TBS' "Conan" to End in 2021 as Conan O’Brien Signs Deal for HBO Max Variety Show [Archive] - Sitcoms Online Message Boards

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06-27-2021, 11:22 PM

Conan O'Brien is finally free of the late-night format that never quite fit him properly (https://www.avclub.com/conan-obrien-never-needed-late-night-1847167269)

Conan's talents transcend the talk show format, says Dennis Perkins. Yet for the past 28 years, Conan was entrenched in a late-night format that was always an awkward fit. "When O’Brien took over Late Night, the late-night hosting post was a cultural sinecure, a comic throne from which to bestow laughs upon those guests granted an audience," says Perkins. "But Conan is not a removed and beneficent bestower—he’s a once-in-a generation comic jester, whose true place is down in the comedy trenches, leaping at every opportunity to find the joke, no matter where he lands. Jumping metaphors a third time, Conan’s not the ringmaster, he’s the funniest clown in the center ring spotlight, who’s also secretly the brains of the whole outfit." Perkins says it was a good thing that The Tonight Show never worked out for Conan because NBC's 11:30 p.m. timeslot would've dulled his off-the-wall comic originality and sparking weirdness. "The current, Jimmy Fallon-hosted incarnation shows just what it would have looked like if O’Brien had truly succumbed to his Tonight Show fate—a wan, charmless cruise of effortful wackiness and placid fawning," says Perkins. Now that he's free of the talk show format, Conan can go back to being "Conan." "With his upcoming move to whatever the hell he’s going to be doing on HBO Max—we know it will be weekly, in the variety show family, and most likely weird, but that’s about it—O’Brien is finally, after almost three decades, stepping wholly away from a hand-me-down entertainment format that never quite fit him properly, and that he never really needed," says Perkins. "And, unlike Letterman’s more genuine retrenchment into prospector-bearded semi-obscurity (and the occasional comedy emeritus Netflix sit-down), there’s a genuine sense of freedom and joy at the prospect of Conan O’Brien deciding to stay in the game, on his own terms. With a cushy HBO deal supplementing his thriving and hand-tailored multimedia Team Coco comedy empire, the late-night-battle-hardened, 58-year-old Conan is striding into a free-form, subscriber-subsidized playroom where he can get back to letting his legendarily febrile comic imagination do whatever the hell it wants. After 28 years, it’s about time."

