Welcome Back, Conan

Compared to the exuberant, triumphant opening video of his first Tonight Show, in which he took the reins of a franchise with such joy that he ran cross-country rather than wait a few seconds for any other mode of transportation to arrive, the opening of Conan O'Brien's self-titled show on TBS bore the scars of the lanky ginger's previous job. This time, Conan was bitter, telling his bosses to screw themselves for ruining his dream and driving off-set, only for a Godfather parody to leave him riddled with bullets and told by stern doctors that he'd never return to network television. After working a series of odd jobs, Conan finally, with the help of guardian angel Larry King, found his way to basic cable, and all seemed right with the world. Until gangsters showed up once more with Tommy guns and tore him apart once more.


Funny as it was, the opening sketch of Conan suggested a continuing resentment for NBC, one that could dominate the focus of his new show. But, apart from a few (excellent) zingers at his old employer's expense, Conan quickly moved into his new job with ease. Whether a conscious attempt to set himself apart from his nemesis, Jay Leno, or simply an expression of gratitude for the fan support that won him his new position, Conan inverted Leno's recent penchant for having the crowd flock around him in a faux-populist move by actually interacting with the crowd of his own volition. As he took his bows before a standing ovation, Conan slipped off behind the camera to hug a woman in the front row. Later, in-between monologue jokes, he casually ducked to the side and shook a guy's hand. Rather than lavish in a sense of community, as Leno does to detrimental effect -- Patton Oswalt nailed it when he said that people creepily congregated around Jay as if he excreted a healing elixir -- Conan poked fun at these moments by playing himself up as a creepy old man playing grab-ass with a captive audience.

One could chalk the strength of his monologue up to the fact that his writers had, oh, about nine months to work on it, but even the delivery was sharp. The nervousness that tinged Conan's first Tonight Show performances, the result of a man -- even a professional -- getting his deepest wish granted on national television and being accordingly stunned, was gone, replaced by the Conan that emerged at the end of his tenure at NBC, a fiery blend of his old Late Night madness with the sophistication (or at least the steely self-confidence) of a host working at 11:30.

Conan is at his best when he's making fun of himself, and beneath the jabs at his former employer were a host of gags at his own expense. Apart from a number of monologue jokes that made fun of himself, Conan brought Andy Richter to the couch, where they broke out Conan Halloween masks that, for legal reasons, were depressingly named "Ex-Talk Show Host" masks. "It smells like tears!" quipped Andy, muffled through the rubber of the hysterically creepy costume. And if that wasn't odd enough, the host then turned to look at the background image painted behind the desk, complete with a moon Conan could move via remote control, leading to a low-fi wobble that made Andy shout "Any Mayans watching this are freaking out!" (In case it wasn't obvious, Richter was as on-his game as O'Brien.)


Compared to the moving but shaky first episode of the Tonight Show, Conan hit the ground running, displaying the best of its host. In some ways, frankly, it displayed better than Conan's previous best. As an interviewer, Conan has always been good at setting up funny and interesting guests with whom he has a prior relationship, but he has been desperately stilted with stars just there to plug material. With a taped message from Ricky Gervais, an interview with Seth Rogen and a musical performance by (and with) Jack White, Conan certainly surrounded himself with buddies, but I found myself most drawn to his chat with Glee star Lea Michele. Where I expected him to stick to the cards and ask simple questions, he suddenly got involved with the guest, engaging in as much of a chatty atmosphere as he did with Rogen -- hell, he might actually have been more on-point with Rogen with his questions concerning Green Hornet. Michele, while not a bore or a ditz, didn't bring a whole lot to the conversation at first, and I feared a dull interview, but Conan's more natural side brought out the best in her, and by the end of their five or six-minute chat, I was a fan of her.

