Conan O'Brien is finally free of the late-night format that never quite fit him properly

https://www.avclub.com/conan-obrien-never-needed-late-night-1847167269

Conan's talents transcend the talk show format, says Dennis Perkins. Yet for the past 28 years, Conan was entrenched in a late-night format that was always an awkward fit. "When O’Brien took over Late Night, the late-night hosting post was a cultural sinecure, a comic throne from which to bestow laughs upon those guests granted an audience," says Perkins. "But Conan is not a removed and beneficent bestower—he’s a once-in-a generation comic jester, whose true place is down in the comedy trenches, leaping at every opportunity to find the joke, no matter where he lands. Jumping metaphors a third time, Conan’s not the ringmaster, he’s the funniest clown in the center ring spotlight, who’s also secretly the brains of the whole outfit." Perkins says it was a good thing that The Tonight Show never worked out for Conan because NBC's 11:30 p.m. timeslot would've dulled his off-the-wall comic originality and sparking weirdness. "The current, Jimmy Fallon-hosted incarnation shows just what it would have looked like if O’Brien had truly succumbed to his Tonight Show fate—a wan, charmless cruise of effortful wackiness and placid fawning," says Perkins. Now that he's free of the talk show format, Conan can go back to being "Conan." "With his upcoming move to whatever the hell he’s going to be doing on HBO Max—we know it will be weekly, in the variety show family, and most likely weird, but that’s about it—O’Brien is finally, after almost three decades, stepping wholly away from a hand-me-down entertainment format that never quite fit him properly, and that he never really needed," says Perkins. "And, unlike Letterman’s more genuine retrenchment into prospector-bearded semi-obscurity (and the occasional comedy emeritus Netflix sit-down), there’s a genuine sense of freedom and joy at the prospect of Conan O’Brien deciding to stay in the game, on his own terms. With a cushy HBO deal supplementing his thriving and hand-tailored multimedia Team Coco comedy empire, the late-night-battle-hardened, 58-year-old Conan is striding into a free-form, subscriber-subsidized playroom where he can get back to letting his legendarily febrile comic imagination do whatever the hell it wants. After 28 years, it’s about time."