The Tonight Show with Conan O'Brien

For the first time in years, I made it a point to flip over and watch The Tonight Show last night. It was the first night of shows for Conan O'Brien and, as a Conan fan, I was interested to see how much of the shtick that worked for him at Late Night he was planning to bring with him to his new time slot.

Turns out that the show wasn't all that different from what he had done in the past. It just seemed like he had more studio space and a bigger budget to play with. It was still the same show format with a short monologue, pre-taped video sketch and second, shorter skit when he got back from commercial. The format was familiar to those people who had watch Conan for years - even the set didn't look all that different. To me it was a gentle way to break in the new audience who may not be familiar with his style. He pushed his style of humor, but didn't force it, letting people see that from now on it'll be more skits, less monologue-type jokes. He didn't break out the Masturbating Bear or Triumph, but you got the gist.

The question will be whether or not those type of skits ever come on the show. As I've said before, you can get away with a lot more at 12:30 than 11:30. It'll be a bit of a balancing act. If he pushes the line too far he could lose the older folks who liked Leno and his Jay-walking skits; he doesn't push far enough and he loses his core audience. After all, he and The Colbert Report probably had a lot of the same audience and now they're going head-to-head with each other.

I would be interested to see the ratings break-down of last night's show. The goal of moving Conan up an hour was to try and pull in more young people to the show. I'm sure it did well, cause there were lots of people like me who love Conan (even if we can't always stay up until 12:30 - it sucks getting older) who were curious about the show. Like I said, I hadn't watched The Tonight Show for years and last night's show was appointment viewing. But, did last night's effort have me clamoring to make sure I set a DVR to record it every night? Nope. Still, I'll be an interested observer over the next couple of months to see how this plays out.