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Conan O'Brien's self-consciousness is what sets him apart from Jimmy and Jimmy and James and Stephen (https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/tv/story/2021-06-25/conan-obrien-tbs-final-show-team-coco): "They are all more or less regular guys where he is an irregular one; even his whiteness is a different shade of pale. In classic rock terms, it’s the difference between being a fan of Neil Young and a fan of those other guys in that supergroup," says Robert Lloyd. "He is a performer almost by accident, a writer who suddenly found himself — a man who needed much introduction — in David Letterman’s Late Night chair, shot from a cannon. But that he thinks like a writer must also have influenced the fictional frames his late night shows put around the more or less nonfictional appearances of his guests....His energy and his looks — Short called him a 'a ginger crash-test dummy' — make him hard to place chronologically, O’Brien is 58; he will have been getting AARP mailers for some time now. For late-night-retirement context, he’s eight years younger than Johnny Carson was when he quit The Tonight Show, a decade younger than David Letterman when he left Late Show, a year younger than Jay Leno when Leno turned the keys to The Tonight Show over to him in 2009, before taking them back for another four years. He has stayed in longer than his contemporaries but is getting out sooner than his elders, making sure not to stay too long at the fair. Probably he would have found the measure of The Tonight Show eventually. But perhaps it worked out for the best. O’Brien’s self and sensibilities truly are a little strange, a little disturbing, a little bit out of the way. It’s not that I would wish less success on anyone, but TBS may have been the better fit in the long run. Bigger is not always better; budget is the mother of invention. In the end, it proved only that there is more to late night than a name or a network. If anything, it was a matter of being struck down only to become more powerful: The imbroglio made O’Brien into a cause, Coco of Team Coco; it gave him an underdog’s advantage, set him on the moral high ground and laid the grounds for his future."
Conan’s speech to close out his time in late-night was one of the best ever (https://www.pajiba.com/tv_reviews/the-dust-has-settled-and-conan-obrien-is-no-longer-a-late-night-talk-show-host.php): "I legitimately feel that it will go down in TV history as one of the best ever," says Andrew Sanford. "It was packed with so much gratitude, so much love. Also, Conan didn’t try to revel in it. He didn’t spend the whole time patting himself on the back, he thanked the people who helped make his journey possible. He showed humility in a way that not many people in his position would be able to. I fully acknowledge that my bias may be showing here. Conan is the first late-night talk show host I ever felt a connection to. But dammit, he stuck this landing like a pro. Television will not be the same without Conan O’Brien. The future of late night is a bright one, but it is changing rapidly. Conan’s exit is further proof of just how big that change is. An era has ended and the landscape is forever different. Raise a glass, give a salute or a toast or a moment of silence for one of the best to ever sit behind a desk and tell jokes. Conan’s time in late-night has ended, but his time making us laugh is far from over."
No disrespect to TBS' Conan, but The Tonight Show offered the best version of Conan O'Brien (https://ew.com/tv/tv-reviews/conan-series-finale-review-o-brien/): "By my rough calculations, O'Brien spent around 2 percent of his late-night career hosting The Tonight Show," says Darren Franich. "So it's some kind of cruelty that I constantly think about how amazing his short stint was. The most conventional wisdom today mitigates the importance of the Late-Night Wars, and not just because everything important in 2010 looks idiotic now. Certainly, the Gen Z straw person who torments my sleepless nights thinks the whole Jay Leno Show kerfuffle was a ridiculous bit of privilege infighting, a few white guys holding on desperately to a network model cusping toward apocalypse. Maybe. I think it was a monumental event, the difference between a bright timeline and the dark one we live in. The specific details are too complicated, and memory promotes the macro-drama. See Conan O'Brien, avatar for the ascension of Generation X, caught between the avatars of two other hosting generations. From the past: A boomer who refuses to leave. From the future: A millennial-baiting smiler peddling clickbait nostalgia. I know, I know, silly to point fingers, obviously Jimmy Fallon was just an innocent bystander who mysteriously reaped all the benefits. From 2021, it looks like a temporal pincer movement, and it ended O'Brien's broadcast days. Whatever. O'Brien's eight Tonight Show months were the only Tonight Show for me."
Conan in Korea showcased a wide breadth of aspects and nuances of Korean culture and stayed true to his trademark blend of bizarre yet entertainingly riveting style (https://observer.com/2021/06/conan-finale-conan-in-korea-essay/): "As a Korean American, O’Brien’s Conan in Korea episode held particular significance to me and my family," says Jenny Lee. "At the dinner table, we would laugh and reminisce about O’Brien’s attempts to learn Korean, getting into a snowball fight with a Buddhist monk and adopting an octopus from a fish market and subsequently naming it Samuel. (O’Brien, while unable to bring Samuel home with him to the United States, was able to find him a home at Coex Aquarium in Seoul.) The fact that O’Brien chose to bring along Korean-born American actor Steven Yeun, with whom O’Brien has built up a longstanding friendship throughout the years, to join him in Korea meant a great deal to me and my family. Yeun, who is well-known for his role as Glenn in The Walking Dead and his Oscar-nominated performance in Minari, has spoken in previous interviews about the big influence his Korean heritage has had on him, not only as an actor but as a person. O’Brien not only acknowledged this, he went a step further and took the time to celebrate, learn about, and explore Yeun’s Korean background, getting to know Yeun as a whole person rather than simply as another actor."
Lisa Kudrow pays tribute to Conan after he paid tribute to her on his final show (https://www.instagram.com/p/CQjnWmjpcmU/): "Well last night he made me cry," she wrote on Instagram. The truth is, for the last 31 years I have periodically pinched myself over the fact that the smartest, most decent man who is for ALL TIME genuinely and uniquely brilliant is really my friend. I love you Cori. Stupid autocorrect! I love you Cory."

Jimmy Fallon pays tribute to Conan O'Brien (https://twitter.com/jimmyfallon/status/1408451105311232004)

Fallon was among the last late-night hosts to send off his Late Night and Tonight Show predecessor from late-night television. "Congratulations @ConanOBrien. One of the funniest brains in comedy," Fallon tweeted Friday morning. "Without you, I wouldn’t have a job. Thank you for everything. I’ve always said - you can’t spell HBO without at least one of the letters from CONAN." Fallon made his late-night talk show debut with Conan in 2000 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WMJrlxjQUO4).

