It may surprise you to learn that Canada has never had its own late-night talk at the scale of one of the U.S. shows. That may be why Canadians of a certain age look back so fondly on one week in February 2004 when Conan O’Brien—then ten years into his run at Late Night with Conan O’Brien and at the height of his powers at NBC—brought his show to Toronto.
Not since The Beatles performed two shows at Maple Leaf Gardens in 1964 had the city seen such an entertainment invasion from another land. No other American late night show—before or since—has ever shot episodes in Canada.
“It’s exhilarating. It’s good for us,” O’Brien told me at the time. “We’re at the point, after ten years, when you’re looking for the next big thing.”
As the TV columnist at The Toronto Sun at the time, I raced to keep up with O’Brien that week. All four shows made the front page of our newspaper. O’Brien, The Max Weinberg 7, and an army of producers, writers and crew members crossed the border and took the city by storm.
Such moves do not come cheap. The province of Ontario and the government of Canada together kicked in a million dollars in taxpayer money to help lure the show north in hopes of boosting tourism to the city after 2003’s deadly SARS outbreak.
The four shows packed the historic, 2149-seat Elgin Theatre, right down to the ornate opera boxes. (O’Brien’s usual Late Night playpen, Studio 6A at Rockefeller Plaza in Manhattan, sat just 188.) A mob of placard-waving O’Brien fans who couldn’t get tickets spilled outside onto Yonge Street for each show.
O’Brien did everything but cover himself in maple syrup while shooting remotes for the week of shows. He dressed up as a Mountie, travelled through a snowstorm to Niagara Falls, and demanded border crossers sing Gordon Lightfoot songs to gain re-entry. He even put on hockey gear and got in a fight with Toronto Maple Leafs’ enforcer Tie Domi.
On stage at the Elgin, he held nightly challenges between mascot versions of Toronto’s CN Tower and the Seattle Space Needle, culminating in a limbo competition. The crowd went crazy when the CN Tower smacked the space needle across the back with a chair.
On the third night, O’Brien sicced Triumph the Insult Comic Dog on Quebec where he proceeded to poop all over French Canada. “You’re French and Canadian?” said Triumph (aka writer-producer Robert Smigel). “That makes you both obnoxious and dull.”
At Smigel’s direction, one of the main streets of Montreal was renamed “Rue de Pussies.” A beret-wearing Triumph then relieved himself in the snow at the Quebec Winter Carnival. Cut to schoolchildren rolling popsicles in what they thought was maple syrup–implying that wasn’t the traditional winter treat, known as cabane à sucre, that these kids were enjoying.
While Triumph’s antics landed him in the doghouse with some Canadians (the host apologized the following week, and the segment was removed from reruns), where O’Brien truly triumphed was with his guest list. Canadian superstars who never came back for Canada’s only nightly late-night talk show, The Mike Bullard Show, flew home to be with O’Brien.
Jim Carrey, who was shooting a movie at the time, confirmed his appearance with Conan’s executive producer Jeff Ross a week before his appearance. He flew directly to and from Toronto on his Gulfstream jet. He completely took over the show, leading the crowd into a spirited version of the decades-old Expo 67 anthem, “A Place to Stand.”
This puzzled some of the twentysomethings in the front rows in Leafs’ sweaters (and, undoubtedly, the 2.5 million Americans watching on NBC) but the boomers in the theater all sang along.
Carrey even brought with him a Canadian entourage, including a guy in a giant, round, Peter Puck costume (familiar to fans of Hockey Night in Canada); The Amazing Kreskin, the mentalist who was a Canadian TV staple for a while in the ‘70s; and Bonhomme de Neige, the toque-wearing snowman of the Quebec Winter Carnival.
When a phoney U.S Department of Immigration official came on stage to award Carrey a U.S citizenship, the actor, who grew up north of Toronto, stood and played to the house.
“Why would I want to become a U.S citizen when I come from the greatest country in the world,” Carrey declared, shoving the passport in his yap, then chewing it up and spitting it out. “It tastes,” he told the crowd, “of manifest destiny.”
Eric McCormack, the Will & Grace star who grew up in the east end of Toronto, came on next and joked that following Carrey “was every actor’s dream.”
Other Canadian stars who appeared that week included Mike Myers, Nickelback, Michael J. Fox, the late, great Stompin’ Tom Connors, a moose caller, and Barenaked Ladies.
In Canada, O’Brien’s Toronto shows drew ten times the audience as The Mike Bullard Show. The Canadian late-night talk show was shut down one month later.
Back home in the U.S., reporters began asking, “When will you take over for Jay Leno on The Tonight Show?” In mere months they had their answer. As part of a new contract negotiated after the Toronto shows, NBC announced that O’Brien would indeed take over Tonight five years later, in 2009.
We all know how that turned out, but as Toronto audiences could have told you in February of 2004, Conan O’Brien did not need The Tonight Show. He’s Conan, a brand that continues to grow and expand with his podcast Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend and his Max series Conan O’Brien Must Go. Must go back to Toronto? Why not? He’ll find he made plenty of friends.
Correction: an earlier version of this story incorrectly identified Mike Bullard’s 2004 late-night show. It was titled The Mike Bullard Show.
