From Chicago: Gateway to Milwaukee ... it's --------------------------------------------- LATE SHOW NEWS for Tuesday, August 30, 1994 Issue #28 A weekly electronic sheet by Aaron Barnhart --------------------------------------------- NOT BEHIND CONAN ? ^ ^ ^ NBC executives confirmed last week what many who have seen the show have suspected: that _Late Night with Conan O'Brien_ is in trouble. By waiting nearly until the final month of O'Brien's contract before deciding whether or not to renew it, and then announcing that it would do neither, allowing the host merely to stay on the air until instructed to do otherwise, the network failed to send the ambiguous signals it had intended to send. Granted, judging strictly by the numbers, there is no reason for panic. _Late Night_ has cleared the convenient Nielsen benchmark of 2.0 -- that is, 2% of all American t.v. households, or double the audience NBC had promised to deliver to advertisers in 1993-94 -- three out of the last four weeks. This is up a third from Conan's mid-season nadir of 1.5. Since that time he has swapped guest appearances with Dave Letterman, who has had nothing bad to say about the show (or at least about the aspects of the show he cares to praise), and Conan has benefited from higher visibility in NBC late-night promotions. Perhaps most encouraging, the ratings for _Late Night_ now regularly exceed Arsenio Hall's final average of 1.9, and with an important difference: where Arsenio, whose talk party once had a bigger audience than Letterman's, was on his way down and out, Conan has not even completed one year on the air. Surely he is up and coming. Or maybe not. For despite an otherwise smoothly running program -- great band, funny writing, very un-Dave riffs on familiar self-referential comedy themes -- Conan as a host is spinning his wheels. The flop sweat is still perched on that brow, ready to burst at each commercial break. The on-air presence of his sidekick, Andy Richter, is even more widely loathed, though he may simply be a useful diversion for the abuse no one really wants to see heaped on O'Brien, who is widely (and we hear deservedly) liked. The critics beat up on Regis Philbin, too, when he was Joey Bishop's right hand in the late '60s; eventually he got the boot and that was the beginning of the end for Joey. Nor will the '94-'95 season be any easier for _Late Night._ NBC suits seem to think Lorne Michaels devoted too many of his people and resources to the show last year and not enough to his flagship, _SNL_; Michaels is responding by overhauling the latter. This undoubtedly will take time and maybe people away from Conan's show. And with Tom Snyder's and Jon Stewart's arrivals this fall, making the 12:35 slot genuinely competitive, there is reason to wonder if O'Brien hasn't topped out in the ratings. All of which would explain NBC's tenuous, if patronizingly generous, embrace of its Greg Kinnear warmup. THE PRIVATE LIVES OF PUBLIC RELATIONS Item 1. If you are a faithful reader of _TV Guide,_ and what media-savvy guy or gal isn't, you may have noticed your Guidelines for last Thursday touting that evening's _Late Show with David Letterman_ as "an encore of Madonna's much-talked-about appearance, which was laced with bleeped profanities." Not a bad choice, given all the hype that the No Material Girl's appearance generated for the show, and given that last week was supposed to showcase the best of best-ofs, the most memorable episodes since Dave signed on CBS one year ago today. Well, we here at LATE SHOW NEWS don't consult _TV Guide_ for our listings. We have a source that is much more current, and that source reported that Thursday's rerun was to-be-announced. We had heard that the Madonna show *might* air and took the TBA to suggest that the uppity-ups at Worldwide Pants were debating whether they would go ahead and "put the Lord thy God to the test." No such luck: in fact, the decision to yank the Madonna rebroadcast had already been made, as we finally learned by reading Ben Kubasik's report in _Newsday._ Kubasik speculates that Dave and his people did not want to appear hypocritical by airing a program that he has repeatedly apologized for in this most recent big-hype media tour to commemorate the show's anniversary (including, natch, a cover story in _TV Guide_). Eventually a substitute encore was shown, one from earlier this summer with Tom Hanks and Mujibur and Sirajul who, if not free of controversy themselves, are at least more palatable to Dave's mainstream (and natural-born) audience. Item 2. Chrysler Corp. is using Greg Kinnear as spokesdude in a massive t.v. and radio advertising blitz to sell its Eagle Vision line of cars to young hepsters. According to a company weasel, the choice of Kinnear is "daring," calculated to "separate [Eagle] from the automotive clutter." This is probably true in that, by the same token, _TV Nation_ stands apart from the clutter of newsmagazine