Conan O’Brien takes over “The Tonight Show” (10:35 p.m., NBC) after waiting five years for the job. The lanky late-night host and former “Simpsons” writer inked a deal to take over “Tonight” back in 2004.

Some have worried aloud that Conan may be too quirky, too East Coast, too Harvard Lampoon, too fill-in-the-blank to successfully inherit “The Tonight Show,” a place considered the gold standard of talk since Johnny Carson took over from Jack Paar back in 1962.

While I think Conan will do just fine, it’s almost certain that no one will restore “The Tonight Show” to its former glory and pre-eminence. There’s simply too much competition for any one host to dominate the conversation.

It is interesting to note that during last fall’s election, when talk show hosts Jon Stewart and David Letterman had a lot of fun at the expense of candidates, neither Jay nor Conan created many headlines or much controversy.

For all of his obvious intelligence, Conan is a cool interviewer, more apt to make his guest (and his audience) comfortable by maintaining a nonthreatening demeanor and making sure that he remains the subject of ridicule.

In this way, Conan’s style harks back not to Carson, but to Bob Hope. Like Hope, Conan enjoys making fun of his awkward looks and putting people at ease with the silly, exaggerated notion that he might be a lady’s man or macho hero. What other TV host would spend a week exploiting his own uncanny resemblance to the female president of Finland?

And for all of his barbed comments about the management, or mismanagement, of his own network, Conan is a real fan of television. He exults in the addictive nature of shows like “24” and “Lost.” Unlike Stewart, who at times seems to pretend that he’s better than all this and would rather be discussing policy with Fareed Zakaria, Conan has a deep love affair with his own medium.

In that way, too, he resembles Hope, a man who maintained a five-decades-long unrequited love affair with Hollywood’s leading man, Oscar.

On his first “Tonight Show,” Conan will welcome Pearl Jam as well as another shamelessly self-deprecating performer and practitioner of the serious science of silly, comedian Will Ferrell.

• O’Brien’s biggest hurdle may be the lead-in audience. NBC recently reached a new low in viewership. And that was before tonight’s debut of “I’m a Celebrity … Get Me Out of Here!” (7 p.m., NBC).

• Allison’s vision reveals a dark end for her family on the season finale of “Medium” (9 p.m., NBC).

She was probably dreaming about ax-wielding NBC president Jeff Zucker. NBC canceled “Medium,” but it survives to move to CBS next season.

Tonight’s other highlights

• A desperate patient takes hostages on “House” (7 p.m., Fox).

• Jillian dazzles a would-be beau with a shiny object on “The Bachelorette” (7 p.m., ABC).

• Stevie Wonder appears in his first-ever TV concert on “Great Performances” (8 p.m., PBS, check local listings).

• “Capturing Reality” (8 p.m., Documentary Channel) offers a survey history of nonfiction filmmaking.

• A double murder in gator country leaves Horatio scratching his thinning hair on “CSI: Miami” (9 p.m., CBS).

• “Here Come the Newlyweds” (9 p.m., ABC), and there go the viewers with any brains at all.

Cult choice

Groucho creates his own kind of Marxist dictatorship in the 1933 musical comedy “Duck Soup” (1:30 p.m., TCM), starring the Marx Bros. and Margaret Dumont.