Conan O’Brien, daytime talk show host? After his NBC exit, but before he landed at TBS, that was one scenario O’Brien and his team considered.
In this Thursday’s episode of his Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend podcast, a discussion about CBS’s decision to replace Stephen Colbert’s cancelled Late Show with Byron Allen’s Comics Unleashed leads to the revelation that Conan was pitched a daytime talker in 2010 after his brief run at The Tonight Show came to an end.
With his longtime executive producer, Jeff Ross, serving as this week’s guest, O’Brien introduced the topic: “What’s going on in Hollywood these days?” On the late night front, Ross noted that Allen has “bought” The Late Show‘s 11:35 p.m. perch from CBS.
“That’s fascinating…,” O’Brien remarked of the “time buy” option. “Can we buy the 4 a.m. time slot on NBC, create our own show, and sell all that sweet advertising money that’d be coming in at 4 a.m.?”
When O’Brien took that notion a step further and posited, “I think I’d be great in daytime, I think housewives would love me,” Ross jumped in to remind him that just such an opportunity was presented to them years ago.
“Before we went to TBS [with Conan], we took a meeting with these guys [at] Debmar-Mercury, and they wanted to do a daytime show,” Ross shared. (Debmar-Mercury’s past and present daytime-TV titles include The Wendy Williams Show and Sherri.)
Reflecting on that sliding doors moment, O’Brien exclaimed, “I’d be so lovable and fun” as a daytime talk host—but his podcast crew begged to differ.
“Your humor is for the wee hours of the night,” his longtime assistant Sona Movsesian opined. “Your sense of humor is kind of silly and edgy and goofy. A lot of moms would be like, ‘What is this?'”
Producer Adam Sachs agreed with Movsesian, adding that from his particular POV, “As you’ve aged, your audience has stayed very young. You have a very young, mobile, digital-first audience.”
O’Brien responded with exaggerated umbrage.”I say this to Adam with all respect: F*ck you. F*ck you.
“How dare you tell me I’ve aged,” Conan continued. “This makes me want to shut down the podcast and the HBO travel show [Conan O’Brien Must Go] immediately. And because I am very reactive, I’m launching a daytime talk show. It’s called Conaan! “(with two As, and an exclamation point), and it will exist purely to spite Sachs.
“It’s syndicated, and yes, it will do terribly,” O’Brien allowed, “but we get to own how terribly it does.”
Jeff Ross confirms to LateNighter that the previously unreported meeting with executives from Debmar-Mercury did indeed happen, in the office of Rick Rosen, Conan’s chief agent at the time. The pitch was for O’Brien to host a 30-minute syndicated show.
Conan in Day Time with Debmar/Mercury would have been an interesting partnership. They could have made it work too. LOL.
IN this digital age (and like Adam Sachs mentioned that Conan’s audience remains young), I could have seen a daytime show starring Conan being successful enough digitally, with people sharing clips on social media and such.
The linear ratings of a daytime show, however….Sona had it right when she said that the usual daytime linear viewers would have been like, “What?!”