every major shipwreck of the early 20th century. But the powers behind the Titanic Museum are “basically like the CIA plus the yakuza,” according to Rip. Anyone who gets close to revealing the horrible truth about the movie’s famous lovers is at risk of murder by Titanic Museum operatives, marked with “JR” tattoos.

While Rip and Saltine are hiding out in his safe house, Rip decides their only recourse is to go to the media. Once they’ve blown the whistle, they’ll be safe, since their murders would draw too much suspicion toward the museum. That’s when we find out what the average Joe is watching whenever they happen to switch off ArkyTV: The Night Show, which Rip is determined to get booked on so that he can tell the world about the Titanic’s horrible history. Saltine wonders if he shouldn’t go to a journalist. “Sadly, no real news organization reaches all of America now, Saltine,” Rip replies. “Only Chortles does. He bridges the divide.” 

Fortunately, Rip and Chortles have a connection, as former boarding school classmates — and that’s not all: “You know that book, Lord of the Flies? We once had to read it for English class.”

Hosted by Chortles Collins, The Night Show has some features in common with Late Night With Seth Meyers. For starters, Chortles is voiced by Meyers. Chortles also has the back-combed hair Meyers used to have in his Weekend Update days. The Night Show’s segment “On the Contrary” is more than a little reminiscent of “Really!,” the former Weekend Update bit Meyers occasionally revives at Late Night.

But there are some notable differences, too. Chortles wears a suit, like Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Fallon and Jimmy Kimmel all do, but which Meyers hasn’t done since he started shooting his show from home, during the pandemic. Chortles has his first guests, arky Zane Troy (Guz Khan) and his wife Gasolina (Lauren Lapkus) play “What’s in the Box?,” which is more of a Jimmy Fallon thing. As the Box is wheeled out, we see another key difference between The Night Show and the current Late Night.

Chortles still has a live band; budget cuts required Late Night to lose the 8G Band. Chortles can accentuate a punchline with a timely rim shot from his house drummer.

As of last fall, Meyers cannot. 

There’s probably one difference between Late Night and The Night Show that’s most pertinent. One is hosted by a Northwestern-educated, Boom Chicago-minted comic, writer, improviser, impression camp graduate and father of three. The other is hosted by a Titanic Museum sicko who has a “JR” tattoo on the back of his wrist, and who holds Rip at gunpoint during a live taping to keep him from revealing what he knows about the real Jack and Rose. Having already teased a big announcement, Rip folds, and says that, counter to previous documentation, the Lusitania’s carpets weren’t tan, but blue.

Ultimately, Chortles can’t prevent the truth from coming out: Jack and Rose’s daughter goes public with the fact that shipwrecks were her parents’ sexual kink, and that all those people drowned so that Rose and Jack could start a family. It’s a dark revelation in an episode full of murders historical and recent — including that of Chortles, attacked by a carpet store owner for broadcasting the blue news, causing customers to cancel their orders of carpet he’d promoted with the slogan “As tan as the Lusitania’s carpet.” 

As Chortles gasps out his last breaths in Rip’s arms, one can’t deny that some conditions for late-night hosts in the Digman! world are more perilous than in ours. We may be hearing this week that Meyers, despite a contract at NBC through 2028, is worried for his mental health if the network ends the show then (or sooner). He’s probably less worried that a floor-covering discussion on the show might lead to his death. 

Given the high stakes that surrounded the carpet conversation, Chortles probably should have been more careful. But at least, before he succumbed to his injuries from taking an enormous carpet staple to the gut, Chortles got to hear his live band, in his studio, one last time.