I remember when I was younger, fourteen I believe, I managed to get my hands on this DVD. A DVD is a circular, glass and metallic disc that is used to play films and TV Shows , though it saddens me to have to explain this. To this day, I cannot remember who bought it for me, or if I bought it myself. Fourteen, so unlikely. The title on the cover: Late Night with Conan O’Brien: 10th Anniversary Special, while underneath a tall, sprightly, ginger haired man with a cheery grin like something from a 1920s silent comedy.

The elation and joy this DVD gave me, the comedy this man performed, I will have with me forever. Years later, he means more to me now. Not just his comedy, which he continues to split sides to this day, but rather what he represents. I want to tell you the story of how Conan O’Brien changed the world.

Conan’s career

Conan is quite popular in the UK, and I think I have a theory as to why. Most comedians in the UK come from very elite backgrounds: Stephen Fry, Hugh Laurie, David Mitchell, Robert Webb, the entire cast of Monty Python. Like them, Conan boasts himself as a graduate of elite higher education, as an alumnus of Harvard.

He was an editor for their comedy magazine, the Harvard Lampoon. That’s not to be confused with the Harvard Crimson, which is another student newspaper who they have a natural rivalry with for reasons I couldn’t give a shit about.

He would later go on to work on the hit NBC sketch show Saturday Night Live. Here, he learned about his true loves for comedy, acting, as well as meeting and mooching celebrities. Here was his first encounter with NBC, where he met Lorne Michaels, the producer of Saturday Night Live and Late Night.

After that, in 1991, he left NBC to briefly work with Fox on the other hit show The Simpsons, writing some of the show most historically popular shows, such as “Marge vs. the Monorail” (with that annoyingly catchy song) and “Homer goes to College”. He worked during the fourth and fifth seasons which, if you ask any hardcore Simpsons fan, is considered the best seasons of the entire history of the show. In fact, some say that Conan’s contributions to the show was an integral part of its growing success. I am one of them.

After a year and a half at Fox, he got word that the host of Late Night, the famous and much-loved David Letterman, was leaving Late Night. As Conan says, “thirty things had to go wrong for me to get that job.” Lorne Michaels, who was the producer, asked Conan to join the production, but Conan really wanted to perform. They did the auditions, and Conan was later chosen as the new host. This wasn’t easy though, as Conan would be faced with his FIRST legal dispute. Fox didn’t want him to leave, and refused to let him leave his contract. Conan and NBC split a settlement deal to be able to let him go.

Conan really came into the lime light during Late Night. At first, he seemed to struggle. Literally no one had ever heard of him! Ratings weren’t very good, and there were even rumours that he might be replaced early (foreshadowing). But give it a few years, and he’d become one of the most popular personalities on late night television. He was known for being particularly risqué, which he could get away with as Late Night historically airs at midnight (remember this, it’ll come up later). But this would all come too a seemingly flashy, but, in reality, tragic, end as – dun dun dun – he renewed his contract.

The Dreaded Scandal

We have all had a point in our jobs where we must negotiate a new contract with out bosses, or at least an opportunity to get a pay rise. Conan was way above that, and in 2004 he negotiated a full-on promotion with his contract with NBC. He would remain as host of Late Night for another five years. After that, he would hand off his show to someone else, just as he would be taking over the for the departing Jay Leno on the Tonight Show.

I think it goes without saying the Tonight Show is a big deal. Whether you watch it on TV, see clips on YouTube, or do not engage with it at all says a lot about how this story will end. Nonetheless, it remains one of the most popular franchises on TV, as it was back then. Airing at 11:00pm, just before Late Night the two shows formed a night time line-up unmatched on television.

There’s also a lot of historical significance too. The Tonight Show first began in 1954, and has existed in the same basic format ever since. Late Night didn’t begin until 1982, but that’s still quite a while ago. Late Night was created to follow the Tonight Show, and the two shows have had an almost symbiotic relationship ever since. The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson would end with “stick around for David Letterman”, and Jay Leno would end with “stick around for Conan O’Brien”.

In 2007, Jay Leno began changing his mind. Obviously, there’s nothing he could do about his departure in 2009, but he had now started being hounded by other networks with all sorts of job offers.

Finally, on June the 1st 2009, The Tonight Show with Conan O’Brien aired for the very first time. Meanwhile, Jay Leno had secured his own talk show with NBC, The Jay Leno Show, which aired in the timeslot right before at 10pm.

The Tonight Show with Conan O’Brien had a very strong start, but after a few months the ratings started dropping. It was bad; very bad. Ratings had dropped even below The Late Show with David Letterman, which ran opposite on CBS. Rumours had already begun circling about what NBC was going to do about it. The awful thing is the rumours turned out to be right. NBC’s masterplan to fight this fall in ratings is to shorten the Jay Leno show to thirty minutes, move it to 11:30pm, and push the Tonight Show back to 12:05am.

There’s something about this that is tough to explain if you are unaware of the history of the show; I do not just mean the vague told history like I have already explained, but more of the sentimental history; the history of the love people have for this show. It is something that has lasted decades and generations, and it was changing now in ways people did not like, especially O’Brien himself.

