Late night talk show host and all around funnyman Conan O’Brien, whose new TBS talk show Conan will premiere in just a few short weeks, is featured on the cover and in the pages of the new issue Rolling Stone magazine. In his coverstory interview, Conan opens up about the depression he felt in the [...]
Late night talk show host and all around funnyman Conan O’Brien, whose new TBS talk show Conan will premiere in just a few short weeks, is featured on the cover and in the pages of the new issue Rolling Stone magazine. In his coverstory interview, Conan opens up about the depression he felt in the wake of losing his hosting gig on The Tonight Show and explains what his life was like after he completed his nationwide Legally Prohibited from Being Funny on Television Tour. Here is our first look at Conan on the cover of RS mag and some excerpts from his coverstory interview:
In July, shortly after his Legally Prohibited From Being Funny on Television Tour wrapped up, Conan O’Brien began visiting the set of his new talk show, at Warner Bros. Studios in Burbank, California. For various reasons, the show had not been staffed yet, nor had the set been built, so on those days, O’Brien would occasionally pause en route to his office and stand alone in a giant, empty warehouse … O’Brien had lost his dream job as host of The Tonight Show in January, at a speed (seven months!) almost as humiliating as the circumstances of his departure (ousted for Jay Leno, which is the comedy-world equivalent of being left at the altar for a cast member of Jersey Shore). “My wife says those first couple of months, the thing I said most often was, ‘Wait a minute, what just happened?’” O’Brien recalls. “Those weeks after the tour, where not much was going on, Conan was miserable,” confirms his wife, Liza Powel, a blunt and dryly funny former advertising executive with whom O’Brien has two children. “That was when he was the most depressed.” Powel says she had “all sorts of grand designs” about keeping her idled spouse busy: He would be responsible for camp drop-offs, he would cook dinner at least one night a week. None of which ended up happening. O’Brien did go for long bicycle rides, and read lots of history books. At a parents’ night at their son Beckett’s preschool, there was a stack of volunteer sign-up sheets, and O’Brien, who still had too much time on his hands, became overly ambitious and started signing up for everything: “Oh, I’d love to come talk to the kids about natural history!” “He was in the house all the time,” Powel recalls. “I said, ‘This can’t last – it’ll drive us crazy!’ Literally every 10 minutes, he’d poke his head in the room and say, ‘I don’t wanna bother you, but do you know where the Band-Aids are?’ ‘I don’t wanna bother you, but do you know how to use the phone?’ He was so sweet about it, and I felt like such a jerk. But seriously, I almost rented an office for him.” The morning after O’Brien’s final Tonight Show – his second-highest- rated episode ever, quadrupling his average nightly viewership – he and Powel drove up to a resort in Montecito. “I felt like I’d just been in a car accident,” O’Brien says. “Like a crazy mix of elation, anger, sorrow. Confusion was a big one.” That night, when they entered the dining room and the other guests stood up and applauded, O’Brien says, “It almost made me cry.”
This Rolling Stone excerpt continues after the jump, where you will also find a photo from Conan‘s RS photospread as well as behind the scene video from the shoot …
“I hated to see him in such a state of tension and unhappiness,” Powel says. “It was very painful for him to let go of this hallowed ground that he’d finally got a chance to stand on.” But, she goes on, “There were so many factors at work, such a confluence of change that had to do with so much more than him. The truth is, The Tonight Show was the definition of cultural relevancy for decades. And all of a sudden, it’s not. That’s not Conan’s fault. It’s not anybody’s fault. It just happened. And it’s no longer a show he should be pinning his life’s hopes on hosting.” Indeed, the spontaneous pro-Conan Internet campaign generated by fans in January – complete with Shepard Fairey-style iconography and its very own slogan, “I’m With Coco” – was driven largely by young people for whom the venerable institution of The Tonight Show meant little or nothing. For some, the show might have even made O’Brien less cool by association. The Tonight Show had been unhip for a very, very long time, not just for the past 17 years it has been hosted by Jay Leno, but for (let’s be honest) pretty much all of the Eighties … Consequently, when O’Brien was undone by NBC’s fecklessness and Leno’s treachery, it only affirmed what we knew all along: He’d thrown his lot in with the wrong crowd. Overnight, O’Brien not only regained the underdog status he’d held for much of his career, but actually found himself in a wholly new position: rebranded as an indie icon.
The full coverstory interview/article can be read in Rolling Stone magazine. They make a great point about how disassociating himself from the lame Tonight Show really reinvigorated Conan O’Brien‘s career … thus far. Sure, he’s gonna hafta do well with his new TBS talk show but I don’t think that will be much of a problem. His huge fanbase will be a boon for TBS. Getting fired from NBC will prolly be the best thing to ever happen to our dear Coco. Here is behind the scenes video from Conan‘s RS photoshoot:
Conan‘s time is now … I honestly believe he is about to embark on the next, even more successful stage of his career … and it couldn’t happen to a nicer guy.
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