At This Point, Does Fred Armisen Even Remember How To Get To Late Night With Seth Meyers?

Other than the fact that giving the job to a fortyish white dude was kind of expected, I had no problem with the announcement that Seth Meyers would be taking over Late Night from Jimmy Fallon. Is he kind of smarmy? Sure. But late-night talk shows are the natural habitat for smarm. I was even okay with the news that Meyers had named his former SNL colleague Fred Armisen as his bandleader. Armisen was a musician before he was ever an actor, and since it is the province of hosts to employ their bandleaders in comedy bits, at least Armisen would be better qualified to pitch in than, say, your Kevins Eubanks. Sure enough, Armisen and Meyers started their signature bit early on: Meyers would say he'd heard Armisen had done something outlandish (started a cult, for instance), and Armisen would straight-facedly improvise along, offering details on this premise he was obviously hearing for the very first time when it came out of Meyers's face on stage. But if you only started watching the show in July, all of this is probably completely foreign to you for a very simple reason: Armisen has not been there. In a while.

I am not a crackpot. I just don't know in what sense Fred Armisen can still be called Late Night's bandleader when he basically never shows up for work.

It's not that I want to keep Armisen from pursuing other opportunities -- one of which is his Emmy-winning sketch series Portlandia, a show I heartily enjoy. I know he also shot that show when he was still on staff full-time on SNL, so maybe he thought that scheduling Portlandia around his Late Night obligations would be just as easy. But it turns out that Late Night doesn't have as many bye weeks as SNL -- it does not take the summer off, for starters -- and that Portland is actually pretty far from New York. And so since Armisen had to take off the whole month of July (and I don't have a great feeling about August either), producers apparently decided they'd finally have to acknowledge Armisen's absence and create a segment he could do remotely so that viewers didn't start thinking he was in rehab or something. Presenting FredEx.

But even before Armisen was away shooting Portlandia, he was away for other reasons -- promoting Portlandia, for instance. I don't watch the show every single night, but when I would record it to see a guest I especially liked, it felt as though, after the first couple of weeks, I would see Armisen in 50% or fewer of the episodes I saw. At what point is someone just going to force the issue and tell Armisen that, however much he likes his Late Night With Seth Meyers business cards, this charade has got to stop? I mean, honestly, by now I have band-led almost as many episodes as Armisen has.

I understand why Meyers may have given Armisen this job. It's the same reason that Meyers has had on, as a guest, someone he worked with on SNL in ten out of the nineteen weeks the show's been on the air (and that ten goes up to fourteen if you count people who worked on SNL before Meyers got there). Maybe Meyers has been insecure about his new gig and wanted to surround himself with familiar, supportive faces; having a former SNL castmate in front of the band would give him that human security blanket every single night -- or so he must have thought. So maybe Armisen has been absenting himself this much to show Meyers that Armisen isn't his lucky feather and that he knew how to fly all along!

Or maybe he's just been doing his own shit knowing that there are perfectly well-qualified musicians in The 8G Band with equally chunky black-framed glasses who could cover for him no problem. WELL THAT GUY HAS A NAME. It's Eli Janney. And given how many of Armisen's shifts he's been taking, it should not have been as hard as it was for me to find out who he was. Let's drop the farce that Armisen is still Late Night's bandleader and give Eli Janney a chance to be his generation's Paul Shaffer. I am not a crackpot.