Conan O’Brien offered a candid, unscripted assessment of late-night television’s fading fortunes on Wednesday, comparing the genre’s decline to the collapse of Detroit’s auto industry.
Speaking at Bloomberg Screentime 2026, O’Brien was asked by Bloomberg’s Ashley Carman whether late-night TV still made economic sense. He answered by tracing the format’s history back to its earliest days.
O’Brien recalled that in the late 1940s, networks went off the air at 10:30 p.m., leaving only the American flag and music playing overnight, until his former employer, NBC, became the first to fill that dead airtime with programming.
“And my analogy has always been, you own a nice house, kind of like ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’ house, you fix it up, the kids live there, it’s the nice old drafty Victorian, and then you realize, hey, there’s an attic,” O’Brien said. “What you do is you go up there, and you just put down some basic flooring and put some beds in there, and suddenly you have all this room you didn’t know you had.”
“That’s what networks did,” he continued. “They found room that was not being used. NBC, in particular, capitalized on it. You have an early show, then you have Steve Allen, then Jack [Paar], then Johnny Carson, and you’re off and running.”
He said late-night TV quickly became “a giant machine that fires out cash,” and that it remained that way when he began hosting “Late Night with Conan O’Brien” in 1993.
“And then I saw over my 17 years with NBC … I started to see, oh, this is really changing. This is really changing,” O’Brien said. “They’re asking us to be much more cost-conscious. And it was for a good reason, which is that HBO, Cinemax, these are the things [that] are coming up. There’s more networks — instead of one late-night show, ‘The Tonight Show,’ there’s now ‘Tonight Show’ and there’s David Letterman’s show, then there are other shows.”
“It’s a little like Detroit and automobiles. Like, the things just started to change, and you can get really upset about it,” he continued. “But then streamers come along. And then I’m not even mentioning the internet. For years, we were working really hard to do something innovative and creative at night. Now you’re competing with how many people in America are posting videos every day, or worldwide. Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of millions of people are making funny videos.”
“If you do the math, nine of them are going to be one of the funniest things you’ve ever seen. Those come out every day. That’s what you’re competing against.”
O’Brien spent decades hosting late-night shows on NBC and TBS before moving into podcasting; he now hosts “Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend.” TBS ended its late-night programming altogether in 2022 after canceling “Full Frontal with Samantha Bee.”
Earlier this year, CBS canceled “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert,” replacing it with Byron Allen’s syndicated talk show “Comics Unleashed.” The Colbert show was reportedly losing CBS $40 million a year on a $100 million annual budget.
Although “Comics Unleashed” draws a fraction of Colbert’s former audience, CBS is now expected to turn a $15 million profit in the same time slot thanks to sharply lower production costs.
