Remote

narrative-driven short films

A famous remote found Conan visit a historic, Civil War-era baseball league. That piece was one of O'Brien's personal favorites, later remarking, "When I leave this earth, at the funeral, just show this, because this pretty much says who I'm all about."

Within a year, O’Brien began to work out a kind of comedic formula for “Late Night.” In addition to the usual glittering array of guests, the show combined the lewd and wacky (regulars included a masturbating bear and Triumph the Insult Comic Dog) with more elegant, narrative-driven short films (which are called remotes) in which O’Brien left the studio and reported on, say, a historic baseball league or a station in Houston that refused to carry his show at its normal hour. The apotheosis of the “Late Night” remotes centered on the realization in 2006 that O’Brien bears a striking resemblance to the (female) president of Finland. “We took the show to Helsinki for five days,” O’Brien recalled, “where we were embraced like a national treasure.”

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