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That’s when former “Saturday Night Live” star Jimmy Fallon was introduced as the person who will take over “Late Night” when its current host, Conan O’Brien, heads to Burbank to take over the “Tonight Show.”
Asked by a reporter if he had any idea what kind of show he would do, Fallon — who has hosted exactly one episode of late-night TV — offered something about not “reinventing the wheel” but also said, “When Conan took over for Letterman, he wasn’t Letterman, he was Conan.”
And he will be Jimmy — beginning sometime in 2009, after Jay Leno voluntarily steps aside as host of the “Tonight Show.”
Ever since Leno made that deal with NBC in 2004, rumors have persisted that he was feeling seller’s remorse, that he would be looking for a new gig on another network once NBC made him a free agent. (As evidence, Leno once was as famous for taking reporters’ calls as he was for his work ethic but has been giving us the silent treatment since shortly after signing his last contract.)
Meanwhile, some at NBC are said to be suffering buyer’s remorse. After dominating his competition for more than a decade, O’Brien appears to have met his match in Craig Ferguson.
A native of Glasgow who speaks with a thick Scottish brogue, Ferguson was a long shot to succeed Craig Kilborn as host of “Late Late Show” on CBS in 2004. But he won the job and has been steadily picking up viewers ever since.
When I saw Ferguson in January, after a performance at the Uptown Theater, he asked me, “Have you seen the ratings?” Turns out that in less than three years, he had quietly wiped out nearly all of O’Brien’s lead.
It’s a feat even more impressive when you consider that “Late Late Show” is delayed in markets like Kansas City, meaning that its potential audience is smaller than for “Late Night.” Ferguson predicted he would soon take the lead in total viewers, and that’s just what happened in April — for a week, anyway.
The point is this: The guy who’s leaving “Tonight” has had no similar lapse in ratings. In fact, Leno kept beating Letterman during the writers’ strike earlier this year, even though the “Tonight Show” writers were still on strike while Letterman’s writers had signed an interim deal with the union and were back at work.
With the Fallon announcement, though, it appears NBC executives are either determined or resigned to move on without Leno, who has been affiliated with “Tonight” since being named Johnny Carson’s permanent guest host in 1986.
You didn’t have to search far Monday to find skeptics wondering what NBC saw in the former “Weekend Update” anchor. When the network signed Fallon to a holding deal in February 2007 — a move seen at the time as a precursor to naming him O’Brien’s successor — the snotty Web site Gawker seemed to speak for many with the headline, “Is NBC Stupid Enough to Give ‘Late Night’ to Jimmy Fallon?”
Last week, as word of an official announcement grew imminent, Alan Sepinwall of the Star-Ledger in New Jersey wrote, “Unless NBC intends for Fallon to host the show as Barry Gibb” — referring to an “SNL” sketch in which Fallon and guest host Justin Timberlake played the singing Gibb brothers — “I don’t think this is such a good idea.”
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