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By Tom Feran -- The Plain Dealer (Cleveland, OH) -- March 8, 1994 -- Section: ARTS & LIVING, Page: 17E The show is called "Later," but you have to wonder whether NBC is getting ready to make it "Earlier." One week after Greg Kinnear took over the wee-hours program that Bob Costas hosted since 1988, it's looking a lot like the show that the network ought to be running in place of "Late Night With Conan O'Brien" in a seamless transition after "Tonight." It would come as no surprise to see NBC flip-flop "Late Night" (seen weeknights at 12:35 a.m. on WKYC Channel 3) with "Later" (Monday-Thursday nights at 2:05 a.m. on TV-3) before the May ratings period. Or to notice that, by golly, six whole months have gone by for O'Brien, and gee, wasn't it fun while it lasted? With its once-invincible late-night franchise looking increasingly tattered, NBC can't afford to wait while CBS develops a new show of its own to follow David Letterman. If O'Brien looks over his shoulder, he'll see Kinnear closing fast - or feel him breathing down his neck. Kinnear, who developed a cable cult following as the host of E! Entertainment Television's "Talk Soup" - a roundup of yeasty highlights from daytime talk shows - arrived on "Later" with exactly the sort of glib, assured and comfortable TV presence that O'Brien is still developing. On his debut last Monday, Kinnear was, as he put it, a guy "confidently walking up to the betting window of life like a man who knows he's laid his money down on the only horse in the race with four legs." It's definitely a good bet - even though it has, regrettably, become a horse of a different color. "Later" has been reformatted to suit Kinnear's style, and something of quality has been lost. With Costas as host, it was a smartly produced half hour that was taped on a small set in New York without a studio audience. Relieved of pressure to play to a crowd, Costas and each night's guest engaged in revealing, intimate interviews that were more like good conversations. It was a rare haven of civilized discourse whose guests, often held over for a second show or more, came from the worlds of politics, sports and letters as well as show business. The focus now has shifted squarely to entertainment, as so much of public life has. Kinnear performs before a large, cheering audience in Burbank, and conducts lighter, briefer and shallower interviews with his guests - all entertainers so far - at a sideways desk in front of windows depicting L.A. by night. Both of the first two guests, Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Martin Short, commented on the resemblance to a job interview. It all comes considerably closer to "Tonight" than "Late Night," and Kinnear himself provides the defining difference. Instead of a monologue, he opens with a "videologue" called Media Bites that's borrowed from "Talk Soup" and could be the show's most promising element. It features the winking, chuckling Kinnear offering comments and one-liners on video clips of the day lifted from NBC News Channel: Nancy Kerrigan at Disney World, Lorena Bobbitt going free, an animal-rights "fur funeral" in Columbus and so on. It's a wonder by now that someone hasn't turned that sort of thing into an entire show, taking "Talk Soup" and "Saturday Night Live Weekend Update" to their logical next step. In fact, an emptying of the day's media wastebin ("Killer B-Roll"?) might be just the show we need. Costas turned up in one of the clips on Kinnear's opening night, a comedic bit in which he gave a small boy one of his Emmys ("I've got lots of 'em"), scorned the new host as "Smirkmeister" and "Soup Boy" and invoked the memory of such distinguished broadcasters as Edward R. Murrow. "Isn't Edward R. Murrow one of those guys from `Baywatch'?' quipped Kinnear, displaying the cheerfully ironic, media-smart Generation X attitude he wears better than O'Brien, his contemporary at age 30. His too-contrived desk sketches with Louis-Dreyfus and Short fell flat; the more conventional interviews with Phil Hartman and George Carlin never approached the level of hilarity that's become standard for Letterman or the conversational highs reached by Costas. But Kinnear does connect with guests, and he showed the amiably cocky consistency that makes this type of show work. Its best moments were his, including a week-ending reel of staged "bloopers" that had him falling off the stage at one point and being mauled by a visiting dog at another. So while something has been lost on "Later," something has also been found. Forget the guests, bands and production concepts: Johnny Carson, who would know as well as anyone, once said that the guy behind the desk is what these shows are all about. On that basis, the show should thrive under Kinnear, who is no sudden-hit stand-up, but - like Carson and Letterman - an experienced broadcaster who cut his teeth hosting "about four or five hours of programming a day" for E!'s predecessor, the Movietime cable channel. "Thank you for tuning in or setting your VCR," he told viewers last week. Sooner rather than later, we could be setting them earlier for "Later." |