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Later, most critics would be rapturous, but a few first-night viewers with vested interests would express some reservations about this choice: a taped piece that early? And one that long? And one that didn’t quite work for some (such as a contingent of associates from 30 Rock)? And one that was so clearly—maybe too clearly—Lettermanesque: the host exploring the new neighborhood, riffing with regular folks, relying on spontaneous wit and quick tape cuts?

But OK, it was the first night, and not everything had been locked in yet. If Conan’s nerve ends seemed a bit jangly to some of his old colleagues in New York, it was understandable.

After the first commercial, when he took his seat behind his new elegantly S-shaped cherry-toned desk, Conan had the obligatory exchange with Andy, now revealed in an unexpected location: standing behind a wooden podium that made him look like an exiled candidate from a presidential debate. But after a comfortable bit of business with the always reliable Andy, Conan would go no further without checking off the next critical item on his to-do list.

“I want to take a second,” he said. “I want to acknowledge somebody, a very good friend of mine, a true gentleman, a very gracious man, a man who hosted this show for seventeen years, took good care of the franchise. Ladies and gentlemen, let’s all give it up for Mr. Jay Leno!” As the obligatory applause rained down, Conan added, “He’s going to come back on the air—in two days, three days maybe, tops!” Then he slipped into the high-pitched Jay voice: “You know, got to get back in there!”

After the laugh, Conan added one more thought: “He’s been a very good friend to me. And so I’m looking forward to him being our lead-in once again.”

A few moments later Conan brought on his sole guest for the night—Will Ferrell again—and got a huge kick out of Ferrell’s apparent disbelief that someone actually went through with it and gave Conan the job.

“Don’t get me wrong—I’m pulling for you,” Ferrell said. “But this whole thing is a crapshoot at best.”

The overnight, unofficial Nielsen numbers attested to just how big a deal Tonight remained in the United States. Conan’s premiere pulled over 9 million viewers, more than triple David Letterman’s audience for the night, and more than anything on television that evening in prime time—on a night in June, no less. He utterly dominated among the younger audience segments, which was exactly what his network wanted him to do. Conan’s 3.8 rating among the eighteen to forty-nine audience would have been a hit number for any show in prime time at any time of year. In late night it looked like something from a time machine—a throwback to the 1980s.

But over the course of the premiere week a pattern seemed to emerge. Viewers over the age of fifty, many of them presumably Jay Leno fans, started to check out—steadily, night by night. It wasn’t as though Conan hadn’t anticipated a reaction like that. The focus group bit he had teased on Jay’s last show (and would run on his own during the second week) had been conceived specifically to address the lingering questions about whether older viewers would ever embrace Conan. In concealing makeup that made him look a little like the Popeye character Wimpy, O’Brien, posing as a researcher named Stuart Wexler, led a group of senior citizens (“crusty, crotchety old people,” as Conan put it) in discussions about a series of clips involving this comic named Conan O’Brien. The most outstanding of the many pretaped pieces the show had banked, the hilarious focus-group bit showed Conan at his smartest and best: interacting with people and getting laughs without making fun of them, and landing a point at the same time. One woman suggested this guy didn’t belong on TV, he belonged in a mental institution. Another said simply, “I can see why some younger men who watch a lot of pornography might like this.”

Later, some at NBC would suggest the piece carried particular irony. The night it aired, Tuesday, June 9, was Conan