Sometimes I wake up and think it’s hard to believe that less than 15 years have passed since the era of peak TV when shows like Breaking Bad, Mad Men, and even network TV shows like The Good Wife brought intricate and interesting storylines into homes. If you were to talk to Conan O’Brien, however, the decline of the TV landscape has been ongoing for much longer. Gone are the days of ordering “lobster” and “champagne” while working at NBC, he recently said.
Conan was on TV for decades. He worked on The Simpsons and SNL before joining NBC as a late night host in 1993 taking over Late Night from David Letterman before briefly hosting The Tonight Show. He’d taken over for Jay Leno and was replaced by Jay Leno, ironically, in a now very famous and very publicized story. Afterward, he went to TBS, where he remained until 2021.
During this time, he was at NBC quite a lot (SNL, his own late night shows) and he said at Bloomberg’s Screentime Conference that it was a great place to be a writer when he first started. The Peacock Network was very generous, and the money 30 Rock was bringing in supported young writers handsomely. Like I’m talking “lobster” and “champagne” for lunch handsomely.
The old days of a writers room running from August to April or May and everyone being paid very handsomely and you can order food. In the early days of my late night show when we were doing well and making money hand over fist for the network, my writers meals were paid for. And like assholes, they used to order lobster and champagne.
He seems pretty happy actually about the writers these days not being given the same opportunities to push boundaries. In fact, he's a little sheepish about what his writers did at the time. He did say there will be “unexpected” consequences, both positive and negative, when it comes to TV changing.
I’d come in and be mad and they’d be like, ‘They said we could have whatever we wanted.’ … That’s not coming back, it shouldn’t come back. … it will change.
Still, it sounds as if he feels this has been a long time coming, as things were already shifting when subscription cable really became popular and began upending the network system. Now, we’re decades later, and streaming budgets and different ways of watching (aka not in live time) are really changing the ways that TV is making money. It’s more about subscribers than advertisements, though that is changing on platforms like Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon, which are all offering packages with ads at slightly cheaper prices.
Per Conan, the era of lobster and champagne ended long before these trying times. Still, he said at the conference it’s been sad to see late night go from “a giant machine that fires out cash” to a genre facing an uncertain future, though he's not the only one spouting some unsettling things about network TV lately.
Over my 17 years at NBC, I started to see, ‘Oh, this is it really changing.’ They were asking us to be much more cost-conscious, and it was for a good reason. Which was that, you know, HBO, Cinemax, these other things are coming up. There’s more networks. Instead of one late night show with The Tonight Show, there’s now The Tonight show and David Letterman’s show. Then, there were other shows It’s a little like Detroit and automobiles. The things just started to change… then streamers come along. I’m not even mentioning the Internet!
Conan O’Brien was a part of the late night landscape until 2021, when TBS ended Conan. We know thanks to reports that were made public around the time The Late Show with Stephen Colbert was axed this past season that revenue for late night is dwindling a bit more each year. Kimmel likened this phenomenon to late night being “poisoned,” but it’s more complicated than that. The money isn’t rolling in, and it’s not just with late night, it’s with every ounce of TV programming being created.
