JIMMY FALLON
Leno’s heir apparent.
Work is under way to bring the “Tonight Show” back to New York.
NBC is building a state-of-the-art studio at 30 Rockefeller Center for Jimmy Fallon, the network confirmed yesterday.
The new studio, which has been under construction for several weeks, means that Jay Leno’s job all but belongs to Fallon, 38.
“I’m not allowed to say it — yet. But I think there’s an inevitability to it,” “Late Night” executive producer Lorne Michaels told GQ magazine in an interview released yesterday.
“He’s the closest to [Johnny] Carson that I’ve seen of this generation.”
NBC has been trying to get Leno to bow out gracefully from the hosting job in the coming weeks so it can unveil Fallon at its annual presentation to advertisers in May.
But Leno isn’t going down quietly, making fun of NBC’s last-place finish in the latest ratings and ignoring orders to tone it down.
“Scientists say they are getting closer and closer to being able to do ‘Jurassic Park’-style cloning of extinct species,” he cracked on last night’s show. “Things that were once thought to be extinct could now be brought back from the dead. So there’s hope for NBC.”
The “Tonight Show” started in New York in the ’50s. Carson moved it to LA in 1972 because, the thinking was, that was where all the stars lived.
The move to dump Leno, 62, is part of a plan by the struggling network to freshen one of its oldest shows — and another sign that the center of gravity for show business is moving from Hollywood back to New York.