After seven seasons building Late Night with Conan O'Brien into a cult comedy hit, and charming the world as the hilariously deadpan sidekick, Richter will make his final exit from the couch Friday.
The 33-year-old announced his departure last year, saying he wanted to carve out a new career in TV and film work. And Late Night will pull out the stops to say farewell, with surprise guests, favorite Andy moments, a production number and--of course--one last staring contest with Conan.
Amid the teary goodbyes for Michael J. Fox or Beverly Hills, 90210, it might be easy to overlook Richter's departure from the tube. But then again, few would have predicted that either Richter or O'Brien would ever be around after seven seasons.
When Late Night first premiered in 1993, critics dogpiled on the show, slamming the tall redheaded host, not to mention taking shots at his rotund second banana. "Mostly they just seemed to say I was fat," Richter tells the Los Angeles Times. "They were too busy spewing bile at the rest of the show."
Since then, the show has recovered to become a big hit with drunken college kids stumbling home from the bars and insomniacs with twisted, goofy senses of humor. Richter soon became the anti-Ed McMahon, matching wits with Conan and diving into skits unlike any other chat-show sidekick before him.
"There's no word, really, for what it was that Andy brought to the show," O'Brien tells the Associated Press. "We never said, 'You be the Ed McMahon sidekick, in the traditional role.' The idea was, 'Let's have this funny guy who has a different rhythm than me sit next to me and do whatever he wants."
Devoted viewers are equally depressed about Richter's departure, saying O'Brien's jolly partner leaves some big shoes to fill. O'Brien says there are no plans to immediately replace Richter, but the show may test out some guests on the couch this summer.
"It seems like yesterday that Andy spoke of 'winning the sidekick contest by scratching a card inserted in a box of doughnuts,' " writes one fan on alt.fan.conan-obrien. "I'll bet none of us will really know what we're losing until he's gone."
Richter was hired as a writer for the show, but he and O'Brien turned out to work well as a duo and he was in the sidekick seat for show number one. It was his first job on TV, after playing Mike Brady in the New York and Los Angeles productions of the sitcom spoof, The Real Live Brady Bunch. As for future roles, Richter will show up as one of Richard Gere's hunting buddies in the upcoming Robert Altman comedy, Dr. T and the Women.
Though Howard Stern playfully bashed him this morning for giving up his dependable and successful Late Night gig, Richter decided it was time to find something different, and he's admitted that the sidekick duties were starting to tire him out.
"I have moments where I'm a little nervous about it," Richter tells the Times, "but I still want to see what's out there."