So I Was Wrong...      Late Night's Late Riser

Has Conan O'Brien Finally Emerged From David Letterman's Shadow?

by Tom Shales  --  Washington Post  --  June 18, 1996  --  Section: B

David Letterman's "Late Show" has become David Letterman's Lame Show. "Tonight," with Jay Leno, was once counted out as a flop but now beats Letterman regularly in the ratings. ABC's "Nightline," with American icon Ted Koppel, is having another spectacularly successful year.

And Conan O'Brien, 33-year-old host of NBC's "Late Night," has gone through one of the most amazing transformations in television history. Rarely if ever has such a shiny silk purse been made out of such a humble sow's ear. His ascent from obscurity is commemorated this week with a long cover story in TV Guide.

We call them talk shows, but they're also soap operas, these late-night network programs that scramble and hustle for viewers and guests, rise and dip in the ratings, and tend to reveal much more about their stars than any prime-time shows do. What's being revealed about Letterman now is that he's not quite so funny anymore, that he is not so much irreverent as just badly behaved, that the decline in his ratings is apparently enough to drive him visibly crazy.

Letterman no longer seems to just have an edge; he is an edge, and who wants a big edge coming at you at 11:30 every night?

But for all those viewers who used to love Letterman for his adventurousness and off-the-wall antics, O'Brien, after a rocky start, has become the new Dave. "Conan O'Brien is doing the most innovative comedy in television," says Robert Morton, who until April was Letterman's executive producer. Letterman dumped Morton and, in an interview with Rolling Stone, referred to him as a "diseased limb" that had to be sawed off the tree.

Even Letterman, in an interview last year, expressed admiration for O'Brien and his staff of wackies. "When I see that show, it just withers me with exhaustion," Letterman said. "They do so much stuff, and I know a little of what it takes to get that stuff on the air every night."

Letterman's company produces Tom Snyder's "Late, Late Show," which airs opposite O'Brien in many markets. But Snyder's program has caused little excitement and appears doomed. In the recent May ratings sweeps, O'Brien had a 2.0 Nielsen to Snyder's 1.4. Letterman's people thought Snyder would do a newsmaking

"Nightline"-style show. He didn't.

O'Brien, who succeeded Letterman as "Late Night" host and tends to be worshipful of him, says he doesn't embrace the notion that Dave is out and Conan is in, that Conan is the New Dave. "No, I don't like that," O'Brien says from his SoHo apartment in New York. "I'm never comfortable with that. It feels silly and wrong. This `Late-Night Wars' business just seems ridiculous to me, like when they compare our show to Tom Snyder's. He's making ice cream, and we're building birdhouses. I like what he does, and hope he might like what I do."

Modest, wry, self-effacing and demonstrably the most intelligent of the late-night comics (and the only Irish Catholic in the bunch), O'Brien survived a merciless drubbing when his show premiered in September 1993. Some critics, present company included, were excessively mean, perhaps because it seemed so presumptuous of the unknown O'Brien to be following the near-legendary Letterman.

"As hard as anyone else was on me, I've always been hard on myself," O'Brien says with no apparent bitterness. "I never said to myself, `They're all crazy, this show's great, it's right where it needs to be.' There are things in the first week that I'm proud of still, but basically the show was ass-backwards. I had not figured out how to be myself in this strange environment."

Like sharks sniffing blood, network executives in Burbank, Calif., circled the show, sending endless notes and complaints to O'Brien's executive producer, Jeff Ross, who shielded him as much as possible.

"I never actually got the call, `You're off the air in two weeks if things don't improve,'" O'Brien says, "but obviously they were worried. They had to be thinking, `Maybe this won't be our 12:30 show.' It's probably best that I don't know how close we came to being replaced by old `F-Troop' reruns."

Said Letterman last year: "I think Conan and those people deserve a lot of credit, and from what I hear, NBC under-appreciates them a bit." O'Brien makes $2 million a year, paltry compared with Letterman's $16 million, and has had only small raises from the network since his five-year contract began. But NBC has given him some votes of confidence lately, including the scheduling of O'Brien's first-ever anniversary show, on Friday, Sept. 13.

NBC brass still reportedly bombards the show with complaints and requests for changes. One possible casualty: a funny recurring bit that had O'Brien talking to a puppet known as "Polly, the NBC Peacock." Polly, the network logo, had a habit of unabashedly blasting shows on other networks, calling them garbage and crud.

O'Brien, though, says Polly is not necessarily dead and "probably will be back." He refers to the bit as "Comedy of the Bad." There are plenty more sure-fire routines that make the O'Brien show sparkle: "In the Year 2000" is a mock-pretentious look at the future, which turns out to have just as many ghastly horrors as the present. "If They Mated" uses computer-altered photographs to create the frightening offspring of unlikely celebrity couples. And the most reliable staple of them all is what the staff calls the "Clutch Cargo" segments, named after an ancient cartoon series that was so cheaply produced, only the mouths of the characters moved.

A TV screen is lowered behind O'Brien's desk and a still photo of a news figure appears -- with moving lips electronically added so O'Brien can have chats. The lips and voice are usually supplied by O'Brien's longtime writing partner Robert Smigel, whom O'Brien describes as "a failed dental student who ended up at Second City," the famous comedy troupe. Frequently popping up on the screen are Bill Clinton, portrayed as a party-crazed hillbilly who shouts "yee(sic)-hah!" and Bob Dole, a stern megalomaniac who calls O'Brien "Carrot-Top" and orders him to "Bow down, bow down to Dole!"

