Conan O’Brien Compares Late Night TV to Detroit and He’s Right – But Not for the Reasons He Thinks

Former late night talk host Conan O’Brien recently compared the late night TV shows of today to the decaying city of Detroit.

It is an apt point he is making and he is right, but for the reasons that he thinks he is.

He’s so close to figuring out the problem, but he just can’t see it. He thinks the problem is that there is so much competition these days.

FOX News reported:

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…

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. There’s more networks — instead of one late-night show, ‘The Tonight Show,’ there’s now ‘Tonight Show’ and there’s David Letterman’s show, then there are other shows.”

“It’s a little like Detroit and automobiles. Like, the things just started to change, and you can get really upset about it,” he continued. “But then streamers come along. And then I’m not even mentioning the internet. For years, we were working really hard to do something innovative and creative at night. Now you’re competing with how many people in America are posting videos every day, or worldwide. Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of millions of people are making funny videos.”

Competition from other options like streaming is not the problem. In fact, in a healthy environment, competition is good. It makes everyone stronger.

The real reason late night TV is becoming like Detroit is this… Drumroll please….

ONE PARTY RULE.

Years of one party rule by Democrats destroyed Detroit and now it is doing the exact same thing to Los Angeles. And it will do the same thing to late night TV.

Late night shows have been captured by the far left, and that is the only audience they cater to. So what happens? Half of the country walks away and the late night audience gets smaller and smaller and smaller.

Watch any late night TV show, with the sole exception of Gutfeld, and who are the guests? Democrat politicians and hosts from CNN and MSNOW.

And then they wonder why no one is watching.

Mike LaChance has been covering higher education and politics for Legal Insurrection since 2012. Since 2008 he has contributed work to the Gateway Pundit, Daily Caller, Breitbart, the Center for Security Policy, the Washington Free Beacon, and Ricochet. He has also written for American Lookout, Townhall, and Twitchy.

You can email Mike LaChance here, and read more of Mike LaChance’s articles here.