Conan and the Barbarian

As the 2024 election looms, here's why Conan O'Brien's Emmy-winning travel series is must-see TV.

“We have people that have been released into our country that we don’t want in our country, and they’re coming in totally unchecked, totally unvetted. And we can’t let this happen. They’re destroying our country, and we’re sitting back and we better damn well win this election, because if we don’t, our country is going to be doomed. It’s going to be doomed.”—Donald Trump, Wildwood, N.J., May 11, 2024

When it premiered earlier this year, Conan O’Brien Must Go felt like a brilliantly goofy travelogue with an unexpected sense of heart, a late-career triumph for a much-loved comedian and talk-show host.  But then something strange, and also entirely, depressingly expected, happened.  A candidate for president of the United States—I think you may know the one—and his neckbeard running mate began spreading lies about migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers, both documented and otherwise. 

They began to tell us that people in search of a better, safer life were escapees from mental institutions; that they were violent criminals; that they were being brought in to vote for Democratic candidates; that they were eating household pets.  It was an elite-fueled eruption of xenophobia and hostility to the least among us, propelled by deliberate lies. 

And standing in opposition to the likes of Donald Trump and JD Vance, might I propose: Conan O’Brien?

@teamcoco"Conan O'Brien Must Go" coming soon to @hbomax

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He would meet them through his podcast.  They would call in from far-flung locations, their faces appearing vaster than life on a screen on the wall facing the desk where he sat, offering brief words of encouragement or comic disparagement, telling him they listened to everything he recorded, or that their families did not understand the joy they took in a 60-year-old Irish Catholic comedian with red hair, skin so pale it was practically translucent, who had been on their television screens since before many of them had been born.

“They’re emptying out their mental institutions into the United States, our beautiful country. And now the prison populations all over the world are down. They don’t want to report that the mental institution population is down because they’re taking people from insane asylums and from mental institutions."—Donald Trump, Wildwood, N.J., May 11, 2024

It is perversely easy for us to continue thinking of Conan O’Brien as youthful, even as he is now only a few brief years away from the era of discounted movie tickets and half-off subway rides.  O’Brien looked 60 when he was 30, or like a 60-year-old’s idea of what a young man might resemble, and so he has remained strangely ageless.  He still possesses that floppy skiff of hair that tumbles off his forehead; the awkward-white-guy-on-a-dance-floor physicality; the Harvard Lampoon propensity for quirk and non sequitur.

“In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs, the people that came in, they’re eating the cats, they’re eating the pets of people that live there.”—Donald Trump, Philadelphia, PA, September 10, 2024

In truth, I took quite a few years off from Conan O’Brien.  As a teenager, I loved his late-night show, its insult-comic dogs and awkwardly transposed moving-lips sketches and the way in which he breathed an air of deliberately cultivated chaos, as if the show might go off the rails at any moment.  Conan had inherited David Letterman’s time slot and show, and while I knew comedy fans who worshipped Letterman, I had never found him the slightest bit amusing.  Conan was my guy.

Conan would go on to an unexpectedly shortened run at The Tonight Show, a comedy tour documenting the fallout, and a revitalized show on TBS, all of which mostly passed me by in the years after college ended.  I still liked Conan, but, preoccupied with parental life and episodic television, never thought to watch him.  I only rediscovered Conan O’Brien through an out-of-context YouTube clip of O’Brien and his assistant and comic sidekick, Sona Movsesian, visiting Armenia together as part of his travel series, Conan Without Borders. 

“This is country changing, it's country threatening, and it's country wrecking. They have wrecked our country.”- Donald Trump, Grand Rapids, MI, April 2, 2024

An American original, Conan seemed like a comedy aesthete who might not be able to survive beyond the city limits of Los Angeles or Cambridge, Massachusetts, but here he was visiting Movsesian’s ancestral homeland, listening to her speak movingly about the Armenian genocide and its impact on her family.  Of all the absurdities in Conan Without Borders, it was the sight of the usually unflappable Movsesian overcome with emotion at the Armenian Genocide Memorial Complex that stuck with me.  Movsesian, who begins the episode bantering with O’Brien about drinking on the job, is here attempting to imagine what it might have been like for her grandparents to have lost their entire families to genocide as children, and simply draws up short. 

We were a nation of immigrants, and those immigrants carried with them the burden of their pasts, and the stories of what their families might have endured to arrive at this new place called home. 

Freed from the constraints of a traditional talk show, I enjoyed watching O’Brien traveling to Israel, Australia, Japan, Cuba, Italy, and Mexico, chatting with locals, visiting world landmarks and gatherings of oddballs, mocking people and also listening to their stories.  And always, always appearing on their goofy variety shows and soap operas.

The Democrats say, 'Please don't call them animals. They're humans.' I said, 'No, they're not humans, they're not humans, they're animals,'"- Donald Trump, Green Bay, WI, April 2, 2024

O’Brien came back earlier this year with a new, four-episode travel series for Max, Conan O’Brien Must Go, that feels newly relevant in light of our presidential election, and the abysmal cruelty demonstrated by Republican nominee Donald Trump in speaking about migrants, immigrants, refugees, or asylum seekers. 

In each episode, O’Brien meets someone new who calls in to his show, and then treks across the world to visit them in their homeland.  He helps a Norwegian hip-hop MC record a new single; he has an Irish doctor of Pakistani descent perform a surgical procedure (read: cutting a single toenail) on him; he makes an appearance on a fast-paced Thai variety show he struggles to comprehend; he guests on an exceptionally low-rated Argentinian radio DJ’s show.  

