Lisa Kudrow still remembers telling Conan O’Brien in 1993 that “You’re no one.”
The Friends star was notably dating Conan at the time, and meant it as a compliment, as he was about to helm his first talk show, Late Night With Conan O’Brien, and replacing broadcasting great David Letterman. Apparently, Lisa felt that fact alone should inspire Conan with confidence.
“I don’t know how much we talked about it,” she told Vanity Fair for an oral history of Conan O’Brien’s first year. “I just knew, ’You’re trying to replace David Letterman. No one replaces David Letterman. You’re no one. It can’t be anybody that an audience would know’.”
Letterman was already an industry veteran who had hosted late night shows since 1982. Conan, meanwhile, was a witty Simpsons scribe who had yet to prove himself on camera, but brilliantly acknowledged that pressure in the hilarious opening sketch of his debut episode.
NBC reportedly considered hiring writer and comedian Garry Shandling before choosing Conan, which the network presumably regretted when the first season resulted in shoddy reviews and bad ratings. The fresh-faced host was nearly deemed a failure — until 1994.
“Then we hit the summer and suddenly the audiences became great,” Conan told Vanity Fair. “I didn’t know what was happening. And then it dawned on me. Colleges let out. So college students started to come.”
Conan, who recalled his hosting audition feeling like “linguine meeting marinara sauce for the first time”, said he had been naive and “had to go through the spanking machine” of network television to “develop from a fetal pig to a full-size pig in front of America”.
The rest is history. Despite Late Night With Conan O’Brien nearly getting cancelled several times before it flourished, the show was nominated for 28 Emmys (winning one in 2007) and ran until 2009. For Lisa, the reasons are obvious.
“He just kept showing up as him,” she said of her former partner. “He just kept being himself, with his own kind of humour and comedy, where if you just keep doing it, then people get it: ‘Oh, that’s you. This isn’t an awkward thing. It’s you.’”
Conan then famously took over The Tonight Show in 2009 but was controversially replaced only seven months later when NBC reinstated Jay Leno. Conan went on to launch his self-titled talk show on TBS in 2010, and hosted over 1,400 episodes until the show’s end in 2021.