Conan O’Brien is shedding a bit more light on what led to his Max travel series pushing three episodes from its planned six-episode Season 2 to a newly announced third season. As expected, hosting the Oscars threw a wrench in his schedule.
O’Brien recapped prepping for and hosting the Academy Awards in a conversation with head writer Mike Sweeney in a special installment of Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend Thursday, where the host detailed how the Oscars offer fell in his lap at a hectic time.
“We were so busy,” O’Brien recalled. The offer call came in last November, just one day after the host and his team had returned from shooting an episode of Conan O’Brien Must Go in Spain. Sweeney added that O’Brien and others on the show’s staff had gotten sick while in Spain as well.
The idea of hosting the awards show was “not on our radar,” O’Brien said. O’Brien credits streaming service Max with graciously allowing him to interrupt his filming schedule for Conan O’Brien Must Go, which had been renewed for a six-episode second season six months earlier.
“HBO Max very kindly said, ‘Ok, you’re supposed to finish this travel season, so yes, go host the Oscars, but can you knock this other travel show [episode] off very quickly?,” O’Brien explained. “We immediately dash to Austria,” O’Brien recalled, to give the streamer one more episode for the time being.
However, even that episode faced complicating factors.
“We’re shooting a show in Austria when I get the call that my father had passed away,” O’Brien recounted on his podcast. “So I rush home, and then while I’m home, I see that my mom is going too, and she went three days later. And that was an experience that was very intense.”
When O’Brien headed back home, Sweeney and the rest of the Conan O’Brien Must Go team stayed in Austria to finish the episode, shooting a segment with Jordan Schlansky. (Sweeney also began building out the Oscars writers room while in Austria.)
“I had to go mourn my parents while you guys went to Vienna and shot b-roll and drank Schnapps,” O’Brien jabs to Sweeney during the interview.
Following that, O’Brien was forced to evacuate his home amid the Los Angeles wildfire, and was quickly consumed by Academy Awards prep.
“I was so enraged when people would try to talk to me about the travel shows,” O’Brien admitted of his time preparing for the Oscars.
“Every now and then, [executive producer] Jeff Ross would say something like, ‘So anyway, if we do end up going to India…’” O’Brien recalled, adding in mock extreme anger, “And I’d be like, ‘If it’s not about the Oscars, I don’t want to talk about it!’”
With three new episodes of Conan O’Brien Must Go in the can, Max is now calling that the complete second season, with the remaining three in its initial Season 2 order to be shot at a later date as part of an upcoming third Season 3.
Conan O’Brien Must Go’s second season is set for release on Max sometime in May, documenting the host’s visits to New Zealand, Spain, and Austria. It’s unclear how many episodes have been ordered for Season 3.
Max has their hand tied. They pretty much have to work with whatever the schedule one of the greatest hosts in history can give them. There’s no way he could pass up hosting the Oscars…so kudos to them to hear they pretty much went with the flow. I have a feeling It will be a lot more than three seasons he’ll be on…