When we got to Bethpage and started rolling, Conan dutifully dug in with the players and the umpire, asking them why they were so committed to this kind of silly project. I think in less than an hour, the remote was approved. I took the article directly to Mike Sweeney, and Sweeney took it in to Conan. Steve showed me a newspaper article about an “olde tyme” baseball league, and he and I chatted about how neat it all looked - amateur ballplayers in period uniforms playing by 1864 game rules. The whole piece was sparked by our excellent stage manager, Steve Hollander, an avid baseball fan. My favorite piece from my time writing for Conan is certainly the field trip Conan took to Old Bethpage, New York, to interview the men and women dedicated to the historical preservation of 19th-century baseball. Writer (Late Night, The Tonight Show ), 2000–10 Well, also a studio audience very capable of sitting in confused silence. The only people standing guard between a stupid idea like the Slipnutz and 2 million people were the two funniest humans on the planet, Conan and Mike Sweeney. I was ecstatic to return to Rockefeller Center and a show NBC (except for Rick Ludwin) had forgotten they make. I took a short leave from the show to be in a sitcom pilot and was rudely introduced to the massive amount of useless interference in a show the network is paying attention to. He went on to have much more success with Brooklyn Nine-Nine than he did avoiding diarrhea on that trip. Dan Goor came along to produce the piece with me. India is a beautiful country filled with people who are kind, hospitable, and great at playing along with insanity. NBC effectively and inexplicably agreed to cover a vacation to India for me and my girlfriend and a crew as long as I came back with good TV. It showed how an extremely ridiculous decision could get approved as long as it was funny. There’s another where Conan takes me apartment hunting/becomes a dictator and we annoy everyone. Another time, I hailed taxis in midtown, trying to find one to take me to Toronto, and finally found a cabbie named Happy who was up for the drive. I brought my desktop computer to India to find the NBC help-desk woman Sharon, who had been trying to help me over the phone. To celebrate this monumental run, Vulture spoke with 16 of O’Brien’s present and former writers (and one writer-sidekick) and asked them to reflect on their favorite moments and what made O’Brien’s show special. He’s ubiquitous, and like his idol Johnny Carson before him, somewhere along the way he graduated to the elder statesman of late-night television.Īfter three time slots, two networks, and nearly 28 years on the air, this week O’Brien will end his late-night talk show and reinvent once again on HBO Max. In 2021, O’Brien has been a talk-show host, a theatrical documentary subject, a tour headliner, a superhero, a Funko Pop! figurine, and, most recently, a podcast vanguardist. But now, through a circuitous route, the unknown (to the public, anyway) O’Brien was about to take the reins of Late Night from David Letterman. He had been working as a successful writer, jumping from The Harvard Lampoon to Saturday Night Live to the hottest show on TV, The Simpsons. In 1993, Conan O’Brien was about to start a new job.
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