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Now that the darkest days of late night are behind him, critics agree, the kid's got the hang of it now By Jim Bawden -- The Toronto Star -- January 13, 1996 -- Section: STARWEEK; Pg. SW32 NEW YORK - "Do I consider myself a survivor?" asks TV's Conan O'Brien in mock horror. "I could teach a survival course with what I've been through. Plonk me down in any wilderness and I could survive." The lanky redhead is walking taller these days - he's survived two years of merciless browbeating from TV critics and do you know what? Some have even come around to say the kid's getting better by the week. A Conan revival is underway and watching The Late Show no longer gives mild pain, but some pleasure. "It was pretty brutal for all of us but I was told to expect it. Now the show is starting to turn around. I've got a lot of work ahead of me making it the way I think it could be." The odds were heavily stacked against him. I was in the audience of TV critics in Los Angeles when he was first introduced to the press a mere day after NBC gave him the assignment. Out of the wings stepped a shy, nervous guy who looked like a teenager in his jeans and the baggy jacket NBC had borrowed from the prop department. The questioning was intensely hostile but at that stage Conan didn't have a clue what kind of show he was going to put on. Still, his niceness was disarming and he even sang a song from The Sound Of Music to indicate where his musical tastes lay. One critic even suggested Conan didn't look like he was having much fun up there. "And do you know what?" O'Brien asks. "I wasn't. I wanted to get out of there real bad." Up on the ninth floor of 30 Rockefeller Plaza there's a gaggle of Conan clones - all young men in their early 30s who put the show together. They're learning together by trial and error. "When David Letterman came on he was very gracious. I told him how green we were and he said that was the route to take, to find our own way. I always knew what I wanted but wasn't sure how to get there." O'Brien says inheriting The Late Show mantle from Letterman was hard enough. "We deserved to fail really big if we tried to take any stuff from his show. I'd be known as the son of Dave forever." NBC argued it still held the copy rights to such Letterman inventions as Stupid Pet Tricks and The Top Ten list but Conan refused to go near them. "Yeah, like I'd wander out and do a top Eight List? No, thank you." The first big problem was the monologue. Every late night talk show host has to have one. O'Brien was all arms when trying to deliver a punchline. Something else was needed. Conan was told not to scratch his face and to immediately establish eye contact with the screen. In the end the monologue was shortened to three or four cornball jokes, which seemed to suit Conan's eager-to-please personality. On another floor, executive producer Lorne Michaels is telling the story yet again of why he picked the completely unknown Conan. "In private he's very funny and ingratiating. I liked the way he was always goofing around. He's a sweet guy, not a hard standup comic. I needed somebody aged 30 who'd be almost a generation younger than Letterman or Jay Leno. That lack of experience didn't scare me because this is the last timeslot on TV where you can really experiment." Says O'Brien, his long legs dangling over his chair, "It was harder being myself than I'd ever imagined. I'd never done interviews so I wrongly decided to become as prepared as all get out. If I had five questions written out I'd ask them all no matter which way the conversation was going. "I watched those compilation tapes of Johnny Carson and saw Carson was a great listener and that's the secret." The O'Brien style might be described as a pleasant amalgam of everything he's ever watched on TV. "That's right. I'm a child of TV. So my influences are broad. SCTV is right up there - I remember watching with my brothers and understanding that there's something funny about coming from Canada. Like Massachusetts where I'm from. People seem to be funnier." He says he wants to exploit TV's technology, like the talking lips, which seem to be his most popular invention. The original, grand scheme was for a comedy show with lots of skits, a concept that was far too ambitious for five hours a week. "Eventually we had to scale back. I just wasn't comfortable with a lot of it. There's no short cut. Doing hundreds of shows has given me the experience. At first I'd talk to the writers in a tiny voice because I wasn't sure. Now it's boom - that's not funny! - show me something else." Everything about the show seems to have rubbed middle aged critics the wrong way. The set is a grungy brown with a few windows painted blue to highlight Conan's blue eyes. There's comic sidekick Andy Richter, whom Conan says "really makes me laugh. His job is to step in when I need help. People think we've been together since the fifth grade. In fact, we met the summer I was hired." At first it seemed potential guests avoided the show to go on Letterman. But recently Conan has been attracting a better variety, from Senator Bob Dole to Faye Dunaway. And O'Brien recently performed at the Washington Press Club for President Bill Clinton "something I couldn't have done two years ago - I would have been too scared." Some things have been working since the start including The Max Weinberg Seven band and the musical guests. But the best part of O'Brien's act, TV viewers never see - the warmup. He comes into the audience in his shirtsleeves and really rocks it with a female chosen from the audience. As an Elvis imitator he's pretty wound up, but he can't always manage the same grace when talking with guests - he still fidgets a lot. The son of a doctor and a lawyer, O'Brien was editor of The Lampoon at Harvard University for two unprecedented years and says, "I guess I always was the goofball. But I'm Catholic so I was like a respectful class clown." After graduation he left for L.A. where he was a gofer on Comedy Relief before writing for Saturday Night Live and The Simpsons. "I'd go into a room and write by myself, which was weird. I'm best bouncing ideas off other people." Letterman had 10 years to perfect his act. O'Brien's had two years and now has a repertoire of "about 50 bits of business we can use". For his third year he'd like to take the show on the road - "anywhere but L.A." He's already taken a cruise around Manhattan with the show. He says his collegiate humor must be making it outside of dorms "because they're not metered and a lot more people are watching." He still doesn't know when he's done a good show. "The bad ones I can feel. But often I'll think the timing was off only to have people stop and compliment me about that show. So I guess I'm too close to it. "I'm still learning this business. The Catholic in me says I should pay for all this with my blood. The comic in me says shut up and just be funny." CORRECTION: Conan O'Brien's NBC TV show is called Late Night With Conan O'Brien. Today's pre-printed Starweek gave an incorrect name. The Star regrets the error. (January 13, 1996 Page A2) See correction at end of story. GRAPHIC: color photo: Conan O'Brien |