Chris Pratt "mistakes" Jimmy Kimmel for Conan O'Brien by throwing him a retirement party (https://etcanada.com/news/795439/chris-pratt-throws-a-mistaken-retirement-party-for-jimmy-kimmel/)

“Jimmy, thank you so much for letting me be a part of this incredible night,” Pratt told Kimmel. “It’s just so nice to be able to congratulate you in person — come on, guys — on his last show!”

There will never be another distinctive daily voice quite like Conan O’Brien’s (https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/tv/a36816306/conan-obrien-final-show-tribute/)

"The same way some kids looked up to baseball players, he was an idol to me, and the coolest person imaginable," says Rob LeDonne, who wore Late Night with Conan O'Brien merchandise to high school, of Conan O'Brien. "As a result, I never missed a single show. Since it aired way past my bedtime, I’d hit record on my VHS player every night I went to sleep, and then fast-forwarded to the 12:30 a.m. hour when I got home from school. Of course, I'd rewatch classic sketches ad nauseam. I also have vivid memories of friends and family rolling their eyes at me one summer because I wouldn't stop reading fake predictions out loud from the companion book to the show's popular segment, 'In the Year 2000.' (Example: “It will be revealed that carrots will not actually improve your eyesight. But they are still number one when it comes to scratching a deep rectal itch.") In other words, I was a member of the Late Night hive—a Conan stan, years before the figure of speech came into vogue." With Conan's time in late-night now over, LeDonne says that the TBS show allowed Conan to do a talk show on his own terms. "O’Brien could have done anything with Conan, but in a direct reaction to the Trump years and disturbed by a bubbling xenophobia, he used his platform to produce a series of travel specials to introduce Americans to the human side of other cultures, dubbing it 'Conan Without Borders,'" says LeDonne. "When Trump was stoking fears of immigration and border walls, O’Brien went to Mexico. Immediately after Trump reportedly called Haiti a 'sh*thole' country, Conan went there too. And in an effort to raise awareness about the Armenian genocide, he devoted an episode to visiting that country as well. Now, aside from brief ... gap(s) in (2009 and) 2010, viewers won’t be treated to a daily talk show hosted by O’Brien for the first time since 1993. And while we sure have a hell of a lot of other options, there will never be another regular distinctive daily voice quite like O’Brien’s. We won’t be treated to a daily monologue or his famous string-dance, Conan using his physicality, including towering height and bright red hair, to masterful effect. We’ll be missing his trusty sidekick Andy Richter and his perfect quips. And we’ll miss a trademark fetishization of silly intelligence, with Conan reminding us not only to never forget to be foolish no matter how hard one works, but also that those two things can even go hand-in-hand to beautiful effect. So until his HBO Max show premieres on some unknown date, and in whatever form it takes, I’ll still be wearing my Late Night merch proudly. Regardless of whether or not it gets me laid."

