NBC’s musical chairs of late night start to move very soon, with the farewell appearances on”The Tonight Show with Jay Leno” to culminate Feb. 6, with his final guests Billy Crystal and Garth Brooks, NBC entertainment chief Robert Greenblatt announced Sunday.
Crystal, he noted, “was also his very first guest when he took over the show from Johnny Carson in 1992.”
Earlier in the week, Jimmy Fallon will join Leno “for a passing of the baton” on a final week of guests “that will give Jay the proper send-off,” he said.
Then, during the second week of Olympics, “The Tonight Show starring Jimmy Fallon” makes its debut Feb. 17 at midnight with his first guests, Will Smith and U2. The show airs at midnight the first week because of the Olympics coverage. It moves to its regular 11:35 time slot the following week, on Feb. 24, the night when “Late Night with Seth Meyers” makes its debut at 12:37 a.m. with his own first guest: Amy Poehler.
Poehler, Meyers and Fallon are all graduates of “Saturday Night Live,” whose creator and producer Lorne Michael will continue to produce “Late Night” even as he adds “The Tonight Show” to his duties, as the show moves from Los Angeles to New York.
Meyers and Fallon were flown out from New York to Pasadena Sunday especially for their sessions at the TV Critics Association winter press tour day, where they were the chief attraction of NBC’s day.
Meyers had just done one of his last “Weekend Update” segments hours before live from New York; Fallon would be flown back in time for his Monday night “Late Night” slot.
The big question for Fallon is whether he would broaden his comedy from the edgy and music-tinged humor late at night. He says he doesn’t think he’ll have to.
Says producer Josh Lieb: “a lot of the difference between an 11:30 show and 12:30 is mental.”
Fallon will move to Studio 6B where there will be a new set. But he’ll bring along The Roots as house band and most of his writers. And what his “Late Night” show has grown into fits with the original roots of the show, he said.
“I wish that Steve Allen and Johnny Carson were still around just to see what we’re going to do with the show because I think, when they invented this show, it was all about being fun and silly and goofy,” Fallon says.
Fallon says he got one piece of advice from Leno: Lengthen his monologues from four minutes to 10, in part to be more informative. He says Leno told him, “If they happen to miss the news, weirdly enough, they go to you for the news. So you have to have a complete view of the news and make jokes about what’s going on so that everyone knows. They look to you sometimes instead of the news.”
Fallon says he tried to get U2 for his first “Late Night” show as well, but it didn’t work out.
“They didn’t want to tell me, but at the time, they had a secret thing with Letterman,” he says. “They were doing a week on Letterman. So I couldn’t get them. So instead I got the next best Irishman, which is Van Morrison, and he came, and he was my first musical guest.”
Asked what his show would be like, Meyers says he’s excited to do topical humor on a nightly basis instead of waiting for Saturdays. “We are very excited to get out there every night and do jokes about the news, topical jokes. We want to have a really strong monologue.”
A lot about the show still has to be determined, including who or what the house band will be.
Meyers says he may create some characters writers will play to appear in sketches or interviews, as happens on “Weekend Updates.” He says after recently co-writing Jebidiah Atkinson the 19th century theater critic for “Weekend Update,” “we were, like, “Oh, we should have waited six months.”
Greenblatt began the NBC day at press tour taking time to read a tribute to Leno, who was dragged into a public relations fiasco, when he made way for Conan O’Brien’s takeover of th “The Tonight Show” for a 10 p.m. show, only to go back to the 11:35 p.m. slot, bumping O’Brien.
Other guests for Leno’s final week of “The Tonight Show” include Betty White Feb. 3, Matthew McConaughey and Charles Barkley Feb. 4, sandra Bullock and Blake Shelton Feb. 5.
Leno’s case is odd since he leaves the station at a time when he continues to be No. 1 in late night, on a network that apparently values the young and hip appearances over raw audience numbers.
“This network has been incredibly fortunate to have had a talent like Jay on our team since 1992,” Greenblatt said. “He’s kept the great brand of ‘The Tonight Show’ virtually No. 1 for his entire run. He’s been a fixture at this company and in people’s bedrooms for over two decades. He’s written and produced thousands of monologues that, for millions of people, summed up the news and crazy events of the day.
“He’s interviewed countless celebrities, ranging from several presidents of the United States to one very contrite Hugh Grant, and he’s done it all with respect and good humor,” he said. “It is no exaggeration to say that Jay Leno is the hardest working man in television, the very definition of a team player, and to those who know him personally and I’m happy now to include myself in that group he’s truly one of the nicest and most decent people in this business.
“As he told me recently, NBC has really been his only home,” Greenblatt says, “So I’m very much hoping we’ll enter into a new relationship with him after ‘The Tonight Show’ and keep his home here at NBC.