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.JIMMY KIMMEL ERUPTS OVER QUESTIONS ABOUT LATE-NIGHT TV'S RELEVANCE IN STAR-STUDDED 'LATE SHOW' EPISODEComedian and podcast host Conan O'Brien speaks at Bloomberg Screentime 2026 in Los Angeles, Calif., on Wednesday, Sept.30, 2026.
(Joseph A.Wulfsohn/Fox News Digital)"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.
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