One of the
very first articles that appeared on this site was The Mighty
Conan, a fan page celebrating Late Night with Conan
O'Brien. Now that its host has succeeded Jay Leno as the
host of The Tonight Show, it's a good time to look
back at the rollercoaster ride that was Conan's early talk
show career, as well as look ahead to his first week on the
coveted 11:30PM time slot once occupied by television legends
like Johnny Carson and Steve Allen. We'll also describe,
with some sadness and regret, the events that led to
Conan being forced out of The Tonight Show, and where
he may go next.
PROLOGUE
If necessity is the mother of invention, then
Conan's start on Late Night was borne of desperation.
When Johnny Carson vacated his spot as the host of The
Tonight Show, there was a battle between Late
Night host David Letterman and occasional Tonight
Show fill-in Jay Leno to take that spot. Having spent a
decade paying his dues behind Carson, Letterman thought he was
a lock for his job... but he hadn't counted on Leno and his
opportunistic manager working closely with the chairmen at NBC
to take The Tonight Show for themselves. After much
scheming and even a little Metal Gear Solid-style espionage,
Jay Leno became the host of NBC's flagship late night
series... and a disgruntled David Letterman was forced to
either remain second banana at NBC or take his talent
elsewhere.
Filled with a
boundless resentment for Jay Leno that would remain with him
for the rest of his career, Letterman chose the latter
option... and the suits at NBC had an hour of programming to
fill. Saturday Night Live creator Lorne Michaels was
quick to offer one of his former writers, Conan O'Brien, as
Letterman's replacement. O'Brien could be funny, as his work
on both SNL and The Simpsons clearly proved, but did
he have the charisma to take the place of a late night legend?
NBC didn't care. The network needed an ass to fill that chair
while it was still warm, and at the moment, any ass would
do.
Late
Night with Conan O'Brien debuted on September 13, 1993,
starting with a sketch featuring both the host and NBC news
anchor Tom Brokaw. Brokaw put pressure on O'Brien, repeatedly
reminding him of the gravity of his position as the new host
of Late Night, and O'Brien responded by locking the
door of his dressing room, standing on a chair, and threading
his neck through a noose. Before he could kick the chair
away, a page knocked on his door, shouting "Three minutes
'till showtime!" Conan took his head out of
the rope and headed for the stage, grimly accepting
his fate as the replacement for the dearly missed and badly
squandered David Letterman.
IT BEGINS
The first Late Night with Conan O'Brien
set the groundwork for future episodes, with announcer Joel
Godard starting off the festivities with his piercing baritone
voice and stocky Andy Richter serving as the trusty sidekick.
Rather than the crusty big band stylings of Doc Severensen or
the lounge lizard cheesiness of Paul Schaffer, Conan took the
concept of the late night band into the modern age with Max
Weinberg, the drummer of beloved blue collar rocker Bruce
Springsteen. Although Max had all the acting talent of your
average professional athlete, he was frequently included in
comedy sketches along with Richie "La Bamba" Rosenberg and the
rest of the Max Weinberg 7.
Although the
foundation of Late Night was strong, the house set on
it was distressingly flimsy. Conan had the same issues as
other unproven newcomers to the talk show circuit, starstruck
to the point of distraction by his celebrity guests and eager
to please his viewers with no idea of how to actually make
that happen. Tested on MTV and offered as a replacement for
Arsenio Hall in syndication a year later, Jon Stewart did a
much better job of appealing to the jaded twenty-something
viewers that NBC hoped to entice with Conan O'Brien. As
a matter of fact, there were rumors that the network had
considered Stewart as O'Brien's replacement.
(Looking
back, it's somewhat shocking that Jon Stewart's show only
lasted two seasons. Some of its sketches were incredibly
cutting edge, particularly Talk Show Jon, best described as an
early predecessor to series like Action League Now!
and Robot Chicken. Its absence would be more deeply
felt if Conan hadn't improved and Stewart hadn't replaced
Craig Kilborn as the host of The Daily Show in
1999.)
SERVED BITTER
Two years after the debut of Late Night,
the devastating reviews from television critics (The
Washington Post's Tom Shales referred to Conan as a "fidgety
marionette") and mounting pressure from NBC to improve ratings
had clearly taken their toll on Conan O'Brien. His once
cheerful demeanor had gone sour and his comedy was starting to
show jagged edges. Perhaps the best (or rather, the worst)
example of this was one of the first sketches to use the
less-than-sophisticated Synchrovox technology pioneered by the
low-budget cartoon Clutch Cargo. Synchrovox sketches
would eventually become Late Night's bread and
butter, but their debut was inauspicious at best, a shrill
left-wing screed against Newt Gingrich's Contract with America
culminating in Sonny Bono singing a butchered version of "I
Got You Babe" along with other vilified Republican
congressmen.
