Conan O'Brien: "Doing half an hour could shock me into coming up with new stuff"

Vulture

Citing the movie Die Hard, Conan says in a lengthy interview with Vulture that TBS was initially reluctant with his plan to downsize to 30-minute shows. "The truth is that the initial resistance to half an hour came from the business side," he says. "They didn’t want to stop selling an hour’s worth of ads. But we’re not going to be giving them less content. We might even be making more content and just putting more of it directly online." He adds: "There are parts of late night that feel very pro forma. At this stage in my career doing half an hour could shock me into coming up with new stuff." In a lengthy Die Hard analogy, Conan says that from his years of experience, he's learned that executives are committed to a plan, even when things change. "Sometimes my experience with executives is as if they’re Hans Gruber and the internet is Bruce Willis," he says says. The veteran host also discussed how he's gotten over The Tonight Show debacle, saying: "Without getting into specifics, there were a few people who I felt were not being good human beings. But I see that what happened was an inevitable clusterf*ck. I had a bad feeling the minute NBC said, 'You’re going to go do The Tonight Show but Jay’s also going to be on at 10 doing a Tonight Show before your Tonight Show.' It’s like when the Bachelor can’t decide: All three of us were not going to fit in that hot tub."