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Watch Conan O'Brien's farewell to TBS and late-night, including special tributes to Lorne Michaels and Lisa Kudrow (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4itx6mXEJ6c): Michaels was responsible for believing in Conan and urging NBC to hire him as Late Night host to replace David Letterman in 1993, while it was Kudrow who talked him into taking the gig. "I'll just close with this one thought," Conan said in wrapping his TBS show. "I have devoted all of my adult life, all of it, to pursuing this strange phantom intersection between smart and stupid. There's a lot of people that believe that they cannot co-exist, but god -- I will tell you, it is something I believe religiously -- I think when smart and stupid come together-- It's very difficult, but when you can make it happen, I think it's the most beautiful thing in the world."
Jack Black appeared on stage in a walking boot at the Conan finale after spraining his ankle rehearsing a song and dance number for Conan's finale (https://variety.com/2021/tv/news/conan-finale-obrien-jack-black-1235005030/)
Homer Simpson reunited with former Simpsons writer Conan to conduct his exit interview (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gFfgrPm7-KY)
Breaking down the five phases of Conan's late-night career (https://www.theringer.com/tv/2021/6/24/22547171/conan-obrien-tbs-farewell-late-night): Phase 1 was Conan's 16 years on NBC's Late Night, according to Rob Harvilla. Phase 2 was The Tonight Show in 2009. Phase 3 was The Tonight Show in 2010, when everything went awry and he said goodbye on Feb. 20. Phase 4 was the one-hour TBS show from 2010 to 2018. And Phase 5 was the revamped half-hour TBS show that premiered in January 2019. "The best part of Conan’s TBS tenure is what he didn’t do, which is to say he didn’t lean too hard into the Trump era in either direction: He was not a tousler and/or enabler like Jimmy Fallon or Saturday Night Live, nor did he attempt to refashion himself as an eviscerator type like the ineffective and consistently out-satired CBS-era Colbert or the far more effective John Oliver or Samantha Bee," says Harvilla. "Conan’s TBS show stood still while every other late-night show broke into a wild and unsustainable sprint, and he nearly came out of the Trump era back on top by default."
With "Clueless Gamer," few people made having a bad time look more fun than modern-era Conan (https://www.avclub.com/clueless-gamer-let-conan-master-his-favorite-game-dunk-1847155017): "Take it, maybe, as an evolution of the straight-man persona that saw O’Brien spend years feeding set-up lines to a menagerie of masturbating bears, angry little sisters, and racist ghosts on Late Night, a comic exasperation that only got more exasperated during the swift rise and fall (and final, Pyrrhic rise) of his run on NBC’s Tonight Show," says William Hughes. "Somewhere along the line, O’Brien got a lot more comfortable channeling his apparently limitless reserves of annoyance into comedy, whether in the form of the many pieces built around his irritations/interactions with employee (and ostensible friend) Jordan Schlansky, or in his confrontations with the medium of video gaming as a whole."
From "In the Year 2000" to "Actual Items" to "Staring Contest": Presenting 16 of Conan's most essential bits (https://ew.com/tv/conan-obrien-16-essential-bits/)
Conan O'Brien's longtime executive producer Jeff Ross says TBS kept its promise to be hands off (https://variety.com/2021/tv/news/conan-obrien-finale-tbs-executive-producer-jeff-ross-1235004765/): When then-Turner Entertainment president Steve Koonin pitched Conan on launching a show at TBS, he emphasized that Conan would be able to do whatever he wants -- but he wouldn't have a big audience. “He was true to his word. Also about the audience,” says Ross, who's been Conan's executive producer since launching their NBC Late Night show in 1993. “But at least he said it up front: This network can’t deliver you the audience that a network can. But ‘you can come here and it’s your playpen, and we’ll leave you alone.’ And they did. And to this day they have, even after Steve left (in 2014).” Ross and Conan will now take a breather and map out their HBO Max show, which is expected to premiere some time in 2022. “We don’t really know what the show is yet,” says Ross. “We know it has to be something different. We don’t know how often, how many we’ll make yet and we’re still in those conversations. But those guys have been great also, they’re like just, ‘what do you want to do?’ And we’re trying to figure it out.” Ross has also spent time in recent weeks appreciating what Conan was able to accomplish at TBS. “Of course, you know you’re in the volume business, they’re not all gems,” he says. “But the amount of stuff that we did in 11 years that’s so f*cking funny, and of quality, that’s hard to do when you’re doing it every day. I was touched. I was proud to be a part of it.”
Andy Richter describes his feelings as the TBS show wraps: "It’s a little sad," he says (https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-news/andy-richter-conan-obrien-late-night-1234971705/). "Mostly, what we’re feeling now is a celebration and, just, pride. I mean, I do feel one of the best things about our show is that we meant something to younger people, people younger than us that were serious about comedy in the same way that the shows that meant something to me when I was in my teenage years, my college years, and thinking about, 'Maybe I want to do comedy for a living,' that we made an impression on people like that and helped form their senses of humor and what they wanted to do with television when they got a chance to do something with television."

Jimmy Kimmel pays tribute to Conan O'Brien by taking a shot at Jay Leno (https://www.thedailybeast.com/jimmy-kimmel-delivers-one-last-fck-you-to-jay-leno-for-conan-obrien)

“I also wanted to congratulate Conan O’Brien on 28 years of very, very funny late-night television,” Kimmel said in his Jimmy Kimmel Live! monologue (https://youtu.be/Yw6MrdtssjQ?t=60) Thursday night. “Conan wrapped up his show on TBS tonight. You know, before Conan, I didn’t even know bears could masturbate.” Kimmel, one of Conan's fiercest defenders in 2010 when Leno wanted The Tonight Show back, added: "Anyway, here’s to Conan and Andy Richter and everybody involved with that show. We look forward to whatever you have planned next at HBO Max...And I also want to say, congratulations to Jay Leno on his new time slot at TBS.” Earlier in the day, Kimmel paid tribute to Conan and Andy Richter (https://twitter.com/jimmykimmel/status/1408033836248670213), with whom he collaborated with on the short-lived ABC game show Big Fan. "Tonight, two men I respect tremendously close a chapter of their brilliant careers," Kimmel tweeted. "Conan made doing his job the hard way look easy. He & Andy are among the funniest of the many funny people I’ve met. Congratulations to you & your co-workers on a remarkable achievement."