He was extremely vocal how he did not like this idea, but NBC were very much willing to fight him on this. They gave him a choice: either accept the new time, or leave. On January 12th, he responded:

“For 60 years the Tonight Show has aired immediately following the late local news. I sincerely believe that delaying the Tonight Show into the next day to accommodate another comedy program will seriously damage what I consider to be the greatest franchise in the history of broadcasting. The Tonight Show at 12:05 simply isn’t the Tonight Show. Also, if I accept this move I will be knocking the Late Night show, which I inherited from David Letterman and passed on to Jimmy Fallon, out of its long-held time slot. That would hurt the other NBC franchise that I love, and it would be unfair to Jimmy. So it has come to this: I cannot express in words how much I enjoy hosting this program and what an enormous personal disappointment it is for me to consider losing it. My staff and I have worked unbelievably hard and we are very proud of our contribution to the legacy of the Tonight Show. But I cannot participate in what I honestly believe is its destruction.”

On January 22, the Tonight Show with Conan O’Brien aired it’s last episode.

And Jay Leno, who stood by and did nothing, apparently watching the entire fiasco, without hesitation said yes to accepting the Tonight Show once more. You might think I am being too hard on Jay Leno – all his did was take advantage of a situation – but this is not the first time he has done this before.

Letterman vs. Leno

First off, I should explain briefly how the Late Night show came about. David Letterman originally had a morning talk show, simply called The David Letterman Show, but it was cancelled after only four months. While off the air, David Letterman then became a guest host on the Tonight Show. The Tonight Show, under Johnny Carson, would occasionally have guest hosts; mostly famous comedians, including Jay Leno. This is how Letterman and Carson became friends.

The time slot after the Tonight Show was formerly held by The Tomorrow Show, but in 1982 it had been cancelled after a new host had unsuccessfully taken over. With the help of Carson, they created the Late Night show, and selected Letterman to be the host.

Fast forward about ten years in 1992, Carson had announced his departure from the Tonight Show after being the host for a solid thirty years. Everyone knew who the new host would be; David Letterman for sure! Carson had even picked Letterman himself as his successor. However, one of the guest hosts of the Tonight Show, Jay Leno, had begun schmoozing with the network executives, even to go as far as hiding in the closet of one of the meeting rooms.

Jay Leno got the job. Letterman was pissed, and so was Carson. On Carson’s advice, Letterman left the network altogether, handing his show to the then unknown Conan O’Brien, and moving to CBS to start his own show, the Late Show with David Letterman which ran directly opposite the Tonight Show.

What now for Conan?

For his final show on the Tonight Show, Conan told his fans:

“All I ask of you is one thing: please don’t be cynical. I hate cynicism — it’s my least favourite quality and it doesn’t lead anywhere. Nobody in life gets exactly what they thought they were going to get. But if you work really hard and you’re kind, amazing things will happen.”

Upon leaving he was given a settlement: $40 million, plus a Non-compete agreement. This meant that, for one year, Conan was not allowed to do anything on TV, Film or perform on the internet. Luckily, they mentioned nothing of live performance.

He immediately started on his tour. The Legally Prohibited from Being Funny on Television Tour was a smash hit. It made forty-two shows, which all sold out only hours after Conan made a single, vague tweet. That is just how popular he is! In the show, he did not only do stand-up comedy but a whole musical performance as well. A documentary, called Conan O’Brien Can’t Stop, was made all about it, showing all the hard downfalls of being a comedian, including when he got so pissed off he threw a banana at someone because they did not laugh at his penis joke.

After his tour, he moved to cable television on TBS, where he hosts his new show Conan. He said he named it that so it was harder for people to replace him.

Though the format of Conan’s show followed fairly consistently from Late Night to Tonight Show to Conan – stand up monologue, two interviews behind a desk – in the last six months Conan has completely revamped. Changing from an hour long show to a half hour, a lot of people thought this was a reaction to his lowering ratings. He quickly expunged this idea, saying that he wanted a new style of show. Since its relaunch, we see it’s a lounge style interview, where he doesn’t even wear a suit anymore. Though his famed series Conan Without Borders, a recurring special where he travels abroad to ‘tackle’ some issue in the news (most recently Greenland to ‘assist’ in Trump’s plan to purchase the island nation) and meet the locals to make a fool of himself, continues to be an hour long.

TV Forever Changed

This story has been told quite a lot, but there is one thing that they never mention about this story, and it’s the aftermath that we still experience to this day.

No one really took the internet, or any of the social medias like Facebook and Twitter seriously. Which is why Conan took advantage of the fact that the NBC lawyers left that out of his Non-compete agreement. That means, even though he wasn’t allowed to go on TV, movies or anything else, he could tweet! Which is exactly what he did!

The support generated for Conan at the time was intense. Because the networks did not care about it, they could not have imagined that people would be willing to organise actual protests outside the NBC HQ.

This conflict showed the networks, the studios, the investors and business people, the advertisers and the journalists, the people and the institutions, that social media was a game changer. it has changed the way we interact with businesses.

It brings me back to when I first got a hold of that DVD; how that, and a couple of pirated clips on YouTube, this small-time website companies could never be bothered with, was all I could see. Now I can get anything online. I can tweet to Conan and Jay directly. I can see their shows anytime I like, and comment on them before they even air. This is the change I feel when I watch his show. This is how Conan O’Brien changed the world.