You were interested in comedy at a very early age, right?
Yeah.
It's a thing where again, this is, this is just,
we were talking about David Letterman earlier.
For me, you were like Letterman.
Cause I didn't watch Letterman.
So I just, that was comedy.
It was, to me, it was the Simpsons, SNL, Seinfeld and,
and Conan was late night to me.
Wow.
So this is a weird thing for me.
Well, that's very cool of you to say.
And we are just going to put that on the loop.
(laughing)
If you don't mind.
We're just gonna put that over and over and over again.
Truly. It's more a function of my age.
It's just not like I like you better than Letterman.
Exactly.
It's really just my age.
Exactly.
Exactly. You just weren't alive
when Dave was hitting it out of the park, that's all.
I'll start first of all by congratulating you
on the podcast you're doing with,
with Mr. Rob Lowe and it's called Parks and Recollection.
This is a show that I'm very excited about.
Yes, full disclosure, it's part of our Team Coco
empire if you will.
But you guys talking about that show,
which I really admire, which you wrote on,
and so you have all this access to how it was put together
as does Rob from a different angle.
Sounds like a very cool project.
Yeah, it has, you producing as nothing
to do with me being here. Zero.
Oh not at all. I had.
You know what, let me tell you something, Allen,
I'm at a point in my career where I don't even know what I'm
involved in anymore. So.
(laughing)
It's an empire. It's an empire.
Shondaland, you, you know?
It really is.
I am. And so there are,
there are times where people remind me, hey Conan,
you have a big part of Exxon Mobile.
Right.
Like you're a major stockholder.
And I'm like, oh, I didn't know.
And that's when you encourage them to just forget safety
precautions, send the boats out there no matter
what the weather conditions are just.
Hey, they're getting paid.
(laughing)
The last time I checked,
they were getting money.
And I say, if there's rough seas in the North Atlantic,
get out there and get the oil.
That's what I say to them.
Who cares where the icebergs are.
(laughing)
No, but the podcast, no,
the podcast has been really fun.
We just started recording it.
And, and at first, to be honest, I was like,
I don't know if I want to watch all these episodes again.
It's a lot of time.
Let's bring people up to date.
You, you worked for, were you there the entire time?
I was there for 125 episodes.
As far as writers go, Mike Schur, the co-creater and me,
I think we're the only ones who were there the whole time.
So.
Right.
Yeah. So.
And so, you were there at that show and I remembered,
I'm obviously very good friends with Greg Daniels, who,
who was responsible for bringing The Office to
United States.
And then of course, you know, had a hand in,
in getting Parks and Rec going.
And so, I was very familiar with both shows and I remember
The Office had kind of a slow start
initially and then took off.
Parks and Rec, it didn't happen
right away for Parks and Rec.
It's still taking off now. It's 2021. You know.
It, it was though season one.
It was, it was definitely almost an indentical
trajectory to The Office.
And I think for similar reasons,
because if you look at The Office,
what Greg did with The Office, again, a brilliant show,
he's adapting it from a British one.
Right.
And so the first season's a little
bit closer to the British one.
And then the second season,
kinda sprouts its wings and flies
on its own and becomes it's own thing.
And Parks and Rec started as was conceived at first was
maybe going to be an office spinoff, and then it wasn't.
And so that first season,
I think Mike and Greg were still trying to work out kinks
and trying to see, okay,
how different from the office tonally, et cetera.
Right.
And then second season, it really starts taking off
and part of that was taking on Amy Poehler's personality as
well and, and, and making use of her so.
A really good TV show in my opinion is not a finite thing.
It's an organism.
The shows I've always really loved,
If you look at The Simpsons, for example,
you can look at the first season
and Dan Castellaneta does not have Homer's voice yet.
Yeah.
His way into Homer was he sort of thought of his voice as
being a Walter Matthau kind of voice.
And you can listen to that first year of the Simpsons.
And that's a lot of boy.
Yeah. It's a lot of boy.
Boy. Yeah here boy.
Now Lou will send me,
and then it changes and then they find it.
And I think shows like a lot of things and probably like a
restaurant or a, you know, so many endeavors,
you need to figure it out. You need to,
you find it by doing it.
And I think people sometimes misunderstand and think, ah,
it's a widget,
it's something that's manufactured and you're cranking them
out and you do 22. And then the next 22,
the only way you really know what your show is,
is by doing it.
My late night shows were constantly changing and morphing
and often, sometimes not by design.
It was just sheer desperation.
We don't have anything today.
I know, let's, what if a bear masturbated and then suddenly
you're off on that and
you've hit what many call a Renaissance.
(laughing)
A form of television. A form of television in general.
(laughing)
As far as masturbation humor goes,
I think, are quite fairly a Renaissance.
But, but yeah, it's, it's, it's fascinating to me
that these things and evolve and
it's, it was not all assigned on day one.
It's fascinating.
It's exactly what you said,
which is, and you lived on the long end of this, right?
You're doing a daily show.
Right.
A show and you can really react to what the audience is
thinking, you know, how they're reacting.
Right. Right.
What you're like as a host, what Andy's doing, whatever,
all of that stuff, you can react.
It's a read and react type thing.
And so with a show like Parks,
they don't make that shows that run that long anymore.
So, you know, we, we went on to do Master of None.
It's been six years, we've done 25 episodes of Master.
You know, it's like, it's like so crazy.
Aziz. Aziz's is now, I tuned in the other day,
he's 65 years old.
(laughing)
Yeah. It just keeps going.
And he he's on his third hip.
Yeah.
Yes.
That kind of television where you're just cranking it out
every day and going through massive arcs sort of creative
arts over three month periods and, and, you know,
people saw it or they didn't,
there was no checking it out later on online.
Now when you go back and watch it and for a lot of people
for the first time, they say, wait a minute,
there's something going on here.
And I think that's what's happened with
Parks and Rec, is that it's enjoyed a Renaissance.
I'm friends with Nick Offerman,
and he said the same thing, like this is,
this is fascinating that people are finding the show now.
And we, it's been,
what has it been 10 years since you guys made one?
Yeah. And it's a fun as hell re-watch.
That's what I'm realizing while re-watching it.
It, it's almost perfectly designed for right now,
2020, 2021, the darkest time.
Yes.
In a long time where everyone's indoors,
you're looking for something warm,
something heartfelt, something comforting.
It's a great re-watch.
I sound like an NBC executive right now, but,
but literally like while watching it.
Yeah, I was going into
night terrors.
Yeah. Yeah.
(laughing)
Something, I, smelled sulfur in the room.
(laughing)