Even the set reflected a honing of Conan's skills. Though he eventually made great use of the expansiveness of NBC's Tonight Show set, his previous digs were simply too massive, creating too wide a gulf between host and audience and leaving the vast majority of the room unused. Only when Conan started running races, practicing Hollywood stunts or bringing elephants in the place did he finally make it feel human. TBS gave him a set that resembled his large but still intimate Late Night studio, bigger than the cramped, '80s-Letterman style room he got at the start of his run but manageable. He still has plenty of room to do something big, and I hope he brings some of the more daring (if expensive) ideas from his Tonight Show to TBS. But the smaller set works to his benefit and allows him to seem more human instead of the occasional detachment that came with Conan's previous show, even when it took off in terms of quality. (Now they just need need to condense that Lopez Tonight set; does he tape in a goddamn abandoned warehouse or something? You can hear the mic echo, for God's sake.)

If there was anything I wanted to see done differently, it was the ingenious bit of Conan's "first guest," introduced to much fanfare, only for it to be the curator of a nutcracker museum who walked from stage right to stage left, pausing just long enough to hand Conan a notably stereotypical leprechaun nutcracker before exiting the building. It was pure Conan, but I couldn't help but wish he'd asked her some questions. Some of Carson's (and Letterman's) best bits came from interviews with the unconventional "normal" people in society, not celebrities. Regular people weren't so much plugging something as discussing a passion, and in all their weirdness they were endearing -- who can forget Johnny inviting a woman on who collected potato chips, only to play one of his most riotous jokes on her?

I also view the unchanged talk show format with a slight amount of hesitation. Coming off his live tour, which mixed performance art, monologue, taped segment and various forms of off-the-wall, borderline avant-garde comedy into something that befitted his absurdity. Yet the traditional talk show format is how he worked for 20 years, and just because he worked within a formula didn't mean he was stilted. Sure, his monologues work mainly because of his wacky delivery and recovery, but the two staples of talk shows -- monologues and interviews -- have been weak spots for him. Even so, he made his show(s) work, and work brilliantly. As he showed last night, he still had the touch.

We'll see what happens when the initial luster wears off, the guests aren't stacked to be friends of Conan and the writers have to come up with material daily instead of on their paid leave, yet something was different in Conan last night. While far from arrogant, he did not let the humbling power of his recent career path subdue him. He was not a man meekly inheriting a dynasty but a confident leader establishing his own, a Yu the Great for basic cable. It's easy (and sensible) to take Conan at face value when he says he chose the title because "it makes me harder to replace," but his decision also acknowledges, perhaps painfully, that talk shows no longer have a legacy beyond their host. No one watches The Late Show or The Late Late Show, they watch "Letterman" or "Craig." O'Brien admirably brought a reverence for the Tonight Show's history to his all-too-brief run, but Leno had spent nearly 20 years pretending as if no one else had ever hosted the thing. Hell, he had to: the king of late night was, is and forever shall be Johnny Carson, and Leno forced him out with weaselly business practices. As much as people, even of my generation, continue to love Johnny, it was Jay's show long enough that he became synonymous with it, and also with its slide into tame mediocrity. Now, Conan can build something from the ground up, and in a forum where the financial stakes are lower and the potential for creative freedom is higher. Some continue to mock the transition as a downgrade, and it is -- he lost the Tonight Show; everything else is a step down -- but moving to basic cable in an era when nearly everyone has regular cable and the distinction no longer matter was a masterstroke that sidestepped the hairy issues of working for FOX. I can't wait to see how Conan works with the change.

I hope that a more madcap style seeps into the show's actual format and not just in Conan's behavior, but either way, Conan's return exceeded my expectations. Once they get settled in, I imagine we'll be treated to a new set of bizarre characters, the always enjoyable moments when Conan leaves the studio and just interacts with people as kooky as him, and the legacy of a great comic will be restored. Glad you're back Conan; Neil Young sang for Conan's last Tonight Show, "Long may you run."

My Thoughts on the Leno/Conan Fiasco

Oh good Lord, I'm writing about late night television again? Hey, consider yourselves lucky: I've written three pieces on late night over the last year, only one of which made it here. I reviewed the first week of the new Tonight Show and The Jay Leno Show; for the former article I gushed about my giddiness of Conan's ascension. In the latter, I marveled at the trainwreck I saw coming from a mile away and detailed what it felt like to actually watch him from start to finish.

