When Conan O’Brien — a 30-year-old Harvard-educated writer who’d worked on The Simpsons — was tapped in 1993 to replace David Letterman as host of NBC’s Late Night, the general reaction was, “Who?” Twenty-eight years later, the 6-foot-4 comedian, with the swooping red hair, becomes history’s longest-running late night host when his TBS show, Conan, broadcasts its final episode June 24 after a decade on air.
“I picked a deli in Westwood,” recalls Richter, 54, of his first meeting with O’Brien.
It was head writer and Saturday Night Live veteran Robert Smigel who thought Richter might be well suited to fill the Ed McMahon role.
“We weren’t really given a chance,” says Richter, who had returned as Conan’s sidekick on Tonight after leaving Late Night in 2000.
Then he called me and said, “Hey, this guy that’s replacing Letterman is a friend of mine, and I’m going to be the head writer on the show.
They were still shooting shows while we were up on the ninth floor, writing and trying to conceive what we were going to do.
There was a day where there was a camera test, and Robert called me and said, “Hey, will just go sit by him and keep him company?” One day they brought in a chef to do a cooking demonstration, and I was there for that.
He would come on the show, and I would notice that he always wore suits with linings that matched the pocket square and the tie.
I come back to my desk, and there was a beautiful desk clock, a gold desk clock from Tiffany’s on my desk in a box.
My favorite one was “Satellite TV.” We said that we have this satellite system that allows us to get all these channels that aren’t available to the public.
And then the way it all played out was so horrific, I mean, to a fan, to watch it.
There was this kind of notion of, “Can the Conan show cut off the rough edges and make itself more palatable to elderly people, in an hour-earlier time slot?” So we already had that kind of pressure.
I went from being like, “OK, now I’m on The Tonight Show ” — like a tenured professor of television — “I’ll be here as long as I want to be,” and then it vaporized in seven months.
I mean, I do feel one of the best things about our show is that we meant something to younger people, people younger than us that were serious about comedy in the same way that the shows that meant something to me when I was in my teenage years, my college years, and thinking about, “Maybe I want to do comedy for a living,” that we made an impression on people like that and helped form their senses of humor and what they wanted to do with television when they got a chance to do something with television.
One thing that the last 10 years have been in short supply of is for me to get to act as much as I would like to.