George Lopez wants to bring party atmosphere to new talk show

After being a guest on almost every late-night talk show, George Lopez enters the fray as host of “Lopez Tonight,” premiering Monday night on TBS.

Anyone who has watched TBS recently no doubt has seen the commercial with President Obama telling Lopez that his show is “change I can believe in.”

“He was really funny because he played it really dry,” Lopez said in a recent telephone interview from Los Angeles. The bit was filmed while Obama was still a candidate.

Lopez spent time on the campaign trail stumping for the future president and realized there that the time was right to host a talk show.

“I would see the people that were coming out and the hopefulness of those people and seeing how they related to me,” he said. “And knowing that late-night TV was in a bit of decline, I thought that there was an opportunity for something to happen like it happened 20 years before with Arsenio Hall.

“I did ‘The Arsenio Hall Show’ 16 times in five years, so I saw what that inclusive party format looked liked.”

The comedian hopes to bring a similar format back to late-night.

“I don’t just want to do good. I really want to wreck it every night,” he said. “I want to destroy it. I think there is a place to be inclusive, a place to be relaxed, a place to be funny and a place to be spontaneous.”

That means no desk and no pre-show interview. Sometimes members of the audience will ask the guests questions. Ellen DeGeneres, Eva Longoria-Parker and Kobe Bryant will join Lopez for the premiere.

“I’ve been on all the sides of (talk shows),” he said. “But what I didn’t like is the pre-interview that (felt) like you were being interrogated for something that was going to last seven minutes. Jimmy Kimmel was really great at being loose. When you did Leno, you had to stay on point from the first question to the second question to the third question.”

Lopez also brings diversity to a field dominated by white men.

“I think you lead by example. I’ll show (viewers) what America really looks like. They might not see it every day, but they’ll see it here. And maybe in things that we say, in things that we do, it will open people’s eyes to what is already out there, which is just a different color of a world.”

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