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Conan who usually has a love in with the media is kinda getting ripped after 60 minutes last night, I thought he came off well

Hollywood Reporter

"It's crucial to me that anyone ... take away anything from this, it's that I'm fine," Conan O'Brien says in his "60 Minutes" interview with Steve Kroft. "I'm doing great. I hope people still find me comedically absurd and ridiculous."

If there was one statement that encapsulated the awkward mishap that was O'Brien's post-contractual-TV-blackout coming-out party, it was this rather transparent attempt to contradict a portrait he probably didn't intend to offer on national TV. Because the O'Brien on display is clearly not "fine," but a deeply hurt individual licking his wounds for all to see......

But O'Brien is doing great, right? Displaying zero of the antic charm that makes him such a great comic in late night, O'Brien openly wallowed in misery at a time when he should have been turning the page. The empty praise he gave his upcoming opportunity at TBS -- half-heartedly spouting some corporate boilerplate about the power of cable -- came in stark contrast to the envy he displayed losing his beloved "Tonight Show" throne to Leno.

Even scenes from his comedy tour that should have shown O'Brien employing success as the best revenge had a sad quality to them. Listening to the comedian perform songs recounting his struggle, I was reminded of Jason Segel's pathetic character in "Forgetting Sarah Marshall," singing silly ditties to deal with the pain of getting dumped.

Baltimore Sun

O'Brien actually used such expressions as "but that's just me" and "I can sleep at night," to contrast his behavior with that of Leno's. I was surprised that he didn't also say he can "look in the mirror" and like what he sees -- as opposed to Leno. And yet, when asked pointblank to judge Leno, he invoked the clause.

Well look, it you are going to take $30 million to not say certain things, then don't weasel around the edges of it with whining, sniping comments about how you can sleep at night and others presumably can't. And don't put your wife on TV to say how your "heart was broken" by big, bad NBC -- the same big, bad company you and your wife took the big, fat check from.

CBS' "60 Minutes" is a storied and glorious news franchise. Sunday's interview with O'Brien was not one of its better moments. In fact, it was not even one of its better soft celebrity profiles. In fact, it wasn't even a profile -- just a quick-hit interview with a subject who got to have his way while CBS got to take a few shots at a competing network.

Variety

Look, Conan O'Brien is a talented guy, and a likable guy. Which is why people have agents and managers -- and why his account of "The Tonight Show" history is narrow and self-serving.

O'Brien didn't personally deliver any ultimatums in 2004, when NBC promised him "The Tonight Show" in five years. But his manager/agents (a.k.a. Team Coco) made clear that O'Brien had plenty of options and would pursue one of them if NBC didn't signal that Jay Leno was on his way out and that their guy would be in....

By the time the show was to be officially his, it was equally clear that Leno was still the top dog in latenight -- and could easily scuttle NBC's best-laid plans of a smooth transition by opening up his own franchise on a competing network. A series of poor decisions, most of them badly handled, followed.

But the impetus behind all of this was that O'Brien and his posse were demanding a promotion, and NBC wanted to keep him badly enough that they promised it to him.

In other words, when Steve Kroft's softball interview asked O'Brien about whether Leno had "acted honorably," well, as evidenced by O'Brien's move to TBS pushing George Lopez to midnight, there's more honor among thieves than there is among talkshow hosts. And to paraphrase an old line about baseball, despite O'Brien's insistence that he's not holding a grudge (perhaps for contractual reasons, his wife actually did most of the complaining), there shouldn't be any crying among latenight millionaires, either.