Conan O'Brien returned to late night television this week. It's easy to think of him as a successful celebrity millionaire, who will never need to worry about how to pay the bills, but Conan has more in common with a lot of Americans than you might think.
I like to imagine what it might have been like for Conan back in the 80's and 90's working as a writer on Saturday Night Live. He was so close to comedic success, yet in the company of people who never achieve the kind of success he eventually would. Conan eventually achieved his dream job of hosting the Tonight Show, only to fail at the highest and most public level and lose it to the guy that had it before.
Last week, when he returned to the airwaves on his new show on TBS, Conan came back humbled and it would appear, more determined than ever to be a success. It seems that his exile might have made him funnier, ignited a fire that can die with success, and gave him a new direction. The self deprecating theme provided a lot of material.
What Conan is exemplifying is that it is not our success or failure that must define us, it is how we rise again when we fall that matters. That no matter how big we get, we can always be made to feel small. That success is relative, and so is loss.
Now he moves forward, on a much smaller network. But he has started a new legacy, instead of continuing an old one, and instead of having to be pushed back into a new time slot, someone else moved back for him. You'd better believe George Lopez didn't mind being asked to follow Conan. In Conan's life, as in my own, it looks like things are going to work out after all. Not the way anyone expected, and not the way that they'd hoped, but perhaps, in the end, even better.
After all, the only thing America loves more than a success story, is a comeback.
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