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"FacebookPinterest\n\nIf you've ever seen a criminal standing before a firing squad and felt jealous of all the attention he was receiving, then you would have loved writing for Conan O'Brien. There was a ritual at rehearsals for Late Night: Every afternoon, the writers responsible for that day's comedy would enter the studio, file past Conan's desk, and position themselves behind the guest couch, standing shoulder to shoulder or seated on apple bos. (Later, at The Tonight Show, these were upgraded to four director's chairs.) The arrangement was awkward but practical\u2014it gave writers a good view of the rehearsal and kept them close to Conan and Mike Sweeney, the show's head writer, for notes and on-the-fly changes. It may have appeared as if the writers were enjoying a seat of entitlement up there, and when rehearsals went well, it was an incredibly entertaining privilege. But if a piece of comedy flatlined, there was nowhere to hide from the hot sting of shame.\n\nThey didn't even have the decency to hand out blindfolds.\n\nAs a new hire on Conan's writing staff\u2014my first television-writing job of any kind, having mostly survived before that as a stand-up and an advertising copywriter\u2014I was reluctant to join that lineup. Beyond whatever underwear-threatening terror I felt, it seemed like hallowed ground, and I wasn't totally convinced I belonged in that studio, behind the couch, among these incredibly funny people whose comedy I'd been watching for years. I was still trying very hard to remember names and departments while keeping up with the unrelenting pace of our daily production schedule. And when that failed, I tried valiantly to fake my way through it\u2014like nodding confidently during writers' meetings whenever some arcane production shorthand was used, then writing it all down and, later, privately asking friends on the staff to explain what it meant. (To this day, I have no idea why photos were referred to as \u00ADADDAs. According to Wikipedia, Addas was a young Christian slave boy who lived in the mountainous area south of Mecca.) I was also obsessed with meeting some kind of imaginary and self-imposed daily quota for material. Every free minute was spent crafting ideas for the show\u2014scribbling in a notebook during my morning subway commute and running jokes past my wife with my mouth full of toothpaste. I was motivated both by genuine excitement about the new position I'd found myself in and its obvious and natural flip side: an all-consuming fear of failing at it.\n\nSo it wasn't until my third day of work that I finally decided to slip past Conan\u2014hunched over his desk, busily doodling on that day's script\u2014and join the other writers behind the couch. As I settled into my spot among three veteran writers and prayed for invisibility, Conan glanced over, sized us up, and mock sneered, \"Look at you four, standing there. You're like a Mount Rushmore of incompetence.\" Then he chuckled and returned to his cartooning. It was a quality put-down, and I was honestly overjoyed to be included in it.\n\nWhen I was hired, I joined a writing staff of thirteen (nine other sketch writers and four monologue writers) at an unusual and transitory time. Conan was within a month of ending his sixteen years hosting Late Night, and the majority of the staff had been with the show for more than a decade\u2014a few people had even been there since day one. While the rest of the staff was reminiscing in one another's offices, I was usually locked in my own office, frantically trying to figure out how my wife and I were going to move ourselves (and two confused house cats) to Los Angeles in just five weeks. I had lived in New York for nearly fourteen years, and I would miss it tremendously, but there wasn't really time to deal with those feelings. Maybe later, when we had some downtime on the new show, I could pencil in a nice, relaxing emotional breakdown.\n\nCompared with Late Night, writing for The Tonight Show was practically an abstract concept to me. I never watched the show growing up\u2014when I was old enough to be awake at that hour, I skipped directly to Late Night with David Letterman\u2014and I knew Johnny Carson mostly from impressions by Rich Little and Dana Carvey. By the time Leno began hosting, I was more interested in sketch comedy like Kids in the Hall and, eventually, Mr. Show and Conan. But I was always aware of the show's iconic presence and its comfortable place in popular culture. I was also aware that, by some accounts, The Tonight Show's place in popular culture had grown too comfortable\u2014late-night TV's equivalent of sweatpants. With Conan stepping into the role of host, critics (and even my landlord) worried the show's legacy would sand down his comedic edge, or that he would have difficulty adapting to The Tonight Show's mainstream audience. But shows like Saturday Night Live and The Simpsons had already pushed the boundaries of the mainstream; I figured in time Conan would gradually do the very same thing for The Tonight Show.