Sleepless Long Nights...

The Primetime Emmy Award Show, television's biggest party, aired on Sunday. While the night had its share of memorable moments; Ryan Seacrest dressed in theatre wear, Sally Field's passionate (but censored) acceptance speech, and anything involving Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, the award show made history for a different reason. Last Sunday, a curse was broken. "Late Night with Conan O'Brien" captured the Emmy for best writing on a variety program. 'O Brien had previously won the award for his stint as a writer on "Saturday Night Live" in the late '80s. However, "Late Night with Conan O'Brien" has never won a Primetime Emmy, despite almost annual nominations for the host and the writing staff since 1996.





The show's win rightfully ends its streak of being the Susan Lucci of the Primetime Emmys. I have been a fan of Conan's show since 1999, and the writing is amongst the best on late night television. Conan's show got off to a rocky start, filling David Letterman's snarky shoes under a mushroom cloud of controversy. The saving grace of "Late Night with Conan O'Brien" was that it has had one of the most creative and daring writing staffs on television. Competitors like "The Colbert Report," "Real Time with Bill Maher," and perennial favorite "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart," have writing staffs that are very good at what they do; writing satire within the frame of current events. What the "Late Night" staff gets to do is toy with pop culture and come up with completely creative material not rooted in reality. This freedom has brought audiences timeless characters like the Masturbating Bear, Triumph the Insult Comic Dog, and Pimpbot. While "Late Night" was not initially a hit with audiences or with critics, it has now been transformed into the standard of cool. Trendsetters see the bands they love on "Late Night," and also see their cultural attitudes embraced. O'Brien has finally found his niche as a host, and surpassed the expectations of his critics. All this in fourteen years, and he still had time to date all three lead actresses from "Friends."

The "Late Night with Conan O'Brien" writing staff finally winning an Emmy tells us that the establishment has fully come around and accepted a new generation of humor on late night television. Emmy voters, television critics and many viewers all resented David Letterman for being a "mean" guy. He wasn't a kind, gentle man like Johnny Carson. But then again, there was only ONE Johnny. They didn't like Dave's winking, nodding, style of humor and his "smarter-than-you" demeanor in interviews. It seems only fitting that, once Dave left the Peacock Network for the Eye, the same Nielsen demographic that embraced Dave are the ones that saved Conan from getting canceled in the mid-'90s. The college kids and the twenty-somethings who wanted their laughs served bitter. These kids weren't afraid to laugh at themselves, or skewer sacred cows, and neither were Dave and Conan. It is this original thought that won the mainstream audiences over. The Emmy voters followed, like a kid who finally got the joke hours after the punchline was uttered.

Evidence that the tide is changing can be found from the mouths of NBC executives. The same network that wanted to cancel Conan little over a decade ago, has now entrusted the most holy of time slots to him: 10:30 p.m. The home of legends like Johnny Carson and Steve Allen will have a new tenant in 2009, when Conan takes over "The Tonight Show" hosting duties from Jay Leno. Call it a long time coming, but Conan and his writers have wedged their way into Emmy voters' hearts. As a fan, I can only hope that the staff doesn't play it safe or rest on its laurels. No one wants to see Conan's show go the way of so many late-night flops before it (see Joan Rivers, Chevy Chase, and Magic Johnson if you don't know what I mean). I raise my glass to Conan and his writers for keeping their noses to the grindstone and always remembering that when in doubt, insert a self-gratifying woodland animal or a hand puppet.


~Meryn