Heroes: Count Jay Leno in. Jay Leno may be headed out The Tonight Show door next spring. And he may turn up on ABC next fall. But for now, he's a loyal do-bee.

In heavy makeup, bald-headed with a goatee, he turned up yesterday morning in the back of the big press room to fire some fake questions at his current bosses, Ben Silverman and Marc Graboff.

Silverman is Mr. Show at NBC, and Graboff is Mr. Biz, and they handled Jay's queries with aplomb. With the real critics' questions, not so much.

Leno's last show is May 29, 2009, and Conan O'Brien takes The Tonight Show hosting mantle June 1, having departed his Late Night early in the year. Replacing him will be former Saturday Night Live star Jimmy Fallon, who will get his sea legs with a show on the Internet for a couple of months before going on the air in March or April.

Buzz in some circles is that Leno is miffed at NBC for turning him out to pasture early and that he can't wait to get to ABC and eat O'Brien's ratings for a late-night snack.

Mr. Show and Mr. Biz tried to dampen that buzz.

"We've witnessed a lot of transitions at NBC," Silverman said, and they think the late-night one will go smoothly. "We're still talking with Jay about staying within NBC Universal, and we're confidant The Tonight Show will continue to be dominant in its time period."

"We made a long-term deal with him four years ago," Graboff said. "We can't force him to do something. We're presenting him with a number of opportunities that we think would be great, and that we hope he thinks would be great."

Discussing other matters, the honchos said:

Saturday Night Live's Amy Poehler will get her own show next year, from the same people who make The Office, but it will not be a straight spinoff of that show.

They think Heroes will come back Sept. 22 with an even bigger audience than it has had before. The two-hour season opener is a big deal. "[Executive producer] Tim Crane has nailed it, awesome, compelling, big fun, accessible stuff."

Their critically lauded but ratings-challenged Thursday-night comedies (My Name Is Earl, 30 Rock, The Office) can get by with lower numbers because they deliver viewers who are smarter and wealthier than the audience of most shows. NBC has also found "new ways to monetize the shows," including higher fees for selling them to cable networks rather than to individual broadcast stations in syndication.

"We have the best, most sophisticated actors that night," said Mr. Show, listing cross-over movie stars Jason Lee (Earl), Tina Fey and Alec Baldwin (30 Rock), Steve Carell and Rainn Wilson (The Office), and Poehler. "When you analyze it, they go way beyond the culture of the medium. I don't know if there's ever been that much talent assembled around one night of television."

Live from New York, it's Thursday night! Saturday Night Live plans a concentrated schedule leading up to the presidential election, with six live shows, and only one rerun, and four weekday prime-time shows.

SNL Weekend Update Thursday will air live half-hours Oct. 9, 16, 23. On election eve, the 90-minute Saturday Night Live Presidential Bash 2008 will include flashbacks to former SNL prexy mimickers ranging from Chevy Chase's Gerald R. Ford to Will Ferrell's George W. Bush.

Also included: the more recent Hillary Rodham Clinton stylings of Poehler, and stabs at Barack Obama by Fred Armisen, who admitted this weekend that he was still struggling with the character:

"I think I will physically grow more into it. You know, it's something I'm definitely working on, and people have been kind about it, as well."

He ridiculed complaints that because he is not African American he's unqualified to mock Obama. "I grew up on a hippie commune, and things were pretty loose there. My dad told me we don't really know who my mother is, so she can be one of many races."

SNL chief Lorne Michaels said the difficulty doing Obama was just that he wasn't well-known enough: "Sooner or later, everyone does something to irritate us."

The success of an impersonation depends a lot on the audience, according to Michaels: "In the summer before the 2000 election . . . Darrell [Hammond] did Al Gore twice on 'Update' at dress [rehearsal], and neither time it worked, and he already had been vice president for seven years at that point. . . . It took until fall when everyone was paying attention, to get clear as to where they were prepared to laugh. His take, by the way, in May was the same as it was in September, but everybody was paying attention then."

I asked video jester extraordinaire Andy Samberg what his plans were for 2008-09. "I'm not particularly looking to do politics, but they always need pretaped segments," he said. "Actually, I'm just going to phone it in this year."

Talk to these goofballs enough, and you see why they have their jobs. English is their second language; sarcasm's the first.