\n\nOver the next couple of months, the old Late Night staff gradually made its way to the new Tonight Show offices at Universal Studios, and every day seemed like a reunion. We shared cheat sheets for the California driver's-license written exam. We congratulated one another on our totally practical automobile purchases. We grew used to the horror of seeing one another in shorts. And Conan's energy was boundless. He was constantly shooting video pieces on location, and he still found time to make an appearance at our writers' meetings almost every day, often to entertain us. His customary entrance was slamming open the door and striding into the room with a guitar and portable amp strapped to him as we showered him with overly earnest applause. In one of my favorite recurring riffs, he would casually walk over to Sweeney's desk, pick up a newspaper, and begin reading from an imaginary article. The story usually \u00ADdetailed the journalist's scandalized account of Conan O'Brien engaging in some kind of inappropriate and unrepeatable public behavior, with Conan reading in the style of a 1940s gossip reporter and making it all up as he went along.\n\nWhen Conan wasn't inventing stories about getting into fistfights with children, we were, of course, trying to create a show. As writers, we were encouraged to amass ideas from anywhere and everywhere in our strange new environment. This sometimes meant sitting together in our unfinished studio or taking the Universal Studios tour, armed with notepads and pens, looking for places to stage comedy\u2014in the miniature skyline behind Conan's desk, through the twenty-foot-tall studio doors, or along the shores of \"Jaws lake.\" That's what inspired a lot of the show's early comedy pieces, like Conan and Andy Richter canoeing along the L.A. River, Conan going undercover to assess his likability from a focus group of senior citizens, or Conan denying our associate producer health insurance so we could afford to bring the USC marching band into the studio.\n\nThere was so much work involved with simply producing these ideas and getting this show on its feet, it was rare to find time for reflecting on the significance of what we were doing\u2014to the audience, or our careers, or Conan's. But every now and then, someone would interrupt the conversation in the writers' room to announce with genuine shock and pleasure, \"Guys, we're writing for The Tonight Show.\"\n\nAnd it was kind of a big deal. Our greenroom was always packed with publicists pecking at BlackBerrys. The hallways outside the studio overflowed with actors dressed as strippers, banditos, and middle-aged vampires. Celebrity guests autographed the walls with a Sharpie (Martin Short: \"Best pizza in town!\"). All while our costume department scrambled to do things like fit golden-retriever puppies into kitten costumes. This was a show with a ten-foot-tall S. But as we learned, we still had to occasionally manage our more unreasonable expectations. The writing staff had gotten it into our heads that The Tonight Show was a second home to every A-list celebrity in Hollywood. And that if we wanted a celebrity cameo, Hollywood's biggest stars would be eager to drop by at a moment's notice and participate in any sketch, however ridiculous or demeaning. That na\u00EFvet\u00E9 led to countless pitches that included phrases like \"Cameron Diaz in a bear trap\" and \"Conan discovers Sir Ian McKellen backstage, running an illegal cockfighting ring.\"\n\nEven as we were creating our new show, there was still a lot of nostalgia for the old show, especially among the writers. There was a particular fondness for some of Late Night's more spectacular failures\u2014often, highly conceptual comedy pieces that began with a smug or angry character interrupting Conan from the audience and ended in scattered, confused laughter. I was always a fan of Late Night and had a pretty decent knowledge of its history, but there were plenty of times one of the writers would describe an old sketch and I would listen with my jaw hanging open in disbelief. There is something about the 12:30 a.m. time slot\u2014when the writers assumed that anyone over the age of 25 and with a blood-alcohol level under .10 was asleep\u2014that created the ideal environment for sketches like \"Potato Judge\" (in which an actual potato with googly eyes and a castrato voice sentenced a child to death) and characters like the Reverend Otis K. Dribbles (who honestly defies description). No matter how much fun the writers had experimenting with that kind of comedy, most of it was probably not going to have a home on The Tonight Show, where there was an established and older audience, many of whom would not appreciate a visit from \"the Fun-Hole Guy.\" Plus, after sixteen years of playing the straight man to all the idiocy going on around him, Conan might have justifiably felt it was time to move on.\n\nWhen, at rehearsal, a piece of comedy was too tasteless, too Late Night, or just too poorly conceived, Conan would let its silent reception permeate the room for a minute. Then he would slowly swivel his head around to meet his writing staff in the eyes and, with grim determination, declare, \"I want names.\" He was joking, but there was a certain notoriety that came with being on the receiving end of one of those. I definitely had my share, like the time I spent an entire day working on two horribly misguided pretaped sketches: one featuring a robot caught masturbating, and another featuring the president's dog repealing the No Child Left Behind Act. Separately they were, as Conan and Sweeney might say, \"thin soup.\" After a back-to-back screening, the response was so deafeningly silent, I felt I owed everyone a handwritten note of apology.