Hats off to Conan

New York

Next to the door of NBC’s Studio 6A hang framed pictures of Steve Allen, Jack Paar, Johnny Carson and David Letterman, each of whose landmark, late-night programs originated from that space. And as improbable as it might sound to anyone who can vividly remember 1993, the current occupant -- once known to the world as “Conan who?” -- appears destined to join them in the pantheon of late-night hosts.

Then again, improbability will always be the opening chapter of Conan O’Brien’s story -- how a then-unknown “The Simpsons” writer with limited performing experience emerged to replace Letterman on NBC’s “Late Night,” weathering a media circus and tumultuous few years in which the executioner’s ax seemed forever poised over his lanky, 6-foot, 4-inch frame.

With O’Brien preparing for his 90-minute, 10th anniversary show in prime time on Sept. 14, it’s still easy to marvel over his graduation from critics’ punching bag to late-night institution -- someone positioned to play a major role when the next seismic shift takes place.

O’Brien has been happy to reminisce about being Conan the Survivor as he promotes the latest milestone, taking time to talk after a recent show in his disheveled office -- the couch blanketed with junk that was placed there when a rat was sighted nearby. Exhibiting a fondness for baseball metaphors, the 40-year-old host said he would be the last rookie thrust into such a job, with cable having established a farm system to groom talent that didn’t exist when Letterman dropped his “I’m going to CBS” bombshell.

“We’re living in a different era now,” said O’Brien, who, stripped of makeup, looks every bit as pale as he frequently jokes about being. “If I left today, it’s very easy to replace me, because there are so many people doing this now that NBC could announce a name and people wouldn’t be shocked and outraged.”

He rattles off a list that includes “The Daily Show’s” Jon Stewart and MTV’s Tom Green. “If I was killed in a ballooning accident tomorrow, they’d say it’s one of these nine names, and people would say, ‘Oh, OK.’ ... There won’t be a ‘What? What are you talking about? This is insanity!’ reaction.”

O’Brien has persevered to become a proven veteran whose options could become interesting again in a few years, what with Letterman and “The Tonight Show’s” Jay Leno both in their 50s and young males (encompassing those just old enough to shave and those in their mid-30s) representing the coin of the late-night-TV realm.

Although reluctant to discuss the future, O’Brien acknowledged being flattered when Fox came courting a few years ago, before NBC signed him to a long-term deal in February 2002, reportedly worth about $8 million a year.

“The Fox people are impressive,” O’Brien said. “They are smart, and they said all the right things, and I believed them -- that if anyone could make that work, they could. They had charts and graphs and puzzles and recipes, and when it came down to it, it just didn’t feel right to me. I feel like my job here at NBC at 12:30 isn’t done.”

Fox almost certainly won’t be the only suitor the next time around, which is only a source of wonder when you reconsider history.

Although names such as Garry Shandling were mentioned to fill Letterman’s post-”Tonight Show” shoes, “Saturday Night Live” producer Lorne Michaels ultimately convinced the network to take a chance on O’Brien, then 29, whose primary credits included writing for “Saturday Night Live” and “The Simpsons.”

The pivotal moment, perhaps appropriately, occurred on Carson’s old “Tonight Show” set in Burbank, where O’Brien auditioned before a crowd packed with his friends. Jason Alexander and Mimi Rogers took part in the mock show, and O’Brien was especially good with the latter, ad-libbing to her mention of a tasteful Playboy photo spread, “You mean you’re wearing a top hat and reading the New Yorker?”

“That’s the key to these shows -- to come up with funny lines under pressure,” said Rick Ludwin, NBC’s senior vice president of late-night and prime-time series, who cited the axiom that TV creates stars and noted that O’Brien was “someone who had nothing to lose.”

Off on the wrong foot

The audition helped sell a network with plenty to lose, caught in the midst of a media firestorm. O’Brien remembers being told that Bob Wright (then president, now chairman, of NBC) loved the tape and not knowing who that was. The performance, he said, was as good as he could have been at that stage -- better, in fact, than he was for the first year on air, which he subsequently described as “like a premature baby in an incubator.”

Critics certainly agreed. Initial reviews were brutal, softened only perhaps by the drubbing Chevy Chase received for his short-lived Fox program that premiered a few days earlier -- “proving,” as the Los Angeles Times’ Howard Rosenberg put it then, “that not everyone can host a talk show.”

Among the most memorable broadsides at O’Brien was an Associated Press article that concluded he “may already be flunking” as host, based on accounts from dress rehearsals before the show made its debut. That AP article still rankles some of the show’s insiders; asked recently about it, “Late Night” executive producer Jeff Ross produced a copy from his desk, saying that potshot “just flipped me out.”

O’Brien is philosophical now about his baptism by fire as well as the vagaries that go into hosting a late-night show. “I don’t think there’s any other way to really learn how to do this other than to do it,” he said. “It’s like how do people learn how to high dive. At some point, they step off a 50-foot diving board and aim their skull at some water and hope it works out. That’s what these shows are.”

O’Brien added that he is constantly “amused” by the syndication business, where luminaries from one sphere or another -- from Ellen DeGeneres to Sarah Ferguson, the Duchess of York -- are transformed into talk-show bait to entice TV stations.

