The Adventures of Team Parker

A number of people have come to this blog for information on how to get standby tickets for the Conan O’Brien show. Having been through the whole process, I’ve decided to write a more thorough post on the subject. So, for those interested, here are my top 3 tips on getting into Late Night with Conan O’Brien.

1. Book in Advance

The best way to get tickets is to phone the NBC ticket line to reserve your free ticket. According to the ticketing website, this is how you go about getting tickets for Conan O’Brien:

Tickets to Late Night with Conan O’Brien are available by calling our ticket office at (212) 664-3056. You can request up to 4 tickets and all audience members must be at least 16 years old. You may only book tickets every 6 months and you may not book tickets with any other groups of people.

2. Keep calling, keep calling, keep calling

The problem with booking tickets via phone is that you need to keep calling, day after day. Tickets open up 4 to 6 weeks in advance so timing is important. When you call, you may get a message that says that ticketing will reopen soon but no explicit instructions on exactly when this is. If you get this message, just keep calling each day. Sameer called the number every day for three weeks straight and one day found that he kept getting an engaged tone. He realized that this must mean that people were on the line doing more than phoning and hanging up i.e. they must actually be booking their tickets. So he kept trying and eventually got through to the ticketing line himself. When we got through in the first week of May, we were offered tickets for shows in the first two weeks of June. We’re pretty sure that if we hadn’t been calling each day and keeping track of when the tickets became available, we would have missed the crucial window in which to get through.

3. Stand by early!

If you can’t get reserved tickets or you find yourself unexpectedly in New York, your best bet is to get standby tickets. Here’s what NBC has to say about standby tickets:

For standby tickets, arrive no later than 9:00am on the morning of the taping under the “NBC Studios” marquee on the 49th street side of 30 Rockefeller Plaza. Only one ticket will be issued per person. Please note that a standby ticket does not guarantee admission.

This is what the spot looks like:

Now how it works is, you go to NBC at the address listed above and wait in line until 9am when someone from the show comes to hand out the standby tickets. These are given out by number on a first come first serve basis. Each person gets only one ticket and everyone is told to come back later that afternoon, around four.

When you get there in the afternoon, you go through security and stand in another queue until the staff have an idea of how many of the people with reserved tickets failed to show up. If there are six seats open just before taping, they let the first six standby people in. If there are 15 open seats, they let the first 15 standby people in. Bear in mind that the studio for Late Night is really, really small - there are only about 200 seats. This means that even if 10% of the audience fail to show up there would still only be 20 standby spots available.

When we tried to get standby tickets for the show in April, we took the information on the NBC website literally. They said to be there by 9am for the latest so we thought getting there by 8 would put us somewhere at the front of the queue. Well, when we arrived, we were 40th and 41st in line. The people at the front of the queue had been there since 7am.

We asked the NBC rep who handed out the standby tickets if we had any hope of getting in and he said “You never know”. He told us that the number of people who fail to show up for a taping varied so much that they never knew exactly how many people they could let in on standby. In the last week they had one day in which only seven spots were open and another in which there were 20. The day we went, they actually let a whopping 28 people in. We weren’t among those but we consoled ourselves by saying that even if we’d arrived before 8, we still wouldn’t have made it through.

When we took the NBC tour later that day, one of the NBC pages told us that you should get there no later than 7:45 to have a chance of getting in but my advice would be to get there closer to 7am. There is never any guarantee that you will get in but your chances get better the closer you are to the front of the queue. So get there early, leave one of your buddies in the queue and then make a coffee and bagel run. When you get back, get comfortable and have your breakfast and a nice long chat while you wait.

Other things to bear in mind:

• The show tapes at 5:30 but people who are on standby are asked to come back by about 4pm.
• Some internet sources say the show only tapes Tuesdays through Fridays but if you get through on the ticket line, a voice recording states that the show tapes Monday through Fridays.
• If you get in for the show, take a sweater or jacket with you; the temperature inside the studio is very much on the low side.

That’s pretty much all the advice I can offer on the matter. I hope you find it helpful and good luck with getting in to the show.