Is TBS damaging Conan O'Brien?

[TMC]

http://www.vanityfair.com/online/osc...hould-quit-tbs

Why the "Conan" star is "frittering away his talents on TBS."

[TMC]

http://tinselpit.com/?p=285

This isn’t a Leno/O’Brien thing. This is a perspective thing. And what it comes down to is – Conan O’Brien lost his. He had the perfect set-up for his style of humor. The time-slot of his old show, twelve-thirty, was pristine. When O’Brien is at his best, he’s surreal/absurdist, and the eighteen to thirty crowd, college students to, as they say, “young urban professionals,” are the best audience for that. And twelve-thirty was perfect for them.

But that is not the demo of The Tonight Show.

What in the world was O’Brien thinking? Did someone push him into this? His wife? His agent? He never should’ve tried for The Tonight Show. It’s too middlebrow, middle-of-the-road, mediocre, what-have-you. He was never right for it, and anyone who thought he was couldn’t see the forest for the trees. He should’ve stayed where he was, and when he didn’t, everything that happened was inevitable.

It was inevitable that he would fail. It was inevitable that he would not appeal to the Geritol-crowd of The Tonight Show. It was inevitable – because O’Brien is too odd to impress Tea-Baggers and other Republicans, too bizarre for the AARP set.

Jay Leno is the perfect host for those drones. Conan O’Brien was always too eclectic, too eccentric, too Dada, too strange. He never should’ve tried it. And his ratings were pitiful. Jay Leno is actually right. Conan’s numbers for the Tonight Show were horrible.

And now he’s on TBS, and he’s dying by inches.

We should’ve known things were going south when he embarked on that cringe-inducing concert tour after his Tonight Show bit the dust. Whenever a comedian sings Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive” in a non-ironic way, you know the cream has started to curdle.

The new Conan show is terrible, because O’Brien has been shaken in a primordial way. Beard, no beard, who cares? Whatever happened to masturbating bear? Whatever happened to Pimpbot? Whatever happened to genius? Now, on his new TBS show, O’Brien comes across as crazed. He’s not a hipster. Whenever he tries to sell himself as one, as with his new slogan (“keep cool, my babies” – God help us all), it’s like we’re watching a favorite Uncle have a nervous breakdown. This is not the Conan I signed up for. This is not the one I faithfully watched for years. This is an idiot who has no understanding of his appeal. Who has been rocked by his own misjudgment. Who put himself in a moronic position, and in a feeble need to save face, has been pushed into a doltish corner of desperation. Now he has to blaze his stupidity across the screen, with double-dumb ad campaigns (that stomach-churning “pour some sugar on me” one), because he has no idea why things stopped going his way.

Am I the only one who’s noticed his monologues are all insult-comic now? Who does he think he is, George Lopez? Triumph, the insult-comic dog? Has he gone around the world and up the ass of his own satire? Has he become the very thing he used to mock?

Of course he has. And his beard is hideous. Enough already, O’Brien – beg NBC for your old job back. You should’ve thanked your lucky stars they were willing to give you the midnight slot. Now you really are stuck between a rock and a hard place, and it won’t be long till both move your way and crush you flat. The novelty of your new show gave you good ratings at the start, but they’re not going to last. Eventually, people are going to realize that you’re a pale (literally and figuratively) George Lopez imitation with Byron Allen’s old set, and they’re going to switch the channel to anything else.

[TMC]

http://www.rollingstone.com/tv/featu...ubble-20150415

The Conan star, who turns 52 on Saturday, has found viral success taping remotes, whether they are in Cuba or at a Korean day spa.

[mets82]

I somewhat agree with the second link posted. I mean something has been a bit off with Conan. I mean its not as funny as it once was. There's too much filler as far as lame bits. I mean there was before but not as many as there is now. What happened ot all the classic bits he had on the old show?

