Sorry, not ‘Tonight,’ or any of its cousins

Craig FERGUSON is a Scottish actor, comedian and writer, and he is the new host, for about a month now, of CBS’ “The Late Late Show With Craig Ferguson,” the 12:35 a.m., post-David Letterman slot abandoned last summer by Craig Kilborn. Ferguson has a slightly shambling, three-pints-later-at-the-pub air to him, and he speaks with an accent. This helps set him apart from the competition, but not enough, because Ferguson is being shoehorned into the same old late-night format of a topical-joke monologue followed by a desk bit and celebrity guests. Please welcome the fourth lead on “24.” This is usually around the time each night that a late-night talk show officially dies.

Kilborn, who brought to “The Late Late Show” blondness, tallness and smugness, increased the show’s younger viewership before leaving to “pursue other opportunities.” This was kind of eye-opening: Late-night talk show hosts aren’t supposed to quit, they’re supposed to be fired in a heap of poor ratings and headlines and battles with affiliates that bump their shows to 3 in the morning to air reruns of “Entertainment Tonight.”

At least that’s how it used to work; I’m no longer sure. The most contemporary late-night talk shows now are the ones that spoof the genre. They represent the cultural triumph of cable, because they don’t even have to get an audience of millions -- not as long as they parody, in some way that resonates with a core group of young viewers that a niche network can show advertisers, what has come before.

The best of them make what Letterman and Jay Leno and even Conan O’Brien do seem pro forma -- like writing checks when you can just do your banking online. It’s not that these guys aren’t good at what they do, it’s that what they do isn’t that good anymore. Nor does the strategy of taking the old format and going cruder have much traction, if you can judge by the escapades of “Jimmy Kimmel Live,” the midnight bacchanal for boys that ABC brought to late night two years ago, starring Kimmel as the schlemiel.

What resonates now is not just the media darling “The Daily Show With Jon Stewart” on Comedy Central but the friskier “Da Ali G Show” on HBO (gibberish-speaking hip-hopper interviews foreign dignitaries) and the ingenious “The Kumars at No. 42,” which recently began its second season on BBC America. The Kumars are an Indian family living in Wembley, north of London -- mother, father, son, grandmother -- who have bulldozed their garden to erect a talk-show studio where the son, Sanjeev, hosts his own talk show, while the family, on a nearby sofa, repeatedly interrupts. The Kumars are a sitcom family in a talk show world, a hybrid universe in which a grandmother is in the kitchen making samosas when the father walks in and says, “Should be a good show! We have Richard E. Grant and Michael Parkinson.”

But of course you couldn’t produce “The Kumars” five nights a week, or “Ali G,” for that matter. One of the reasons late-night talk shows endure in their current incarnation is that the format has become so franchisable. Above all else, they’re doable.

On his tribute show to Johnny Carson on Monday night, Letterman said as much, comparing the great “Tonight Show” host to a public utility, meaning -- as I took it -- that Carson established a service that came to seem as basic to civilized middle-class American life as the advent of air-conditioning.

But Carson was the master, and watching Letterman that night, it was hard not to feel as though he were talking to an audience that had left the building years ago. Those 20 million people being tucked in at night with a Carson monologue are now the savvy culture consumers of today. They tuck themselves into bed with whatever’s on their TiVo -- the last Farrelly brothers movie, a “Law & Order,” whatever. Everyone else, the ones old enough to remember Carson’s place in the culture, or their parents’ culture, are asleep. “We are so tired at the end of the day, or several hours before it,” David Thomson wrote in the New York Times after Carson’s death. “And only a riddle would keep us up. Jay and Dave and the others know this, and they know that they are merely naughty kids compelled to stay awake when the rest of America is sleeping.”

The host as hub

“My choice is to find the right host, and when you find the right host then over time you find the right format and voice of the host, so it becomes his own show,” said Peter Lassally, the “Late Late Show” ’s executive producer, in a phone interview last week. “And that will take a little time. I mean, Craig Ferguson did seven shows on the air before we decided he was the right man. Normally any host of any new show has three months of preproduction where they do test shows and tinker with it. We didn’t have that. We auditioned everybody on the air, and then had just two or three days to get ready before we went on the air with the new host.”

Lassally, who for more than two decades was a producer of Carson’s “Tonight Show,” has been through three “Late Late Show” hosts -- Tom Snyder, Kilborn and now Ferguson.

“You have to learn how to be utterly yourself and hope yourself is enough to draw viewers,” said comedian Dennis Miller by phone. Miller, now hosting a “topical interview talk show” on CNBC, did his first talk show in late night, a syndicated series that aired in 1992 opposite first Carson and then Leno, after Carson’s retirement. It lasted less than a year.

“You can feign being someone else, but then it’s like Parris Island, you get ground down. You find yourself, after six months on the air, you reach a point of truthfulness that’s foisted on you, as opposed to you doing it on your own volition.... That’s when I started getting a little better at it. I believe I was whacked about 10 minutes after that.”

For now, anyway, reduced expectations seem to suit Ferguson’s whole shaggy demeanor (you imagine a Eugene O’Neill play could break out onstage and Ferguson would fall right into character). Already, Ferguson has mentioned a stint in rehab, divorce, single parenthood. In this sense, watching him is kind of pleasurable, a different experience, even if the show’s rhythms are like those of most of the other late-night shows.

And so it can be a chore to watch. Each night, Ferguson moves through the monologue like he’s filling out a form. There was a joke that began with “Oscar fever” and thudded into Condoleezza Rice at her confirmation hearings, saying “it was an honor just to be nominated.”

Then he finds a more conversational groove. At least one of the characters he plays in videotaped bits is funny -- Clive Buggerman, a beer-swilling, meaner-than-Simon-Cowell celebrity judge on “American Idol.”

“Do people date a lot in Scotland?” actress Famke Janssen asked a few weeks ago, sounding like she’d been fed the line.

“Men go out, club women, take them back to the cave and make haggis out of them,” Ferguson replied good-naturedly.

Right now, the show is trying to get a little too much mileage out of Ferguson’s accent, his otherness. It’s a crutch, at least until the show figures out where it might actually be headed. Then Ferguson will become another example of the late-night predicament: So familiar you can forget about him.