TVSquad

Jimmy Fallon's first week on the job wasn't great, but it had some promising moments that showed the former SNLer was capable of doing good if he could just get comfortable in his new pad.

Fallon's exuberance for the job shined through, but his nerves sometimes seemed to get the best of him. That's natural. If I was the face of a multimillion dollar television show beamed to hundreds of thousands of people every night, I would consider my work a success if I could get through each show with a clean pair of shorts.

The host has come a long way in the last three months. He seems less nervous and more comfortable as the captain of Late Night, and it has made him and his show funnier. The cleanliness of his shorts are not known. I don't know anyone that close to Fallon's staff.

The monologue and joke segments have gotten 100 times better than the first week. Fallon knows how to tell a joke, but his confidence in the material has grown, and each joke gets a heavy boost of muscle behind it before he pushes it over with the punchline. Even if the jokes don't work, he recovers nicely with either a clever quip or a new show tradition such as giving the cue-card away to a member of an audience.

Not every bit works, but he commits to each of them and works through material that doesn't always fire on every cylinder. He's learned how to shuck and jive and one of late night TV's most interesting rules: the funniest moments don't come from the jokes. I call it the "Crispin Glover law of motion" (a crazy person in motion will remain in motion until the host brings them to rest).

The interviews still seem a bit reserved, but an interesting touch is the personal connections he makes with the people who dare to sit on his couch. For example: MSNBC commentator Keith Olbermann stepped into the studio and instead of using Fallon's airtime as another space to do what he already did on television, the two talked about baseball cards. It was engaging, interesting and even funny, sometimes all three at once. That's more than anyone can say for baseball.

Just in general, Fallon feels comfortable with his new job. The nervous giggles and tense laughter that was Fallon's Achilles hell has gotten a heavy dose of Tinactin, and even if it does flare up, he uses it to his advantage in ways they can only work on a late night show. So I'm officially calling it: 1:54 a.m. June 9, 2009, the late night alert on Fallon's show has been downgraded from Chevy Chase to a solid Arsenio Hall.