O’Brien in talks to bring show to T.O.
Discussions are under way to bring NBC’s Late Night With Conan O’Brien to Toronto for a week in February, The Toronto Sun has learned.
The nightly talk show, which recently celebrated 10 years on the air, would tape its four shows that week from a venue yet to be determined.
Late Night executive producer Jeff Ross, reached by phone yesterday at his New York office, wouldn’t say the Toronto gig was a done deal, but did say that they were “trying to figure out” a way to bring the show across the border.
“We’d like to do it,” Ross said.
The show is produced by NBC Enterprises and Broadway Video, the company owned by Saturday Night Live boss and Toronto native Lorne Michaels. Ross has a Toronto connection himself, having lived here when he was executive producer of The Kids In the Hall in the 1990s.
O’Brien representatives may be in Toronto next week to scout venues.
O’Brien tapes his show in Manhattan at Rockefeller Centre in the same studio used by David Letterman for 11-plus years. The Canadian shows likely would include O’Brien’s house band, the Max Weinberg Seven, plus Robert Smigel, the voice behind those phony celebrity interviews, as well as Triumph the insult comic dog.
This would be the first time a U.S. late-night talk show broadcasts from a Canadian city. David Letterman took his CBS Late Show to London in summer 1995. Both Letterman and O’Brien have taken their shows on the road to Los Angeles and other U.S. venues.
O’Brien frequently refers to the Great White North on Late Night, joking during the Iraq war that “the prime minister of Canada said he’d like to help, but he’s pretty sure that last time he checked, Canada had no army.”
The 40-year-old talk show host and his wife, advertising copywriter Liza Powell, had their first child in October.
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