Entertainment

George eyes younger audience with edgy late-night show

TALK-show newcomer George Lopez smells a decided advantage over his more seasoned competitors as “Lopez Tonight” nears its TBS premiere.

“This show plays younger,” says Lopez, whose hourlong show kicks off Nov. 9 and will air Monday through Thursday at 11 p.m.

“The average late-night viewer is in their mid-50s and the average viewer of TBS is in their 30s and is largely African-American and Hispanic, already, before I even get there,” he says.

“And my sitcom is on at 10 and that continues to pull great numbers so there’s a bit of cohesiveness,” he says of “George Lopez,” his former ABC sitcom which airs on Nick at Nite. “If I was another show, I’d be a little frightened of that — and I get that all just by showing up.”

Lopez, 48, sounds very confident about the prospects for “Lopez Tonight,” even as he enters an already-crowded arena that will also include newcomer Wanda Sykes, who kicks off her weekly Fox talk show Nov. 7.

“I’m not trying to catch the right formula and do that every night. That’s not fun for me,” he says. “It’s all about spontaneity.

“I was on ‘Arsenio‘ 20 years ago when [Arsenio Hall] first started and I was there for five years and right before the show started I told him, ‘This is an exciting place to be,’ it was ground-zero for excitement.

“I’d like to recapture that,” he says. “After ‘Arsenio,’ people went to dinner and it regenerated a certain amount of business in the area. There’s nothing exciting about being taken from a city sidewalk and told to sit there [during the show] and clap and be just a body.

“People want to be entertained and we want them to come back,” he says. “We want people to come, dress up and have fun.

“It’s almost 2010 — why shouldn’t a show jump out at you from TV? Why can’t it — and why shouldn’t it?”

Lopez says he won’t have the standard-issue late-night desk — “just a couple of nice chairs and we’ll do some stuff from stools” — but he will open the show with a monologue, sort of.

“I’m gonna do more standup than a monologue, moving back and forth rather than standing in one spot,” he says. “I look at it as a little edgier than a monologue.”

Lopez also points to his Mexican-American heritage as another advantage to cut through the late-night clutter.

“You’re in New York,” he says, referring to The Post. “The day is colorful in New York, the people are colorful in New York. There’s not a street you walk down in New York that’s only white people.

“A lot of those streets on TV are white . . . and as a host I’m a crossover, and I’m specific enough to hold onto my own people.

“One things Latinos want to do when a [fellow Latino] becomes a success is to leave.

“But I’ve kept them and I’ve stayed grounded,” he says. “I worked the same job for 25 years. I’m not privileged –I may live a little bit of a different life, but I’ve always kept that mentality.”