But I do not come here to tell you that Leno isn't funny or that Conan is superior. I shouldn't even be writing about this at all, not simply because the parties involved have not reached final decisions, not simply because the Internet has already suffered floods of discussion on the subject but because, frankly, this is the Internet, and thus it already sides with Conan. Do not let the inundation of #saveconan tweets and outraged Facebook statuses lull you into a sense that the world shares your pain: that way lies the box office failure of such guaranteed hits as Snakes on a Plane and the hysterical Presidential campaign of Ron Paul.

For the Tonight Show's audience, as it stands now, relies on older crowds than the ones who typically spend their days on social networking sites. Or at least, that's what the Tonight Show's audience was, before they gave Conan, not exactly a spring chicken but someone who undoubtedly plays to a younger crowd, the gig. It was a gamble by NBC (more on that in a moment), but after only seven months, mass fallout from the results of their late night lineup changes, the network decided to make a bad situation much, much, immeasurably much worse.

NBC's decision to cancel The Jay Leno Show due to its adverse effect on the 11 pm news programs of NBC's affiliates has created a snowball that turned into a shitstorm, spiraling out of NBC's hands just as rapidly and catastrophically as I just lost control of that metaphor. In an attempt to keep all of their hosts, NBC has proposed that Leno return to his original time slot at 11:35 for a half-hour program, while Conan would retain the Tonight Show but shift the program forward a half hour to 12:05, affecting Jimmy Fallon's Late Night and Carson Daly's Last Call similarly.

What does this mean for the parties involved? Well, first let's discount Carson Daly (everyone else has) and Jimmy Fallon; moving Daly from 1:35 to 2:05 will have no effect, and Fallon might actually benefit from a shift, relaxing pressure on him to give him the time to find his footing (and might I say that he's not been half as bad as some myopic, implacable naysayers would have you believe?). The parties most clearly affected are, obviously, Jay and Conan.

Conan assumed the role of the host of the Tonight Show in June of 2009, but he technically won the position in 2004, when NBC gently strong-armed Leno into giving up the program in five years' time in order to secure Conan, who didn't lobby for the job over Jay's convenience but was receiving enough lucrative offers from other networks with the approaching end of his Late Night contract that Jeff Zucker ensured Conan's loyalty (though he turned down the other networks) by promising him the biggest prize in late night. Leno never enjoyed the idea of having to let go of the Tonight Show, leading NBC to give him his 10 pm program to prevent him from jumping to another network.

For those who know anything about the last major upheaval in late night TV -- and, thanks to this mess, those of us who didn't snag a copy of The Late Shift before it went out of print have had all the relevant details given to us by various articles (see my review of the hysterically bad TV movie adaptation here) -- Leno's situation in '04 contains a certain cosmic irony: where Conan did not court NBC into giving him the promotion, Leno and his camp lobbied hard for the Tonight Show back in '92, with such ferocity that Johnny Carson grew tired of the infighting and announced an early retirement. Instead of turning the program over to Dave Letterman, who'd started Late Night and turned into a program that, in some circles, was just as legendary as Carson's show, NBC offered it to Jay, who tested higher with older audiences and wasn't as abrasive as the acerbic Dave.

Yet Jay has always displayed a tendency in his comedy to be just as nasty with Dave, albeit with the sanctimonious image of the everyman; salvaging some issues from my article on Jay's first week with his new program, the one that sticks out the most is my surprise at Leno's twisted bite. I love acidic, black humor, but I don't know how to explain Leno's brand of humor while still avoiding the non-issue of whether it's funny (because let's be clear: ratings trump talent when it comes to programming). Watching him present the image of an avuncular buddy-type host while engaging in bits like "Jaywalking," where a staffer or celebrity guest (not Jay himself) takes to the streets to find airheads who cannot answer simple trivia questions for the snickering delight of Jay and his audience.

I bring this up because it displays the deep hypocrisy that Jay and what few vocal supporters he has are building around him in this situation: most people who know Jay have bent over backwards to let us know what a "nice" guy he is. His entire persona is based upon that perception. But one of the first things they teach you in journalism school -- the first, if my first class is any indicator -- is that, at the end of the day, you review actions, not personalities and private lives. I do not dispute that Jay Leno is a nice man to his guests, to his family and friends and anyone else with whom he might converse. But he's been at the epicenter of the two biggest fuckups in late night history, one brought on directly by his intense lobbying and the other the result of his refusal to go quietly into that good night, a justifiable position to take albeit one underscored by the general pettiness of his decisions regarding the late night shift.

