TELEVISION : COMMENTARY : Has He Stepped Out of the Shadow? : As Jay Leno finishes his first year at the helm of ‘The Tonight Show,’ his ratings are good and his jokes mostly get laughs, so why does everyone think it needs a prescription?

Buddy Hackett recently showed up in an impromptu appearance on “The Tonight Show,” and after he sat and the applause died down, he turned to host Jay Leno and said, “I wanna pay you a compliment. I been on this show before with Johnny. He wasn’t good for two years. What you’re doin’ is so far ahead of what everyone else is doin’.”

Leno looked at him appreciatively. He’s nothing if not a polite host, so he couldn’t very well have said: “Thanks, but who asked?”

It’s been a year now since Leno took over hosting chores from the dearly departed Johnny Carson.

His ratings are solid--neck and neck with “Nightline” but still far ahead of everyone else in that time slot. He can still depend on a cheerful greeting from his studio audiences and, as a rule, the requisite tiers of laughter to roll down at the end of his punch lines.

Leno still gets first crack at the blue-chip guests; that is, the same dozen or so people making the late-night rounds in a given week to flog a new movie, an album or a TV appearance. And his cameo in the movie “Dave” signals that he’s still watched by politicos who want a weather check outside the Beltway.

Everyone knew that it would be impossible to predict how long it would take for Leno to step beyond Carson’s lengthy shadow, and if no one’s calling him king of anything yet, all outward signs point to a dependably solid watch at the “Tonight Show” helm.

Why, then, is there this vague, indefinable sense of disquiet about him, this pull between wanting to see an obviously well-intended and conscientious fellow succeed in one of the toughest jobs in entertainment, and the dread of watching a smart figure metamorphose into a dutiful bore?

You see it pop up in odd places. In a recent Henry Martin cartoon in the New Yorker, for example, a somewhat tousle-haired guest dressed in a suit jacket and open-necked shirt sits at the show’s fabled first-chair position and beams, “If this will help your ratings, Jay, I think your listeners would be interested to learn that while I was breaking into show business I constructed an A-bomb, which I dismantled after I got my first major part.”

Thanks, pal. But who said anything about ratings?

Or, this overheard exchange between a veteran performer turned TV director and NBC Entertainment President Warren Littlefield:

Questioner: Why is Jay doing bad?

Littlefield: What’re you saying? He’s pulled in a younger demographic, his ratings are holding their own. We’re very happy with Jay.

Questioner: Oh, so then it’s true. He is doing bad.

One of the most exquisite truisms that link politics and entertainment, which our director’s occupational sensors caught, is that when everyone professes happiness about something, you can be certain that it’s not working. For all its surrounding campfire glow, “The Tonight Show” right now is one log that won’t quite roll.

The reasons why are hard to pin down. As with yuppie flu, there are several low-grade symptoms, but nothing alarming enough to call for drastic remedy.

For openers, Leno and the “Tonight Show” staff might have used the stormy departure of Leno’s John Sununu-like manager and producer Helen Kushnick as an excuse to perform an immediate make-over in the show’s design. The opening visual sequence, a series of unveiling bordello curtains from which Leno finally emerges like a tiny figure in an oversized, overwrapped gift box until the camera zooms him up, is a perfect metaphor for suffocating heaviness. The color scheme for Leno’s half of the set is confined to the cold, dark side of the spectrum.

By contrast, the tonal scheme for Branford Marsalis’ “Tonight Show” band is old-gold brightness and warmth. The brassy instruments, the light design, the background paneling, even the colorful way the musicians themselves dress up, all suggest a congenial atmosphere for good times ready to roll. This may seem a minor distinction, but it points to one of the most uncomfortable elements of the show: the racial DMZ that runs between Leno’s half of the house and Marsalis’.

Not that there’s the slightest hint of friction between them. But there isn’t an ounce of rapport either, which is painfully underscored whenever they try to buddy up in a sketch (as they recently did when they put on cowboy hats for an excruciating country-western awards show parody), or in the rare instances when Leno tries to administer an awkward school principal’s prideful huggie on the shy Marsalis.

