In light of a new report alleging The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon suffers from being a toxic place to work, it has us wondering if we didn’t miss out on an ideal timeline on the multiverse if the person who was once promised the talk show rightfully took his throne.
Of course, I am talking about the debacle with Conan O’Brien’s botched ascension to hosting The Tonight Show after previously helming Late Night for many years. Since more than a decade has passed since the infamous showbusiness snafu, it can be easy to forget that The Tonight Show with Conan O’Brien was indeed a show that existed — for less than a year.
You see, O’Brien was originally meant to take over for The Tonight Show with Jay Leno. However, NBC made the bizarre decision to keep Leno on the network with The Jay Leno Show, then trying to put it in The Tonight Show with Conan O’Brien‘s slot at 11:35 p.m. O’Brien’s Tonight Show would air after midnight in this scenario. However, O’Brien would have none of it and said he would quit The Tonight Show if they bumped its slot from its traditional placement following local news.
NBC ended up parting ways with O’Brien, buying out the remainder of his contract for him and his staff for $45 million (per The New York Times) and reinstating Leno as host of The Tonight Show. O’Brien moved on to greener pastures with his new TBS talk show, Conan. Meanwhile, Fallon took the helm of The Tonight Show after taking over Late Night from Conan years earlier, following Leno’s retirement in 2014. So, if you really stop to think about it, NBC booting O’Brien was the first domino to fall in a chain of events that eventually led to Fallon hosting The Tonight Show years later.
Now, a report from Rolling Stone citing two current and 14 former employees of The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon paints the latest iteration of the legacy talk show as a toxic work environment. That includes chaotic and rapid leadership changes, allegations that Fallon has berated employees in front of other staff, workplace bullying from some of the showrunners, and accusations that Fallon’s relationship with alcohol is negatively affecting the show behind the scenes. All of this has us thinking: Where would The Tonight Show be right now if O’Brien was allowed to continue as host as he wanted?
Maybe O’Brien’s departure from the famed talk show once hosted by the legendary Johnny Carson was a key event that has placed us on the darkest timeline possible. However, we must assume everything unfolded for O’Brien how it was meant to. After all, his reputation in the talk show space has only risen since the 2010 PR disaster involving NBC.
While Conan went off the air, with its last episode airing on TBS back in 2021, O’Brien was given the freedom and flexibility during that time to help innovate the talk show format. That includes incorporating his hugely popular remote segments that saw O’Brien travel worldwide and adopting a looser structure with a truncated 30-minute episode runtime beginning in 2019.
O’Brien is still active to this day, hosting a podcast, Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend, and a forthcoming series inspired by his remote segments, Conan O’Brien Must Go, that is slated to debut on Max. These projects represent how O’Brien has reinvented the variety show genre for new mediums. O’Brien’s departure and Fallon’s troubles also highlight how the more rigid and traditional talk show could just be a dying format at this point.