When Does Conan Season 12 Come Out? Is It Renewed?

What is Conan about?

Conan O'Brien landed on TBS in 2010 after the messy, very public collapse of his Tonight Show tenure, and the show he built there turned out to be something more interesting than a consolation prize. Running for eleven years and over 1,500 episodes, it was a late-night talk show in the traditional sense, with a desk and a couch and celebrity guests, but O'Brien has never been particularly comfortable doing the traditional version of anything.

What made the TBS run distinctive was how much O'Brien leaned into his own absurdism and self-awareness, often more freely than he could at NBC. The remote segments, particularly his "Clueless Gamer" series and his travel pieces to places like Armenia and Japan, became genuine highlights, partly because they revealed something true about him: he is funnier when he is confused and uncomfortable than when he is in control. Andy Richter's return as announcer and sidekick restored a comedic chemistry that Late Night fans had missed for years, and the two of them together have a looseness that most late-night pairs never find.

Critical reception was warm rather than rapturous. Audiences appreciated the show's willingness to be weird, and it scored a solid 8.2 on IMDb from a devoted fanbase. It never competed seriously with Fallon or Colbert in the ratings, but it was not really trying to. TBS gave O'Brien room to be niche, and he used it.

The show ended in 2021 with O'Brien transitioning to a podcast format, which felt right. By the final seasons, the desk-and-guest structure seemed like something he was tolerating rather than enjoying, and the best moments came whenever the format bent or broke. That tension, between what late night requires and what O'Brien actually wants to do, ran through the whole eleven years and gave the show most of its energy.

Created by Conan O'Brien

Is Conan renewed or cancelled?

Why did Conan end?

Conan O'Brien spent eleven years at TBS after his well-publicized exit from NBC's Tonight Show, and by the early 2020s it was clear he had simply outgrown the traditional late-night format. The show ended on his own terms in June 2021, not because TBS forced him out, but because O'Brien had been openly restless with the five-nights-a-week desk-and-couch structure for years. He had already experimented his way toward something different, cutting back to a half-hour format in 2019 and leaning heavily into his travel specials and podcast work, both of which seemed to energize him far more than another round of celebrity interviews.

The broader late-night landscape was also shifting in ways that made a linear cable talk show feel increasingly like a relic. Audiences, especially younger ones, had moved away from watching late night in real time, and even the clips-on-YouTube model that had sustained shows like his was losing steam as attention fragmented further across platforms. TBS was itself reconsidering its identity during this period, and a long-running talk show with declining live viewership was not exactly the center of anyone's growth strategy.

O'Brien transitioned to a podcast format with Conan O'Brien Needs a Friend, which had already become enormously popular, and later landed at Max with a new project. The end of Conan the TBS show feels less like a cancellation and more like someone deciding to stop commuting to an office they no longer needed. He had made 1,510 episodes. That was enough.

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