‘Late Night With Seth Meyers,’ go to bed

When Tom Hanks appeared on the second night of Conan O’Brien’s new TBS talk show, he looked around the generic set and said ironically, “You have taken the late-night chat-show format and blown it out of the water!”

But O’Brien had an excuse for moving his version of “The Tonight Show” intact to cable: If he changed anything, it could be seen as an admission that NBC was right in pushing him out.

Seth Meyers, who is basically starting from scratch as the new host of NBC’s “Late Night,” doesn’t have an excuse, but he’s brought nothing new to the gig. Although he has worked through his early stiffness, his performance in his monologues, interviews and comedy bits is average, and his personality and comic stance remain hard to grasp.

The show has chosen to forgo Meyers’ proven skill as a fake newsman without finding anything else that plays to his strengths. Though Meyers should be able to coast for a while on the lead-in audience from Jimmy Fallon’s “Tonight Show,” he’s going to have to come up with some reason for viewers to seek him out.

In his first episode, on Monday, Feb. 24 (or the morning of Tuesday, Feb. 25), Meyers looked like a beginner during the opening monologue. Staring straight ahead for much of it, he seemed to be reading off cue cards. This was in character when Meyers was anchoring the “Weekend Update” segments on “Saturday Night Live,” but it made him seem stiff and nervous doing standup.

By this week’s Tuesday and Wednesday night shows, however, Meyers had learned to look left and right and pretend to make eye contact with the studio audience. It was a great improvement.

Given Meyers’ years of experience working with topical material, it’s surprising that the jokes in the monologues aren’t more on-point. On Wednesday, noting that Steven Spielberg is considering making a remake of “West Side Story,” Meyers said that “the Spielberg version will feature actual sharks and actual jets.”

The comedy bits have been a mixed bag. In the first show, a routine using Venn diagrams largely misinterpreted what a Venn diagram is. On Tuesday, Meyers speculated about what famous people in photos were texting. Ben Affleck, for example, was writing to Christian Bale, “How do you do the Batman voice. Any chance he might be from Boston?”

On Wednesday, Meyers challenged one of his writers to detangle some headphones faster than Meyers could explain the current situation in Ukraine. After the writer lost, he said that Meyers had threatened to fire him if he won.

The celebrity interviews have been a mixed bag. On the first night, Meyers’ former “Update” co-anchor Amy Poehler was reliably delightful, and their banter was quick. Nonetheless, it didn’t sound that implausible when Meyers said, “We have faked chemistry so well over the years.”

Poehler brought out the best in the next guest, Vice President Joe Biden, who seems to have become her soul mate since his appearance on her sitcom “Parks and Recreation.”

On the other hand, Wednesday’s interview with Ice-T and his wife and reality-show co-star, Coco, was a long slog, unredeemed by the fact that Coco and Meyers’ wife attended the same Montessori school in Albuquerque, N.M.

A highlight of each show is Meyers’ brief chats with his bandleader, Fred Armisen, another former “SNL” colleague. Spontaneous if not wholly improvised, they let Armisen’s oddball personality shine. In one, he discussed his new History Channel show, which covers the history of the previous hour and airs whenever the channel tells him.

Those chats underscore two problems with Meyers as host. First, he is more skilled as a straight man than as a monologist. Many of his best moments on “SNL” came when he was the foil to one of the guest commentators on “Update,” like Bill Hader’s Stefon.

But more important is Meyers’ lack of a strong persona that we can identify and that he can use as a springboard for comedy. Whereas David Letterman is the grouchy neighbor, Jimmy Fallon is the eager-to-please little brother and Fred Armisen is the out-there colleague, Meyers is…the smart guy?

When he told an anecdote about his inability to handle a flat tire while on a weekend getaway with his wife, the story suffered because it’s hard to imagine him having a wife, or even having weekends.

A news anchorman, real or fake, can thrive for decades without projecting relatability and humanity. But if Meyers wants to be the last person a lot of people see before going to bed, he’s going to have to find a way to tell us who he is and why we should like him.