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Astaire and Rogers, because “she gave him sex and he gave her class.” Michaels himself suggested the last one, though only the sex part seemed apt. Fallon provided more sass than class; he came across as kind of the cute-and-I-know-it bad boy of the act. What mostly worked was that the jokes—one part smart satire, one part ribaldry—had real bite. “After experiencing chest pains Monday, Vice President Dick Cheney was rushed to George Washington Medical Center,” Tina intoned one week in her mock-serious newsbabe voice. “When asked how Cheney’s angina would affect the administration, President Bush confidently told reporters, ‘Boys don’t have anginas!’ ”

Jimmy could occasionally push the limits: “Sesame Street Workshop announced this week they are laying off sixty workers. News of the firings was brought to employees by the letters F and U.ʺ

The team hit all the magazine covers; they pushed SNL back into the national conversation. Jimmy hosted the MTV awards; he was named one of People magazine’s fifty most beautiful people; he started getting movie offers. Many other SNL grads had followed the latter path, of course—everyone from Chevy Chase to Adam Sandler (and eventually Tina, as well). But Fallon’s decision to try films played, for some reason, as presumptuous arrogance to many of the growing legion of his detractors. It was too soon for Fallon to run off to Hollywood, the argument went. What made him think he was a movie star?

None of that quibbling would have mattered if the movies were hits. Instead Fallon picked losers like Taxi, a misbegotten comedy with Queen Latifah. Fever Pitch, about an obsessive Boston fan, was a reasonable success—it might have helped that he had established credibility as a Red Sox fan thanks to Sully—but overall, Fallon’s film career was going nowhere.

That did nothing to dissuade Lorne Michaels, who, in pondering possible replacements for Conan, never had another thought after Jimmy, whom he saw as having “a natural appeal for the audience.” That and his real comedy chops would see him through. Lorne backed Fallon with the best producer at his disposal. Mike Shoemaker was one of Lorne’s top lieutenants at SNL, who had run the “Weekend Update” segment when Fallon was there.

Lorne’s idea was to go back to Late Night’s roots—an experimental comedy show for a different generation. The target would be the college crowd that had anointed first Letterman and then Conan. Now, of course, because that group had infinitely more diversions for its time, most of them tech based, a new young host would have to be adaptable to the tech world. Even with his truncated computer science background, Fallon filled that bill as well as anybody in comedy at the moment.

Michaels still believed that what worked on late-night talk shows was a host people could identify with and like. “The more time you fill on television, the more and more of you comes out,” Michaels said. “These jobs define overexposure.” He had total confidence that he had a new team that would step in smoothly to Late Night—far more so than had been the case with the installation of Conan sixteen years earlier.

“That,” Lorne recalled, “was a difficult birth.”

In early December, Jeff Zucker gathered his West Coast entertainment chiefs, Ben Silverman and Marc Graboff, to announce some important news: Jay Leno had agreed, in principle, to stay with NBC and move to a new show, airing five nights a week at ten p.m.

Both men were flabbergasted; neither had played a direct role in NBC’s effort to retain Leno because Zucker had taken full hands-on responsibility. Silverman, who had been heavily preoccupied with fending off attacks from other quarters of Hollywood and the press for NBCʹs latest roster of prime-time misses, had tried to build a relationship with Jay, but he had never really penetrated Jay’s self-protective shell. Graboff was widely liked but mainly restricted himself to the business side, which kept him from confronting many personnel and talent issues.

Zucker took obvious pleasure in the announcement, and Graboff could see