I'm with Coco. At least until Colbert comes on

Larry King sported wings. Jon Hamm made a cameo. And the Mas­tur­bat­ing Bear re­turned to tele­vi­sion, all dur­ing the pre­miere of Conan O’Brien’s new, aptly named show “Conan,” which pre­miered Mon­day night on TBS.

The down-on-his-luck host, no longer down on his luck, made his tele­vi­sion come­back with the kind of non­sen­si­cal shenani­gans and self-dep­re­cat­ing humor that he de­vel­oped dur­ing his years on “Late Night” and his short seven-month stint on “The Tonight Show.” O’Brien’s open­ing se­quence was a med­ley of cul­tural ref­er­ences. Spoofs of “The God­fa­ther” and “Walk the Line” were fol­lowed with failed ven­tures into the ad­ver­tis­ing busi­ness (fea­tur­ing Don Draper from “Mad Men,” who told Conan that in the 1960s, the co­me­dian was still a tod­dler and thus not qual­i­fied to be an ad exec) and birth­day party clown­ing after NBC booted him out. The show’s first of­fi­cial guest was the cu­ra­tor of a nut­cracker mu­seum in Leav­en­worth, Wash.

O’Brien laced his hour-long pre­miere with jokes about the high-pro­file squab­ble with NBC and his move to basic cable. His open­ing mono­logue at­tempted to sum­ma­rize all the major events that oc­curred while he was work­ing on his new show. Ricky Ger­vais ap­peared in a video to di­min­ish­ingly con­grat­u­late him for his fu­ture hy­po­thet­i­cal moves from TBS to the Food Net­work and fi­nally to The Weather Chan­nel. O’Brien even named his new house band (minus Max Wein­berg) “Jimmy Vivino and the Basic Cable Band.”

It’s hard to gauge how well O’Brien’s new show will fare in the fu­ture. (Who knows? We may some­day see him re­port­ing the weather from Day­ton, Ohio, as Ger­vais proph­e­sied.) But if his first show was an in­di­ca­tion of any­thing, it showed that he still hasn’t got­ten over los­ing “The Tonight Show.” De­spite get­ting a salary of “much less” from TBS, how­ever, O’Brien has much to gain. In the months lead­ing up to the NBC squab­ble, O’Brien’s de­mo­graphic had nar­rowed. His view­er­ship mostly came from the 18 to 34 age range. With his new cable show, O’Brien will be able to focus on cater­ing to this young au­di­ence.

O’Brien never quite fit into “The Tonight Show,” which tries to at­tract a very broad au­di­ence that in­cludes adults over 50. Cable seems to be a bet­ter place for him. He does his best work when he caters to a younger de­mo­graphic — the same de­mo­graphic that tuned in to his orig­i­nal “Late Night” show. To add to that, the hype that pre­ceded his TBS pre­miere was the re­sult of a strong on­line cam­paign that uti­lized Face­book, Twit­ter and YouTube.

In the cur­rent media cli­mate, “The Tonight Show” is no longer the giant it once was. “Conan” will not be com­pet­ing with broad­cast tele­vi­sion, but with two of Conan’s clos­est col­leagues: Jon Stew­art and Stephen Col­bert. Among adults 18 to 34, “The Daily Show” out-rated its broad­cast com­pe­ti­tion. How “Conan” will fare against the two Com­edy Cen­tral gi­ants — es­pe­cially after the mo­men­tum of the midterm elec­tions — is un­clear.

For now, O’Brien can bask in the lime­light. His pre­miere at­tracted 4.2 mil­lion view­ers, beat­ing Stew­art and Col­bert. Oh, and Jay Leno and David Let­ter­man.