Conan O'Brien Must Go (Photo: Max)
“To truly appreciate the astounding grandeur of this planet, sometimes you must defile it. Behold the defiler,” Werner Herzog’s rich European voice intones at the start of the new Max documentary series Conan O’Brien Must Go.
The defiler is none other than Conan himself, a late-night host whose career arc has landed him squarely in the pantheon of comic legends. As Herzog walks us through how O’Brien has traveled beyond the realm of late-night talk shows in the last few years, venturing into his wildly popular podcast Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend, we get glimpses of images that will repeat later in the episodes, with O’Brien rolling around the floor of a bakery or donning Norwegian-style Viking gear and looking suitably ridiculous. Fans of O’Brien’s work will recognize Conan O’Brien Must Go as a fusion of one offshoot of his now-long-running podcast, as well as a recurring feature on his TBS talk showin which he would travel to different countries and explore those unique cultures in only his daffy way.
If there’s anything truly wrong about the very funny and fleetly paced Conan O’Brien Must Go, it’s that the series is only four episodes long. The premise is elastic enough that it could apply to so many countries, but what we have so far limits Conan’s travels to just a few: Norway, Argentina, Thailand, and his ancestral home of Ireland. This aspect of the series recalls his Conan Without Borders features on the old Conan show, but it’s combined now with something from one of O’Brien’s offshoot podcasts in which he interviews fans of his from around the world. It’s not just that Conan O’Brien “must go” to the aforementioned countries, but that he must specifically visit a random assortment of fans from those countries, much to their delighted surprise, and then squeeze his way into their personal lives.
Each of the four episodes allows Conan to see the world through very different eyes, not just from his fans (including a would-be Norwegian rapper and an Irish expat), but from many people within the countries he visits who have little awareness of him or tolerance for his unceasing and delightful exuberance. In general, Conan O’Brien Must Go serves as a reminder that even though he’s not a late-night staple anymore, O’Brien is still immensely comfortable as both a host and a jester. On the latter front, there may be no greater highlight in these four episodes than when O’Brien drags along his ever-stoic associate producer Jordan Schlansky in the Argentina installment.
In each episode, O’Brien walks a very fine line between expressing legitimate curiosity about his fans and their home countries’ cultures and being as ridiculous as possible, tromping around those countries as an outrageous wrecking ball of comedy. The various setups — from O’Brien and Schlansky learning about how to be an Argentine gaucho to O’Brien working his local connections to get his Norwegian fan’s hip-hop track play on the radio to trying to get a Thai woman to lay off her daughter a bit while they share a home together — are funny enough. However, the way his eyes light up in cheerful surprise and laughter when bouncing off regular people who don’t stick to a script is key to why this show works so well.
O’Brien’s only a few years removed from the vagaries of the late-night world, but the way he had already begun to morph Conan before he wrapped the show in the summer of 2021 was enough of a clue that he wanted to break out of more familiar talk-show tropes. Conan Without Borders was an early hint of his seeming interest in pushing the boundaries of what he could do with the late-night format. The fact that by the end of his run on Conan, he was interviewing one guest a night in a 30-minute package was a clearer sign that he wanted to do something entirely different if he stayed on the air.
O’Brien is far from the first celebrity to do a travelogue series, but he’s one of the first to play around with the expectations people have about those series. Though celebrity appearances are light here (outside of Herzog’s narration, which appears at the outset of each episode), O’Brien gets a big kick out of acknowledging and mocking some familiar tropes. The best of these running gags is the way in which Conan O’Brien Must Go both utilizes and mocks the overuse of drone photography in travel-style shows, breaking the fourth wall to a point where a camera nearly crashes through it.
With the show arriving April 18 on Max, O’Brien has naturally been making the PR rounds, notably appearing on The Tonight Show for the first time since a previous regime of NBC executives summarily decided to either push O’Brien’s iteration of that show back to 12:05 a.m. or let him walk away with a hefty payout. In watching him interact with current host Jimmy Fallon (or checking out his appearance in the latest episode of Hot Ones), it’s as clear as it is in watching Conan O’Brien Must Go that few people are more adept, more creatively suited, and more welcome on television than O’Brien.
Though O’Brien’s singular presence — from his height to his red-hued pompadour — makes it so he could never believably play a character in a TV show or movie without reminding us who he is, few people are as at ease at being an emcee, a comic, and an improvisatory mind. (Not that you need proof of his very funny inability to vanish into a character, but one of the Must Go episodes does let us see Conan appear on yet another soap opera in a drop-in part.) Though he may indeed defile the ethereal presence of everything from the Northern Lights to Buddhist temples simply by being Conan O’Brien, the man’s new travel series is proof positive that the nearly three years since he’s regularly appeared on television is far too long. We can only hope that Max renews this series and lets Conan run rampant in even more countries moving forward.
Conan O’Brien Must Go premieres April 18 on Max.
JoshSpiegelis a writer and critic who lives in Phoenix with his wife, two sons, and far too many cats. Follow him on Bluesky at@mousterpiece.