This was when
I had nearly given up on Late Night. It certainly
didn't help matters that I was almost literally a
card-carrying member of the Young Republicans at the time, but
the unvarnished truth was that the sketch just wasn't funny.
It was a textbook example of transference, with Conan's rising
contempt for his critics seeping into his work. While the
resentment was certainly understandable, lashing out at the
viewers, the only ones who could rescue his floundering show
from cancellation, was not.
Perhaps Conan
wasn't all that concerned with burning his bridges at that
point... in an interview with People magazine published in the
mid 1990s, it seemed as though he had resigned himself to a
post-Late Night fate. If only he knew how much brighter his
future would be in just one year!
THE TURNAROUND
Conan O'Brien fans generally agree that the show
took a turn for the better in 1996. Even Late Night
itself seems to acknowledge this... in the show's tenth
anniversary special, frequent guest Mr. T wheeled a cake
topped with a seven onto the stage. When Conan reminded him
that the show had been on for ten years, the A-Team
star barked back, "Hey foo, you only been funny for
seven!"
There are a
number of factors responsible for Late Night's
sudden, drastic improvement. Writer Robert Smidgel is
undoubtedly at the top of that list... the creator of the TV
Funhouse segments on Saturday Night Live was also
responsible for enduring characters like Triumph the Insult
Comic Dog, as well as the later Synchrovox interviews with
comically exaggerated parodies of Bill Clinton and Bob Dole. A
more carefree attitude, improved show structure, inspired
segments like In The Year 2000, and sharpened interview skills
also contributed to Late Night's transformation from
one of the most forgettable talk shows on television to one of
its best.
The day I
realized Late Night had become something special was
January 2nd, 1996. Conan had celebrated the end of the holiday
season by jamming the Late Night Christmas tree,
ornaments and all, into a chipper shredder. Never before, or
since, have I witnessed someone so perfectly capture how
quickly Americans dispense with the holidays after the last
present has been unwrapped. From that moment on, I considered
myself a fan of Late Night... and for the rest of the
1990s, Conan never gave me a reason to question my
loyalty.
As the years
progressed, Late Night continued to improve.
Characters like Pimpbot 5000 and the Gaseous Weiner were
introduced and quickly became fan favorites, with some even
catching the attention of celebrities. Most of Conan's guests
liked Triumph, or as they often called him, the Poop Dog, but
Nicolas Cage was especially fond of Cloppy the suicidally
depressed Late Night Horse.
Conan O'Brien also played with standard talk show
conventions, including the monologue which traditionally was
the weakest part of Late Night. After he
told a joke about Pamela Anderson with an embarassingly
obvious punchline, his sidekick Andy Richter dropped down
behind him in an iron cage and jubilantly shouted, "'Cuz
she's got big fake BOOBIES!"
END OF AN ERA
As it entered the 21st century, Late Night started
to lose some of the demented brilliance that made it so
successful in the late 1990s. A signficant chunk of it went
out of the door in 2000, when Andy Richter left the show to
pursue a career on prime-time television. That decision hurt
Late Night, with Conan forced to make hasty changes
to sketches like Desk Drive and In The Year 2000 that were
largely dependent on Richter's involvement. However, the
exodus didn't work out too well for Richter, either... neither
the pompously titled Andy Richter Controls the
Universe or Andy Barker P.I. lasted past
one season. The shows themselves were clever, but Richter's
boyish face and pudgy physique simply didn't click with the
more superficial prime-time audience.
Late
Night was also a victim of burnout. Characters like
Shoeverine, a parody of Wolverine from the X-Men
films with loafers for hands, were too topical, lacking the
long-term appeal of the characters they replaced. Furthermore,
sketches that had worked in the past were starting to show
their age, while brilliant ideas like Late Night
Closed Captioning were quietly put into retirement. After ten
years, anyone could see the punchlines of Celebrity Survey
coming from a mile away!
Despite his
show's dip in quality, Conan's past successes and his enduring
popularity with young viewers were getting him noticed at NBC.
After years of grudgingly extending his contract week by week,
the programming executives at the network became much more
eager to keep him around, signing him for years at a time and
even giving the greenlight to a reality series called Lost
(not to be confused with ABC's more
successful Lost), created by O'Brien's
production company Conaco. Conan also hosted the
2006 Emmy Awards, giving him unprecedented exposure to a
prime-time audience.