Which leads to another rub: Marsalis’ total inability to relax on camera. When the complete changeover in the “Tonight Show” staff was first announced, Marsalis seemed a brilliant choice to succeed Doc Severinsen. Not only is he a gifted and prominent young musician at home in the rock, pop and classical genres, but on his own he is a refreshingly candid free spirit who won’t be laminated in anyone’s stereotype, musically or racially. The early danger, it seemed, would be that he’d easily outshoot Leno from the hip.

What we got instead was a diffident bandleader who looks as though his tour bus has rerouted him and his group to an incomprehensibly foreign country, and he stands outside pleasantly awaiting the kindness of strangers to bail him out. Every time Leno turns his way with a quip in search of a rejoinder, Marsalis gazes at him like a decal and the mike goes dead.

Marsalis is still a good choice if “The Tonight Show” would play to his strength and not make the same mistake as the old “Tonight Show”; that is, announcing what a great band it has--or, in the current instance, what brilliant musicians are sitting in--and then reducing them to a few fade-out, fade-in commercial licks. What’s the point of having them at all, if we can’t listen in?

But even if NBC hired the top production designer in the world and added a contemporary musical equivalent of Spike Jones and his band of zaniacs--with Rip Taylor blasting confetti out of first horn--the show’s interest and energy would still have to emanate from Leno. And his lunch pail contains few sweet surprises.

A lot of Leno loyalists concede that his interviewing skills are not especially adroit and that it’s his monologue that kicks the show into gear--regardless of whether there’s a powerhouse guest on hand to keep the audience squirming with anticipation.

(Question: If “Nightline” has made such a successful ratings run at “The Tonight Show” by squaring off at the same time, 11:35 p.m., what would happen if “Nightline” moved to 11:42, when a certain percentage of people have tuned Leno out after his monologue?)

The surprise here, or maybe not, considering the unmerciful voracity for fresh material those monologue minutes pose nightly, is that the material is rarely sharp. The things that brought Leno’s comedy up to the major leagues--which include imagery, richness of language, a storyteller’s feel for the perfect detail and an attitude freshened by communal moral pique--have been leached out of his routines as they’ve become more and more formulaic, tonally and structurally.

Now it’s a chain-link rhythm of setup and punch, setup and punch, in which he pumps out a standard variety of subjects with a schoolboy’s nasal snicker. Chances are, on any given night, you’ll get your joke about Clinton (or Ted Kennedy) and Dole (or another Republican who said something nasty that day), a McDonald’s reference and your list of stock villains, such as Geraldo or Jack Kevorkian. And your clunky political reference that zips straight past the audience into the Bermuda Triangle of lost jokes: “The new edition of Webster’s Dictionary really reflects our evolving language. I looked up ‘tax cut’ and it said, ‘See tax hike.’ ”

Of course, anything is fair game for any comedian, and most of the greats had their pets to fall back on while they took a fresh comedic breath. Hope had Zsa Zsa. Carson had Bombastic Bushkin. The problem here is that the majority of Leno’s routines now give off the staleness of the obligatory--there rarely is a sense of freshness; we can anticipate what the punch lines are before they’re delivered.

And he’s further muddied his delivery by couching his jokes in explanatory verbiage, so that they mutter off into irrelevance. Although it’s unfair to take a joke out of context, here’s a symptomatic example: After the “tax hike” line, he talked through whatever potential there was for laughter by adding, “So it really does reflect what’s goin’ on.” This Energizer background noise in which he keeps on talkin’ has become habitual. At the moment, he’s abandoned his writer’s sense of economy, his trust of language’s surrounding silence.

Interviews do remain his weakness. It was good-hearted altruism that once prompted him to say, “I have the spotlight in my monologues. I let the guests have it when they come on.” But it can lead to quiet catastrophe, as, for example, in the segment when Rutger Hauer did his actor’s rude manipulative number on the ineffectually polite Leno, which temporarily turned things sour. Or the recent night when Marilu Henner went into hebephrenic teen meltdown at the sight of Sting and completely yanked the show out of Leno’s control.

Any host would be hard-put to handle those situations (although you can see David Letterman peer into Henner’s face and say, smilingly but with unmistakable authority, “Calm down”). The problem is in the more general run of the interviews; Leno doesn’t appear to have a deep curiosity about people, or a frame of reference outside of comedy, and it seems he’s embarrassed to make anything out of a moment beyond small talk.

