For Its Second Season, ‘Conan O’Brien Must Go’ Loosens Up

In 2010, a few months after the last episode of The Tonight Show With Conan O’Brien aired, O’Brien embarked upon The Legally Prohibited from Being Funny on Television Tour. Through the spring and summer of that year, he traveled around the U.S. and Canada with a variety show based on the titular idea: After NBC canceled his version of the long-running late-night show and replaced him with his predecessor, Jay Leno, O’Brien contractually had to wait before launching another show. Less prominent was the fact that O’Brien’s TV time-out was conditional on the exit package he had negotiated, which paid him $32.5 million, plus $12 million for his former Late Night staffers, who had moved to Los Angeles when O’Brien was promoted to The Tonight Show — so while he was certainly done wrong by NBC, it’s not like he was actually entertainment’s biggest victim, despite how he portrayed himself. 

I attended one of those tour dates, and wondered at the time if maybe O’Brien, whose “joking” bitterness was palpable, wouldn’t have been better served recovering in private. Then again, if he possessed the ability to do that, the tour film that resulted wouldn’t have been called Conan O’Brien Can’t Stop. 

Fifteen years later, O’Brien has had a long run hosting a talk show on TBS; spawned a whole network via his podcast, Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend; starred in a Hall of Fame episode of Hot Ones; hosted the Oscars; won the Mark Twain Prize for humor; and is about to launch the second season of his travel show, Conan O’Brien Must Go. I obviously don’t know if he’s at peace with how his time at NBC ended (though a New York Times profile last year strongly suggested that he is); I do know he’s a lot more fun to hang out with now.

The first season of Conan O’Brien Must Go — a natural continuation of the Conan Without Borders travel specials O’Brien would occasionally do at TBS during the run of his eponymous talk show there — took several years to reach viewers. That’s why it was kind of a surprise when the first “season” was more of a miniseries of just four episodes, each taking him to a different country. The second season had a much shorter gestation period — its first episode drops on Max May 8th, roughly a year after Season One — but is also 25 percent shorter. Granted, the second of the season’s three episodes is set in New Zealand, so maybe producers had to scrap a possible fourth episode when just getting to the second country took twice as long as usual.

One of my (small) issues with the first season was that some of the comic set pieces — generally involving local garb, often seeming to have been chosen to look especially striking on O’Brien’s 6-foot-4 frame — felt overproduced; my favorite bits came when O’Brien had free rein to goof around with the civilians he gets to meet in his travels. In Season Two, the proceedings feel much looser, giving O’Brien more time and space to riff. 

The big guest star in the first episode, set in Spain, is Javier Bardem, an Oscar-winning actor and huge hunk of jamón: We see him (among other segments) doing a drunk bit with O’Brien with a plate of famed hangover food chocolate con churro, and telling a crowd of fans that he’s Antonio Banderas. 

But O’Brien is just as fun with Javier, the tourist info booth staffer and podcast listener we are given to understand is the reason O’Brien has chosen to visit Spain. Arriving in Madrid, O’Brien learns that Javier’s employers haven’t granted the show permission to film in the booth, so O’Brien sets up a rival information desk across the street. The flimsy table and O’Brien’s loose grasp of Spanish generate several minutes’ worth of comic fodder; though it’s unclear whether O’Brien actually convinces anyone to, for instance, check out El Rey De Burger, offering dubious travel tips to passersby is exactly the kind of thing I want to watch O’Brien do.

Taika Waititi fulfills a Bardemian function in “New Zealand,” where he and O’Brien join thousands of residents in an Auckland rugby stadium for a mass haka, winning back the record for the largest in the world from previous record holder France. But the busy Waititi doesn’t stick around, giving O’Brien plenty of time to spend with Reilly, the fan we see at the top of the episode telling O’Brien about the container house he shares with his wife and two daughters. The family’s five acres are entirely off-the-grid, which means the makeshift toilet the family shares is a bucket.

When O’Brien stops by, he waits exactly as long as he is physically able before asking to see the restroom facilities, and Reilly shows him the cabinet the bucket is housed in, next to a pail of sawdust the family uses to cover their waste. “It’s not as crazy as I thought,” O’Brien tells Reilly. “Is this great? No, it’s not. Would you get a great Yelp review if this was a bed and breakfast? No. Would you get return customers? No. Is this, in its own way, in the 21st century, some kind of crime? Yes. Should you be prosecuted? Yes. Is this a terrible thing to do to your family? Yes. But all that taken into consideration, this isn’t so bad. Is it the worst thing I’ve ever seen? Yes. Is it a horror show? Yes. Does it make just doing your regular business a horrendous ordeal? Yes. But it’s not as bad as I thought it was going to be!” 

The sense one gets is that O’Brien had 50 more rhetorical questions about the bucket in reserve — or, possibly, that he did bust them out on Reilly, but a judicious editor decided to cut their conversation down to the nine best ones.

Probably the most serious the season gets is in the third episode, “Austria.” This time, the fan inviting O’Brien to visit is Muntazir, who made an arduous journey from Iraq to Linz. Now a teacher, he’s applying for citizenship, and tells O’Brien he’s trying to prove his worthiness of approval by wearing traditional lederhosen (at least some of the time). When O’Brien gets to Linz, he introduces Muntazir to Marie and Laurentis, native Austrians O’Brien has enlisted to help Muntazir bolster his citizenship application by teaching him to yodel. Muntazir’s story, as represented here, is emblematic of what a comedic travel show is for: It portrays the broad range of people who live in a given place; it highlights elements of local culture; and even when the details that underlie a participant’s story are dark, the show remains respectful while keeping things light.

I can imagine focus-group testing on the show indicates that the segments with O’Brien’s know-it-all producer Jordan Schlansky — in which O’Brien alternates enduring lectures on every subject Schlansky considers himself an expert on, and mocking Schlansky for his tedious pedantry — are favorites for a certain kind of fan. I personally could have done with just one Schlansky appearance in just one episode, but we’re stuck with a lot more. It’s not that O’Brien isn’t good at roasting Schlansky; it’s that Schlansky clearly knows what he’s there to do, and their interactions feel both inauthentic and, on O’Brien’s part, bullying. It’s like it’s an echo of the old post-Tonight Show bitterness, and it’s a lot more enjoyable to watch O’Brien when it seems like he appreciates where he’s ended up.

There are comics who have very successful careers without seeming particularly warm toward the people who cross their paths — even ones whose main job is or was to talk to people about their lives. The fun of watching the best David Letterman interviews, for instance, was seeing how hostile, dismissive or just generally cranky he could get without actually causing his subject to walk. But O’Brien came to his on-camera life with a completely different energy. As a non-performer installed to replace Letterman on Late Night, O’Brien knew he had something to prove, and has never stopped trying to prove it. The title Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend could easily have been repurposed for the travel show, which finds him journeying the world making friends everywhere he goes. If it sometimes seems like he’s just fucking around, so be it: He’s earned the right to fuck around like this, and it’s a pleasure to feel like we’re fucking around with him.