This would
not be the end of NBC's concessions. In 2004, the network
stunned the world by offering The Tonight Show to
Conan O'Brien, despite the fact that Jay Leno was still
pulling in strong ratings and had no intention of retiring
from his post. Conan graciously accepted the offer, and in
late March of 2009, celebrated by tearing his old studio apart
and giving the pieces away to members of his audience. The
years of obscurity and precarious employment were over...
Conan had become the host of the most famous late night talk
show in history!
THE NEXT LEVEL
The new Tonight Show began on June 1st,
2009, with Conan O'Brien racing from one end of the country to
the other to become its host. So eager was he to begin his
duties that he even tore through a wall to reach the stage,
housed on a Universal Studios lot. After an inoffensive but
largely uneventful monologue, he left to spend some
quality time with a hundred Universal Studios tourists,
cracking jokes about the movie sets and buying them gifts of
cheap toilet paper and off-off-brand soda at a nearby
dollar store. Next came the first guest of the night,
Saturday Night Live alum Will Farrell, followed by a
performance from grunge rock pioneers Pearl Jam.
Fans feared
the earlier time slot would dull Conan's comedic edge, and
indeed, the first week of the show seems to confirm those
suspicions. The new show is more structured than the old one,
with a longer monologue and pricey pre-taped segments
replacing the hilariously low-budget Synchrovox interviews and
bizarre bit characters. Sadly, for every dollar invested in
the slickly produced comedy routines, an ounce of quirky charm
and seat of the pants improvisation has been lost. You need to
look no further than the newly titled In the Year 3000 for
proof... the ratty old smocks with jingle bells sewn into the
fronts are gone, but so are the wonderfully surreal jokes and
unpredictable punchlines.
Also, for all
he brought to Late Night, Andy Richter seems
dreadfully miscast as the announcer of The Tonight
Show. His voice just doesn't have the authority of Joel
Godard's, sounding more like it belongs to the excitable fat
kid in fifth grade who got his hands on a copy of Super Mario
Bros. 3 the night before, and forgot to take his Ritalin in
the morning. It's also a little jarring to have the camera
rapidly switch back and forth between a brightly lit Conan and
his friend, shrouded in darkness. If Ed McMahon could share
the spotlight with Johnny Carson, there's no reason Conan
O'Brien can't reserve a space on his lavish new stage for Andy
Richter.
In spite of
its flaws, longtime fans have to feel an immense sense of
pride for Conan in taking the reins of The Tonight
Show after years of living in the shadow of Jay Leno's
massive chin. They also have to believe that the show
will get better more quickly than Late Night had...
Conan just needs to adapt to his new surroundings, feel around
for the boundaries set by Broadcast Standards and Practices,
and sneak past them when they're not paying
attention.
THE LENO EFFECT
In January 2010, just seven months after his debut,
Conan O'Brien's improbable rise to The Tonight
Show came to a sudden, ugly end. Few thought NBC would have the audacity to
pull the rug out from under Conan so soon after his
Tonight Show debut, but radio personality Howard
Stern had his suspicions. In a Late Night
interview from December 14, 2006, Stern dispensed with his
usual self-congratulatory banter and asked Conan, "you don't
really think this is going to happen, do you?" Stern had
good reason to doubt that Conan's transition to 11:30PM would
go smoothly... after all, Jay Leno, the man who had previously
usurped The Tonight Show from David
Letterman, had never actually left the
network.
Jay Leno
announced that he would retire from The Tonight Show
in 2004, but quickly changed his mind, threatening to pull up
stakes and start a talk show on another network. NBC
president Jeff Zucker panicked and quickly signed Leno to a
new contract, forgetting that he had already made a
prior commitment to let Conan O'Brien have The Tonight
Show. The crisis of Leno migrating to a
competitor was averted, but the decision would only
create more headaches for the network in the immediate
future.
How do you
split one talk show among two hosts? As it turns out,
you can't. Conan O'Brien still expected to bring The
Tonight Show into the next decade, while Jay Leno, whose
production company bears the name Big Dog, demanded
to remain the alpha male of NBC's late night
line-up. Zucker proposed a solution that would keep
all parties happy, while lowering production costs at the
network. Inspired by the success of low-budget reality
television, he offered to give Leno a variety show in the 10PM
time slot and let O'Brien keep his own show at
11:30PM.
In theory, Zucker's plan may have seemed like it
was crafted by Solomon himself, but in practice, it was as messy
and unpleasant as splitting a child in half to appease
its squabbling parents. Although Conan kept quiet
about NBC's decision to undermine his authority as the
king of late night, Norm MacDonald said what he must have been
thinking in his final appearance on Late
Night. "Leno outfoxed you again, didn't
he?," MacDonald teased as the news of Leno's move to 10PM
came to light. He then imitated Conan's manager, saying,
"Remember that conversation we had where you said you'd never
have to f---ing follow Leno again? Well..."