\n\nIt was always obvious when an idea worked\u2014laughter was usually a clue, though not always\u2014and there were so many ways for one to go wrong. Most of the comedy we created for the show had a very compressed production cycle. It required split-second decision-making and assistance from a number of different departments that were fielding requests from the other writers while also struggling to keep up with a few side projects, such as designing a new logo for Max Weinberg's drumhead. An idea might be conceived at 9:30 a.m., pitched in the head writer's office at 10\u00A0a.m., debated and tweaked by the other writers, then approved for that day's show at 10:30\u00A0a.m. Between that time and a 1:30 p.m. rehearsal, the idea had to be cast, scored, shot, and edited. Graphics, props, video clips, and sound effects had to be requested, if needed. And, oh yes\u2014there's the small matter of writing the script. That's why a large writing staff was both necessary and extremely humane; it provided breathing room for a writer to have a bad day. To work in that kind of environment without ever falling behind or questioning your self-worth, you would have to be a sociopath.\n\nAfter those first adrenaline-fueled months, The Tonight Show entered a more uncertain phase. We were trying to develop a tone and style that was appealing to our larger audience without betraying what we all found funny. And when you have a nightly show to produce, you can't always take a leisurely step back and address those larger questions\u2014so you end up focusing on things like format and timing. We'd sometimes receive writing assignments from Sweeney that were both highly specific and utterly vague: \"We need ideas that require Conan to walk outside the studio, right after the monologue.\" \"Looking for ideas for Justin Timberlake today\u2014must be golf-related.\" There were times, right after reading one of these e-mails or leaving a particularly tense and gloomy rehearsal, that I felt honestly confused about how to write for this show.\n\nAs we pressured ourselves to nail the show's comedic voice, Letterman was pulling ahead of us in the ratings. Then, following the premiere of Jay Leno's 10 p.m. show, our numbers tumbled again. Even though we had no real understanding of how ratings could affect our work, we sometimes had serious discussions about them in writers' meetings, the same way 13-year-old boys discuss sex: with great imagination and little authority. If the network was panicking\u2014I saw no signs of it. The show never fit that clich\u00E9 image of glowering ecutives in expensive suits standing in the wings with their arms crossed in disapproval. As far as I could tell, they were more concerned that the cast of Celebrity Apprentice was drinking enough Snapple Compassionberry&#153; Tea on-camera than how hard we were sticking it to the Gosselins on any given night. After all, the Tonight Show franchise was a long-term investment. Carson hosted it for thirty years, Leno for seventeen, and it took him a couple of years (and Hugh Grant's frugal taste in prostitutes) before he hit his stride. We figured we'd have plenty of time.\n\nIt was my first day back after a December holiday break and my seventh month as a writer for The Tonight Show. I was walking by some of the other writers' offices before our afternoon rehearsal when I noticed one of them staring intently at his computer. Without taking his eyes off the screen, he called out, \"Come here. Look at this.\"\n\nDominating the TMZ.com home page were side-by-side close-up images of Jay and Conan, beneath a red exclusive banner. The photos were so oddly cropped and blurred, at first glance you might wonder if TMZ was reporting that these two talk-show hosts had been captured by Al Qaeda. But the photos were not nearly as unsettling as the headline above them: \"NBC Shakeup\u2014Jay Leno Comes Out On Top.\"\n\nAs I headed back to my own office to find out more, I noticed several other co-workers sitting at their computers, each staring at the same fuzzy photo. It was unusually quiet on the floor, but if you listened closely, you could hear a kind of low whirring sound emitted by all of our brains at once: FUUUUUUUUUUUUUU\u2014\n\nBefore there was time to finish that thought, we were summoned to the studio for a mandatory staffwide meeting. We sat in the audience, waiting for Conan. I did whatever I do when I'm in an unbelievably uncomfortable situation\u2014I joked around, trying to spread a rumor that beginning tomorrow, The Tonight Show was going to exist only as an iPhone app. (That joke made it to the show a few nights later.)\n\nTwenty minutes passed; Conan finally bounded into the studio, stood center stage, and grabbed a hand mike to address us directly. His was the first calm face I'd seen all afternoon. He immediately dismissed the rumors but acknowledged that some changes were definitely happening. The speech was brief; his tone was pure confidence. He ended with the assurance that \"I'm going to be okay. We're all going to be okay.\"\n\nThat afternoon there were an unusual number of office doors closed, mine included. I answered questions from my family, friends, and agent. I didn't have much to tell anyone, and it seemed a little naive to tell my friends, \"Conan said we'd be okay, so I guess that settles it.\" When my agent called, he said that maybe now was a good time to start setting up some meetings. He laughed, then let the words hang there long enough for me to decide whether it was actually a joke.