Ferguson confident he'll beat Fallon

TCA -- Craig Ferguson expressed cautious confidence about his CBS "Late Late Show" going head-to-head with Jimmy Fallon this fall. In recent months, Ferguson has been steadily gaining against NBC's "Late Night," whose current host Conan O’Brien is switching over to the "Tonight Show" desk.

Asked if he's prepared to beat his new rival, Ferguson says, "I think Jimmy Fallon's audience -- I think you're right -- I think it's a different audience. I think Jimmy's competition is [Cartoon Network's] Adult Swim. I don't think it's me."

A critic asks: "Do you expect a year from now to be No. 1 in ratings in your time period?"

"Yes," Ferguson says. "Yes, I expect that, and I also expect disappointment in my life, too... I expect to still be on the air, but then, again, I may bedisappointed there, too. I say the wrong thing here today, it's over."

Yet Ferguson urged critics to give Fallon some time to get warmed up before passing any creative judgments.

"Give Jimmy a month before you review him," Ferguson says. "That would be fair. Nobody knows how he's going to do, not Lorne [Michaels] and not Jimmy, not Jeff Zucker. Let's be honest, who amongst you thought I'd be sitting here four years after the last time I talked to you? I would have given me a couple of weeks."

Ferguson drew laughs calling the pre-premiere criticism of Fallon a "reverse Barack Obama."

"It's like he hasn't done anything yet, but everybody is commenting on his performance," he says. "Give him a chance."

Also, "Late Late" executive producer Peter Lassally weighed in about NBC putting "Tonight Show" host Jay Leno into 10 p.m., saying it will doubtless have significant impact in the late-night landscape.

"It's a brave choice on the part of NBC, and it's a very big gamble," Lassally says. "If Jay Leno is a success at 10 o'clock, which is certainly a possibility, my concern would be will people go to sleep after that? I've always felt that the competition on a late-night show is not so much your opposition, but it's sleep. NBC affiliates would be very unhappy for the 11 o'clock news ratings to slip. I'm also wondering what it would do to NBC's 11:30 and 12:30 shows. This is a whole new experiment, and it could shake up things tremendously ... We're now going to have five late-night talk shows in L.A. alone. People are all going to go after the same guests. So it's going to be quite a change this coming year, and a whole new star could be born; that we can't tell at this moment."