It occurs to me I haven’t seen hide nor hair of him in ages, and I never see his show advertised, nor do I see him in the public or in the media. All the other late night hosts, constantly, but not a peep from Conan.
Yes, on cable (TNT). Been on for years now.
The bastard won’t let me go to bed at night. Once I turn the show on I can’t turn it off.
TBS. He has quite a loyal following.
I guess you don’t use Reddit, where his clips show up on /r/videos, just like Stephen Colbert and Jon Oliver.
He’s also all over youtube and has his own channel Team Coco.
He also has his own Superhero costume. Notice the hair helmet.
Also, according to his IMDB credits he regularly appears as a guest on other shows. Maybe not very high profile things but in the past 2 years he’s been on The Daily Show, hosted Carson on TMC, MTV Awards, Inside Edition, Extra, Charlie Rose, and several other documentaries and TV shows. A Google News search brings up 133,000 results with recent articles in Popular Science, Yahoo Finance, Entertainment Weekly, New York Daily News.
After Conan got bounced from The Tonight Show and TBS picked him up, he had the prefect opportunity to remake the whole show in ways a major network never would have let him get away with. It could have been the most talked about show on television.
Instead, he did a lamer version of exactly what he’d been doing. He’s been phoning it in ever since. I watch occasionally if he has a guest I’m interested in, but if he doesn’t care I can’t care.
His show is highly profitable and is the flagship property at TBS. I’m sure he’s perfectly content with what he’s doing.
I’m glad he’s doing well at TBS, but I only wondered at his low profile especially this election year. My fault, I don’t stay up late enough or watch the wrong stations.
He started changing his act on Late Night after getting the Tonight Show gig (ironically he spent more time toning it down on Late Night than he did actually hosting the Tonight Show) and it’s never quite been the same.
For instance - the monologue, that’s never been his strong suit, he used to just tell 2-3 jokes then go to the desk for a skit or some other act, usually very funny and off the wall. After announcing his Tonight Show gig he started doing a full monologue segment, just like every other host ever. YAWN
Yeah, that’s my point.
He had the perfect opportunity to be outrageous and new. No pressure, no expectations, $35 million in his pocket. And he didn’t. Why?
Maybe he didn’t want to?
Well, why that? Did he want to become a forgotten nonentity? Neither decision makes any sense.
He is neither forgotten nor a nonentity. He is the most prominent personality on his network and his ratings are competitive against cable shows in his timeslot. His fans are fiercely loyal and his travelogue episodes have received critical acclaim. He is more popular with 18-34-year-olds overseas than most other American talk show hosts. His contract is secure through 2018. Every year he does a week of shows and events from Comic-Con which sell out months in advance.
The fact that he’s managed to slip under your radar doesn’t mean that what he’s doing is unsuccessful, or that he’s failed in some way. He’s got a job, he does it the way he likes, his bosses are happy, and he’s good at it.
Seems incredible that Conan is so quiet during an election like we’re having. His satire of both candidates should be scathing, funny, on target, and widely talked about.
I guess he wants to play it safe and phone it in.
Good grief. Bunch of armchair TV critics, ripping on someone as “phoning it in” just because he hasn’t approached his performance the way you think he should. As stated above, he is the winner in his time slot for the most attractive advertising demographic.
I think he is doing okay.
Election year stuff has never been Conan’s strongest skill. Colbert and others are much better at it, anyway. Conan is the goofy nerd you turn on when you’re sick of hearing about the election and want to see something bizarrely funny or idiotic.
Glad to see that Conan still has fans. But you made me curious about ratings. I didn’t see anything to back up your numbers.
He’s on the bottomof this comparison. Second last here, ahead of only one guy in a later timeslot. Barely competitive with Larry Wilmore here, a bad sign since Wilmore never got going. He also seems to lose a large fraction of Samantha Bee’s audience, though that’s a harder comparison since she’s earlier and weekly. Of course, Conan starts a half-hour earlier than most of the others except TDS and even with Noah’s slide in ratings, it beats Conan soundly.
Is he doing good enough to stay on the air? Sure. His contract did get renewed. He’s just not doing nearly as well as you claim. And that’s against newly weakened competition.
Yeesh, looks like he sure took a plunge over the last year, probably losing a lot of his US audience to Colbert. It will be interesting to see if he can recover his numbers by 2018.