By Michael Walsh
As reports fly in about a final agreement between The Tonight Show host Conan O’Brien and maligned employer NBC, thoughts should be focused more on the future of O’Brien and less on the past wrongs.
The two parties reportedly agreed to a $45 million severance deal. Roughly $33 million of that total sum will go to O’Brien for simply saying goodbye. The rest will be split between The Tonight Show staff.
As sad as it is that the comedic dream of O’Brien, one shared by comedians across the country, has come to an end so suddenly after seven short months of airtime, perhaps the best is yet to come for O’Brien and his dedicated fans.
When O’Brien was promoted from his 12:35 a.m. Late Night show to the one hour earlier The Tonight Show, his act entered a safer and more vulnerable territory, a slight hindrance to the style of comedy that O’Brien became popular for.
O’Brien, who began his career as a writer for Saturday Night Live and The Simpsons, relied on his strong writing abilities and made the most of his creative and strange style of comedy by coming up with witty skits, satirical video segments and outrageous characters such as Pimpbot 5000 and The Masturbating Bear. This brand of humor simply wouldn’t mesh with the target age groups the 11:35 p.m. time slots long held by former and once again Tonight Show host Jay Leno and Late Show host David Letterman usually aimed at.
And ever since the job promotion and debut of The Tonight Show with Conan O’Brien in June of 2009, it’s been clear that O’Brien’s aim had maybe gone astray. It wasn’t all gone, of course, which can probably help us understand the low ratings O’Brien took in during the short seven months he’s been on the air with the new show. The montage showed on Friday night’s finale summed up the humor O’Brien is loved for. I mean, he did pretend to kill Tom Hanks with an asteroid at one point. Not to mention that whole contest aimed at blowing up one lucky fan’s terrible car.
It’s been clear that “Crisis Conan” has been one of the best versions of O’Brien. The last two weeks of The Tonight Show were filled with some of the bizarre humor O’Brien’s true fans grew up with. The Masturbating Bear made a cameo appearance and O’Brien and sidekick Andy Richter have been on fire giving NBC and Jay Leno a scalding-hot bath of punishing jokes. Not to mention the accompanying of pointless gags galore.
During the 2007-08 Writers Guild of America strike, O’Brien’s Late Show saw some of its funniest moments. “Crisis Conan” returned to the air without his writers and spent air time fooling around with stunts such as ziplining his way to his desk through the studio audience at suggestion of viewer submissions, among other gags that exemplified his core style of humor.
With O’Brien now reportedly in the clear to return to television with a new network in the fall of 2010, the doors have reopened for one of the funniest men in late night television to resume that role he left behind when he traveled across the country from New York to Los Angeles in 2009.
While so much can be said about who is to blame, whether it be former Tonight Show host Jay Leno’s unwillingness to step aside like he said he would back in 2004 or the pure result of the impatient NBC CEO Jeff Zucker not wanting to give O’Brien his fair shake, what’s done is now done. Leno, who will resume duties as host of The Tonight Show after the Winter Olympics on NBC are over, is now left alongside Zucker with the challenge of having to rebuild their damaged reputations and the damaged goods known as The Tonight Show.
As terribly sad and disappointing as it is that O’Brien will no longer hold his dream job of being the host one of the longest running television programs, perhaps the one shining light that comes from O’Brien’s gracious and honorable departure is the possibility to begin anew at another network. Who says you can’t build your own late night dynasty?
