This is just my opinion, but I personally think Conan’s hit a few speed bumps in his transition to The Tonight Show, and that his old show was better. First, his stage is just way too big. Late Night with Conan O’Brien’ studio used to be home for David Letterman’s show. When he moved to CBS, one of the complaints was that his larger stage took away a lot of the intimacy. So NBC refused to learn from this and gave Conan an even bigger stage. He seems a lot less able to interact with the audience now that it’s so huge, and there’s way too much distance between Conan and Andy when Conan’s at his desk. This is even worse when you consider that for Jay Leno’s Tonight Show, they moved part of the audience out of the stands to seats right in front of the stage to make his show more intimate and give the feeling of a comedy club. So the old Tonight Show audience is used to a much more intimate show than the one Conan is giving them.

More than that, Conan still doesn’t seem totally comfortable on The Tonight Show. I suspect his producers and NBC executives might be putting pressure on him, because a lot of times he seems like he’s trying to impress his new audience by not playing along with some of his crazier guests as much as he used to (see: Howie Mandel). Eventually he’ll probably be able to relax more and cut loose, but that looks like a pretty long way off.