What goes in to making a nightly talk show like Late Night With Conan O'Brien?

"A typical day for me here is wake up a half-hour before showtime, sober up, start weeping, get slapped around by my producer and then get on the air," O'Brien said last week in New York. He kids.

Every Monday, a rerun is aired. That allows O'Brien and his team to set aside a day for writing and shooting remote segments used throughout the week. From Tuesday to Friday, O'Brien, his 15 writers and the rest of his NBC team usually put in a 10 hour-shift.

"It's more work than people think it is," O'Brien insists. "I'll be talking to somebody and say, 'In rehearsal today ...' They'll cut me off and go, 'You rehearse?!' Which is the way it should look. It should look like we're just screwing around."

Here's a quick look at a typical day in the work life of Conan O'Brien:

10:30 a.m.: O'Brien arrives at his eighth-floor office in the GE building at Manhattan's Rockefeller Centre. He starts off by checking e-mails, returning calls, "all that nonsense that goes nowhere," he says. Sometimes he'll try to squeeze in an interview and do other promotional work.

11 a.m.: He meets with executive producer Jeff Ross, where he's briefed on last night's show. Was there a problem? Did we get complaints? Did we get sued? "There's always problems. Things don't work, guests cancel, blah, blah, blah," says Ross, whose job it is to make the problems go away.

Noon: O'Brien huddles with head writer Mike Sweeney. They put their heads together not just on that afternoon's show but on future shows.

1 p.m.: The host then meets for an hour or so with his segment producers. There were three guests on the show I caught in New York last Wednesday night. O'Brien suggests several bits of business, including having one of the guys in the band sing a new theme song for The Today Show's Matt Lauer.

2:30 p.m.: Rehearsals are key and can last an hour or two. Besides fine-tuning the Wednesday show, O'Brien ducks into an editing bay to check out the first of the Toronto remotes. The first cut is "fat," meaning it runs way too long. That way, O'Brien and the producers can get a better idea where to take it.

4:30 p.m.: As the 188 studio audience members are lined up in the narrow halls of the studio, O'Brien tries to steal a nap for 15 minutes on his couch. He then heads to hair and makeup and does a final run-through of the monologue jokes with his cue card guy.

5 p.m.: From his dressing room, O'Brien can hear the audience being loaded in. "I hear them all murmuring and they're all excited. Sometimes I kind of have an out-of-body experience and I think, 'Wow, I wonder who's hosting that show?' "

5:25 p.m.: After the warmup comedian works the crowd, O'Brien himself leaps into the audience. "I like these people to bump up against me, literally," he says. He likes to "wake them up a bit," to let people who might have been to other tapings know that this ain't Rosie or even Dave.

5:30 p.m.: Show time. Each episode takes as long to shoot, one hour, as it does to watch.

6:45 p.m.: O'Brien and Ross huddle for a brief post-mortem of that night's show. Changes can be made before air time. "Sometimes we'll have a time issue where we have to nip and tuck something," he says.

8 p.m.: Conan has left the building.