Conan O'brien Must Go

The series is a spin-off to his podcast Conan O'Brien Needs a Friend and a successor to the Conan Without Borders travel specials that originally aired as part of his TBS show Conan. Premiering on the streaming service Max in the United States on April 18, 2024, the series features O'Brien meeting various fans in person whom he had previously featured via video calls in his podcast series. He travels to Norway, Argentina, Thailand, and Ireland.

Conan O'Brien Must Go
Title card for the show
Genre	Comedy Travel show
Created by	Conan O'Brien
Directed by	Mike Sweeney
Presented by	Conan O'Brien
Original language	English
No. of seasons	1
No. of episodes	4
Production
Executive producers	Conan O'Brien Jeff Ross
Production company	Conaco
Original release
Network	Max
Release	April 18, 2024 (2024-04-18) (United States)
Related
Conan Conan Without Borders Conan O'Brien Needs a Friend

 

 

(Left) O'Brien at the US Embassy in Helsinki in 2006 and (Right) at Al Udeid Air Base during an episode of Conan Without Borders in 2016.

O'Brien has a long history of featuring segments that occurred outside the traditional studio environment, dubbed "remotes", ever since his first late-night show, Late Night with Conan O'Brien. They became some of his best-received segments, including a famous remote when O'Brien visited a historic, Civil War-era baseball league. The 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."

The apotheosis of the Late Night remotes centered on the realization, in 2006, that O'Brien bore a striking resemblance to Tarja Halonen, entering her second term as president of Finland. Capitalizing on the resemblance and on the 2006 Finnish presidential election, O'Brien and Late Night aired mock political ads both in support of Halonen and against her main opponent, which influenced popular perception of the race, and traveled to Finland shortly after the election. "We took the show to Helsinki for five days," O'Brien recalled, "where we were embraced like a national treasure." As part of the five-day trip, which was released as a one-hour special episode of Late Night, O'Brien met with Halonen at the Finnish Presidential Palace.

O'Brien began hosting the show Conan on TBS in 2010. The first international travel special on the show was in February 2015. Following the onset of the Cuban thaw, O'Brien became the first American television personality to film in Cuba for more than half a century. A few months later, O'Brien visited Armenia in an episode that featured his assistant Sona Movsesian, who is Armenian American. Thirteen specials in total aired before the ending of Conan in 2021. The travel series, collectively referred to as Conan Without Borders, became some of O'Brien's most popular work, winning an Emmy in 2018 and being nominated in 2019.

Conan O'Brien Needs a Friend premiered November 18, 2018, when O'Brien's talk show was on hiatus and being retooled from an hour-long format into a half-hour format. The title refers to the podcast's premise that O'Brien is only friends with people who work for him, and the friendly conversations he has with celebrities on his talk show rarely translate to lasting friendships, an issue he is looking to fix. In April 2021, O'Brien launched a subseries on the podcast titled Conan O'Brien Needs a Fan, in which he and cohosts Movsesian and Matt Gourley take questions from fans via video calling.

In November 2020, it was announced O'Brien would host a weekly variety series for what was then known as HBO Max. O'Brien stated in a 2024 interview that this announcement was a miscommunication, and that he never intended to produce a variety show. Conan O'Brien Must Go was announced in May 2023. It was delayed by the 2023 Writers Guild of America strike which lasted from May to September 2023. It was released on Max in the United States on April 18, 2024. The series features O'Brien meeting various fans in person whom he had previously featured via video calls in his podcast series Conan O'Brien Needs a Fan. He travels to Norway, Thailand, Argentina, and Ireland. The show is produced by O'Brien's company Conaco, and executive produced by O'Brien and Jeff Ross.

Tania Hussain writing for Collider described the show as "what might be the year's most inventive and wildly hilarious series," and that it was "a shame there are only four episodes." Stephen Rodrick writing for Variety gave the show a positive review. In another positive review, Eric Deggans writing for NPR called the show a "funhouse mirror version of a travel show", with Jen Chaney writing for Vulture similarly noting the series "is much more blatant about its interest in riffing on and subverting the tropes of the travel format" than the Conan Without Borders series. In an otherwise positive review from The A.V. Club, Meredith Hobbs Coons noted that, "the vibes can be a bit off at times, and certain scenes seem to drag, as if he's willing with all his might to draw comedy from them", with Variety similarly mentioning that, "some of the stuff goes on a bit long".

Many reviewers praised O'Brien's self-deprecating approach to comedy, noting that the choice helped avoid any cultural insensitivity. The episode in Ireland in which O'Brien explores his heritage was especially praised for its profundity and heartwarming qualities.