During the weeks preceding the Academy Awards telecast, Babe the Talking Pig would occasionally show up on the screen to campaign for the Oscar, shamelessly bad-mouthing the competition with such unsportsmanlike remarks as "`Sense and Sensibility' sucks!"

"There's a childishness about it," O'Brien admits. "They're caricatures of political figures, not good impressions of them." O'Brien analyzes his own humor as a combination of "silliness and sharpness" and says, "Sometimes I think we're really doing a show for children here, one that's more reminiscent of `Pee-wee's Playhouse' than of any of the other talk shows. We try to stay away from the detached irony of that '80s sensibility, and so we get cartoonish almost."

Among the most cartoonish recurring figures is the Gaseous Wiener, which is, yes, pretty much what it sounds like, a flatulent frankfurter -- a man in a big hot-dog suit who makes what the British call "rude noises." The Wiener (played by writer Tommy Blacha) was invented during a sketch about mascots of little-known college football teams. Others included the Drexel University Catty Ants ("Nice suit, Conan, but what's Grandma gonna do without the drapes?") and the University of Eastern Michigan's Decapitated Conans.

Key to the success of the show is O'Brien's sidekick, Andy Richter, who seems far more compatible with O'Brien than any of the other talk show cohorts do with their bosses. "I really admire him," O'Brien says. "There's an affection there that isn't manufactured." Richter joins O'Brien for many of the sketches and has starred in his own recurring talk show parody, "Andi," supposedly taped during the day when O'Brien's studio is not in use.

On one edition, Richter had to talk loudly because a cleaning woman was vacuuming the stairs. On another, a grieving daughter was told that her long-lost mother would not appear as expected; instead, two male strippers were brought out to "ease her pain." At his best moments alongside O'Brien, Richter evokes memories of the late, great John Candy as William B. Williams, luckless second banana on SCTV's brilliant talk show spoof "The Sammy Maudlin Show."

O'Brien also benefits from the best band in late-night TV, the Max Weinberg Seven, led by Bruce Springsteen's former drummer. Weinberg's only problem is a tendency to stare into the camera through his thick glasses while drumming. He looks dorky.

Asked whether he would like to guest-host "Saturday Night Live," which like his own show is produced by Lorne Michaels, O'Brien says, "I've done enough getting-in-over-my-head to last a lifetime. "Known to dive into fits of instant depression, O'Brien still smarts from the wounds he suffered early in the run. His ratings aren't quite as good as Letterman's were in the time slot -- O'Brien averages a 2.0 to Letterman's old 2.5 -- but O'Brien has more competition than Letterman did. No one can deny he's come a tremendously long way from a hugely ignoble beginning.

And he says he doesn't covet the earlier time slot that Leno and Letterman have. "Twelve-thirty is a great place to be," O'Brien says. "I can really see living here the rest of my life, if they'll let me. You can really misbehave at that time of night."

Dave's World

Dustin Hoffman won't do the Letterman show because he does not want to be subjected to Letterman's bad manners. Sean Connery and Denzel Washington, who've both been on, reportedly refuse to return because they had unhappy experiences. Letterman has, of course, always been a quirky and maddeningly eccentric, but as he flails and falters, he appears to be getting nastier.

Still, he's the best ad-libber on TV. And a seemingly easy choice over "Tonight" on NBC. Leno's monologue can be full of snappy zingers, but once the monologue is over, the show is over. Years of traveling alone on the road and playing comedy clubs have apparently taken their toll on Leno; he has trouble relating to any other human being. As recent evidence of his cloddishness, Leno chased guest Charles Barkley around the studio with a big slimy frog when Barkley let it clearly be known he did not like frogs, did not want to touch the frog, did not want anything to do with the frog. Leno taunted and ridiculed him like the meanest kid on the playground. He has no idea, really, how to treat people.

Conan O'Brien isn't mean. Conan O'Brien isn't nasty -- or when he is, he can get away with it in the ingenuous way Carson did. Coincidentally or not, O'Brien is scheduled to appear as a guest on Letterman's show next Monday night. Maybe he can help Dave come to his senses.

O'Brien's show is taped in New York, about the same time Letterman's is, and one of O'Brien's pranks a while back was to fill a large Trojan Horse with his own writers, send it to the Ed Sullivan Theater, and try to take over Letterman's show. Ah, but the plan went awry. Just as the horse neared the stage door, a truck zoomed by and demolished it. Writers spilled out onto the street like beans from a bag.

Of course it was all a gag, but maybe Letterman would have been better off if the horse had made it inside and O'Brien's team had taken over.

There's every chance Letterman will recover. Industry scuttlebutt has him moving the show late this year to Hollywood, where he can get bigger guests, and deeding the Ed Sullivan Theater to comic Jon Stewart, just hired by Letterman's World Wide Pants Co. as a possible Snyder replacement. But until that happens, if it ever does, Conan O'Brien is more than just an adequate Letterman substitute. He's his own secret ingredient, and his show an inspired absurdist romp.

"Gee, I hope Jay and Dave are having a good time," O'Brien says boyishly, "or else, what's the point? I do get depressed, but when I take the full measure of things, I realize I'm having a real good time, and I hope I can hang on to that." Having one, yes, and giving one, too.

copyright:  Washington Post