A long time ago in a late-night TV landscape far, far way, a young comedian named Stephen Colbert hoped to land a breakthrough gig as a writer on an equally young show — NBC’s Late Night With Conan O’Brien, which replaced Late Night With David Letterman in the fall of 1993. The South Carolina-raised writer and performer didn’t get that gig, but he did eventually find his way to late night fame and fortune via The Daily Show, which beget The Colbert Report, which beget The Late Show With Stephen Colbert — where he replaced a departing Letterman.
So it was only appropriate that Colbert sought advice from O’Brien as he suddenly finds himself looking from his next gig. The longtime friends and late night veterans shared the stage at Newark’s New Jersey Performing Arts Center on Sunday night, five months after CBS announced that it was bringing the curtain down not only on Colbert’s show, but the entire Late Show franchise.
“CBS is not replacing me,” Colbert confirmed to O’Brien and the sold-out crowd — including Gold Derby. The departed host reiterated that the network is getting out of the late night game entirely under its new corporate owners, the David Ellison-run Paramount Skydance Corporation. O’Brien himself exited late-night television for good four years ago, signing off from his TBS chat show, Conan, in 2021 after an 11-year run on the cable network. Since then, he’s successfully moved into the podcasting space with Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend and also headlines his own streaming series, Conan Must Go, on HBO Max.
Colbert and O’Brien were both very much aware that they’re the last of a vanishing breed of television host and they took a moment to mourn the version of the industry that they grew up watching and then inherited after their predecessors stepped down. “This is a really old television form; one of the oldest, most successful television forms,” Colbert mused. “I love who I work with, and I enjoy what I do. I’m kind of sad for the form that there’s one less place to have that experience.”
“I’m sad, too, about this form that was everything I could have asked for 10,000 times over,” O’Brien agreed, before adding that he truly believes the kids will be all right. “I’m a 52 percent optimist, and I believe that humans find a way,” he said. “People who are between 15 to 25 right now are going to use what’s available to them to make beautiful, hilarious, funny things. It will not be the same path as ours, it will be more or less the same idea. I believe that.”
An uplifting sentiment to be sure, but it also led Colbert to pose another question — what could a 61-year-old ex-late-night host do in this brave new world? Once again, his friend and near-employer had an the answer. “One of the first things I said to you when this news broke is that there isn’t a person on this planet who is worried about Stephen Colbert,” O’Brien said about what Colbert’s next act will look like. “I’ve had so much fun with the new shows that I’ve been doing; it was a great lesson for me and I hope something for you to think about. The [late night] shows are a way for Stephen Colbert to relate to people, but they are not the way.
“There are so many different things that you can do and that you are going to do, which are going to give you an enormous amount of pleasure,” O’Brien added, fully embracing his career coach mode. “You’re going to have people in the street saying, ‘Oh my god, I loved that thing you did,’ and it will be this other thing that you’re. You’re just not there yet; you haven’t done it yet.”
O’Brien went on to offer up Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend as an example of how quickly one of those other things can take off. “I started my podcast as a joke,” he admitted. “And then all of a sudden, I was going: ‘Al Pacino is going to come sit with me, and we’re going to talk for an hour and 15 minutes and I can be as weird as I want. Then I’m going to read an ad for this product, but I’m also going to kind of make fun of this product — and they’re going to pay us?”
Besides podcasting and traveling the world, O’Brien also tried his hand act acting this past year, playing a memorable supporting role in Mary Bronstein‘s If I Had Legs, I’d Kick You opposite Rose Byrne — whose performance has been winning accolades and awards. A theater-trained Northwestern University graduate, Colbert indicated that he, too, is thinking of looking for new opportunities to play characters that aren’t just variations on the Stephen Colbert that people know from late night.
“Sure, I’ll be in a movie,” he said in response to an audience question. “I was an actor until I did the Late Show — everything I did was a character up until then. Maybe will somebody will employ me or maybe I’ll write my own thing. When I was a young performer, no one would hire me. That was how I became a writer. No one would hire me, so me and my friends had to write our own stuff.”
It just so happens, he and O’Brien already have a pitch for an acting collab. The duo revealed that they want to star in one of the Hallmark Channel’s many Christmas movie — and they intend to play it completely straight. “We don’t touch the script … [and] we don’t chew the scenery,” O’Brien promised, sketching out an idea where he and Colbert play half-brothers in love with the same big city girl who has returned to her small town just in time for Christmas. (Think of that Will Ferrell and Kristen Wiig Lifetime movie, A Deadly Adoption, but played even straighter.)
Whatever Colbert decides to do next, O’Brien’s ultimate career advice was to recognize that there’s life beyond the Late Show and late-night television in general. “Terrible things can happen,” he said, referring to his own turbulent time in the medium. “But if you can tread water without thinking your way out of it, you start to see the landscape around you change and you see opportunity. There’s no better person I can share the stage with right now than you. The world is your f–king oyster.”