Military TV, Television - Military Times

Conan looks back before moving forward

NEW YORK - When Conan O’Brien worked as a writer on “Saturday Night Live” in the late 1980s, he would gaze in awe at the black-and-white photographs of John Belushi and other early “SNL” stars that adorned the hallways of NBC’s Studio 8H here.

“I looked at those pictures the way you would look at photographs of Lincoln at Gettysburg,” he recalled in an interview. “Those sketches were done when I was in the fourth or fifth grade.”

Now, it’s a similar sense as O’Brien, 45, looks back on clips of himself as a “fresh-faced” comic who, at 29, stumbled into his hosting job with no on-camera experience. “We’ll look at a clip from 1993, and it does look like a kinescope, a clip from ‘The Steve Allen Show.’ ”

At the time, he says, “I was uncertain as a performer and insecure about how do I fit into this world. I was following Dave [Letterman] at the height of Dave-mania, and we went a completely different way. Dave very much used the world around him,” while O’Brien “created an alternate reality. [We] used animation, we used puppets. When something worked, it was great, but when something didn’t work, it was a Hindenburg crashing.”

His move west to L.A., where he’ll take over “The Tonight Show” on June 1 in a freshly built studio that’s twice the size of his current one, is cause for more jangled nerves. Bandleader Max Weinberg is considering a new contract, and as Bruce Springsteen’s drummer he has a conflict with a summer tour. “We’d like him to come; we’re trying to work it out,” says executive producer Jeff Ross.

But the rest of the band and many of the show’s writers will follow along. O’Brien’s wife, Liza, and kids — Neve, 5, and Beckett, 3 — already have spent time in a new house in Brentwood, and he predicts the move will “have a profound impact” on the show.

“I’ll be a fish out of water,” he says. “I physically don’t belong in L.A. I’m not genetically engineered to live that close to the Mexican border, and I’m not a smooth showbiz character.”

Plus, “you can’t do something like that and not change the DNA a little bit. I like the idea of us at this stage, after 16 years, let’s challenge ourselves. Let’s put the whole show into a box, shake it up and spill it out into a different environment and see what happens.”

Then there’s the matter of NBC’s move to keep Leno by giving him a prime-time berth, essentially preserving his role as O’Brien’s lead-in and potentially stealing viewers and guests.

“There was a minute, I have to admit, when they said it’s five nights a week at 10 o’clock, where you stop and think, ‘OK, how’s that going to work?’ Nobody understands completely the ramifications of what’s going to happen,” he says. But “I have enough variables without worrying about that.”

O’Brien has matured from his early, more tenuous days, says NBC late-night programming chief Rick Ludwin. “He’s taken on a gravitas and an authority. He has become so comfortable in the job, and the audience responds to that.”

On-air last week, O’Brien ceremonially bade farewell to a host of recurring characters, including Shoe-verine (a sort of Wolverine with shoes on his hands) and the Masturbating Bear: “11:30 is no place for a compulsively self-pleasuring animal,” he decreed. “Say hello to the more acceptable Bear Frantically Trying to Find His Cellphone in His Fanny Pack.”

In reality, it’s not so cut and dried. “There are things that you won’t see, but I would be foolish to say I know what they are,” Ross says.

But can O’Brien — with CBS’ Craig Ferguson now gaining on him — find new fans while holding on to his loyal audience? “As Johnny Carson said, it’s all about the person behind the desk. It’s still me. And anybody who has learned to like my sense of humor and what I do every night, that’s going to continue on ‘The Tonight Show.’ ”