What are talk-show hosts made of? Television's formula too often has been sugar and spice and failed careers as singers. But in casting about to fill the graveyard slot after Johnny Carson's Tonight with an hour called the Tomorrow show, NBC gambled on a newsman—or, at least, an L.A. anchorman.

Tom Snyder is his name, and he seems to have settled into TV's new moonlight zone as naturally as Rod Serling once occupied the twilight zone. An estimated 3.5 million viewers have been hooked by this 37-year-old Sunset-Strip-Susskind, with his accompanying admixture of ingenuousness (knocked off from Nebraska boys Carson and Cavett) and the vainglory of Mary Tyler Moore's "Ted Baxter," plus an interviewing tenacity closer to the Mike Wallace than the Mike Douglas marshmallow end of the spectrum.

Most refreshing and distinctive about Tomorrow is its ban on guests plugging new movies or club acts and on the familiar talk-show circuit-riders like the Gabors. Instead the focus is on hot hour-length topics, and the guests are generally unknowns equipped by personal experience to discuss suicide, parole, divorce, group sex or obesity. Shrewdly judging the insomniac and off-center constituency after midnight, a Tomorrow production staffer conceded that "money, sex and death pretty much encapsulate the things we are doing."

On that turf, Snyder's intimidating bulk (6'4", 200 lbs.) and brusqueness stifle kooks who might run away with another show. At times his belligerence is only a mask for inadequate homework, and during breaks the studio audience sometimes has to coach him on the right follow-up question.

Off camera, Snyder is a golf and model-train buff and a combination of self-importance and self-doubt symbolized by his black Cadillac with custom sun roof and TOM WHO license plate. "My father always told me," Tom recalls, "that if you owned an Eldorado, you had it made." That was in his native Milwaukee, and the path to his present Beverly Hills home began with a stint as a disc jockey. Though he lives in the same canyon with Mary Pickford and Fred Astaire, Snyder describes his pool-less place as "a plush dump, with small and tacky rooms." Living with him there are his sleek wife Mary Ann and a 9-year-old daughter Ann Marie, whom Tom resolutely shields from his celebrity. "If they want to be known," he quips, "let them get their own show."