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The landscape of late night television does not shift very often. But starting two weeks ago, the trigger for a massive upheaval was pulled. Conan O’Brien has left Late Night after a week of incredible farewell shows in order to take over Jay Leno’s iconic The Tonight Show in three months, at which point Leno will transition to primetime. It’s been long coming, as the shift was originally announced in 2004. And while Lorne Michaels had been talking about Jimmy Fallon assuming Conan’s desk since around that time, Fallon was officially announced as the heir to the 12:37 throne in May 2008. This new Late Night with Jimmy Fallon premiered last night.

And for something that had apparently been in the works for so long, it’s a shame that its first broadcast was really quite lame. There’s been much ado about the weeks of preparations leading up to this debut, but it would seem that Fallon and his producers forgot to develop much of anything.

Fallon was just as nervous and jittery as he was during his most recent appearance on Conan. If he gets over this or figures out how to work it to his advantage, though, he has the potential to succeed on solely the strengths of his own attractiveness and self-effacing charisma.

His biggest problem is that the show has nothing to say about him and he has nothing to say about his show. Despite the presence of The Roots as house band, everything else feels like a cookie cutter late night show template. Fallon serviceably delivered a monologue with ripped-from-the-headlines jokes that were flatly generic and impersonal, and delivered against a garish blue curtain. The Roots accompanied him in an extended joke about the current stimulus package in a segment they called “Slow Jam the News,” which was cute but overstayed its welcome halfway through its short length. After commercial, Fallon called some members out of the audience to play “Lick It for Ten,” in which three young people licked things like fax machines and lawn mowers to receive ten American dollars.

David Letterman has been doing his job for over 25 years, starting in this very same time slot. He gets to do tired, self-aware shtick like this and his demeanor is ultimately what sells it. Seeing a fresh, eager face like Fallon attempting it just doesn’t work.

After “Lick It for Ten,” Robert de Niro gave an off-puttingly distant two-segment interview (opening with someone as guarded as de Niro was a poor choice; better to pair your new talent up with a talk show guest who always brings the goods like William Shatner), followed by a refreshingly lively interview with Justin Timberlake, whose instant injection of charisma and comfort suggested he might belong on a show like this some day.

There are some potentially good ideas here, though. Despite the dull thud that was “Lick it for Ten,” Fallon seems genuinely interested in interaction with his studio audience. When Timberlake arrived for his interview, he improved some music to The Roots’s music. Strong integration of both band and audience into the show may very well be something that the program could benefit from, but if it does, it needs to break free from the shackles of late night talk show, audience-facing-couch-and-chairs conventions.

This is not to write Fallon off just yet. As Time’s James Poniewozik says in his write-up, “A late-night show is, in a way, one evolving performance; grading it after one day, or even a few, is like reviewing a movie after the first opening title.” If Fallon and his crew figure out how to reinvent the talk show format to play to their own strengths and to deliver something that the other hosts don’t give them, it could become something special. It may take a while to get there, though. And until then, I’ll be sticking with CBS’s Craig Ferguson, who did just that.

I’ll check back in with Fallon next time Craig’s in rerurns.