When The
Jay Leno Show finally debuted three months after Conan's
Tonight Show premiere, it was a disaster on
every conceivable level. After a promising
start, ratings for the series plunged to five million
viewers... a low number for the lucrative 10PM time
slot. The viewers who changed the channel
didn't come back for the rest of the night, a trend
frustrated affiliates called "the Leno
effect." This damaged the ratings for the
shows that followed it, including local news broadcasts and
Conan O'Brien's The Tonight Show.
A glance at
Metacritic reveals why The Jay Leno Show was such
effective viewer repellent. The series, a hodgepodge of
Leno's usual comedy and satellite interviews, was given an
unflattering rating of 48. Critics complained that Leno
hadn't delivered on his promise to deliver something fresh and
unexpected to prime-time, instead relying on the same stale
sketches that had gotten him through sixteen years of The
Tonight Show. "This is Jay and that's what he
does," Mary McNamara of the Los Angeles Times
lamented. "The only thing he does,
apparently."
NBC
stubbornly stood by Jay Leno at first, claiming that his low
ratings were offset by the equally low production costs of the
show. However, the network's affiliates had reached the
end of their patience, and demanded for the sake of their news
broadcasts that The Jay Leno Show be put into
permanent retirement. NBC could not risk its affiliates
signing contracts with one of the other, more successful
networks, so it relented, cancelling the ill-conceived variety
show after four months.
"SO IT'S COME TO THIS"
The Jay
Leno Show was scheduled to be taken off the air in
February, but its host remained a liability.
He still had a contract, and there
was still the risk that he could take flight to a
competitor. Jeff Zucker sharpened up his baby-splitting
axe and offered another compromise... Jay Leno could host an
abbreviated version of his show at 11:30PM, while Conan
O'Brien could host The Tonight Show in its entirety
at 12:00AM.
There was just one problem... although the
ever-malleable Leno was open to the idea, O'Brien
considered moving The Tonight Show after a
sixty year run at 11:30PM blasphemous, and defiantly opposed
it. In a press release addressed to "the people of
Earth," Conan explained that "I sincerely believe that
delaying The Tonight Show into the next day to
accommodate another comedy program will seriously damage what
I consider to be the greatest franchise in the history of
broadcasting. I cannot participate in what I honestly
believe is its destruction."
After the
news went public, Conan O'Brien's fans joined together in
a massive show of support for the deposed talk show
host. Rallies were held across the country, Internet
users started an informal club known as Team Conan, and
ratings for The Tonight
Show steadily rose during the last two weeks, hitting an
all-time high of eight million viewers for the
series finale. David Zurawik of the Baltimore
Sun noted that a significant majority of these
viewers were in the sought-after 18-49 age demographic, and
that more of them had watched Conan's finale than
any other evening program on any network that year.
The last
two weeks of The Tonight Show were incredible,
on par with Conan O'Brien's best work from Late Night
in the late 1990s. No longer constrained
by network executives' demands that he tailor his comedy
to a mainstream audience, Conan went all out for his most
dedicated fans, bringing back characters like the Masturbating
Bear and savaging NBC in both his monologues and comedy
sketches. A brief series of
skits introduced characters like the Veyron Bugatti mouse that
"aren't so much funny as they are crazy expensive" for the
network to air.
(Conan
admitted in the final episode that the sketches really weren't
that expensive, but The Roots
drummer Ahmir "?uestlove" Thompson rebutted this on his
Twitter page by claiming that the licensing for songs played
during guest introductions were in the six figure
range, including a whopping $500,000 for The Beatles classic
Lovely Rita. Hell hath no fury like a redhead
scorned, eh?)
The celebrity
guests who were invited on the last two weeks of
The Tonight Show showered Conan with sympathy
and support. Robin Williams ran to a
painting of the NBC building behind
Conan's desk and made obscene gestures while shouting
"IDIOTS! YOU DID THE WRONG THING!!!" Tom
Hanks was less colorful in his assessment of the
situation, but assured Conan that he would be the only host of
The Tonight Show in his home... before inviting him
to take his act there. Folk rock legend Neil Young
requested an appearance on the final episode, then after a
stirring performance of Long May You Run, whispered
to Conan "thank you for all you've done for new
music."
