Conan O'Brien Takes Over The Tonight Show

O’Brien is insisting he will bring his Late Night-coloured sensibility to The Tonight Show, and that includes Triumph the Insult Comic Dog. Furthermore, he adds, the world as we know it will not suddenly come to an end.

“There’s this archaic idea that there’s 12:30 and then there’s 11:30, and the people who watch TV at 11:30 can’t possibly comprehend what’s happening at 12:30 and vice versa,” O’Brien said in an interview earlier this year in Los Angeles. “The truth is I see things on MTV at 4:30 in the afternoon that I would never want my children to see.”

Time-shifting and the advent of the DVR has changed everything, he added.

A studio audience twice the size of the one that saw O’Brien in New York will crowd into his facility at L.A.’s Universal Studios for “Tonight Show” tapings. The setup will be like Johnny Carson’s “Tonight” studio, except with more crowd shots.

People forget this, because O’Brien’s first few months on NBC were a little shaky (in the sense that Bernie Madoff’s ledger was a little shaky). That very first “Late Night” was, aside from the host’s nerves, almost flawless. O’Brien sang “Edelweiss” as an audience member wearing a Nazi uniform wept. His writing staff killed with the premiere of “Actual Items,” a satire of Leno’s “Headlines” that would become the show’s longest-running comedy bit. The next morning, O’Brien pre-emptively ripped his own debut in an op-ed in The New York Times.

When I brought up that first show in an interview, O’Brien joked, “My plan is to have a really good first show, then an even better second show and then a really bad third show. And then Thursday, a recovery show before finishing strong on Friday.”

But seriously, he said, “I want to be a kid on Christmas morning with a new toy, the ‘Tonight Show.’ That’s what I want people to see. That’s what works for me. People tuning in don’t want to see Conan trying to live up to the responsibility of hosting the ‘Tonight Show.’ They want to see me having a good time.”