Now that beloved carrot-top Conan O'Brien has gone and laid a gentle smack down on NBC for their time-shifting late night foxtrot, what are some ways he could fuck over the (already so fucked) network? Let's imagine some possibilities.


1) Ruin NBC's Olympic Dreams

NBC has cornered the market on Olympics coverage for, like, years now. It's a big deal for them! With that soaring John Williams music and the way other networks have their shows skitter out of the way so they won't compete. The upcoming Vancouver wintertime ski-meet isn't quite as big of a deal as any of the summer games, but it's still a tentpole of the network's programming schedule. So Conan should steal their thunder by staging his own Olympics. Where would he get access to mountains and luge courses and some sort of elven Johnny Weir-ish creature? Why in Finland of course! He already has ties to the country because of his eerie resemblance to that country's (female) president. So he could host all kinds of fun alpine events, while wearing traditional Finnish winter garb, and we'd all watch and laugh and forget about the real Olympics going on on that stupid old network. Though, maybe NBC doesn't need Conan's help on this one. They already stand to lose some $200 million on this year's festivities. Yikes.

2) The Letterman Contingency

Conan and David Letterman have always had a respectful professional rapport with one another — recognizing, perhaps, that they were the weirder and more non-traditional two of the three big men of late night. And everyone knows that Letterman hates Jay Leno, so he'd almost certainly be up for a little anti-NBC mischief. What could they do? Anything to boost David's ratings, basically. Conan could put on a skinny villain's mustache and blackmail Letterman, thus giving his already-high ratings another boost. Maybe they could come up with The Most Offensive Sarah Palin Joke Ever Told (other than this one). That's always a lightning rod. Maybe Dave would just let him co-host for a while. No one could beat the ratings they'd earn together. The Masturbating Bear does a Top Ten list! Abe Vigoda jams with Paul Shaffer! Uh... Joel Godard hits on some of Dave's female staffers? If nothing else, the pair could always just go pour sugar in all of Jay Leno's five million gas tanks. That'd show him.

3) Release the Nerds

One of Jay Leno's most popular bits is that "Jay Walking" thing where the producers find idiots and ask them easy questions and everyone chuckles as they get them wrong. It's like the only thing that Jay Leno does that is remotely funny. So all Conan would have to do is use some of his considerable financial resources by flying a bunch of students from his alma mater (Harvard, natch) to California and have them wander around Venice Beach or the Grove or Burbank or wherever the hell Jay films that thing. That way all the people he asked would be wicked smart and his whole stupid bit would be ruined. For, um, one day! Ha! Mostly it'd just be funny to see Conan barreling toward Los Angeles in an old B-52 bomber full of Harvard nerds. Actually, Conan flying a B-52 full of anything would be funny. Maybe he should just buy an old plane and fly around for a while. We'd watch that.

4) Return to Springfield

Conan could go back to his roots and start writing new episodes of The Simpsons. We're not sure why this would fuck over NBC in any way, but we'd still really like it to happen. Like really, really, really. Even just one! Just one, Conan... ?

Team Coco image via The Curse of Millhaven's comment in our last Conan post, but it's orginally (per Rainn Wilson's Twitter account) was created by Mike Mitchell.