programs. Greg's name will not be mentioned in the advertising ostensibly, according to the p.r. flack, to keep the focus on the product ("We're not saying 'This is Greg Kinnear,'" he told _The New York Times,_ "we're saying, 'This is Eagle'"). Unfortunately, as Bob Garfield's review points out in this week's _Advertising Age,_ the name "Eagle Vision" hardly gets mentioned in the 14 t.v. spots, either. What the commercials communicate, if anything, writes Garfield, "is that Greg Kinnear is pretty funny, in a smug, biting, straight-faced sort of way." We needed a $100 million ad campaign to tell us *that*? BREAKING LATE NEWS Lundbohm@aol.com reports attending a taping of _Wheel of Fortune_ last week as two puzzles were taped for later airing on the Letterman show. Their solutions are "VANNA I LOVE YOU" and "HELP ME I'VE BEEN BITTEN BY A MONKEY." Remember you read it here first ... Despite all the first-anniversary hoopla, the actual prime-time commemorative special will not be recorded and aired until the November sweeps ... _USA Today_ reports there will be yet another week of shows from the Dave-ready Television City studios in Los Angeleez ... Brian Copeland is doing Dennis Miller-styled news satire on NBC's _Friday Night_ for five weeks and wants to know how he's doing. Write him at copie@crl.com ... Bobcat Goldthwaite says he went nuts on Jay Leno's set because that's what he did on Arsenio's set one month earlier and -- the hell? -- isn't that why Leno invited him on the show in the first place? "Talk shows are the only form of entertainment where the people making it don't think it's fiction," Bob, who reprised the debacle on _The Larry Sanders Show_ last week, told the AP. "You walk onto a movie set and you said to Harrison Ford: 'This is fake.' He'd go: 'Yeah.' You walk on a talk show and these guys who have staffs writing their ad libs will tell you what's going on is spontaneous. It's all scripted. Seems like the better the show, the more scripted it is" ... LATE SHOW NEWS readers in the L.A. area can hear us in person Sept. 7 on Jaclyn Easton's "Log On L.A." show at 8 p.m. on KIEV (870 AM) ... And if we read one more feature story about _The Larry Sanders Show_ with the headline "True Lies," we're gonna lose our lunch and mail it to the lucky editor. THE LINEUPS LATE SHOW WITH DAVID LETTERMAN, CBS, 11:35 P.M. EST Tu 8/30 First Anniversary with Super Dave Osborne, 5-year-old geography expert Jonathan Estrada, Black Crowes He's *five* now. We 8/31 Kathie Lee Gifford, Jack Hannah Th 9/1 Ellen Barkin, Samuel L. Jackson, Waylon Jennings Fr 9/2 Kevin Kline, Lee Marek aka "Mr. Science" Mo 9/5 Kathy Baker Tu 9/6 Fran Drescher THE TONIGHT SHOW WITH JAY LENO, NBC, 11:35 P.M. EST Tu 8/30 Kathleen Turner, Ken Olin, Robert Cray Band, rerun We 8/31 Bill Cosby, 108-year-old Sidney Amber, Boz Scaggs, rerun Th 9/1 Michael Keaton, Richard Marx, Joke Run, rerun from N.Y.C. Fr 9/2 Billy Crystal, David Robinson, Texas, rerun Mo 9/5 Terry Bradshaw, Amanda Plummer, Steve Starr Mr. Starr is known as "The Great Regurgitator." You may supply your own Reagan joke here. Tu 9/6 Jason Priestly, Julie Brown, Randy Travis LATE NIGHT WITH CONAN O'BRIEN, NBC, 12:35 A.M. EST Tu 8/30 Michael Moore, Isaac Hayes, Louie Bellson, rerun We 8/31 Leeza Gibbons, Abe Vigoda, John Hiatt, rerun Th 9/1 Tom Arnold, Deidre Hall, Jimmy Webb, rerun Fr 9/2 Harry Connick Jr., David Sedaris, Sarah McLachlan, rerun Mo 9/5 Jeff Garlin Tu 9/6 Holly Robinson LATER WITH GREG KINNEAR, NBC, 1:35 A.M. ET Tu 8/30 Montel Williams, rerun We 8/31 Dick Cavett, rerun Th 9/1 Patti LaBelle Mo 9/5 TBA Tu 9/6 Danny Aiello -- Thanks to S Trowbridge Also, don't miss TOM SNYDER on CNBC, airing live Monday-Thursday at 10 p.m. Eastern with a rerun of that evening's show at 1 a.m. Reruns also air at those times Friday through Sunday. ****** NOTE: The E! rerun schedule has changed on weekends. We rewrote the paragraph below last week but forgot to hang bells and sirens from it. And E!'s own promos haven't changed -- they still say the encores are running "seven Daves a week" and so are only adding to the confusion. The E! entertainment television cable network broadcasts reruns of _Late Night with David Letterman_ "six Daves a week" at 10 p.m. Eastern time weeknights and 11 p.m. on Sundays. There are also re-airings of previously aired reruns (usually the one from the night before), weekdays at 1 p.m. and 7 p.m., Sundays at 6 p.m. only. The following schedule was taken from the E! update line. Mo 8/29 Connie Chung, Teri Garr, Ted Nugent (12-25-87) Tu 8/30 Jack Hannah, Bob Saget (12-1-88) We 8/31 Bryant Gumbel, John Candy, Eugene Levy (2-26-85) Th 9/1 Marilu Henner, Kamar the Discount Magician (12-12-84) Fr 9/2 Julia Child (10-6-83) Su 9/4 Robert Klein, Tom Parker (12-7-83) --------------------------- Entire contents Copyright (C) 1994 by Aaron Barnhart. All rights reserved. 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