Of course, that’s all many people are capable of, but there are still ways to get under the surface to find witty potential without exploiting them. After all, you would expect the show to be an entertainment, not just another assembly-line vehicle for some celebrity’s dreary self-promotion. And what about when a controversial, high-octane guest does get on? Is Ross Perot’s hair really an item of interest when we, like the figures in Washington surely looking in, want to hear his latest on what ails America?

Maybe we’re asking too much of Leno, and the show itself. Maybe he really has the demographic NBC wants him to have. Why, after all, should we ask more of a man than the modest limit he’s publicly imposed on himself? It’s only been a year, but it may also turn out to have been a symptomatic reign after all. If the ‘70s were the decade of ironic detachment and the ‘80s an age of excess, perhaps the ‘90s so far are shaping into a period of earnest mediocrity.

Jay Leno may just be the best we can do for ourselves right now.

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Elsewhere around the late-night circuit:

Will David Letterman succeed in his move to CBS? This observer thinks he will. The one-hour time difference is not radically different as an interzone for insomniacs, students cramming for exams, night-shift workers or other nocturnal creatures, and it will do as much as any other comedy program has to muffle the routine report of mayhem and alarm of the nightly news.

Maybe more. What has consistently delivered Letterman is the length to which he’ll go to break up his (and our) penchant for boredom. He’s always itchy, on the move or doing something with his hands--even if it’s just riffling interview cards or rapping them on the desk. It isn’t his middling taste that appeals to the young as much as it is his restlessness and an intriguing irritability not unlike Jack Paar’s.

He is not an especially good interviewer either. What redeems him there is his benign, democratic suspicion of everyone, his playfulness and his sense of the absurd: In a recent opener he said to the audience, “You seem in a wonderful mood. The world should be in a wonderful mood.” To camera, close-up: “If there’s one thing we need to impress on the young, it’s that they need (pause) to be in a wonderful mood.”

There are only two constants to the Letterman show, the Top 10 list and bandleader Paul Shaffer’s Alice-in-Wonderland Dormouse, to whom Letterman plays grinning Cheshire cat. Everything else is up for grabs, as it should be in comedy, and for that Letterman will land on his feet.

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Every time there’s a shift in late-night programming, the first thing everyone does is write off Arsenio Hall.

Don’t.

True, his celebrity sycophancy is a trial and an embarrassment, but now that Whoopi Goldberg has risen to out-gush him in that department, he can no longer be singled out as the most egregious example of dumb stargazing.

There are several things to recommend Hall. He’s the most naturally stylish of any talk-show host on the air. He has a direct pipeline into the endlessly mutating forms of African-American culture, which throughout its history has constituted a self-preserving avant-garde. And when he gets a truly high-voltage performance guest, he turns his big room and all its state-of-the-art technology over to that artist’s disposal so that we’re sure to get an impressive show.

And he has a core of decency. When Fred Rogers (TV’s “Mister Rogers”) came on the show a couple of months ago, he was met with the standard murmur of derision from Hall’s “Dog Pound” audience--the same kind of snicker Johnny Carson tacitly encouraged when Rogers did “The Tonight Show.”

Hall shot a glance at the crowd and said, in effect, “This is my guest and he deserves respect.” At that point the audience was turned free, some as former latchkey kids perhaps, or just former preschoolers who had once totally entrusted Rogers to tell them the world wasn’t necessarily the terrifying place that the news, and maybe their own experience, made it out to be. A massive inner child’s love and gratitude poured out toward Rogers. It was one of the most beautiful moments in recent TV history, and it wouldn’t have happened without Hall’s encouragement.

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In the long-shot department, some people are laying bets on Chevy Chase to make a solid run at the late-night leaders. In the late ‘70s there was a flurry of speculation that Chase would make a perfect replacement for Johnny Carson--he was the first great stake in the heart of “Saturday Night Live’s” youthful assumption that it was the greatest living example of comedic anti-Establishment incorruptibility. Chase is the purest symbol of the ‘70s narcissism that brought us est and Rolfing and rhapsodic jogging. He will tell us once again that he’s Chevy Chase and you’re not. That is a message of extremely limited usefulness.