How did Conan O’Brien celebrate his big night at the Kennedy Center? With a return trip to Austria, apparently.
The former late-night host jetted off to Vienna hours after he won the Mark Twain Prize to complete production on the Austria episode of Conan O’Brien Must Go. The episode is the third in a batch of three episodes that Max is calling the show’s second season.
O’Brien’s time in Austria was cut short in December when his father died, which was followed by his mother’s passing just days later. “We’re shooting a show in Austria when I get the call that my father had passed away,” O’Brien recalled on a recent Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend.
By that time, O’Brien had already joined local metal band Cringe Blizzard onstage in Feldkirch, Austria for part of the episode.
Head writer Mike Sweeney and the rest of the production staff stayed behind to shoot a Vienna portion of the episode, including a segment with Jordan Schlansky.
Prior to the production hiccup, the episode had already been squeezed into a busy schedule for O’Brien. After unexpectedly signing on to host the Academy Awards in November, Max had agreed to let O’Brien focus on preparing for the awards show after shooting one more episode of the travel show. O’Brien recalled they “immediately dash[ed]” to Austria to knock out the episode.
Following the death of his parents, O’Brien returned to Los Angeles to begin pre-production on The Academy Awards when the L.A. wildfires broke out. Though his own home in Pacific Palisades was spared, he and his family have been living out of a hotel as he and his team worked on the Oscars, and then the Mark Twain Prize, leaving no time (til now) to wrap his portion of the Austria episode.
O’Brien shared photos from his return visit on social media, including one of an “old school yodel beef.”
The rest of Conan O’Brien Must Go’s initial six-episode season order has been shifted to Season 3, which the streamer formally announced earlier this month.
Conan O’Brien Must Go’s second season—featuring trips to New Zealand, Spain, and both jaunts to Austria—is set to premiere sometime in May. Now that production has wrapped on that Austria episode, it’s a good bet that we’ll get an exact release date soon.
