Tom Shales

Conan O'Brien did such a tremendous job of turning the Emmy Awards into an actual entertaining television show Sunday night, why not name him permanent host of the show, the way Bob Hope and then Johnny Carson were for the Oscars ("permanent" being of course relative in telespeak). Jeff Ross, Conan's executive producer, says he's not sure Conan would even want the gig if asked. "It's a ton of work," he told me from New York, where "Late Night" is taping three shows in two days and then taking a few days off. "We must have spent four months working on that thing."

The ratings were not great, but of course they weren't: NBC stupidly and stubbornly insisted it air in August so as not to disrupt the Sunday-night football schedule, and churlish old ABC, in a snit because "Lost" and "Desperate Housewives" weren't nominated, put a Johnny Depp "Pirates of the Caribbean" movie up against the Emmycast, a very ungracious thing to do. Conan, who last hosted in 2002, did do better in the Nielsens than the 2004 awards, which kicked off the TV season and aired in September, not August.

The hilarious "cold open" that had Conan romping from the set of one show to another was shot over a few weeks and of course completed long before Sunday, but some viewers complained about the sequence because it opened with Conan going down in a plane crash, and there'd been a real plane crash, with 49 dead, earlier that day in Kentucky. Ross absolutely positively did not want to comment on the controversy, but it seems like one that will blow over quickly. The sequence could have undergone last-minute editing, but that would have screwed up the continuity and could have had a ripple effect on the timing of the show, which actually came in at a mere three hours for a change.

O'Brien couldn't be reached as he was busy entertaining the hell out of his studio audience. He'll be taking over "The Tonight Show" in a few years according to the timetable that Jay Leno himself helped set up. The happy day can't come too soon ....