[TMC]

http://www.pastemagazine.com/article...ate-night.html

Conan O'Brien is doing what Johnny Carson used to do — and what his fellow late-night hosts rarely do — in consistently showcasing comedians. "The high frequency of stand-up performances on our show is all because Conan is such a fan of comedy," says Conan's standup booker, J.P. Buck.

[TMC]

http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/t...p_culture.html

Half a decade has passed since NBC canned Conan O’Brien as the host of The Tonight Show after 145 episodes, bringing his network career to an abrupt and inglorious end. Before Tonight, O’Brien presided over 2,700-odd installments of sophisticated derangement as Dave Letterman’s replacement on Late Night, where recurring sketches such as the Masturbating Bear and Triumph the Insult Comic Dog brightened the wee hours with their college-boy absurdism. His job was to tend the flame of postmodern nonsense Letterman had lit, his brand to upend banality.

Five years later, his audience is healthy; the show sometimes draws more young viewers than Letterman or Jimmy Kimmel. There have been glimmers of cultural relevance: For instance, O’Brien made news in March by jaunting to Havana for a special Conan in Cuba. But to a certain segment of the late-night audience—a demographic once integral to his cult—O’Brien made this news only by appearing on The Daily Show to promote it. “I’m With Coco” once seemed less like a marketing slogan than a rallying cry. But now, as the fervor ignited by his dismissal from Tonight has waned, O’Brien has receded from the limelight. His bits rarely light up the morning blog circuit. He has in some sense been banished to Burbank, two decades after the departure of its eminence. So I followed him there, tuning into to TBS for a few weeks to see how his act has changed.

Four nights a week, O’Brien hits the stage strutting, in a choreographed display of cutely demented peacocking. Sidekick Andy Richter belts an introduction. A stagehand draws shimmering curtains. O’Brien struts out, swings index fingers like a gunslinger, mingles performative swagger with bowing humility, administers a sizzling twist to his left nipple. He quiets the crowd to deliver a topical monologue indistinguishable from anyone else’s, as if he were an unusually talented cog in a generic machine.

Conan is not what you would call an A-list destination. In April, Jimmy Fallon on Tonight shared his polished grin with guests including Louis C.K., Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Madonna, Chris Pratt, Pharrell Williams, Ricky Gervais, Russell Crowe, Blake Lively, and Michelle Obama. Over the same stretch of time, O’Brien also welcomed Gervais, and his band, Jimmy Vivino’s Basic Cable Band, composed a limp ditty about an audience member’s slight resemblance to Pratt. Sure, there were Kristen Stewart, Amy Schumer, and Ice Cube—all good gets—but from there it’s a bit of a fall off to seat Billy Gardell, David Mizejewski, and Timothy Olyphant on one’s couch as the night’s first guest.

As an interviewer, O’Brien is different, too, in a way that combines a handsome self-restraint and self-enforced semblance of normalcy, as if he’s matured into a streamlined knockoff of his old, weird self. It was not long ago, for instance, that he refused to spare viewers the embarrassment of going gooey for a pretty face. He would purr and pant and melt for female actors, thickly dramatizing the awkwardness of a writers’-room refugee selected to escort a starlet. But we’re getting off easy these days: O’Brien admires Rosario Dawson’s skirt—“It looks like its got candy on it or something,” makes a mere few gorging growls to approximate noshing upon it, and then gets on with things.

More telling than the relative wattage of the celebrities O’Brien’s bookers secure is the presence of government and policy types among their ranks. Elizabeth Warren and Fareed Zakaria have appeared in recent weeks, eliciting from the host a dutiful kind of attention. The proceedings have little in common with the loose-jointed, readily irreverent atmosphere cultivated by Stewart and Colbert and bear only an incidental relationship to the old school of “humanizing” politicians with a softball deskside chat. Even a guest possessing the gruff, unprocessed charm of Barney Frank can only do so much to spice up the overcooked broccoli served by the host himself, whose respectful nods indicate not devoted engagement but the genial discharge of an obligation. The atmosphere is dutiful, and the air leaves the room.

