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For a tech nerd, Jimmy Fallon looks good in a suit.

Though it might not seem possible, the former Saturday Night Live player cuts a rather rakish figure in a tailored black number and neatly-knotted necktie – his costume, more or less, for his new host role on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon (Monday, NBC and A at 12:35 a.m.).

“I haven't worn a tie since I anchored Weekend Update on SNL, and that was a clip-on,” said Fallon during the TV critics' tour in Los Angeles, fidgeting with his fancy silk neckwear. “This is probably a pretty expensive tie.”

Even as the Armani-draped Fallon swims easily among sharks and TV critics at a network mixer, he can't resist falling back into his tech-geek ways, incessantly typing away on his Blackberry to update the show's official blog and his own Facebook page.

“I suppose the blogging thing is way past the point of obsession with me,” says Fallon, working his thumbs on the device while a throng of reporters swarmed his Late Night predecessor Conan O'Brien on the other side of the room. “But it's so extremely important I share this moment with the world, and my friends.”

Fallon's fix on all things Web-related was made evident two hours before, at the NBC press conference for the new Late Night show.

Before a single question was asked, Fallon snapped a picture with his cellphone of the press corps facing him as he sat onstage – for his Twitter page, he claimed. “I'm going to tweak this and then say how nice you guys were to me,” said Fallon, before chastising one critic for leaving his seat: “Don't move there, please. It's a picture. You'll ruin the whole shot.”

Nobody's fool, Fallon immediately won over the tough crowd; and true to his word, the picture was posted within the hour.

The announcement last spring that Fallon would replace O'Brien on Late Night drew gasps in some TV circles. The Harvard-educated O'Brien was the man who reinvented late-night talk, post-Letterman, and the man named as the new heir-host of The Tonight Show.

Fallon, meanwhile, was a former SNLer with a few box office bombs (Taxi, Fever Pitch) on his resume. Truth be told, Fallon's highest-profile gig in recent years was appearing in a 2006 Pepsi commercial opposite Parker Posey. Was NBC serious?

“Even I was sort of amazed when I got it,” Fallon says with an impish grin. “I mean, I wanted the job, but I wasn't sure how they came to choose me. Right from the start I knew the dumbest thing I could do would be to try and make the same show as Conan. That would be a catastrophe.”

Demonstrating rare network foresight, NBC made its decision looking to snag the young and restless Web generation. Nice suit notwithstanding, Late Night with Jimmy Fallon will be a show aimed at younger viewers, most of whom network executives believe are watching TV and surfing the Web simultaneously.

“We grew up with the Internet,” says Fallon, 34. “I'm into tech and gadgets and I want those kind of people on the show, whether it's Bill Gates or the guy who designed the new Palm Pre. I want to know what makes it so great. I think that's interesting for people who are awake at 12:30 a.m.”

The new and improved Late Night will still boast some of the standard antiquities – the big host desk, the studio audience setup, the wacky staff announcer, the house band (Fallon himself approached the hip-hop group The Roots for the honour) – while simultaneously moving into heretofore untouched pop-culture areas. Say, for example, video games.

“Video games are important to a lot of people these days,” Fallon says. “The video game industry now makes more money than the movie business. We want to cover the big video game premieres almost like they were movie premieres.”

Yup, the new Late Night sure doesn't sound like the old Late Night. The unspoken NBC game plan works like this: Jay Leno enables his aging TV audience to go to bed much earlier with his new nightly variety show at 10 p.m., starting next September; Gen Xers, now also older, migrate toward Conan on The Tonight Show, as of June 1; and the fickle Gen Y viewer will receive a revamped Late Night with accompanying Web presence.

“What's great about me,” says Fallon, completely tongue-in-cheek, “is that now you've got Leno at 10, and then the news, and then Conan for another hour. So right there you're ramping yourself up for another hour of talk.”

In most ways, Late Night with Jimmy Fallon already exists. Launched last summer, the show's official website features comedy bits and sketches that will eventually run on the TV edition. In one example, Fallon revisits his Brooklyn birthplace to find his sparring partner from his first childhood fistfight. “He kicked my ass again. It was terrible,” he cracks.

The retooled Late Night site also provides a video clip homage to Fallon's years spent on SNL (1998 – 2004), where for a while he shared the Weekend Update desk with a sassy, relatively unknown Tina Fey.

While on SNL, Fallon created a few characters who now seem eerily prescient: He was entirely believable as the straggle-haired stoner Jarret in the SNL webcast parody Jarret's Room. More memorably, he was Nick Burns, Computer Guy, the insufferable IT expert who barked at employees to “Moooove” so he could fix the problem.

Seemingly comfortable in the blog format, Fallon provides a tour of the show's offices in Rockefeller Plaza, introducing viewers to the interns and staff announcer and revealing the surprisingly complicated network debate about what type of chair he should sit in. Last month, he allowed his Lasik eye surgery procedure to be filmed for the website.

“People expect the blogging, and react to it,” says Fallon. “It gives us a parallel connection to the viewer and lets us be topical, but it won't overwhelm the show. We're not moving too far away from the traditional talk-show model; we will still have an opening monologue. We will book guests. … I heard we just booked the ShamWow guy.”

He's also booked guests with, let's say, higher profiles: Monday's inaugural show brings a rare TV appearance by Robert De Niro, whom Fallon has previously impersonated on SNL (the website has De Niro's blistering retort to the portrayal) and a musical performance by Van Morrison.

The first episode of Late Night with Jimmy Fallon will no doubt be well received. Beyond that, the host does not appear particularly concerned. “I'm not the type of person who worries about reviews,” he says. “I'm actually looking forward to that part of the process. Everyone's been destroyed by critics in the past. It shouldn't be any different for me.”