Conan O’Brien returns to late night

Conan O'Brien is attempting to reclaim his late-night legacy tonight at 11 p.m. with the premier of "Conan" on TBS. The debut comes 10 months after O'Brien's departure from NBC as host of "The Tonight Show."

"There's nothing like stopping for a while to make you appreciate having a show," O'Brien told RGJ.com. "Even just doing the test shows, I felt like a duck getting back in the water. I like being in front of audiences."

O'Brien plans to try new things with "Conan" including giving each individual episode its own title and holding a seven-month anniversary special when they pass the number of episodes they recorded of "The Tonight Show."

"It's exciting to feel like we're getting this opportunity to try and change the rules a little bit, whatever that means, probably just swearing a lot," O'Brien said. "My goal is to seize this opportunity, make some interesting television. I do want to try new things."

O'Brien also plans to showcase segments and characters from his past such as the Masturbating Bear, though NBC could choose to fight for intellectual property rights on anything from his previous shows.

"If there's something we did for a long time that we've established as ours, we'll figure out a way to do it," O'Brien told Rolling Stone. "I won't be denied my Masturbating Bear! What I really want to do is be sued over the bear and then appear in court with the Masturbating Bear. ‘Your Honor, this bear can't help himself!'"

O'Brien's breakup with NBC was a highly-publicized disaster. With Jay Leno's 10 p.m. show failing, NBC wanted to move him into a half-hour timeslot starting at 11:35 p.m. and bump "The Tonight Show" into the next morning at 12:05 a.m.

"It was very painful for him to let go of this hallowed ground that he'd finally got a chance to stand on," O'Brien's wife Liza Powel told Rolling Stone. "There were so many factors at work, such a confluence of change that had to do with so much more than him. The truth is, ‘The Tonight Show' was the definition of cultural relevancy for decades. And all of a sudden, it's not."

Instead of moving, O'Brien accepted a $32 million settlement which included a noncompeting clause forbidding him from performing on TV or radio until September. The events strained a previously friendly relationship between O'Brien and Leno.

"[Leno] can come as the musical guest, because that I want to see. No one knows he has an operatic range," O'Brien told Playboy Magazine. "No, there are certain things I will not do, regardless of the price."

O'Brien used some of NBC's settlement to pay additional severance to his entire staff. The gesture paid off, with all of his staff returning except for band leader Max Weinberg, who is on tour with Bruce Springsteen and the E. Street Band.

"In some ways, I planned and worked for five years toward this one thing that was supposedly the epitome of my television dreams," O'Brien told Rolling Stone. "And then the still kind of unthinkable happened. But one of the advantages of that experience is to really feel like, ‘OK, I'm going to go for broke. I have got nothing to lose.' Let's face it: I'm not going to do another television show after this one."

With his broadcast life on hold, O'Brien took to traveling with the 40-city "Legally Prohibited From Being Funny On Television Tour."

The performances played like a variety hour with plenty of sketches, song parodies and special guests at every stop.

"The best experience I've had in show business in my entire life was that tour," O'Brien said to Rolling Stone. "My whole career has been an attempt to get close to that red-hot core of real show business. That's what I loved about Saturday Night Live, and then the Late Night show: I'm backstage, people are running around, there are cameramen, people in horse costumes. But this tour was the final extension of that, where I'm putting on my own makeup in some dingy dressing room, with the old lights around me, and the band's playing the warm-up. You know, I went back in time. I was in vaudeville."

While doing the tour, O'Brien was courted heavily by FOX for a new late-night show. He surprised many by signing with TBS, who promised the largest promotional campaign in television history.

While they delivered, O'Brien also started his own campaign, rallying behind his "I'm With Coco" supporters and joining the world of social networking, using Facebook and Twitter to keep in touch with fans. He announced his tour on Twitter, and without any other advertising it sold out in hours.

"I'm the person who makes fun of celebrities on Twitter," O'Brien told Rolling Stone. "With the new technology, what we're losing track of a little bit in entertainment is mystery. The big trick is to let the fans in, but also still surprise them. That's the tightrope act of the modern era. Everybody wants to shoot a behind-the-scenes. And then somebody else wants to shoot a behind-the-scenes of the behind-the-scenes."

The irony of O'Brien's move to TBS is that it bumped George Lopez and his show "Lopez Tonight" from its 11 p.m. timeslot to midnight. However, the addition of "Conan" also means an extra show each week for Lopez.

Each show will run from Monday through Thursday. The guests for tonight's premier are Seth Rogan, Jack White, and an unidentified third guest that was chosen in a poll by fans.

"Conan's was the only late-night show I ever wanted to play," Jack White told Rolling Stone. "[David] Letterman is so cold to people and Leno is for senior citizens. I played a live guitar solo on Conan's desk once. If I did that on Letterman, he'd probably have had a coronary."

Fans who went to O'Brien's live tour or watched his show in 2007 during the writer's strike can expect to again see his signature red beard when his show debuts tonight.