Conan O’Brien never planned on becoming the darling of the podcasting world.
“It’s not the natural career step,” he says. “I have a talk show, and it felt like maybe you do the podcast in order to get on TV. But when my staff approached me about it, I kind of thought what the heck? What do we have to lose?”
Despite its star’s initial reservations, “Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend,” an interview program in which the late-night comic engages in free-form chats with everyone from “Barry” creator Bill Hader to historian and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Robert Caro, has become the breakout hit of the audio season. It commands more than 1 million downloads an episode — blockbuster numbers for a podcast — and has inspired O’Brien and his team to create a spinoff show with sidekick Andy Richter, as well as scripted podcasts such as “Frontier Tween,” a satire of prairie life, and “Smartr,” a startup-culture sendup. “Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend,”…