Which brings us to the gags and sketches that are the soul of late-night comedy—the prankishness of Kimmel, the frat-house jamboree of Fallon, the Stupid Pet Tricks that once upon a time defined Letterman’s claim to something like subversion. What flavor of farcical cream tops the pies O’Brien flings these days? One night, he and Richter riffed on an ecclesiastic news item and giggled at the word bishopric, the setup for the bit being their juvenile tittering at the word’s naughty homophone, the payoff being that a vengeful God destroyed the host’s desk with a lightning bolt. Another night, O’Brien was baffled by a string of non sequiturs issuing from Richter’s mouth, and a producer explained that a “rerun Andy” was appearing in the stead of the real one, who was at the dentist, and then to avert disaster “real Andy” turned up still in his dental bib to murder the “rerun Andy” with a rifle. A common complaint is that to explain humor is to kill it, but that is scarcely possible with jokes of this ilk, which defy explanation and are dead on arrival. Conan regularly proceeds as if Conan himself were the payoff. The joker himself has become the whole joke.

The Conan of Late Night and The Tonight Show was wonderfully volatile and strange. The throwaway experimental spirit, the earnest aw-shucks self-deprecation, and the casual sacrilege of such lovely grotesqueries as vomiting Kermit: All of this made him magnetic. So it’s odd to see all his manias coagulated into mannerisms. It is as if the process of being hammered into an icon—a process partly encouraged by O’Brien’s blue period of jeering at NBC—has flattened his self-presentation. Though the endearing weirdness of old still flickers in spontaneous moments, when improvisation encourages a certain looseness, it generally feels as if he is sticking to a script.

In the very beginning, the most frustrating feature of Conan was the insistence of his woe-is-me act—his relentless jokes about his firing from NBC. But now, the TBS show has settled into something much more rote. It regularly puts the host in contexts that are conceptually thin—or, in the alternative, exclusively conceptual—and demands him to fight his way out by force of charm, speed of wit, and frequent resort to pure personality. He is the sum of the parts of all of the bits. The same night Rosario Dawson was on, he did a remote segment taped at an “escape room,” where he and a producer played a game of solving puzzles in a locked space decorated like the office of a film-noir gumshoe.

What laughs there were issued from O’Brien’s exaggerated frustration with his predicament, with his gangly slacking off and wiry acting up and antic adoption of wiseguy period dialogue. The phenomenon serves as a tidy metaphor for the state of Conan now. He amuses the faithful with his sheer exasperation at being trapped in stale quarters. He put in his time lampooning talk shows in a unique way, and he now seems to be doing time putting on a show within established limits, a reined-in version of his former self. This is perhaps its own perverse achievement: to devise a bespoke prison on one’s own wacky Elba.

[mets82]

Yes, something is lacking with Conan. His bits are just not funny. I do seem to remember for whatever reason a lot of the bits he did on the Late Night show were not being done on the TBS show. I mean Celebrity Survey, Conan in the Aisle, the Year 2000, when he "talks" to different people via television monitor using different sets of lips, Triumph, etc. I dont know if it was because NBC wouldnt allow him to do it but I thought it hurt him. The monologue and the bits are just not funny.

[TMC]

The Talk Show That Time Forgot

[Babalu]

Conan O'Brien is a nice guy who was never really funny onscreen. He's most famous for being stabbed in the back by Jay Leno, a not nice guy who wasn't funny onscreen.

[JSP]

Conan O'Brien damages Conan O'Brien by not being funny.

[TMC]

Originally Posted by TMC

The Talk Show That Time Forgot

Why Fallon and Corden Are the True Heirs to Johnny Carson (Whether You Like Them or Not)

[everybodylovesrs]

I just don't find him that funny. My favorite is Colbert (but he needs his writers, without them he's not as good).