Surprisingly, that support extended to talk show
hosts on other networks. Jimmy Kimmel, David Letterman,
and Craig Ferguson called a temporary cease fire with Conan
O'Brien, and instead set their sights on his
replacement. Kimmel was especially vicious, ambushing
Jay Leno on his own show. When Leno asked
Kimmel about the best prank he ever pulled on someone, he
responded, "Well, once I told a guy I was going to let him
have my show in five years, then when the five years came, I
gave it to him, and I took it back almost instantly. I
think he works for FOX now." Letterman took a few
swipes of his own, poking holes in Jay Leno's "nice guy" image
and showing brief documentaries detailing his rival's
unscrupulous rise to power on late night
television.
EPILOGUE
Despite
a surge in ratings and the fierce devotion of
a massive fanbase, NBC remained intractible in its
decision to take The Tonight Show from Conan
O'Brien and return it to Jay Leno. The final episode
aired on January 22, 2010, and spilled over into the next day,
the fifth anniversary of Johnny Carson's death. Repeats
of Conan's Tonight Show will air until March, when
Jay Leno will once again assume control of the
series.
However,
Conan O'Brien has not been pushed out of television
completely. His settlement with NBC includes a
non-compete clause that prevents him from starting another
talk show until September, but he can make
appearances in shows that aren't in direct competition with
Jay Leno, including dramas and comedies.
It's likely that Conan will pop up on network television
to hold onto some of the incredible momentum he gained
from the last two weeks of his Tonight Show. A
patient on House M.D., a substitute teacher on
Glee... it doesn't matter as long as the roles are
tasteful and keep him in the public eye.
When fall arrives, Conan O'Brien will have
to make a difficult decision about the home of
his next talk show. FOX has
shown the most interest in Conan O'Brien, as its head of
programming Kevin Reilly is extremely fond of both the man and
his work. (This is in stark contrast to NBC
president Jeff Zucker, who was the victim of Conan O'Brien's
practical jokes in college.) It's the most logical place
for him to go, as FOX currently has no late night programming
of its own.
However, FOX
has had little success with late night talk shows in the past,
with its own shows and syndicated series bombing badly in the
late evening. This includes not only the obvious, "what
were they thinking?" failures like The Magic Hour (hosted
by sports non-personality Magic Johnson), but talk shows
hosted by adept comedians like Jon Stewart and Dennis Miller
as well. Arsenio Hall had the longest run of them all,
but his series lasted just four
years. Conan O'Brien could buck that trend,
but it's still a risk, especially with affiliates showing
resistance to abandoning an hour of syndicated programming for
a talk show in an increasingly glutted market.
With ABC and
CBS already quite happy with their horses in the late night
race, Conan's only other alternative would be the vast
frontier of cable television. Lopez Tonight was
a surprise hit for TBS, and the one-two punch of The Daily
Show and The Colbert Report have pulled in huge
numbers for Comedy Central. The latter network could be
a good fit for Conan O'Brien, as it's been a
comfortable home for comedians of his generation for well
over a decade. He may have to swallow his pride and
accept a pay cut, but Comedy Central would offer the kind of
freedom he never had in NBC's stuffy corporate
environment.
Speaking of
NBC, what will happen to the peacock network after this
fiasco? Not as much as you think, at least right
now. There are rumors that NBC is having difficulty
booking guests for Jay Leno's return to The Tonight
Show, but it's a situation that will likely be resolved
in time for its March debut. Jay's ratings will suffer
for a couple of months, but bounce back to where they were
once Conan finds work and the controversy surrounding his
dismissal has blown over.
Jay Leno will have a solid run for a few years,
maybe four or five, but then he'll either seriously consider
retirement or have that choice forced on him by illness.
After that, NBC will have nothing to offer as a
replacement. Jimmy Fallon has barely enough charisma to
carry the 12:30AM slot... he just doesn't possess
the personality or the talent to work as the host of The
Tonight Show. Carson Daly is an even worse choice,
a cardboard cutout whose success hinges entirely on his good
looks. By the time Leno either steps down from The
Tonight Show or is forced out, even those will be
history.
Assuming that
David Letterman retires around the same time, the other
networks will have Jimmy Kimmel, Craig Ferguson, and Conan
O'Brien, with Conan either taking up residence
on FOX or taking over for Letterman on CBS. Every
one of these hosts are proven, time-tested talents with
their own unique brand of humor and a dedicated fanbase.
NBC's next Tonight Show host will have none of these
qualities, dooming the once beloved franchise to abysmal
ratings and ultimately, cancellation. By then, an
older and wiser Conan O'Brien will have realized what David
Letterman already knows... The Tonight Show died when
NBC put short-term profit ahead of long-term
entertainment.