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These are tough times for late-night talk-show hosts. Jay Leno, whose late-night show doesn’t air so late anymore, has been under scrutiny for low ratings ever since he went to prime time in September. David Letterman is at the center of a sexual scandal. And those are the guys who are getting attention; Jimmy Fallon has fallen so far off the radar that he recently did a 30 Rock cameo spoofing his troubles as the host of NBC’s Late Night.
With all that going on, it seems only logical to start an interview with George Lopez, who is launching his own chatfest Monday night on TBS, whether he is — to put it the way that he might put it — loco."No, I don’t think so," says Lopez, who sounds relaxed and confident during a phone interview. "It’s an opportunity. It’s almost like Mad Max — you get to ride into town and wear black and clean up."With Lopez Tonight, Lopez plans to clean up a lot of things. When Fallon was announced as Conan O’Brien’s replacement, many critics pointed out that all the network late-night hosts were white men. Lately, there have been some moves to change that, with comedian Mo’Nique’s BET talk-variety show and Wanda Sykes’ new Saturday-night Fox show. Like those hosts, Lopez saw too little diversity in late night, and he’s pretty straightforward about it."You have to acknowledge that there’s a lack of inclusiveness in late-night TV," Lopez says. "As a country, the mainstream is not the mainstream anymore. It’s just not. Whatever that term mainstream meant 30 years ago, it doesn’t mean the same [now] as it did 20 years ago, and it doesn’t mean the same thing it did even five years ago."In markets such as Dallas-Fort Worth, the Latino influence has been showing. In Nielsen Media Research’s weekly reports on how nationally broadcast shows perform here, telenovelas are regularly in the top 30 in total viewership. KUVN/Channel 23’s newscasts are strongly competitive with English-language newscasts. But Lopez notes that Latinos are still underrepresented on English-language TV, and he thinks it’s time for a breakthrough."There hasn’t been somebody who has been known enough, who has the appeal broad enough to bring a little bit of everybody to the same place," Lopez says. "I think that I’m that person."Lopez has given it a crack before, of course. Besides several popular stand-up specials for pay cable, he starred in the sitcom George Lopez from 2002 to 2007. The show, featuring Lopez as a factory manager with the usual family and work problems common to sitcoms, launched to respectable ratings and reviews, but became hard to find thanks to haphazard scheduling. It went through so many time-slot changes that it aired, during the course of its run, at least once on every weeknight.Lopez Tonight won’t face those problems, with its Monday-Thursday time slot firmly in place on TBS. His opening-night guests include Ellen DeGeneres, who knows a thing or two about having a successful talk show, Eva Longoria Parker and Kobe Bryant. Michael Bearden, who was the music supervisor on the Michael Jackson movie This Is It, is the show’s musical director.
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