Conan O’Brien remembers the good ol’ days but warns things are changing.
Asked whether he believed comedians were losing something by having fewer opportunities to be in a writers’ room, the former Tonight Show host said it was a “real problem”.
“When I first was put into a writer’s room when I was 22. I really did feel like a fish that had been living in the desert for a long time, and then I suddenly was put into my environment, and it’s my happy place,” he said at Bloomberg’s Screentime event. “Things are changing.”
O’Brien got his start as a writer on HBO sketch show Not Necessarily The News and Fox talk show The Wilton North Report before landing a job as a writer on Saturday Night Live, where he worked between 1988 and 1991, before getting a job on The Simpsons.
Watch on Deadline
Then he moved into late-night with Late Night with Conan O’Brien and The Tonight Show.
He said during the early days of his late-night career, his writers enjoyed lavish meals. “My writers’ meals were paid for, and like assholes, they used to order lobster and champagne,” he quipped. “I would come in. I’d be mad. They’d be like, they said we could have whatever we wanted, and they have bibs on. That’s not coming back, it shouldn’t come back.”
His comments come as data shows the numbers of writers working today has plummeted. The WGA West’s latest report showed that there were 27% fewer writers working in 2025 than in 2022.
But O’Brien is optimistic that “creative people will find a way to be creative”. “There’ll be ways that people get together and make things, and really talented people will profit from it,” he added.
O’Brien was at the event ostensibly to talk about his podcasting empire. O’Brien struck a deal with SiriusXM in 2022 for the radio giant to acquire his Team Coco company for a reported $150M. That deal is said to keep him employed until 2027.
When asked whether he would continue after that, he said, “I haven’t even thought about it yet. You know, 2027 is so far off. What is it like 2023 right now? I’m not worried about that. We’ll get to that when the time comes. But I assure you, all will be well.”
