Conan O’Brien still thinks everything that went down surrounding his infamous exit from The Tonight Show was “screwed-up.” The late night host turned podcaster spoke with Adweek about his decades-long career, so naturally the 59-year-old was asked about the controversy with Jay Leno in 2010.
“At this point, even beginning to try and explain to people all the different ways in which I thought that was a screwed-up situation — and in some ways unjust — is absolutely asinine and feels completely stupid and self-indulgent,” O’Brien said. “But it was really important to me.”
O’Brien, who’d been at NBC since 1993, was named as Leno’s replacement in 2009. Leno stayed at the network, though, and launched his 10 p.m. The Jay Leno Show as The Tonight Show with Conan O’Brien debuted in the coveted 11:30 p.m. slot. Leno’s show bombed, O’Brien got ousted after one season and Leno took back over The Tonight Show. (In a recent interview, Leno denied “deliberately” sabotaging O’Brien to win back the show.) The shake-up sparked outrage online as social media was finding its footing in pop culture.
“I will admit to you, I am not a seer. I’m not a tech visionary. I’m not a revolutionary thinker. Talk about luck: I happen to exist at a time when the internet at that point, 2010, is really starting to flex its muscles. There was this explosion online, and that took me completely by surprise. I didn’t see it coming,” O’Brien recalled. “I remember at the time, there were people at NBC that—I always picture them in their black tower, going: [shocked indignation] ‘How is he doing this? Release another falcon. Stop him!'”
O’Brien noted that he did not orchestrate the outrage.
“That was a lot of young people who thought it was bulls***. And they use the internet, so they went to town, which led to this grassroots movement. From there it was immediately this feeling of: ‘Let’s do a show for these people,'” the comedian recalled.
O’Brien took his talent and went on the road, playing a sold-out tour across the U.S. He also found a new home at TBS where he hosted Conan for 11 seasons.
“It’s an interesting example of, take what you’ve been given. My sense of humor didn’t change, I didn’t change as a person. But the situation changed completely overnight from, I’m heading the oldest late-night franchise in America, the storied Tonight Show, to that’s over,” the Emmy winner shared.
“It’s about adaptation. I really didn’t want any of that craziness with NBC or Leno; I wasn’t looking for any of that. But once it happened, and this is the situation, you react to that situation using what skills you have. And then you proceed in the new: What’s the new reality?” O’Brien continued. “The new reality is, now I’m doing this in theaters. Hey, there’s a big upside to this. There’s an incredible energy in here. And these theater shows allow for so much more vaudeville, for lack of a better term, than you can do on a Tonight Show or any show like that. And then that led to, well, who would we do the next show for?”
The comic had a poignant response when asked what he wished he knew before he started Late Night with Conan O’Brien in 1993.
“I wish I had known about antidepressants. Because I didn’t. All the feedback I was getting was from the network and television critics was resoundingly negative. What I didn’t know for a while is that there were all these 15-year-olds, 16-year-olds that were watching that never had a problem with it. They immediately said, ‘Oh God, this is so weird and different. This is for me.’ But they had no way of communicating with us,” O’Brien said as it was during pre-internet days. “I wish I’d had some way to know that.”
O’Brien called studio audiences “the saving grace.”
“I’m naturally a humble person. But you don’t go through a couple of years like that and work that hard and not come out of it with some humility and some sense of [having gotten] lucky. I remind people that all the time. We worked very hard, but I could easily have gone away in ’94 and been, as someone once said, a Trivial Pursuit question,” he shared. “I did everything in my power to make sure that we would survive, but we needed luck, too. And that, I didn’t supply. I don’t know where that came from; we just got lucky. I know NBC was trying to replace me, but it never quite lined up. And then by the time they got around to it, someone said, ‘You know, it’s actually doing pretty well.'”
It seems luck is still on O’Brien’s side, then. The Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend podcast host just inked a deal with SiriusXM for an estimated $150 million.
MORE: Jay Leno speaks out about Conan O’Brien drama
