'NBC's New Year's Eve With Carson Daly' airs Monday night at 11:30.
Carson Daly may not have a lock on the New Year's Eve TV audience, but he definitely holds the keys to what may become his highest-rated holiday special ever.
The late-night host has snared red-hot nine-time Grammy Award winner Alicia Keys to perform during NBC's New Year's Eve With Carson Daly, premiering Monday night. Keys, whose new album As I Am recently debuted at the top of the charts and almost immediately went platinum, joins fellow Grammy winner Lenny Kravitz, who will perform in Times Square during the hour-long special.
"Alicia was the very first guest on Last Call, " says Daly, whose regular late-night NBC series launched in 2002. "That was her breakout year, when her first record, Songs in A Minor, came out. In fact, I had known Alicia from MTV and from being a fan and hearing demos of her when she was in the studio. We booked her on our very first Last Call, and I believe the Grammy nominations came out after that, and she had the most nominations. Her success just became enormous, and she has been on our late-night show more than any other musical artistes."
Pretty undeniable
Even back when he was working at MTV, Daly adds, he sensed that Keys was on the verge of a major career.
"At that time, in 2000 and 2001, the music business was in a much stronger situation than it currently is," Daly says. "It just functioned differently. When artistes emerged and buzz started around someone, it just came to fruition at a higher percentage rate than it does now. But even the first early stuff from Alicia, she was so powerful that it was pretty undeniable."
Daly, whose New Year's ratings have gone up each year since his first special for NBC in 2004, says he's equally psyched to have landed Kravitz, who set a record for the most Grammy wins in the best male rock vocal performance category.
"It's been said that we live in an age of disposable music, because there's just so much of it, but you look at someone like Lenny Kravitz, who is a true legend now," Daly says. "He's been doing it long enough and he does it at the highest level, music that is timeless. The fact that he has sustained his career at such a high level for so long is remarkable. He's got a new album coming out, and he wanted to come on our New Year's Eve show as his first big splash to play some stuff from the new record. That's a testament to his faith in us."
If Daly seems comfortable in the high-intensity frenzy of Times Square on New Year's Eve, that's largely because he has spent this holiday night there for most of the past 10 years, starting during his MTV tenure.
"It's really the one night out of the year that I get to be a 'broadcaster'," he says. "When I do New Year's Eve, I'm live in the moment and there's so much going on that you have to be purely reactional. There's really no way to 'prethink' what you're going to say, but having so much experience in Times Square with MTV and the mania that was TRL and all the Spring Break specials, I feel like most of my training is geared perfectly to this. This is a night that I'm very familiar with, and I think it plays to my strengths."
Annual mega special
Of course, Daly's special goes up against a larger ABC event produced and co-hosted by Dick Clark, who some might say has pretty much owned New Year's Eve for a few decades. Daly acknowledges Clark's annual mega special, but says he doesn't consciously counterprogramme against it.
"I never know what the other networks are doing," he says. "The ABC show is drastically different from our show. It's much longer, and their objectives are clearly different, and they pretape a lot of stuff. They put on a good show that a lot of people watch. And Fox does what they do.
"This is still new for us. We really worry just about putting on the best show that we can at NBC, and there's no intention to counter-programme."
For the record, ABC's Dick Clark's New Year's Rockin' Eve returns for the 36th consecutive year, with Ryan Seacrest co-hosting 3 1/2 hours of entertainment from New York and Grammy winner Fergie hosting segments in Hollywood.
Also scheduled to perform during Clark's special are Akon, Natasha Bedingfield, Sean Kingston, One Republic, Plain White T's, Taylor Swift, will.i.am, Carrie Underwood, Miley Cyrus and the Jonas Brothers.
On Fox, meanwhile, Cat Deeley (So You Think You Can Dance) counts down the last minutes of 2007 in Times Square, while talk-show host Spike Feresten interviews partygoers on New Year's Eve Live. The special also includes a review of the past year's most memorable pop culture moments.
Special programming
Several cable channels have scheduled special programming events leading up to and following midnight. HBO has a mini-marathon of Entourage leading up to the premiere of Cathouse: The Musical, an adult musical revue performed by the 'working girls' at the Moonlite Bunny Ranch in Nevada.
Somewhat more elegantly, Turner Classic Movies devotes the evening to a series of musicals with Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, while AMC opts for a Planet of the Apes movie marathon.
Comedy Central serves up a marathon of South Park episodes leading up to the movie South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut. Other cable marathons include Project Runway on Bravo, The Beverly Hillbillies on TV Land and, of course, the inescapable Law & Order on TNT.
- John Crook, Zap2it
