Happier new year?

CARSON DALY knows exactly where he'll be one week from tonight, zipped into a parka and patrolling the happy chaos of Times Square. It will be the fourth outing for his New Year's Eve special on NBC at 11:35 p.m., and to help celebrate, the host has tapped pop singers Alicia Keys and Lenny Kravitz.

That's what the nationwide TV audience will see, anyway, but this time around the behind-the-scenes story involving Daly is a lot more complicated -- and dramatic -- than usual. The New Year's NBC shindig, a leaner rival to ABC's more elaborate war horse, "Dick Clark's New Year's Rockin' Eve," serves as an opportunity to put behind him the events of the last few weeks, which have been among the roughest of the 34-year-old broadcaster's career.

When he announced late last month that he would return to his 1:35 a.m. show on NBC, "Last Call With Carson Daly," without his writing staff and thus in defiance of the Writers Guild of America strike, Daly got locked up in the media's pillory, characterized by critics as a labor-busting network lackey.

"It's been a nightmare," Daly said at a hotel near his home in Santa Monica last week in his first interview since the dust-up. "After the first punch, I just turned really everything off. I tried to stop paying attention to it."

That proved hard. After NBC announced his return to the air, the guild issued a statement saying it was "disappointed" and "appalled" by Daly's behavior. A group of hecklers -- presumably writers on strike -- noisily disrupted a "Last Call" taping. But what really stung Daly is that someone leaked to the website TheSmokingGun.com an e-mail he'd written to family and friends asking them to contribute jokes for a strike-related comedy bit. ("It was 100% in no way a solicitation of submissions, which is how it was positioned online, as some sort of a 'hotline,' " he said. "It was for 'knock, knock' jokes from my dad's golfing buddies, and I was gonna make fun of them.")

Since all this broke, of course, network late-night hosts Jay Leno, Conan O'Brien, Jimmy Kimmel, as well as Comedy Central's Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, have all announced plans to return next month. But Daly took by far the biggest hit, at least in part because he went first among his nighttime colleagues.