Conan O’Brien has found an unusual way to make friends around the world: arrive in their country, insult them and wait for them to return the favour.
Now in its third season, Conan O’Brien Must Go sends the former late-night host around the world to meet fans he first encountered through his podcast, Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend. Season 3 began on August 21, with O’Brien visiting India before travelling to the Netherlands in its second episode. Morocco and the Philippines will follow throughout the rest of the month, releasing on September 4 and 11 respectively
Calling it a travel show, however, feels slightly misleading. O’Brien is less interested in telling viewers where they should visit than in discovering how much nonsense he can get away with once he arrives. Across the series in 2024 and 2025, he has picked olives in Spain, tried Muay Thai boxing in Thailand, and sung with a boys’ choir in Austria. The countries change, but Conan, unfortunately for their citizens, does not. It is this refusal to behave like a respectable traveller that distinguishes Must Go from the increasingly crowded celebrity-travel genre.
Take Netflix’s Somebody Feed Phil for contrast. Its host, Everybody Loves Raymond creator Phil Rosenthal, travels through food, meeting chefs, families and locals with almost relentless enthusiasm. Rosenthal has described himself as “even proudly, a tourist” while emphasising that he considers himself a curious one. He has also described food as “the great connector” between people. His programme reflects that philosophy; Rosenthal’s exaggerated delight encourages people to share what they love with him, and he uses himself to point the camera outward.
O’Brien also points outward, but then runs back into the frame. The joke throughout Must Go is that he is supposedly the most important person in every country he visits. His boasts are enormous, his cultural knowledge is deliberately questionable and his desperation for attention would be concerning if it weren’t so carefully constructed.
Yet the arrogance is also a trap O’Brien sets for himself.
The programme is at its funniest when locals refuse to treat him with celebrity reverence. Season 3’s India episode, for example, puts O’Brien on Mumbai’s commuter rail and eventually has him helping a fan launch a talk show. Director and longtime collaborator Mike Sweeney told the Los Angeles Times that a young man teaching O’Brien street cricket was funny precisely because he was dismissive of the comedian, describing that dynamic as O’Brien’s “sweet spot”.
And it is easy to see why. Conan enters an interaction pretending to possess authority, only for somebody he has just met to puncture it. Suddenly the famous American comedian and the stranger standing opposite him can play on something closer to equal comic footing.
The newly released Netherlands episode continues the formula. After celebrating King’s Day, O’Brien helps a fan’s basketball team improve its trash-talking before attempting to make a traditional wooden clog. These are ostensibly opportunities to explore Dutch culture. Mostly, they are opportunities for Conan O’Brien to experience Conan O’Brien in the Netherlands. That is both the show’s greatest strength and its limitation.
Unlike Somebody Feed Phil, Must Go doesn’t always leave me wanting to visit the destination. Sometimes I finish an episode having learned considerably more about O’Brien’s pathological need for attention than the country named in the title.
But perhaps that is judging the programme against the wrong definition of travel television. Must Go’s real destinations are often its people; podcast fans give O’Brien an excuse to enter homes, workplaces and communities where his comedy can collide with ordinary lives. His deliberately antagonistic persona then produces a strange alternative to Rosenthal’s warmth.
Phil effectively asks: What do you love? Show me. Conan’s approach is closer to: Everything you love is ridiculous. Defend yourself.
Both can produce connection, but Conan’s method depends on his partner understanding the game. When someone pushes back, the hierarchy between celebrity and fan briefly collapses, and the show becomes wonderfully unpredictable. When an elaborate setup takes over, however, the spontaneity that makes these encounters so funny can suffer. One Season 3 review from Collider similarly argues that the programme stumbles when it manufactures chaos but succeeds when it lets O’Brien be himself.
After only nine released episodes, Conan O’Brien Must Go is therefore not the travel show I would watch to plan a holiday. Somebody Feed Phil can keep that job. But O’Brien has stumbled onto something stranger and, at its best, funnier: a travel programme in which cultural exchange begins with mutual irritation.
Phil Rosenthal travels the world by accepting hospitality. Conan O’Brien travels the world by testing it. And somehow, people keep inviting the latter back.
Tabitha Murdoch 
denneyl 
Toffee Kit