As was first announced five years ago, Conan O'Brien abdicated his position as the host of NBC's "Late Night" on Friday night, preparatory to taking up the scepter and mantle of "The Tonight Show." His investiture is scheduled for June 1.
Such changes come rarely in network television -- O'Brien's 16-season run is not coincidentally matched by "Late Night" predecessor David Letterman's still-continuing stint on CBS' "Late Show" and by Leno's soon-to-end "Tonight Show" tenure. O'Brien will be only the fifth host of the latter program, the tree from which most all late-night talk shows spring, following Steve Allen, Jack Paar, Johnny Carson and Leno. "It sounds like the joke at the end of a sentence," he told Matt Lauer on "Today" the morning before his last show. (Self-deprecation is his stock in trade, though he is by definition a success.)
More or less the same things happen in more or less the same order in all late-night network talk shows: the opening monologue, banter with the second banana, skits, interview, possibly a wacky interruption before a second interview, musical guest. And yet they are alike only as nations are alike; each has developed its own culture, its own language, its own coterie of allegiance-pledging fans.
It's no accident that Letterman, an iconoclast who became an icon while still managing to seem an iconoclast, forged his outsider style at 12:30 a.m., a slot where he spent nearly a dozen years before moving to 11:30 p.m., the major leagues, the Big Show. The later the hour, the less accommodating one needs to be to mainstream tastes -- the audience is younger and stranger and smaller. They are the sort of people who do not need to get up in the morning, or can't get to sleep in the first place, or just don't want to. The guest stars are not as reliably stellar after 12:30, so the host and his players may wave their arms a little harder to compensate.
O'Brien was, to be sure, more of an outsider than Letterman, whom he followed onto "Late Night." Possibly 30 people watching knew who he was then (a writer for "Saturday Night Live" and "The Simpsons"), and NBC was unsure enough about the choice that for a while they renewed the show only 13 weeks at a time. But he learned on the job and, somehow, managed to survive until he found success. "I didn't know what you couldn't do on television," he told Lauer, and so he did it. Or as he recently told sometime "Late Night" player James Lipton on Lipton's "Inside the Actors Studio," "All the best things about our show are things that don't really need to exist."
