Conan O’Brien: A free bird at last
A lot will be written about the final episode of Conan O’Brien’s “Tonight Show,” in a process that barely waited for the corpse to cool. Time’s James Poniewozik won the derby, with a good piece posted to the magazine’s web site about 30 minutes after the broadcast ended in the East. I don’t have much to add, except this: O’Brien’s “Tonight Show” was a strange creature, and it never seemed to me that the host completely shook free the burden of TV history and danced his goofy dance the way he really wanted to. That is, until the show’s very final moments, when, in a last segment that was weird, touching and open-heartedly sincere in more or less equal measure, O’Brien and an all-star band ripped deliriously through Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Free Bird,” with a wigged Will Ferrell clonking away on — what else? — cowbell. The look of joy on O’Brien’s face was a thing to see. He looked like a man who was free, and happy, and off to whatever greener pastures await him.
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I think he burnished his reputation as a clever guy by adding an essential and indelible decency to it. While Jay, who made his reputation by spotting the great humor inherent the grisly deaths of two human beings, came across as what he is, a self-centered mean-spirited human being to whom nothing in his world view is as important as his own standing in it.
The sad thing is that Jay represents a much larger percentage of the viewing audience than Conan does, and his ratings will reflect that. Eventually though, it catches up to you. When he goes no one will care, and the biographical buzzards will polish off the rest of his reputation with relish.
Yeah, he really does come out of this thing smelling like a rose. I think history will record that he never got a fair shot in the time slot, that he did the show he wanted to do and conducted himself like a pro, and that when he finally started his record-shattering 40-year run on Fox (later Galaxagon Interstellar) he was the first latenight host to power his show entirely with cool-running, green-friendly space wafers.
In response to another comment. See in context »It’s hard to think of anything more cliched or lacking in adventure than ending your last show with a played-to-death piece of dreck from 1974.
I’ll have to look into Leno’s history to find out if he really and truly is a monster to be despised. Until then, all I know is that his delivery is superior to Conan’s–the same penis, fat, and anti-small-town jokes, just funnier.
Through all of this, no one has seemed to notice that Leno’s failed 10 o’clock show was imitation-Conan. NBC banked on O’Brien’s shtick and the ratings failed to appear, and so they decided to let Leno go back to being Leno. That strikes me as a logical choice, but what do I know?
Well, I disagree with a couple of your base premises here. O’Brien didn’t do anything as dumb or cruel as “Jaywalking,” and if you saw him leaning on dick jokes, well, you weren’t watching the same show I was. And if your read on the 10PM Leno show was that it was faux Conan, ditto.
In response to another comment. See in context »I guess we weren’t. On the show I saw, Kirstie Alley was a regular target for being overweight. Gay jokes abounded, and the drummer/bandleader was the subject of sex-offender humor. Memory tells me penis jokes did occur, and regularly.
This Conan pulled inane stunts that involved constantly running in and out of the studio (nothing more exciting, to be sure), blowing things up in the parking lot, and so on. But, no, this Conan (the one I saw) didn’t pull staged interviews with people on the street.
The Conan I watched was in the same celebrity-worshiping, loud-and-elaborate-skit mode as the ten o’clock Leno, but since we were watching two different Conans, I guess what I witnessed is irrelevant….
In response to another comment. See in context »It seems pretty clear we disagree on this. So I’m happy to give you the last word. Thanks for your comments.
In response to another comment. See in context »