\n\nI was in the middle of a phone call with my wife, reporting that I had nothing to report, when my eyes drifted to the TMZ page still up on my computer screen. Beneath their breaking story, they'd added a video where TMZ's founder, Harvey Levin, was conducting a live press conference to talk about the potential shake-up at NBC. Standing beside him was, I guess, one of his many gossip aficionados. According to him, Conan had been presented an ultimatum from the network: Either squeeze in Jay Leno's show for a half hour at eleven thirty and move The Tonight Show back to 12:05 a.m., or pack your things. I'd been so jostled by the day's events that all I could think as I watched this beefy guy in a tight and aggressively silk-screened T-shirt, designer jeans, and sneakers was, How the hell does the guy from Smash Mouth know more about my career than I do? I could picture a day in the not-distant future when some entertainment-industry-gossip blogger shoos a feral cat from the computer keyboard, smashes down the caps-lock key, and eulogizes all of our careers\u2014perhaps with a tasteful headline like \"TV FAIL!!!\"\n\nI went home that night wondering what it might be like to write for the show at 12:05\u00A0a.m. Would we be following an abridged version of Jay Leno's Tonight Show with our Tonight Show? Maybe it wouldn't be so different\u2014until our show was canceled within a year, which, given the network's current offer, seemed like an inevitability.\n\nThe next afternoon we had another staff meeting, presided over by a very different Conan. Yesterday's Conan was an immovable object. Today's Conan looked drained. He entered the studio unceremoniously, dressed in a leather jacket and baseball hat\u2014like someone getting ready to leave\u2014then slumped into the guest couch and fid his gaze on the far wall as he addressed us, never really making eye contact. It was a sight that shook your faith a little, like seeing your dad on crutches.\n\nAs he laid out some new developments confirming NBC's decision to squeeze in Leno's show before ours, he emphasized how this was what NBC was proposing. He used the phrase a lot: \"That's what NBC is proposing.\" The more he repeated it, the clearer it became that this wasn't necessarily the end. In fact, it was starting to sound like there might be a fight. The sketch and monologue writers had a new assignment: Talk about this infuriating situation. It was cathartic to use all of that anger and frustration with the media, our network, and our competition and actually make it entertaining. Conan opened Friday's show by telling the crowd, \"We've got a great show for you tonight. I have no idea what time it will air\u2014but it's going to be a great show.\"\n\nConan made an unexpected appearance in the writers' room Monday morning. His daily visits had dried up since the bad news started to trickle in, but today he sat among us and spoke briefly about his disappointment and his options. Then he polled the room, asking each of us what we'd do: take the 12:05 a.m. time slot the network was offering or get out. Nearly unanimously, we favored cutting and running. Everyone thought it was a terrible offer and that we were being set up to fail. Before he got up to leave, Conan confessed, \"I think they cured me of my addiction to The Tonight Show.\"\n\nThe next day, he called for a staffwide meeting, our third in a week and our fourth since we began production seven months earlier. He stood downstage, close to his audience, and with great difficulty read us a statement he had just released to The New York Times and \"the People of Earth.\" Upon finishing the letter, he received a standing ovation from the entire staff. There really wasn't anything to say after that. Andy Richter threw an arm around our boss, and they exited the studio together.\n\n\n\n\"HAVE FUN.\" This is something Conan often repeated in the final days. Have fun. With everyone watching now, he told us, \"we have a chance to create some of the best comedy we've ever made.\" So we continued to write jokes about our potential demise, even as the noose was tightening around our necks. I would be a terrible liar if I said everyone was on board with this sentiment. There were definitely people who had already checked out and felt angry or just stunned by the toll the events of these past couple of weeks was having on their lives. Many had uprooted their lives in New York for this job. Surely some believed Conan's refusal to take that 12:05 time slot was a purely selfish decision. \"Have fun\" probably didn't seem like a very viable option to them.\n\nThen there were tales of a $12 million severance package for the staff, which many people outside the show immediately took as a sign that we were all going to come out of this horrible situation incredibly rich. I started getting posts on my Facebook wall from old high school friends telling me it \"must be nice\" or winkingly asking to borrow a million dollars, as if NBC had dropped off a large canvas sack of cash at the studio and we all got to grab as much as we could carry. None of it was close to true, but who am I to argue with Celebrity-gossip.net and the former captain of my color-wars team at summer camp?