Given the preceding item posted here, I was tempted to start this one, "Speaking of disasters occurring on soundstages at Universal Studios…" But truth has to trump funny segues and the truth is that I don't think Conan O'Brien's first week hosting The Tonight Show was a disaster…but I also don't think it was all that wonderful. I guess I was disappointed that he and his crew felt that they could (or should) do pretty much the same show they've been doing for years, except an hour earlier and on the opposite coast.
I've always liked Conan O'Brien, even back in his earliest days when much of the industry was proclaiming him a flop as Letterman's successor and predicting his hasty return to Simpsons writing. I thought he was better than that, and it was nice to see him stick with it and refine his act, sanding off the rough edges until he began to project the notion that he might belong in the job. He and his crew had the wise sense not to panic and begin changing everything around. They didn't start fiddling with the set and format, didn't bring in new sidekicks or anything of the sort. They just kept doing what was essentially the same show, only doing it better and better, until it was good enough for sufficent viewership to accept.
The last few years though, I've felt like he's been doing the same show a little too long. I can't think of a new segment or running gag or new character introduced in quite a while. I thought to a large degree, he'd settled into generating response from the live audience by trotting out catch phrases and acting goofy and playing to them instead of the cameras. If you and I were in the studio, we'd probably laugh out of recognition but we wouldn't laugh, watching the same antics at home. Mr. Carson endured as long as he did because he knew that the job description involved entertaining the people not in your studio audience. I'm not sure any pretenders to his throne appreciate the distinction, the possible exception being David Letterman. (I get the feeling Dave does understand the difference and would simply rather entertain the folks in his theater.)
So I guess I was let down that after all those months of planning, the only real change in Conan's act is that he's doing it from a larger, fancier building. I don't see that that adds a thing to the proceedings and it may even diminish them. Like Norma Desmond famously taught us, when the sets get bigger, the actors get smaller.
I think the set's too big and I think Andy Richter's in the wrong section of it. He's a funny guy, not Ed McMahon, and the best thing I saw all week on the show involved the only non-awkward exchange he and Conan had…Andy sitting next to the host doing "In the Year 2000." Perhaps symbolic of how the show has changed (and not changed), they made it fancier and more expensive and made the cosmetic change to the Year 3000…but it's still the same bit they've been doing since the Year 2000 was actually in the future. And the fun in it is that the two of them are working together. I like Conan better when he's not out there all alone.
We're not budging off our prediction that his ratings will be fine, at least for a while…or that there'll be a week or two when it won't look that way. We're also still hoping that what we saw this past week was Mr. O'Brien and his producers leading with what they knew worked and that they'll soon be introducing new elements into the mix. But nothing I've seen so far made me think, "I've got to make sure I don't miss an episode of this." It's just another talk show that I'll TiVo every night and then watch until it goes déjà vu on me…or not watch at all if the guests don't seem all that exciting. It took Leno a couple years to get me to that point but with Conan, it happened around half past Wednesday night's program.