Every episode of Conan O’Brien Must Go starts like this… so I have to do it here too.

“Earth, a cradle for unimaginable beauty and staggering wonder. Incomprehensible, overwhelming, this planet mocks our feeble power to describe it. Yes, to truly appreciate the astounding grandeur of this planet, sometimes, you must defile it. Behold, the defiler. His character is vile, base, and depraved. Once a proud talk show host, he’s been driven by a changing ecosystem to a drier and harsher climate, the weekly podcast. Here, without the nourishment of his studio audience, this clown with dull, tiny eyes, the eyes of a crudely painted doll, is forced to feed on that meagerest of morsels, the random call-in fan. Unhinged by the feral scent of their mild enthusiasm, he scavenges in distant lands, uninvited, fueled by a bottomless hunger for recognition and the occasional selfie.

This is madness. It’s lunacy. This is chaos.
This is “Conan O’Brien Must Go.”

Werner Herzog really nails that monologue intro, and I never skip it. It’s so good.

I was the weird kid in middle school who had nothing better to do than stay up past 1 AM to watch Late Night with Conan O’Brien. His raw, just-mature-enough humor is my favorite in showbiz. I was ecstatic when he got the Tonight Show, woefully upset when it was taken away, and followed him to TBS. At my first few San Diego Comic-Cons, I paid resale to get into his show at the legendary but now-defunct Spreckels Theater. I have absolutely no regrets, because he’s guaranteed to make me laugh. When you laugh, you smile, and we don’t have enough of that in this world.

Conan O’Brien Must Go

If you don’t know about Conan O’Brien Must Go, it’s a travel show. Most travel shows are designed to teach you things and perhaps even encourage you to visit that country. Conan O’Brien Must Go doesn’t seek to do that at all. In fact, most of what he does at the places he visits is make fun of stuff. It’s not to the point of it being insulting or disrespectful, but just enough to make the locals cringe.

Part of what makes the show work is that he uses it as another platform for his brand of comedy. That, admittedly, isn’t for everyone. After all, that’s why he was canceled and had such a messy divorce at NBC in the first place. But if you are a fan, you know exactly what you’re getting.

When he did have his late-night talk shows, he often did remotes. Conan brought his late-night show from New York across the country and even to places like South Korea and Italy. Everywhere he went, he brought attention to himself in the most awkward of ways. Conan O’Brien Must Go is a 45-minute version of that, and season 3 is longer than usual, with four episodes.

To India, The Netherlands, Morocco, and The Philippines

The show follows a wholesome format. Part of what convinces Conan to go to these places is that fans call him on his podcast, Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend. When he goes to these places, he meets these fans, and he takes detours to different parts of these locations that are both popular and not as well known. Hilariousness ensues in every episode, but not everything hit. I’m not going to share every detail here, and I’m actually talking about them in a way that hopefully encourages you to tune in, but there are light spoilers ahead if you wanna go in blind. Feel free to skip to the last part of the section if you don’t want spoilers.

In India, Conan rides the Mumbai commuter train, and you can tell why it probably didn’t go well (his height). He helps a fan create a talk show in the most Conan way possible, and yes… he makes a Bollywood video.

In The Netherlands, he goes to the Van Gogh Museum pretending to be him, and he does things that wouldn’t surprise me if he got banned from the country. He also meets a fan who’s a professional basketball player in the country, and he tries to teach him how to talk trash.

In Morocco, he makes his fan watch Casablanca because he lives there and never saw it. This episode stood out from the rest of the series because he mostly spent it hanging out with her podcast co-host, Sona Movesian.

Finally, in the Philippines, Conan helps a fan persue fame by co-starring in an action series. He also talks a lot about balut but never eats it because a talking duck convinces him not to.

So let’s take it back to the top. Is any of this stuff something you’d see on a travel show? Probably not.

Verdict

Recommending the third season of Conan O’Brien Must Go really comes down to a couple preferential factors. If you’re a fan of Conan, you know what you’re going to get, and it’s a resounding yes. If you’re not a fan of Conan, you probably also know what you’re going to get, and this won’t change your mind.

I do have to admit that as someone who’s a long-time fan of him, there were bits that I wasn’t really laughing about in every episode. In India, for example, he spent what felt like an eternity trying to catch monkey thieves in what was unapologetically AT&T advertising. At the Philippines, my ethnic homeland, he asked for tips at a hotel (they’re a non-tipping country). In the Netherlands, he spent time at a bike graveyard but did nothing of note. As I’m typing this, I already forgot what he did. All that said, his trip to Morocco was probably my favorite episode.

If you wanna see a funny man do weird things overseas, these three episodes are right up your alley.

Score: 7/10

All three seasons of Conan O’Brien Must Go can be streamed on HBO Max.