Fallon off and runnin’
JIMMY FALLON didn’t want to make it anywhere. He wanted to make it here. And he has.
Taking over “The Tonight Show” from Jay Leno on Monday, Fallon drew a robust 11.3 million viewers.
That’s the biggest “Tonight” audience since, well, Leno’s Feb. 6 farewell was watched by 14.6 million. Still, Fallon’s debut was the largest “Tonight” audience in five years and almost three times this season’s average of 3.9 million.
Neither Fallon nor NBC was commenting publicly Tuesday, saying they are now focused on doing a new show every night.
But an executive at a rival network offered a hat tip to the new boss.
“This isn’t Conan 2.0,” the exec said, referring to NBC’s failed experiment to replace Leno with Conan O’Brien. “He has the broad appeal ‘Tonight’ has always had and needed.”
Fallon’s debut required months of preparation for the single hour of late-night television. To pull it off, celebrities crowded in with civilians, U2 fans stood in hallways for hours, Joan Rivers reemerged from exile and Lorne Michaels conceived of a brilliant rooftop concert that almost required NASA engineers to execute.
In a studio so freshly completed that guests described the dominant aroma as “new carpet,” Fallon ushered in what one NBC source said he hopes will be “a long period when the show only makes headlines for content.”
Rivers said she hoped to banish one old headline — her 28-year exile for the crime of offending Johnny Carson.
Her return Monday was brief, playing a small role in a multicelebrity parade, but she said it still tasted sweet.
“About time,” she told the Daily News. “I’ve been sitting in a taxi outside NBC with the meter running.”
Rivers had been a “Tonight” show regular — and then-host Carson’s permanent fill-in — when, in 1986, she accepted an offer to do her own show on Fox. Carson never spoke to her again and barred her from his stage.
The high point of Monday’s opening show, in multiple ways, was U2’s two-song performance on the roof of Rockefeller Center while the cameras swept around for a twilight panorama of New York City — the city to which Fallon relocated the show after a Carson-initiated, 42-year exile.
Michaels, Fallon’s old boss at “Saturday Night Live,” conceived the rooftop idea — “and didn’t even have to pay for making it happen,” joked an NBC source.
“It was hot and then on the roof it was cold and we waited forever,” said one lucky fan. “But it was totally worth it. It was awesome.”