He Rented a Family and Came Out Ahead
Before he was a late-night host, Conan O’Brien was a staff writer for The Simpsons during its golden era—responsible for Marge vs. the Monorail, Homer Goes to College, episodes that hold up as the best evidence that a TV comedy could be reliably, inventively brilliant week after week. He moved on to Late Night, then a brief and famously messy tenure at The Tonight Show, then his own show where he cultivated a particular persona: self-deprecating, physically awkward, funnier in failure than success. That established identity is what makes his travel segments work as well as they do.
In Japan, he rented an entire family—parents, children, the full domestic arrangement—to accompany him for an afternoon. He visited a Japanese animated character who shares his name and apparently speaks to him as a kind of long-lost relative. He sat through a kaiseki dinner with the focused seriousness of someone who understands that the ritual is the point. The comedy is never at Japan’s expense. It’s always at his own. He arrives as a very tall, very pale American man who doesn’t know the rules, and he submits to that position rather than performing authority over it.
This is rarer than it should be. American television’s relationship with foreign cultures has historically ranged from condescending to predatory—the host as bemused tourist, the locals as colorful backdrop, the whole exercise framed around what’s strange from a Western perspective. Conan inverts that: the strangeness is always his own. His presence is the absurdity, not the country.
I’ve been wanting to go to Japan for long enough that I’ve developed opinions about Japan travel content, which is an embarrassing thing to admit but there it is. I’m tired of the drone-shot version: Shibuya crossing at dusk in slow motion, bullet trains pulling into Kyoto, Fushimi Inari at six in the morning before the crowds arrive. All of it technically accomplished, all of it emotionally absent. It doesn’t tell you what it feels like to be there. Conan’s segments, shot on handheld cameras with natural audio and no visible production polish, come considerably closer.
The rented family bit in particular gets at something true about Japan that the aesthetic travel content avoids: the elaborate social performances that structure daily life there, the way formality and warmth coexist in the same gesture, the fact that a stranger agreeing to play the role of your family for an afternoon is stranger from the outside than it is from within. Conan doesn’t explain any of that. He just participates, and the warmth comes through. That’s the whole trick.