What Conan O'Brien Means to Late Night's Future
The long-tenured host might be moving to a weekly, or all-digital, format in the coming years—another major shift for an ever-evolving genre.
Conan O’Brien was once the upstart of the late-night comedy world, a pretender to the throne hoping to one day rise to the level of luminaries like Jay Leno and David Letterman. Just a few years ago, O’Brien’s sense of humor was still viewed by NBC executives as too unusual and young-skewing, sparking fears that he couldn’t hold onto the broader, older audience of . O’Brien’s brief 2010 tenure at , and his abrupt replacement with the program’s previous host Leno, seems like a lifetime ago. In the intervening years, old hands like Leno, Letterman, Craig Ferguson, and Jon Stewart have all retired, and now O’Brien, the longest-tenured late-night host in the’s days suddenly seem numbered.
