Late Night With Just About Everybody

On a huge billboard, Jay Leno's battering-ram jaw juts out over Broadway. AMERICA IS STANDING UP FOR JAY, the sign says. Maybe NBC hopes the nation's insomniacs will take a loyalty oath to keep watching the Tonight Show, and repel alien threats from David Letterman on CBS and Chevy Chase on Fox. So who's standing up for these guys? Bosnia?

The late-night drawling room has never been so crowded: Jay, Dave and Chevy competing for viewers with Arsenio Hall and Conan O'Brien, Dave's NBC replacement in the late-late slot. The new guys are joining a high-stakes poker game where Rick Dees, Joan Rivers, Pat Sajak, Dennis Miller, Ron Reagan and Whoopi Goldberg have played and, expensively, folded. Arsenio's audience -- his rainbow coalition of young viewers, a high proportion of them women -- has ebbed recently, and will slip further when his syndicated show is bumped toward dawn on many CBS and Fox affiliates.

So lots is at stake around midnight: the usual nine digits of ad-revenue dollars and the hosts' fertile, fretful egos. But, as Leno acknowledges, the free world will survive. "Does anyone really lose?" he asks. "It's not like people go home broke and beaten. Everybody comes out of this a millionaire."

The latest plutocrat is O'Brien, 30, whose new show -- he calls it Late Night with Question Mark -- is racing against the clock to invent itself. All right, sauntering against the clock. In Rockefeller Center, young creative types lounge about in pullovers and shorts. It might be downtime at the frat house; no one displays the panic expected of kids who must start, on Sept. 13, manufacturing five fresh hours of TV each week.

This esprit de cool comes from the host: Harvard Lampoon ex-president, writer-producer for television's best show (The Simpsons), scion of a tony Boston family (he could do my-father-the-doctor, my-mother-the-lawyer jokes, but won't). And, now, the star of Late Night after David Letterman. "I'd be an arrogant fool if I didn't get nervous," O'Brien says. "What calms me, I guess, is that there are a million things I can't do but I have a core belief in myself that this is something I can do."

Can do? Just ask his friends and colleagues. Mike Reiss, an executive producer of The Simpsons, recalls that "we'd be working on rewrites, 16-hour days, with sweaty men glowering at each other. And Conan would always entertain us; he was the comedy writers' comedian. I'd call him the '90s Steve Allen: smart, funny and very likable, with a more modern sensibility." The key is likability -- that elusive, soft-core charisma. Has Conan got it? "He doesn't have the sardonic glibness of Letterman," says Betsy Frank, a senior vice president at advertising giant Saatchi & Saatchi, "which a lot of people like but probably a lot more people find a bit tiring. Conan has a purer kind of humor, and that's being perceived positively."