PASADENA, Calif. -- You could spend a good chunk of every day catching up on late-night chat shows if you taped them all and watched them later. Not sure why you would want to do that, but the point is the TV landscape does not lack for programs in this genre.

From "The Jay Leno Show" (10 p.m., NBC) in prime time to "The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson" (12:37 a.m., CBS) to cable's "Chelsea Lately" (11 p.m., E!) and "The Colbert Report" (11:30 p.m., Comedy Central), there are at least eight hours of topical comedy/chat shows most weeknights.

Add to that number "Lopez Tonight" (11 p.m. Monday-Thursday, TBS), starring George Lopez, last seen headlining an ABC sitcom that bore his name.

Lopez joins other recently launched late-night talk shows, including "The Mo'Nique Show" (11 p.m. weeknights, BET) and "The Wanda Sykes Show" (11 p.m. Saturday, Fox), not to mention the still-evolving "Tonight Show with Conan O'Brien" and the rocked-by-headlines "Late Show with David Letterman."

How does Lopez hope to compete? By being the only Latino late-night host. But he's not looking to exclude anyone.

"We feel that TBS and cable is the right place because they do have an incredibly diverse audience between Tyler Perry doing what he's doing, which is amazing, a little bit of Bill Engvall," Lopez said at a July press conference before TBS canceled "The Bill Engvall Show." "So you have the 8 percent caucasian population that's still left in the United States and myself. It's a Neapolitan night."

Michael Wright, programming chief for TBS, said "Lopez Tonight" will have broad appeal.

"If you look at [reruns of] his sitcom on Nickelodeon, I think 18 percent of that audience is Latino," Wright said. "Do the math. The other 82 percent is everybody else. I think that's the unique appeal of George. What we're looking for is a show that does what a lot of programming on TBS does: It serves a lot of under-served audiences as well as playing to that broad-appeal audience."

A pilot for Lopez's new talk show was shot on an outdoor set on the Warner Bros. lot but has since been re-created inside a soundstage. Episodes will be taped early in the evening West Coast time on the day they air.

Lopez compared his show's entry to Costco joining the fray in competition with grocery stores.

"There's been a lot of supermarkets but until Costco took it to another level with bigger jars of mayonnaise and bigger chicken wings and all that stuff," Lopez said, attempting to make a bizarre analogy. "This show is comedy and entertainment in bulk: Bigger and better."

How will this show be different? Lopez said he won't have a desk and he doesn't want to use cards with reminder questions for interviews.

"It just doesn't look natural if you're having a conversation," he said. Something else he doesn't want to see on his set: Bookcases. A monologue will be replaced by "some stand-up at the beginning," which sounds like the same thing to me.

"I'm just trying to have a party," Lopez said. "Parties are spontaneous."

But putting on another talk show is not. Networks don't enter the fray anticipating failure, even though most new shows do fail.

"As many shows as there are on right now, only 30 percent of the late-night audience watches all of those shows combined," said "Lopez Tonight" executive producer Jim Paratore. "There's a huge audience that's not attached to those shows. We think that they don't reach a lot of the audience that's out there and available that George connects with and that TBS connects with."

TV columnist Rob Owen's Tuned In+ is featured exclusively on PG+, a members-only web site from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Our introduction to PG+ gives you all the details.