Comedian Patton Oswalt placed the Leno/Conan debate -- for this debacle has become largely an excuse for people (almost all of them Conan fans) to compare the two -- in intelligent and reasoned terms and managed to criticize Leno without taking the easy route of "he ain't funny" that has dominated the Internet firestorm. Oswalt charged Leno, once one of the most beloved stand-ups among both the mainstream and other comics (Bill Hicks, who later eviscerated the big-chinned one for selling out, cited him as an early influence), with giving up his talent to create a vanilla program; Oswalt also mentioned that both Conan and Dave were such big fans of Carson (Dave, Conan) and Letterman himself (Conan) that they used their programs as tributes to their heroes while exploring all the areas they, as superfans, wished their predecessors would have gone.

That's the overriding issue with Jay's relentless pursuit of the Tonight Show gig: he doesn't seem to want to make the program his. He wants to make it not someone's else's: not Johnny's, not Dave's and now, possibly, not Conan's. Why, as Oswalt asked, does he want the job so desperately? On the Tonight Show, Leno had no POV for his jokes; where Dave cast a mood of crusty misanthropy that made him ironically unsuited to the role of late night product-seller and guest-schmoozer and Conan played up his Harvard nerd image that served him more as a writer than a stand-up comedian playing one venue every night, Jay was just...Jay. That's what makes his comedy, funny or not, deeply insidious and, ultimately, tragic: he's trying so hard to please everyone that he's even sold his comedy's soul.

Conan released a statement amidst frenzied speculation that revealed his deep and abiding love for the program he inherited, refusing to move the Tonight Show into a slot where it would actually be tomorrow and citing the memory of the program's legacy as something bigger than himself (compare this to Leno's original assumption of the Tonight Show, wherein he didn't mention Johnny in the hopes that no one else would either). When he inherited the gig back in June, perhaps the most satisfying aspect of the transition was that, in a way, Letterman finally won. Even for someone like me, too young to remember Dave's Late Night and turning to YouTube for enlightenment, the idea that Conan, who so clearly modeled his version of Late Night after Dave's while taking it to fantastic new places both metaphorical and literal (who can forget his sojourns to Finland, Chicago, Toronto and elsewhere?), could get the job felt like a validation of off-beat and unique humor. In fact, Conan's statement itself proves his talent as a writer. The Harvard grad crafted the perfect weapon in a situation as volatile as this: a classy letter. By placing the Tonight Show above himself, by also displaying deference the proposed change's effect on his old show Late Night and what it would mean to the memory of Letterman's tenure there and to Fallon's current work on it, Conan establishes himself as the enemy of The Man, a humble and grateful employee who reached his breaking point and did not explode but calmly announced his inability to go along with a disastrous plan. It's a statement that practically forces NBC to release him from his contract (thus giving him a colossal payout and freeing him to go elsewhere), all without ever playing the victim à la Jay or attacking the people who treated him so well for 16 of his 17 years with them.

Numerous commentators have reacted positively to the news that Conan might head to Fox if NBC presses ahead with returning Leno to 11:35, but it still feels like a loss to me: Conan tried so hard to make the Tonight Show his own while respecting the memory of Steve Allen, Johnny Carson and, yes, even Jay; Leno spent two years floundering before Hugh Grant threw him a lucky break and inexplicably ensured his success for the next decade, but Conan, who worked in his early Late Night days under weekly threat of cancellation until he molded that program into a classic, now faces the prospect of losing the show after seven months. However, I want him to be on a show (and network) that treats him fairly, and Conan's right to believe that moving around the Tonight Show and tarnishing its legacy is a greater travesty than the effects of these changes on his ego. If he can find creative and ratings support at FOX (Jesus, wouldn't that be the irony of ironies), then I hope Coco flies the coop and, in my humble optimism, that Leno tanks and takes NBC with him. Ah, to hell with what I said earlier: #teamconan.