When planning a trip to South America earlier this year, I stumbled into the modern traveler’s paradox.
I searched for places where it would be easy to avoid gawking tourists. But if there were cool places somehow undiscovered by tourists, they would surely appear on some online list of “best hidden gems” and would, as a result, become overrun with the same tourists I was hoping to avoid by searching for non-touristy destinations.
For better and worse, traveling has been hacked. Every choice about where to stay is streamlined on Airbnb or Booking.com. Finding a flight around the world is a couple of taps on a smartphone. Every conceivable destination, attraction or experience has been cataloged and reviewed on TripAdvisor and countless other forums.
This traveler’s paradox is the result of what the writer Freddie deBoer calls “over-optimization.” In a recent Substack post, deBoer explained how life in the 2020s — everything from dating apps to restaurant reservations to concert tickets to book reviews to sports — has been degraded thanks to “the plight of too much information.”
Travel, and information about how and where to travel, deBoer writes, “is too accessible for some of the traditional pleasures of travel to survive … A lot of travelers find their own travel to be less fulfilling because of the very systems that enabled them to take the trip in the first place.”
That sense of disappointment is part of why comedian Conan O’Brien’s new travel anthology show on the Max platform, “Conan O’Brien Must Go” is so refreshing: He has no interest in discovering anything.
O’Brien has joked that he wants viewers to know less about the countries he visits than they did before watching, and that is basically what happens. There are no history lessons, no explorations of regional cuisine, no tips on cool places off the beaten path.
It’s just Conan, imposing his goofy presence and disruptive energy upon cultures that did not invite him, and it is insanely funny.
The series appeared in April with a first season of four episodes, each set in a different country: Norway, Thailand, Argentina and Ireland. He shows up with no agenda besides bothering people and catching funny moments on camera, and both of those things happen in abundance.
O’Brien was a late-night-TV mainstay for nearly 30 years, but left his most recent talk show, on the TBS cable channel, in 2021 for the far less prestigious field of podcasting. His series “Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend” became a pandemic-era hit, as did its spinoff show, “Conan O’Brien Needs a Fan.”
It consists of interviews with random fans who call in from around the world to discuss strange occupations or unusual personal problems, and will usually end with an insincere-sounding promise to hang out if Conan ever makes it to their country.
O’Brien, who during his later TV years developed a knack for viral remote and travel segments, decided to hop across the globe to surprise some of his better callers and the people in their orbit.
They include a destitute bachelor who is half of a Norwegian rap duo; plenty of Scandinavians unamused by his attempts to become a Viking; a Thai fan who visibly wants him to leave; and a bar full of Dubliners who are minimally impressed by his performance with the Irish Tenors.
Wherever the camera points, O’Brien remains the center of gravity. He is too maniacal a comedic presence not to be. And the “idiot abroad” setup perfectly suits both his talents and the world that begrudgingly receives him.
O’Brien’s persona is aggressively self-deprecating, which surfaces in a travel series as exaggerated obliviousness. In less skilled hands, this could backfire in a million culturally insensitive ways, but in “Conan O’Brien Must Go,” as with his earlier collection of travel segments, “Conan Without Borders,” it works because he is always the butt of the joke.
This makes “Must Go” a better travel series for our moment than something like “Parts Unknown,” brilliant as that show was. We don’t need anyone telling us how to travel, especially when so many of us could use a lesson in how not to.