O’Brien is still a remarkably gifted physical comedian.  It is worth watching the entirety of Conan O’Brien Must Go only to see him gamely attempt the tango in a Buenos Aires dance studio, or step onto an Oslo street outfitted in what he has been told is the country’s native dress: a black top hat, a red vest with deliriously golden buttons, and what looks like Jerry’s puffy shirt from Seinfeld.

But it is hard not to watch Conan O’Brien Must Go without remembering that it is 2024 and we are in the United States, and try as we might, we are surrounded everywhere we turn with toxic commentary on the perils of foreigners.  They are here; they are surging across borders; they are coming to kill us; they are the worst of the globe, and they are going to change America forever. 

And many, if not most, Americans agree with the kinds of toxic sludge being dumped on us daily by Trump.  Some of us have chosen to mostly tune out Trump, or assume he exaggerates when he says he plans to round up and deport millions of people, but how can we when there is a sizable chance he will be the president of the United States again come January? And what does it say about the country that we have so much ugliness in our hearts for people simply because they want to join us here?

"They're poisoning the blood of our country. That's what they've done. They poison — mental institutions and prisons all over the world. Not just in South America. Not just the three or four countries that we think about. But all over the world they're coming into our country — from Africa, from Asia, all over the world. They're pouring into our country." — Donald Trump, Durham, N.H. Dec. 16, 2023

Perhaps my favorite moment in Conan O’Brien Must Go comes when O’Brien visits his ancestral homeland of Ireland.  Conan mangles Irish slang, sings with Irish tenors, and banters awkwardly with his surgeon friend’s younger sisters, who are utterly baffled by his presence.  He tries the national delicacy of blood sausage and tells the store’s proprietor, “I feel like I’ve come home,” launching into a spasmodic, lurching dance, like a Lilith Fair attendee on Ecstasy, before sinking to the floor.

Tellingly, the episode, and the series as a whole, ends with O’Brien visiting Galbally, the place where his great-grandfather, Thomas Noonan O’Brien, left for the United States.  “So I’m looking at the same exact view that they would have had, and saw those mountains every day,” O’Brien says to the genealogist who has accompanied him to Galbally, “and they left this to go to America.” 

We end with O’Brien sitting on the spot where his ancestors’ home once stood, reflecting on the origins of his own American life: “It was hard to believe I was sitting on the very land where my great-grandfather lived and worked, and that my existence was the direct result of his courageous decision to seek a better life in America.”  There is also a life-sized golden statue of O’Brien hovering over him on this ancestral land, because Conan gonna Conan.  But we linger here briefly on this empty piece of land in a country across the ocean, in this moment of communion between past and present, between home and abroad, between America and the places that created Americans. 

Like Conan O’Brien, my grandparents and great-grandparents came to America in search of a better life.  Thomas Noonan O’Brien likely fled the Irish potato famine; my relatives left Europe just ahead of the Nazis.  America has thrived because it welcomed—with all too many exceptions and carve-outs—immigrants desperate to leave the places they had come from.  I am so grateful to Conan O’Brien for making this immensely silly show and leaving us with a single, firmly made point: we Americans almost all come from somewhere else, the product of unimaginably vast journeys made by others.  Anyone who claims otherwise is simply a clown.

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The Ministry Recommends…

Jennifer: I'll go ahead and recommend Will & Harper, on Netflix: In this documentary, Will Ferrell goes on a road trip across America with his longtime friend and collaborator, Saturday Night Live writer Harper Steele, after Harper's recent transition. With Steele's encouragement, Ferrell asks her everything he's wondering about the transition, and the two hit many of Steele's favorite truck stops, dive bars, and steak houses that she's a little nervous to visit as a trans woman.

Not all goes well—one stop in particular brings out some real transphobia—but both stars show a heroic level of bravery in bringing their relationship to the masses in hopes of promoting better understanding.

Erin: I recommend the buzzy new Netflix rom-com series Nobody Wants This. Adam Brody plays a sexy L.A. rabbi who sweeps Kristen Bell's character, a cynical sex and dating podcaster, off her feet. The chemistry is HOT. The show's depictions of Jewish women are tone-deaf. Still, Nobody Wants This transcends its flaws thanks to the limitless charisma of Seth Cohen — er, Adam Brody. I have high hopes for season 2!

Kirthana: I recommend Didi (now on Peacock), which follows a Taiwanese American preteen named Chris during the pivotal summer before he begins high school. You'll often see Didi compared to Eighth Grade because Chris experiences so many cringeworthy moments that will remind you of your own adolescence. And since it's set in 2008, the film inventively uses AIM chats, MySpace and Facebook to tell an affecting story of how Chris struggles to navigate his friendships, his first crush and his relationship with his family.

What sets Didi apart is Joan Chen's astonishing performance as Chris' mother Chungsing. The mother-son relationship is the absolute heart of this film, and their final scene is an absolute stunner. 

Thea: I can't quite overstate how much "Office Ladies," The Office recap podcast with Jenna Fischer and Angela Kinsey continues to be such a soothing balm and fun, sunny companion throughout sluggish gym workouts, long strolls and busying yourself around the apartment. They're deep in the ninth season now — which is definitely one of the seasons I struggled the most with on The Office — but I loved their recent interview with Catherine Tate and will always find myself going back and re-listening to old eps (there's some great chats with B.J. Novak, Zach Woods and Phyllis Smith.)