The old adage asserts “nothing gold can stay,” but in the modern late night US TV biz it’s really more like “no halfway popular time-filling segment can remain untouched by the spin-off overlords.”
Jimmy Fallon first blazed the trail with ‘Lip Sync Battle,’ which scored its own entirely mediocre show after the original ‘Tonight Show‘ and ‘Late Night‘ bits caught fire. James Corden is about to follow suit with his immensely popular ‘Carpool Karaoke‘ segments currently being developed into their own standalone series. And now it would appear that Conan O’Brien is next in line to make the leap.
Conan’s ‘Clueless Gamer‘ segments are getting spun-off into their own series on TBS, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
The new series will be directly based on the segments, in which middle-aged man Conan feebly navigates his way through various vidya games with hilarious results, and is considered “likely” to go straight to series, meaning there’s a fair chance we’ll get at least one season out of it.
Conan himself will not host the new series, with the future of his own talk show the current subject of speculation. Instead, a new host will be sought for the show, which is also likely to feature weekly celebrity guests. The segments on ‘Conan‘ have thus featured names like Conor McGregor, Elijah Wood, Terry Crews, PewDiePie, Wiz Khalifa, Lena Headey, Peter Dinklage, Seth Rogen, Zac Efron, and Marshawn Lynch, among others.
TBS president Kevin Reilly spoke thusly on the new project:
“We’re going into production next month on a new series, Clueless Gamer, based on the viral video [Conan O’Brien has] done where he essentially makes fun of video games, gets celebrities to play and makes commentary on them.”
“We’ve gotten to the point where video game companies are sending us their new product for us to play and make fun of because it’s been such a huge success. We’re going to go into production on a series of that.”
The new show comes as speculation mounts over the future direction of ‘Conan.’ The late night talk show has been seeing waning viewership numbers as the number of competitors on rival cable networks continues to grow.
There is growing talk that the show could soon shift to a weekly format, ditching the traditional nightly format that O’Brien’s been working in ever since he began hosting duties back in 1993. The rise, and success, of weekly format shows like ‘Last Week Tonight‘ and ‘Full Frontal with Samantha Bee‘ is said to be partly behind the possible shift.
No word on when we’ll see ‘Clueless Gamer‘ hit the airwaves, but it will reportedly enter production soon.
Source: The Hollywood Reporter.