\n\nAt work, flattened moving bos started magically appearing outside our offices. Famous friends of the show and even celebrities we'd had difficulty booking in the past were suddenly offering to do guest spots. We were also being asked to start pitching big \"end of show\" ideas, which wasn't difficult, since we had all those ideas left over from a year ago, when we were leaving Late Night. I pitched an idea that Kirstie Alley, one of Conan's most frequent targets of abuse, would stop by the studio to punch Conan in the stomach. Someone else suggested ending the show by re-airing The Tonight Show's energetic cold open, where Conan races on foot from New York to California, but played in reverse.\n\nWe produced some of the show's most memorable moments in those last weeks, like the $1.5 million Bugatti Veyron dressed as a mouse, and Andy's public plea for work. It was a relief to be freed from the tight constraints of format and the ebb and flow of the daily news cycle\u2014now our show was creating, rather than following, headlines. That's when The Tonight Show officially ended for me. My abstract idea of it no longer mattered, nor did the invisible weight of its legacy. We were writing for a completely new show\u2014one that was honest and edgy, and surprisingly mainstream. Conan's Gospel of Fun, for all its simplicity, worked.\n\n\n\nWhile we were backing up e-mail messages and stuffing ourselves with free food and drink from \"sympathy platters\" sent by Jimmy Fallon and other pals, our fans were doing something else entirely: staging an uprising. Their slogan\u2014i'm with coco\u2014germinated on Facebook, then fanned out across the Internet. Eventually it ended up at our studio gates at the beginning of our last week on the air. Hundreds of people showed up to rally during the worst rain I'd seen since moving to Los Angeles\u2014an endless, angry hosing, flung sideways by high-speed winds. We'd just finished filming a piece for that night's show featuring our band's trombone player, La Bamba, resplendent in a white suit and matching fedora, parading down the street in a makeshift Plexiglas Popemobile. But there would be something else to film\u2014most likely at a moment's notice. This didn't really surprise me. With only five more shows left before we said good-bye, a lot of big things were coming together at a moment's notice.\n\nTed, a director of photography, was by my side with a plastic bag wrapped around his camera for protection. Because communicating was proving a challenge today, Ted had instructed me to simply grab his sleeve and steer him in whichever direction I needed him to shoot, and I was on the phone with our field producer trying to find out where I'd need to steer Ted's sleeve. Except I couldn't hear a word he was saying over the roar of hundreds of people who had peaceably assembled outside our studio that morning, armed with slogans displayed on T-shirts and signs or chanted\u2014\"We want Coco, Leno's gotta go!\"\u2014a refrain that was getting a lot of play. Their numbers had been growing for hours despite the rain, and I recognized past interns in the crowd and some co-workers taking it all in with cell-phone cameras and giddy disbelief. Even drivers were responding to the revelry with short, friendly honks rather than the sustained beeps typically associated with having your lane blocked by a wild-eyed college student dressed in a crappy bear costume, simulating masturbation.\n\nThrough the din I heard the producer shout, \"HE'S GETTING OUT OF THE CAR RIGHT NOW!!!\" I spun Ted around, and we raced across the street, where Conan had just emerged and was now moving along the line of fans, high-fiving and jumping up and down. Ted burrowed into the crowd, joining a second camera crew covering the action from a different angle. Then everyone broke protocol and stepped into the street to follow Conan as he sprinted back toward the studio. At first I tried to keep up, but soon there was no point in orchestrating this chaos, so I slowed down enough to let the crowd swallow me up. Suddenly I was inside this ecstatic nerd herd, running and cheering along with our fans\u2014just like I might have seventeen years earlier if I'd found out the network was prematurely canceling Late Night with Conan O'Brien.\n\nEventually I had to stop, and the crowd excreted me as it continued its chase. I was left standing alone in the middle of the street, soaked, winded, and laughing.\n\nFour days later, we aired our final show.\n\nMy wife and many of the staff's spouses and kids and agents and managers were there for the last episode. After watching our highlights montage from the back of the audience and finding myself surprisingly overcome by how much we'd pulled off during what was basically a very high-profile temp assignment, and after Conan and some friends played us all out with \"Freebird,\" we sent our last audience home and turned the studio into a low-key wrap party.\n\nIt wasn't like the end of Late Night, with expensive catering and a live DJ and attractive waiters passing around trays of candied lady apples. Instead it was just staff and a few friends eating pizza and sushi and cookies, drinking, and draping ourselves all over the studio for photos, like a bunch of tourists. At one point, Sweeney and I dragged in a prehistoric-giant-sloth skeleton we'd used earlier that night as a prop, and everyone posed for pictures around this big, ridiculous-looking dinosaur.\n\nIt seemed a fitting way to say good-bye.\n\nTodd Levin is a comedy writer in Los Angeles. He is also the co-author of Sex: Our Bodies, Our Junk, coming out this month."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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