Seth Meyers Says He Found $20 on the Street and Is Now One of the ‘Finalists’ to Buy Paramount

Tony Maglio
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Seth Meyers had a relatively short set at Monday’s NBCUniversal upfront, but he still got his shots in. Like this one on NBCU competitor Paramount: “I found $20 on the street this morning,” Meyers said. “Long story short, I’m one of the two finalists [to buy] Paramount.”

We’re not sure the Paramount Global special committee is going to take that offer seriously — kind of like Byron Allen’s. See? We’ve got jokes too.

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For real though, the two entities playing tug-of-war with Paramount are 1) David Ellison’s Skydance and 2) a Sony/Apollo Global Management contingent.

Meyers had a few punchlines chambered for his employer. Like this one, on NBCU streaming service Peacock: “Peacock continues to prove that the easiest way to make a billion dollars is to spend eight [billion].”

Peacock is not only (still) losing a ton of money, it has yet to reveal a profitable-by date; even Paramount+ has one of those. (As does Disney+, and Netflix and Hulu already make money; Apple TV+ and Amazon Prime Video are essentially loss-leaders for their respective tech parents.)

The streaming industry in general took it on the chin during the latest installment of Meyer’s annual routine.

“It must feel so gratifying that everybody comes back to advertising. Remember when streamers told you, ‘We’re going to do television a new way, so I’m afraid we won’t be needing your little commercials anymore,” Meyers said to a roomful of advertisers. “Cut to a few years later, every episode of ‘Shōgun’ is interrupted by: ‘Whopper, Whopper, Double Whopper…'”

The upfronts are the mid-May week when major TV (and now streaming) platforms pitch potential advertisers on their upcoming fall slates. They’ve lost their cachet a bit in the streaming era. There are no time slots in streaming and no real seasons, but as Meyers pointed out, there are most definitely commercials these days. How much have the upfronts changed? Even Netflix does an upfront; Amazon Prime Video is doing its first-ever upfront this year.

The “Late Night” host and “SNL” alum had few more NBC-centric jokes, like:

“‘Law & Order: SVU’ has been renewed for a 25th season,” Meyers said. “And this is cool: It’s been on so long that criminals from Season 1 are now eligible for parole.”

And this inside-baseball one:

“NBC is launching a new competition series called ‘Destination X.’ ‘Destination X,’ or as it was originally titled, ‘The Linda Yaccarino Story.'”

Yaccarino is the former longtime NBCU ad-sales chief who jumped ship ahead of the 2023 upfronts to become Elon Musk’s X/Twitter CEO. It hasn’t been a seamless transition. The Yaccarino joke got a huge response in the room. The room, by the way, was Radio City Music Hall — not an intimate venue, but certainly a historic one.

Meyers is always one of the highlights of the upfronts. The other is Jimmy Kimmel, who is the highlight of the week, every year. Disney’s upfront takes place Tuesday afternoon. Meyers’ TV lead-in, Jimmy Fallon, kicked off the NBC upfront with a musical number.

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