If Carson Daly saw himself at a bar, he'd beat himself up. "Whenever I'm in a bar like this, someone will get real drunk and yell, 'Backstreet Boys.' If I were a regular 28-year-old guy, I'd think the same thing, that I'm a watered-down teen idol. I get it," he says, drinking his second Stoli with lime at an Irish pub in midtown Manhattan. "Whenever that happens, I buy the guy who said it a shot of Jack Daniel's, and in 10 minutes I'm his new best friend." Even Jimmy Kimmel, co-host of The Man Show and Daly's real-life friend, thinks the off-air Daly is acceptable. "Carson doesn't do any of the things that put you in that wiener category," Kimmel says. "He loves midgets and monkeys and all the important things."
This week Daly gets his own late-late-late-night talk show, where he will put himself in a less wienery light than his gig of the past 3 1/2 years, Total Request Live. As host of TRL, Daly has become MTV's most famous veejay ever. Screaming teens clog Times Square on weekdays, staring up at MTV's concourse studio, trying to get a glimpse of Daly and his musical guests. His new half-hour show, Last Call, on NBC from Monday through Thursday at 1:30 a.m., will be decidedly mellower, mixing live music with earnest interviews on a relaxed loft-type set. "He's got a lot of charisma, and he's got a strong following with the younger audience," says NBC entertainment president Jeff Zucker. While most of Daly's guests will be pop stars, he hopes to book the kind of folks who show up on the Charlie Rose Show. "I've been dying to talk to [White House spokesman] Ari Fleisher," he says. "It would be cool for a younger audience to appreciate him. That guy's like a rock star. He handles a room."
Daly, who has a nonexclusive contract with MTV, came to NBC after a development deal with CBS fell apart when he failed to come up with a show that the network liked. He also turned down a prime-time variety show for ABC, feeling it was too similar to TRL. Believing that the standard monologue-sketch-interview format for late-night shows has grown stale, he says he accepted the three-year contract with the hope that, over time, he can come up with something different. "I look at it as a testing ground for the future of late night. The old format is pretty passe," he says. His MTV contract is up in 1 1/2 years, and he does not intend to renew it.
But for now, he'll continue hosting TRL and irritating teen boys. One of the reasons they hate him so much is that he has dated, in quick succession, Jennifer Love Hewitt and Tara Reid. Reid broke off her engagement to Daly not long ago, and he's just getting over it, saying he'll never date an actress again. "It's hard enough when you go through a breakup and then to walk in a bar and have someone say, 'Sorry about Tara.' Oh, man." He also promises never to try to act or move to L.A., where he grew up. In fact, he's got a post-9/11 red-white-and-blue tattoo that says nyc on his forearm below a cross and a Corvette logo, a tribute to his car-salesman dad. Though he's a practicing Roman Catholic, he is not, as rumor has it, a born-again Christian, as evidenced by his cursing, drinking and being friends with Jimmy Kimmel.