Promotions for this weekend's "Conan O'Brien Can't Stop" documentary have had the late-night veteran plastered on billboards and on TV spots across the country.
It's more than we've seen of the 6-foot-4 carrot top in the seven-plus months since the debut of "Conan" on TBS. Hard to believe that just a year ago, he was at the center of one of the biggest media stories in a decade.
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Indeed, where the web abounds daily with clips from "Late Night With Jimmy Fallon," "The Daily Show" and "Live! With Jimmy Kimmel," there's been a distinct dearth of nuggets emerging from "Conan" to be digested by cubicle jockeys the next day.
Not that his career is in the dumper, by any means.
His TBS series has averaged more than 1.2 million total viewers. And despite a lack of videos going viral on the web at large, his website, TeamCoco.com, averages in excess of 1 million video views a week, and his Twitter following numbers about 3.3 million.
He also performs particularly well with young audiences -- the median age of his viewers is 32, and according to TBS, "Conan" outperforms "Late Night With Jimmy Fallon," "Jimmy Kimmel Live" and "The Late Late Show With Craig Ferguson" in the sought-after adults 18-49 demographic. (Of O'Brien's 1.2 million average total viewers, 864,000 of them fall in that demo.)
But still, that's network versus cable, where his "Tonight Show" audience had been hovering in the 2.5 million total viewers.
The issue seems to be one of relevance. Conan's now on a network whose staple is reruns of "Family Guy," "My Name Is Earl and "King of Queens." There are no cutting-edge political interviews, or anything remotely zeigeisty coming out of a show that was once the hippest in late night.
His biggest news lately was winning a nonspeaking cameo on "How I Met Your Mother." His most recent magazine cover appearance was for Fast Company.
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For its part, TBS insists that's part of a plan. "Conan's digital presence is amazing -- the digital traffic to Conan is huge, and all of that is due to his appeal to youthful audiences," Michael Wright, executive vice president and head of programming for TBS, TNT and Turner Classic Movies. While Wright says that "the Conan guys put out fewer clips than Fallon or Kimmel," he adds that it's a deliberate choice not to flood the internet with clips.
Still, it's clear Conan has lost the water-cooler effect.
O'Brien was unavoidable in early 2010 when NBC, in a move that sparked outrage nationwide, decided to pull him from "The Tonight Show" after just seven months in order to reinstate Jay Leno, who'd been struggling in his new timeslot at 10 p.m.
