YMMV / The Tonight Show with Conan O'Brien

• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • Conan's first guest during his tenure on the show was Will Ferrell, who sang a farewell song to welcome Conan onto the show. When Conan called him out on it, Ferrell replied that networks are fickle, and one never knows when the show might be cancelled. Everyone took it as a good-natured gag, thinking that booting Conan off the show would not happen - at least, not as soon as it did. Ferrell was also Conan's last guest, and dressed as a hippie, played the guitar and sang a real farewell song, accompanied onstage by his wife who was pregnant and close to giving birth at the time.
  • In a sketch where Conan made a big sign for the exterior of the studio, he joked, "They're gonna kick us off this Universal lot so fast." Oh he had no idea...
  • Conan might have jinxed himself during a final interview on Today prior to moving to Los Angeles to host The Tonight Show. Matt Lauer asks Conan if he would consider coming back to New York for a visit after a year (of hosting the show). Conan jokingly replied that he wouldn't be on television in a year.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • The "Twitter Tracker" skit parodied increasingly vapid celebrity tweets. Guess who made a Twitter account shortly after leaving the show?
  • In a 6/18/2009 episode, Eva Mendes told Conan about a Korean spa where you get a vigorous rubdown. Eva told Conan that he will go to the spa at some point. Sure enough, in his follow-up series, Conan attended said spa with Steven Yeun.
• Memetic Mutation: "Coco", the nickname Tom Hanks bestowed upon him during the second episode of his tenure.
• Older Than They Think:
  • Believe it or not, Conan's small debacle involving New Jersey on The Tonight Show was not the first time the show's host got in hot water for making a joke about another state. In 1985, Johnny Carson made a joke at Nevada's expense, prompting then-governor Richard Bryan to write in and criticize Carson. He retaliated by doing a new sketch called "Lighten Up Governor Richard H. Bryan".
  • Tom Hanks was credited as the person to nickname Conan "Coco". But the first "Twitter Tracker" called him Coco before Hanks did: "Bro's a No No for CoCo?"
• Overshadowed by Controversy: Pretty much anything you hear about this show will either be about or lead to its infamously short run and the drama that came of it.
• Sophomore Slump: In some ways, this is the weakest Conan series. It's still a hilarious show with many famous moments, but it lacked the underdog, "we're on late so we can be a bit edgier" qualities of Late Night and the "screw it, we can do whatever we want", looser quality of Conan. Some fan favorite characters from Late Night like the Masturbating Bear didn't appear. It was also the only Conan series not to have any vacation episodes in other locations. It didn't help that it was the shortest of the three series, but of course that wasn't the show's fault but NBC's.
• Spiritual Successor: Several elements from Late Night were also on the show, such as "Before Photoshop", a successor to "What in the World?" from Late Night with Conan O'Brien.
• Suspiciously Similar Song: Appropriately, the "Conan is the new Oprah" sketches featured a parody of the season 14 Oprah theme song.

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