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Twelve comedians reflect on Conan O'Brien's legacy (https://www.vulture.com/article/conan-obrien-late-night-tribute.html): "His comedy really shaped my comedic sensibilities and my worldview," says Eric Andre, who started watching Late Night in high school. "Every memory I have about my first time on the show is good, and that’s not always the case with every talk show," adds D'Arcy Carden. Nikki Glaser recalled her dad popping in Conan's five-year anniversary special in the VCR in 1998. Bill Hader adds: "I started watching Conan in 1993, when I was 15 years old. Conan and The Simpsons were really the first thing in comedy that I felt was mine. It was the first thing that my parents didn’t get. Before that, I would watch Letterman or Monty Python and the Marx Brothers with them, but then Conan was the first thing that they went, 'What is this?' They were really confused by it, so I think that’s why it’s so special to me. I’d go, 'No, this is my thing.' He spoke to that." Jimmy Kimmel, meanwhile, says Conan is "obviously a very smart, bright guy and also just a naturally funny guy, but what is best about Conan is that he seemed to be doing things that made him laugh. I think that’s the best thing that you can do. A lot of people worry — I think too much — about what the audience thinks, and that never seemed to be a concern of his. I mean that in the best possible way, not as an insult. He really stayed true to the humor that he appreciated, from the very beginning to the very end...I also feel I should mention Andy Richter, who I think is absolutely great and one of the most underrated people ever on TV. The chemistry they have is rare, and he really brings a huge amount to the show and could certainly host one of these shows on his own. Andy genuinely is a kindhearted soul — and manages to be funny despite that." Sarah Silverman adds that "I grew up on Conan. Maybe you grew up watching Conan; I grew up on Conan. I was on it from when I was 22 to now. I’m 50 — that’s 28 years. God, I didn’t know who I was when I first went on. The first time I was recognized on the street was from being on Conan, because after I was fired from Saturday Night Live, he had me on all the time, doing bits from the couch. I felt comfortable enough there to try things on the couch and then later figure them out for stand-up, and usually it’s the other way around. But on Conan, it was so experimental. It felt so safe."
Celebrities paid tribute to Conan, from his fourth cousin Denis Leary to his former intern Mindy Kaling (https://deadline.com/2021/06/hollywood-salutes-conan-obrien-as-conan-wraps-tbs-1234781287/): Conan also received tributes from John Cleese, Wyatt Cenac, Bill Burr, Kyle MacLachlan, Samantha Bee, The Lumineers, Kristen Schaal, Billy Eichner, Tenacious D, The Clinton Foundation and The Pulitzer Prizes.
Stephen Colbert paid tribute to Conan and brought on his Late Show writer and 18-year Conan vet Brian Stack to reveal "dirty secrets" of his former boss (https://www.instagram.com/tv/CQh49ByjBJP)
Brooklyn Nine-Nine co-creator Dan Goor "loved every minute" of working on Late Night with Conan O'Brien from 2003 to 2008 (https://twitter.com/djgoor/status/1408275067742556163): "He is and always will be the funniest person I’ve ever met by a full standard deviation," he tweeted. "I respect him so much, I still go into a cold sweat every time I see him."
How I Met Your Mother co-creators Craig Thomas and Carter Bays dreamed of writing for Conan (but ended up writing for David Letterman) (https://twitter.com/HimymCraig/status/1408096482704646148): "So @CarterBays and I were obsessed with Late Night w/Conan O'Brien in college, bonded over it, decided to be a writing team and spent our senior year writing a packet for our dream job on that staff; alas, not meant to be, but it's part of our origin story & I'm forever grateful!," Thomas tweeted.
Jennifer Garner congratulates Conan by posting her embarrassing 2003 Late Night moment when she incorrectly corrected Conan (https://www.instagram.com/p/CQg9UNtDy62/)