Even comics such as Chris Rock and Jerry Seinfeld have told him how mystified they are by the show’s daily grind and how he endures it. The key, he said, is that he doesn’t really do anything else and didn’t know any better.

“No one can succeed at this who’s already been famous doing something easier,” O’Brien said. “An hour every night is really hard. The reason you can make it work is it’s got to be the best thing that’s ever come your way.”

One of six children in a family in Brookline, Mass., O’Brien graduated from Harvard with a reverence for Letterman and an inkling that he should be a performer.

He was rejected by Chicago’s Second City while a senior in college and later joined the Groundlings improv troupe upon moving to Los Angeles -- a relatively bleak period in which he took odd jobs to get by. (A few years ago he told graduates at Harvard’s commencement ceremonies, “When you have a Harvard degree and you’re working at Wilson’s House of Suede and Leather, you are haunted by the ghostly images of your classmates who chose graduate school ... laughing at you as you stack suede shirts no man, in good conscience, would ever wear.”)

“I just knew that I need to be performing, but I didn’t know what it is I did,” he said. “A lot of it was process of elimination. I took some acting classes but I thought I didn’t have any passion for this.... Stand-up didn’t interest me.”

What did interest him was a stage show he mounted with Bob Odenkirk (from HBO’s “Mr. Show”) and “SNL” writing partner Robert Smigel, whose resume includes “Late Night’s” Triumph the Insult Comic Dog as well as the moving lips of many a newsmakers on what has come to be called “Late Night’s” “Clutch Cargo” segments.

NBC initially wanted him to be a producer on the revamped “Late Night,” but O’Brien put himself forward as a host candidate, correctly guessing the network brass might consider a fresh face, with Michaels touting the need for a “new generation” of on-air talent.

Of course, such arguments barely kept the network at bay in those days when it seemed as if O’Brien would surely get the boot, with Greg Kinnear -- hosting NBC’s “Later” program at 1:35 a.m. -- positioned to supplant him.

“If Greg Kinnear’s show had been popularly received, I’d be a trivia question,” O’Brien said. “Clearly, that was the plan, and [then-NBC West Coast President] Don Ohlmeyer, to his credit, said we’re in a bad situation right now that might get better, why would we replace it with another bad situation, and do another launch?”

Gradually, the critics began to turn. In 1996, the Washington Post’s Tom Shales -- who flayed O’Brien at the start -- credited him with “one of the most amazing transformations in television history: from annoying nuisance to prize package.”

Perhaps most notably, as late-night shows proliferated, O’Brien looked better both creatively and competitively. When CBS introduced Tom Snyder after Letterman in 1995, “Late Night’s” ratings held up. “There wasn’t a context for what’s a good 12:30 rating,” O’Brien said. “The minute CBS put a show against me it was like, ‘Oh wait, Conan the idiot is winning. But I thought that show [stinks].’ ”

NBC’s Ludwin saw “Late Night” taking root based on the audience response, as the college-age crowd chanted “Andy! Andy!” at sidekick Andy Richter before tapings began.

Trusting the ‘little voice’

Clearly, O’Brien was strongly influenced by Letterman and is driven by the same perfectionist impulses. “He’s a guy who always wants it to be better,” Ross said. “It’s never good enough, and the problem with these shows is you can’t make it good enough, because you don’t have the time. It’s a flawed concept doing this every day, in a sense.... We’re in the volume business. You can’t be perfect every night.”

Yet if that sense of purpose helped make his predecessor a success, it has also by all accounts plagued Letterman, who has largely shunned the media in recent years. With O’Brien and his wife, Liza, expecting their first child next month, he’s mindful of trying to achieve a balance.

“I think it’s a bell curve,” O’Brien said. “When you’re down on yourself thinking you could have done a better job, you’re usually spurring yourself to be better. You’re on the left-hand side going up the bell curve. If you just keep flagellating yourself and obsessing about it, you’re going to slide down the other side. I try not to overdo it.”

O’Brien also maintains that the business has changed -- that hosts can no longer be all things to all people the way Carson was, but rather serve niches.

It’s a point echoed by Stewart, whose topical “The Daily Show” joins first-time nominee “Late Night” in the Emmy variety series field this year, along with Letterman’s “Late Show” and “Saturday Night Live.”

“Years ago, you had phenomena -- you had Milton Berle talking to 85% of the audience, and it was a cultural sense of community that this provided,” Stewart said. “Now, the focus is on the individuality of the consumer. Everybody has something they can go to, and what’s lost in that is that sense of a shared experience, other than with the other people in the chat room at the time.”

O’Brien recently watched a tape from “The Tonight Show” the night Leno introduced him to the country in 1993. “I look at that tape now, and I cannot in words describe how hard I’ve worked the last 10 years, and how much of myself I’ve put into this thing,” he said.

As for how his show will be thought of when his picture is on the wall next to Paar’s and Allen’s, he added, “I like being part of the continuum. I’m very proud of the fact there’s a line ... and I’m in there.”

Where the line leads might be O’Brien’s next chapter. “We’ll see,” he said. “Whatever little voice inside me has said, ‘Go left, now go right’ has not let me down yet, so I’m just going to have to trust it.”