Television journalists are deeply, madly in love with Conan O’Brien.
Not figuratively — literally. They would probably, if asked, agree to have his children. Especially the guys.
A Q&A session with O’Brien on the set of his TBS late-night show during the winter media tour last week has the quality of an autograph session after a Miley Cyrus concert.
One reporter wonders aloud when Conan thinks he became a sex symbol.
O’Brien has the good sense to pooh- pooh the idea. He hasn’t gone all “I Am God’s Vessel” on us, like Oprah Winfrey has with her new cable network.
But O’Brien can’t stop talking about the “journey of discovery” he’s been on since NBC decided to return Jay Leno to late night and shift O’Brien’s ratings-hungry “Tonight Show” to midnight, which he rejected, walking away from “Tonight” after just seven months on the job.
O’Brien insists he has an “Irish Catholic suspicion of praise and anything over the top.” But there was that time when he walked into a restaurant and “everybody in that restaurant applauded.” O’Brien insists he would be very “happy to move past this period of time” and have people say whether they liked “my show last night or not,” rather than this media story.
Yet O’Brien had a camera follow him at home and document him in the wake of the whole “Tonight” kerfuffle.
“A friend of mine shot documentary footage, really starting with this period and taking it through the tour and . . . you can see that I . . . have all this energy. . . . I really need to be in the harness — need to be working,” he said Wednesday.
O’Brien also insists that since his new show debuted last November, his nightly audience shouts, “Co-nan! Co-nan!” at the top of each show of their own choice, not at the prompting of producers.
“We can’t seem to stop it, and it’s like anything else — it’s got to play itself out. Last year was a crazy journey of discovery,” O’Brien says.
“It has a Stalinist feeling about it. It’s fun to be Mussolini at the top of the show for five minutes,” he continues. “We certainly don’t take it seriously, and I don’t encourage it.
“But ever since Tom Hanks started all the ‘Coco’ thing — you really should direct your questions at him,” O’Brien simpers. He will drop a lot more names before the Q&A is over.
The 47-year-old O’Brien says he has no idea why his audience skews younger than he. It might be because “I have no dignity” and “I’m not afraid to fall down, not afraid to jump off things. . . . I’m not able to grow up,” he offers.
Asked whether he would want to sit down with Leno, O’Brien responds seriously, “No, I don’t think so. There is nothing to be figured out. We all know the story of what happened.”
