Conan O’Brien compares late-night TV decline to Detroit auto industry

LOS ANGELES — Veteran funnyman Conan O’Brien spoke in blunt terms about what he’s observed in the late-night television landscape Wednesday, comparing its decline to Detroit.

Speaking at Bloomberg Screentime 2026, O’Brien was asked by Bloomberg’s Ashley Carman whether he believed late-night TV “made sense economically,” prompting him to look back at the evolution of late-night from its origins.

The former NBC host first pointed to how networks in the late 1940s would go off the air at 10:30 and just have the American flag and music playing overnight, until his ex-employer was the first to fill the empty airtime with more television.

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“And my analogy has always been, you own a nice house, kind of like ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’ house, you fix it up, the kids live there, it’s the nice old drafty Victorian, and then you realize, hey, there’s an attic,” O’Brien said. “What you do is you go up there, and you just put down some basic flooring and put some beds in there, and suddenly you have all this room you didn’t know you had.” 

“That’s what networks did,” he continued. “They found room that was not being used. NBC, in particular, capitalized on it. You have an early show, then you have Steve Allen, then Jack [Paar], then Johnny Carson, and you’re off and running.”

He said late-night TV quickly became “a giant machine that fires out cash” and remained so when he began hosting “Late Night with Conan O’Brien” in 1993.

“And then I saw over my 17 years with NBC … I started to see, oh, this is really changing. This is really changing,” O’Brien said. “They’re asking us to be much more cost-conscious. And it was for a good reason, which is that HBO, Cinemax, these are the things [that] are coming up. There’s more networks — instead of one late-night show, ‘The Tonight Show,’ there’s now ‘Tonight Show’ and there’s David Letterman’s show, then there are other shows.”

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Conan O’Brien hosting “Late Night with Conan O’Brien.” (Dana Edelson/NBCU Photo Bank/NBCUniversal via Getty Images)

“It’s a little like Detroit and automobiles. Like, the things just started to change, and you can get really upset about it,” he continued. “But then streamers come along. And then I’m not even mentioning the internet. For years, we were working really hard to do something innovative and creative at night. Now you’re competing with how many people in America are posting videos every day, or worldwide. Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of millions of people are making funny videos.” 

“If you do the math, nine of them are going to be one of the funniest things you’ve ever seen. Those come out every day. That’s what you’re competing against.”

O’Brien spent decades on late-night television between his stints on NBC and TBS before transitioning into podcasts; he now hosts “Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend.” TBS ultimately scrapped its late-night programming in 2022 following the cancellation of “Full Frontal with Samantha Bee.”

Earlier this year, CBS pulled the plug on “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert,” replacing it with Byron Allen’s syndicated comic talk show “Comics Unleashed.” “The Late Show” reportedly was losing CBS $40 million a year and had been running on a whopping $100 million budget per season.

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CBS shocked the media and political landscape last year when it announced the cancellation of “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.” (Scott Kowalchyk ©2026 CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved.)

While the viewership of “Comics Unleashed” is a fraction of the audience that Stephen Colbert had, it was reported that CBS now expects to make a $15 million profit in the same time slot due to the massive cost-cutting.