Conan O’Brien announces June finale for TBS show
Conan O’Brien is turning off the lights at TBS.
The late-night funnyman will wrap his eponymous show, “Conan,” on June 24 after 11 years, the network announced late Monday.
The final run of episodes will include special guests before culminating in a one-hour special and retrospective of the show.
“I’m very proud of what we’ve accomplished here,” he said on the show Monday night.
And so what I’d like is I’d like these last couple of weeks to be a fond look back at all the absurd madness that my team and I have concocted. Best of all, I just want to point out, there will be shockingly few, if any, references to Donald Trump because that’s always been my favorite kind of comedy.”
But O’Brien won’t be off the air long: he’ll be moving to a weekly show on HBO Max, described as a “departure from his current traditional talk-show format,” as part of his overall deal with WarnerMedia, which will allow him to continue making “Conan Without Borders” for TBS.
“In 1993, Johnny Carson gave me the best advice of my career: ‘As soon as possible, get to a streaming platform,’” O’Brien said last year when his new show was announced. “I’m thrilled that I get to continue doing whatever the hell it is I do on HBO Max, and I look forward to a free subscription.”
Labeling the HBO Max series the “fourth iteration” of his show, O’Brien provided few details Monday.
“Imagine a cooking show with puppets, and you’ll have the wrong idea,” he joked.
O’Brien, 58, a former writer for “Saturday Night Live” and “The Simpsons” took over “Late Night” for David Letterman in January 1993 and stuck around until February 2009, when he left for a brief hosting gig on “The Tonight Show.” After a hiatus, O’Brien took his show on the road for the cross-country “The Legally Prohibited from Being Funny on Television Tour” from March to June 2010.
“Conan” debuted on Nov. 8, 2010 and has been on the air ever since, making O’Brien the longest serving active late-night talk show host in the U.S. after Letterman’s retirement in 2015.