I’ve had a lot of Conan O’Brien on the brain lately. I finally got the time to read Bill Carter’s excellent book on the recent late night TV conflicts, The War for Late Night, and checked out O’Brien’s live show in Toronto and the subsequent documentary.
I’ve rarely read a better book about show business. Carter takes us behind the scenes at NBC, the network that fought to keep both Jay Leno and Conan O’Brien employed as talk show hosts on the venerable Tonight Show franchise. The arrangement ended disastrously, with NBC firing O’Brien, giving him a huge settlement and rehiring Leno.
All this left O’Brien a very angry man. His fans, younger and more rabid than Leno’s, rallied behind the gangly redhead, calling themselves Team Coco, and launched protests fuelled by the social media.
O’Brien couldn’t perform on TV for six months, so he went on a 40-city tour. I saw the Toronto concert and was very disappointed.
More music than comedy, O’Brien assembled a crack team of musicians for the show and fronted them with his adequate but hardly breathtaking guitar playing. And when he did some funny stuff, he overemphasized every joke, as he sometimes does on his show. It’s strange because his rival and polar opposite, Jay Leno, is guilty of the same thing.
The subsequent documentary about the tour is entitled Conan O’Brien Can’t Stop. In the movie, which oscillates between fascinating and boring, O’Brien is not shown to be a nice guy. In fact, he’s angry, abusive, narcissistic and not terribly funny.
The film certainly captures the tedium of life on the road. You can see O’Brien’s nerves fray as the tour marches on. He snaps at his staff, complains endlessly about his fans and you can even see him age before your eyes as his face becomes hollow and gaunt with the pressures of performance.
O’Brien wouldn’t be used to this life on the road. Unlike his competitors, like Leno and David Letterman, Conan was never a stand-up working 300 dates a year in every town and city in America. It’s one of the reasons I think he’s not a great performer; his soul rests in writing and producing.
When I watch his show, now on TBS, I keep thinking he has the best bits in late night, but I wish that someone else would deliver them.
There’s no denying the success of the Conan O’Brien cult, with shows selling out in six minutes in some cities. But I wonder what his fans would make of this movie. I give O’Brien credit for letting this movie out. It’s honest to a fault, but I can’t watch him now without thinking about his behaviour in the film, which should be out on DVD any day now.
In the end, neither Leno nor O’Brien really won. Both returned to late night with diminished ratings, and Leno with a tarnished reputation.
If anybody won, it was probably David Letterman, who commented on the feud nightly from his lofty perch above the fray.
Of course, you could argue that all of these shows are dinosaurs now that Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert so radically changed the definition of the late night talk show, and you might be right. But there will always be an interest in the traditional host-guest formula that dominates late night TV.
Now if we could only try it again here in Canada.…
Post City Magazines’ humour columnist, Mark Breslin, is the founder of Yuk Yuk’s comedy clubs and the author of several books, including Control Freaked.