Conan O'Brien: Old Late-Night Era Won't Return

Conan O'Brien says the big-money writers' room is not coming back.

Speaking on Wednesday evening at Bloomberg's Screentime conference, O'Brien said the days of comedy writers working August through May on handsome pay in their 20s, with food ordered on the network's tab, are gone for good, as reported by The Hollywood Reporter.

Bloomberg reporter Ashley Carman had asked him whether he accepted the networks' argument that late night has become bad business. The question follows CBS's claim that it was losing $40 million a year, given as the reason for ending The Late Show With Stephen Colbert.

O'Brien said he watched that pressure build over his own 17 years at NBC. He was repeatedly asked to be more cost-conscious as late night changed. He likened the shift to what happened with Detroit and automobiles, a once-dominant industry forced to remake itself.

He knows the system from the inside. O'Brien started as a writer for The Simpsons and Saturday Night Live, a live sketch show, before hosting Late Night at NBC and later hosting further shows at NBC and TBS. A writers' room, the team of writers behind a comedy show, was his first home in television.

Still, he called himself a "53 percent optimist" about what comes next. Talented writers and comedians will find new ways to make funny things and get them to viewers, he said. Creative people will find ways to be creative, congregate and make great things.

Part of that confidence is sheer volume. O'Brien said millions of comedy videos are uploaded around the world every day. The talent is out there. The slot is the problem.

For viewers, this means the jokes may not vanish with the old schedule. He has made the same point before, saying late-night television as known since around 1950 is going to disappear, but those voices are not going anywhere.