Talking in the New Year

It’s 6:25 p.m. and Jay Leno has just wrapped another installment of his top-rated NBC late-night series, “The Tonight Show.”

As the appreciative audience files out of the Burbank studio, Leno chats briefly with his guests: actress Alyssa Milano, director Quentin Tarentino and an 81-year-old man from Indiana who has eaten a Twinkie a day for the past six decades. Leno then poses obligingly for a few photos with some invited audience members before leaving the stage.

Ten minutes later, he has changed his self-described “dorky” dark blue suit for well-worn jeans and a faded denim shirt and is relaxing in the green room of “The Tonight Show.”

Tonight’s taping may be over, but Leno’s workday will continue for another seven hours. He’s managed, though, to delay his screening on the NBC lot of “For Richer or for Poorer,” starring the next evening’s main guest, Tim Allen, to talk about his 2 1/2-year reign as No. 1 in late night and about “Tonight’s” upcoming New Year’s Eve show, which features Carrot Top, Little Richard and the Aussie dance troupe Tap Dogs.

Friendly and chatty, though more businesslike than his on-screen image, Leno acknowledges that the New Year’s Eve broadcast is always a little tricky to do. Not only is it “live live,” he says, “we have to be here at 8 in the morning and we don’t tape until 8:30 at night.” (The New Year’s show airs on a tape-delayed basis on the West Coast.)

“When the show finishes, I still have to go home and write the show for tomorrow, so you are just up that many more hours and you get out of your patterns.”

But at least the studio audience is sober. “I don’t think any performer enjoys New Year’s Eve, because New Year’s Eve is kind of an amateur night in clubs,” he explains. “Everyone is really drunk. You just sort of work and try to get through. The only time New Year’s Eve is fun is maybe if you have an 8 o’clock show and then are going somewhere else later.”

Leno opted to do a live New Year’s Eve show when he inherited the “Tonight Show” from Johnny Carson in 1992 because he was savvy enough to realize that he could capitalize on the event and give people another reason to watch him.

“TV has changed,” he says. “Johnny is the kind of guy who was so popular and had so many fans, he could take two or three days off a week. I can’t do that. We’ve got [competition from] Letterman, Keenen. So consequently, if New Year’s Eve falls on [a weeknight] and people are home, they are going to go to ‘Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve’ unless you have something you can offer them.”

And what Leno offers viewers on New Year’s Eve is more comedy and performances than a regular “Tonight Show.” “You’ll have a monologue,” he states. “You have a sketch and you have three performing guests.” And, of course, someone special, like Miss Piggy last year and John Leguizamo this year, to be in Times Square for the dropping of the ball at midnight.

“You look for people who who will sort of overwhelm the crowd,” he says. “A comedian we’ve used a lot of times before has been George Wallace. He’s loud. He’s big. You don’t want a guy who talks like Woody Allen on New Year’s Eve or the crowd will overpower them.” Breaking into a bemused grin, Leno quips that he can’t understand why West Coast viewers are mesmerized by seeing the ball drop in Times Square. “If you are in Times Square or even on the East Coast, it’s fun, but it has no significance to anybody out here because it happens at 9 p.m., not midnight. You’d think in California we would have a big mudslide at midnight.”

Leno pauses and laughs. “We should find a house on a hill we could push off,” he says. “That’s not a bad idea!”

He says he thrives on and welcomes competition and has even had such late-night competitors as Keenen Ivory Wayans and Bill Maher as guests. Indeed, not only have “The Keenen Ivory Wayans Show” and “Vibe” not made a dent in his ratings this season, but “The Tonight Show” is off to its best start since 1991, and is up 4% in viewers aged 18 to 49.

For 1997, Leno has averaged 6.2 million viewers per night, compared to 4.2 million each for CBS’ “Late Night With David Letterman” and ABC’s “Nightline”/”Politically Incorrect” combination.

“My attitude is, people should try to take it from me,” he says matter-of-factly about his position atop the late-night ratings. “If they can, you lose it. That is what makes America great. The whole country is a football and whoever controls it wins the game.”

They’ll have to fight to do it, though. “We take the minimum of four or five weeks off a year,” Leno says. “I see other talk shows take 10--some take 12 weeks, and they pay the price. People get into a viewing habit. People are not idiots; they know when a show is a rerun, so they click away. In the old days, we could do the occassional author or juggler in the last quarter. You can’t now. You have to have something snap all the time. Somebody from some hot show. Somebody interesting. Somebody different.”

The ongoing challenge, he says, “is to make people want to see the show. If there are guests who are interesting, it’s a real plus, but none of these shows rise or fall primarily on the guests. If people like the monologue and like the comedy, they’ll stay for a guest that’s not as well known. There are only so many guests and there are a lot of shows.”

Leno is scheduled do a prime-time “Tonight Show” after the Super Bowl game on Jan. 25. “Tonight” also will travel to Chicago for a week during the May ratings sweeps.

“The thing about television is, the longer you’re on, the longer you stay on,” he says. “People get into a comfortable viewing pattern. They get comfortable with you.”

“The Tonight Show” airs weeknights at 11:35 p.m on NBC.