Trivia / The Tonight Show with Conan O'Brien

• Budget-Busting Element: Conan O'Brien invoked this during his last weeks hosting The Tonight Show in an effort to spite NBC for their controversial treatment of his hosting era, making a point to introduce one-shot characters who weren't really that funny, but would cost NBC boatloads of money to put on the air. The biggest example was the "Bugatti Veyron Mouse," a very expensive car decorated like a mouse, accompanied by the original recording of The Rolling Stones' "Satisfaction," which O'Brien claimed would cost NBC $1.5 million. (though it may not be that high, as the car was likely on loan or at least a less expensive model than presented).
• Creator Backlash: At outlined in "Keep Circulating The Tapes" below, this iteration of The Tonight Show is very much this for NBC, whether it's fair to O'Brien or not.
• Executive Meddling: The entire debacle that NBC created by trying to reshuffle their schedule by moving The Jay Leno Show from an hour at 10 to a half hour at 11:30 and moving Tonight and Late Night back half an hour. It was unclear if Last Call would remain on the air.
• Keep Circulating the Tapes: Thanks to the 2010 Tonight Show debacle, for pretty much the rest of the 2010s, NBC never released any DVDs or digital downloads of The Tonight Show with Conan O'Brien. In fact, the only acknowledgment of the show at all as of late seems to be a split-second showing of O'Brien's name as part of a list of past Tonight Show hosts that was seen during various promos for Jimmy Fallon's then-upcoming premiere. Doubly annoying is that NBC still enforces the copyright on the show, meaning even clips are hard to come by on YouTube, despite the fact that NBC has no intentions of releasing it themselves. This changed in January 2019, when Conaco, in partnership with TBS and NBC, launched a streaming service showcasing all of his late-night programming, including his stint as Tonight Show host, as well as the similarly blacklisted Late Night with Conan O'Brien (it helps that by that point, all the executives involved in the fiasco have since left NBC). However, as of the end of 2020, most of the clips have been from Late Night; very few from The Tonight Show have been uploaded.
• Role-Ending Misdemeanour: Following the NBC-Comcast merger, Comcast chairman and CEO Brian Roberts would fire CEO of NBC Universal Jeff Zucker for royally screwing up the whole Tonight Show thing, replacing him with Comcast COO Steve Burke. Zucker would later bounce back by becoming President of CNN.
• Screwed by the Network: NBC made all the wrong decisions by pretty much everyone's observation.
• What Could Have Been:
  • The episode with Teri Hatcher as a guest was never aired; it was never finished because Conan was rushed to the hospital for a concussion that he suffered during a foot race with Hatcher.
  • When Conan began devoting his monologues to openly bash NBC after their infamous debacle, one of the writers did a sketch so against the network it seems Conan didn't want to say it.
  • Conan could have been gone months earlier, but refused to accept any exit deal until he could make sure it didn't screw his staff over.
• Writer Revolt:
  • Since NBC's last bits of Executive Meddling, Conan devoted his monologues to openly bashing NBC, and did so right up until the Grand Finale. There's an element of Could Say It, But... here, as Conan had been given a gag order prohibiting him from badmouthing the network. He took to lampshading this in his last few shows.
  • Conan also deliberately ratcheted up the cost of his show, thanks to a contract loophole that allowed him to do whatever the hell he wanted on NBC's tab, with things such as a Bugatti Veyron mouse and the 2009 Kentucky derby winner in a mink coat. Of course, given that the show was made in the middle of the Great Recession, Conan would later have to clarify that most of it wasn't real... except the expensive songs and their royalties.

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