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"  Has American popular culture ever seen anything quite like Conangate? Well, yeah \u2014 Hollywood&amp;#039;s practically built upon outsized personality and scandal. But never before have we, as a country, been so singly rapt in one week by the foibles, failures, and pure, ego-driven stupidity of showbiz. I mean, Conan O&amp;#039;Brien and Jay Leno&amp;#039;s pileup at NBC was almost a bigger deal than the earthquake in Haiti. That&amp;#039;s because never before have we, as a modern culture, had so much to learn in one moment from rich, famous, powerful people with the completely wrong idea about what&amp;#039;s at stake. Yes, Conan, even you have become future-aloof.  Sure, he might be walking away from NBC&amp;#039;s runaway cheese wheel this weekend with his pride, folk-hero status, and a severance check reported to be as much as $40 million. But Conan O&amp;#039;Brien missed a crucial opportunity to reinvent The Tonight Show as a brand-name blueprint for late-night in the twenty-first century \u2014 a variety show for any hour, really, a bold adaptation of one of the few television institutions with the clout and the mandate to change the way we process entertainment.  Now I don&amp;#039;t doubt Conan&amp;#039;s best intentions as stated in his defiant screw-you letter to NBC: &amp;quot;Some people will make the argument that with DVRs and the Internet a time slot doesn&amp;#039;t matter,&amp;quot; he wrote eight days ago. &amp;quot;But with The Tonight Show, I believe nothing could matter more.&amp;quot; Well, Conan, I&amp;#039;ve got news for you \u2014 and any other orange-haired wunderkind of the Web willing to wake up to it: Late-night, if not the age-old concept of mass-audience variety comedy altogether, is changing whether you want it to or not, and as you ponder this next step, you&amp;#039;d do well to think again about what the future really looks like \u2014 and whether Conan O&amp;#039;Brien will be its Incredible Hulk or just its Incredible Fluke:      As that video (from the animation shop of Tiger Woods fame) shows by all too accidental metaphor, late-night&amp;#039;s sacrosanct 11:30 P.M. - 2:30 A.M. window doesn&amp;#039;t just face challenges from such evolving paradigms as cable, TiVo, YouTube, and, for four miserable months in prime time, Leno himself. Quite the opposite: Bedtime TV practically owes its continued existence to YouTube and its fostering of open-source curiosity. If anyone should know this today it&amp;#039;s both Conan and Leno, whose battle didn&amp;#039;t play out in real time on the air but rather in monologue previews before their shows and in highlights bounced around the Web the following day. For chrissakes, even rookie host George Lopez gets that if late-night really remained as simple as determining new ways to fill an hour of programming each night, his DNA-test bits would make his TNT show a masterwork of cutting-edge theatrics as opposed to the squirmingly unfunny ordeal it really is.  Instead, credit Lopez and TNT with understanding that for the diffuse new guard of late-night hosts \u2014 himself, Chelsea Handler, Jimmy Fallon, and Jimmy Kimmel among them \u2014 that the &amp;quot;show&amp;quot; isn&amp;#039;t really the thing anymore. Late-night reputations going forward will be made instead by moments \u2014 any particularly indelible acts or exchanges that can be culled from an hour-long episode and sold and/or disseminated via the Web. From YouTube clips, Twitter memes; from forwards, memories. Lopez had such a transfusion last week when Jennifer Love Hewitt dropped by to promote her new book, only to confess to &amp;quot;vagazzling&amp;quot; \u2014 attaching Swarovski crystals to her genitals as a sex aid. That clip of the interview made zero sense in the immediate term, but it didn&amp;#039;t really have to, because word-of-mouth dropped Lopez unto the frontal cortex of our culture for people \u2014 real people, not your grandma flipping from Larry King to Jay Leno and back again \u2014 to be entertained. The point isn&amp;#039;t that the variety show is dying (or dead), as Conan seems to fear, but rather that given the option, viewers make their own variety. Backwards as the network is, NBC recognized this new wrinkle before its competitors, none of whom have done as well capitalizing on the commodity of moments. If its influence was ever in doubt before, just look at last week, when you could (and still can) chart and/or share the entire trajectory of Conan&amp;#039;s assaults on NBC, destructive as they may be, in one convenient location on the network&amp;#039;s Web site. That&amp;#039;s more than you can say for what CBS made available of David Letterman&amp;#039;s riveting confessions to last October&amp;#039;s sex scandal (read: nothing), which burned up YouTube and thus wasted an opportunity for exposure to the younger audience that watches late-night the next day, and usually in pieces. (Not to mention the ad revenue CBS lost from not streaming that video in-house). The network that snatches Conan into its fold must acknowledge that in late-night today, immediacy and access sell \u2014 even if it&amp;#039;s live reporting from Triumph the Insult Comic Dog&amp;#039;s newfangled cousin and not another embarrassing, insider-y corporate abortion. Love him or hate him, Fallon in particular gets this. He was promoting his show with Webisodes months before it went on the air, offered virtual tours of his set while it was under construction, solicits questions for guests via Twitter, packages segments like celebrity beer-pong matches and mustache races in viral-ready bundles, and cannily responded to the prospect of moving to 1:05 a.m. by saying: &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;ll do my show at 3 in the morning. I&amp;#039;m just happy to have a show.&amp;quot; That&amp;#039;s not Fallon being modest, either, but realistic. As he later added: &amp;quot;Time doesn&amp;#039;t really matter. We&amp;#039;re in a different age. I don&amp;#039;t even know what time Jersey Shore is on.&amp;quot; Fallon&amp;#039;s observation opens up a contradiction for networks, though: If they accept that TiVo and the Web have helped make late-night a philosophy \u2014 a way of life \u2014 rather than the hard-and-fast institution it used to be, then Leno probably should have stood a much better chance of working in primetime. That sensibility should have translated, much the way it does at Comedy Central, where The Daily Show and The Colbert Report successfully occupy both the 11 o&amp;#039;clock hour and three full hours of repeat programming the following day. One could reasonably argue these are apples and oranges \u2014 that Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert host half-hour news-parody shows as opposed to one-hour talk/variety shows. But in their relevance, consistency, reach, audience influence, episode shelf life, brand longevity, and widespread accessibility, the shows embrace the idea of late-night without beholding themselves to any of its traditions besides airing after 11 P.M. None of this cheese wheel drama will matter much in ten years, when Leno and Letterman will be well into retirement, Conan will be pushing sixty, and some younger, more adventurous soul than he will have taken up one Internet network&amp;#039;s offer of originating late-night-style programming the Web \u2014 with no specific air time. (&amp;quot;This is the world of non-linear entertainment,&amp;quot; its pitch to Conan reads.) This will happen, too; as Fallon alluded, it already has to some extent. But Conan would be wise to think it over for himself, because while many viewers enjoy winding down (or dozing off) to the TV, the late-night ritual is ultimately about a relationship with a host and his cult of personality. The more portable that relationship becomes, the wider that attachment can grow. And Conan O&amp;#039;Brien will need every inch of traction he can get wants more than $40 million worth of revenge on NBC. Because if late-night is truly made up of moments, then the future belongs to the host who makes this one his own. S.T. VanAirsdale is a senior editor at Movieline.com. His film criticism and industry analysis have appeared in the New York Times, Vanity Fair, New York, the Huffington Post, Defamer, and The Reeler, which he founded. THE LATEST ON CONANGATE:   NEW LIST: 10 Famous Contract Buyouts Conan Can Learn From  WATCH VIDEOS: Jay Leno Eats His Words on Conan Switch  WTF? Conan as Nicolas Cage \u2014 and Fodder for Strange European Children  REMEMBER THESE? Five Conan O&amp;#039;Brien Skits We&amp;#039;ll Miss the Most  EARLIER: America&amp;#039;s Guilty Pleasures Inside Late-Night Scandal   THE NEW HOLLYWOOD: Read S.T. VanAirsdale&amp;#039;s Column Every Wednesday   "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/entertainment/movies/a6923/conan-obrien-future-012010/>