Before Jimmy Fallon left Saturday Night Live in 2004, SNL and Late Night With Conan O'Brien maestro Lorne Michaels offered a parting thought. Recalls Fallon, "Lorne said, 'Just keep in mind, we're going to have to replace Conan in 2009.'"

Flash-forward five years. Fallon is 34, married and back at 30 Rock, in the legendary studio where Johnny Carson hosted The Tonight Show before flying his ashtray to Burbank, California. Like Carson, O'Brien is bailing for the West Coast, and on March 2nd at 12:35 a.m., NBC launches Late Night With Jimmy Fallon. For a kid from Saugerties, New York, who in eighth grade was voted "Most Likely to Replace David Letterman," the new desk job feels surreal. "I'm nervous, anxious, scared," Fallon says. "But happy."

Lately, Fallon has been chasing advice from everyone who has held a similar post. Stephen Colbert said to him, "Here's something that Conan told me, that Carson told him: 'With this show, you'll use everything you've ever done.'" While Fallon is not throwing out the late-night playbook, he's adding modern wrinkles like blogging, vlogging and Twittering — and he installed the Roots as his house band, "so there's no way anyone's falling asleep."

This is a strange moment for late-night — besides O'Brien's and Fallon's moves, NBC has lavished Jay Leno with a 10 p.m. show that begins next fall. That's a lot of chatting, but the new hire is undaunted. "You can watch Leno, and then the news, and then Conan," Fallon says. "It's just getting people lubed for another gorgeous hour of talk and comedy."

[From Issue 1073 — March 5, 2009]

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