Mr. Eisner’s new neighborhood

CNBC says the talk show “Conversations With Michael Eisner,” premiering tonight at 6, will run “bimonthly,” which makes it sound like a corporate newsletter or a think tank’s glossy.

Certainly the first episode feels mogul-wonky (what, you expected an opening monologue and Michael Ovitz’s straw hat band?), Eisner sitting down at the far end of a long, beautiful conference table and chatting gruffly but amiably with power pals like Martha Stewart Omnimedia’s Martha Stewart and Sony’s Howard Stringer, not to mention Bran Ferren, a former longtime Disney Imagineering technologist who created profitable toys for Eisner, such as Disneyland’s Tower of Terror.

Actually, it was the Ferren segment, more so than the Stewart or Stringer ones, that freaked me out a little -- particularly when Ferren, who has a very long beard and apparently only wears this one cargo jacket, described a creepy near-future in which “database access will be built into human beings” so that we’ll be popping pills encoded to clean out our arteries and Googling ex-girlfriends while appearing to wait in line at the bank.

“I guarantee you that within 25 years,” Ferren says, “kids will terrify and torture their parents, rather than by getting a piercing or a tattoo, by getting a net job, and they’ll just be wired all the time.”

“So, you’ve thought about the future, you’ve thought about the government, is the U.S. over?” Eisner asks.

I’m afraid, Mr. Eisner, that’s the wrong follow-up question. We would have accepted, “What in God’s name are you talking about, man?” or “Would you be available to repeat that to me and Joe Roth at Mr. Chow’s tomorrow night?”

“Conversations” proves two things: Anybody can get a talk show on CNBC -- though it helps if you have a bazillion dollars and eccentric friends -- and two, moguls like Eisner are super-salespeople who understand that the American public will always fall for the plain speaker, no matter what you say to the people you actually work with.

The conversation between Eisner and Stewart is impossibly chirpy (you’re a scary micro-manager? I’m a scary micro-manager too!), though amusing for that.

“Type A’s cannot do gardening,” Eisner challenges her.

“Oh yes they can, and it does teach you patience.”

Stewart re-spins the little securities transgression that landed her in prison last year as the little securities transgression that could.

“I am very interested in entrepreneurial initiative,” Stewart says of her work with fellow inmates. “Wherever I find it, I’m always encouraging it ... and trying to give them good advice, sound advice....”

“Yeah,” Eisner says, reasonably, “but when you give them sound advice in Connecticut or Westchester or New York, they have a little privacy, they can go back and think it over. They’re not showering with 12 other people.”

Eisner apparently got the idea to become a talk show host from his daughter-in-law, as he said when he guest-hosted “Charlie Rose” last year. Given the keys to Charlie’s car, Eisner took it around the block with old buds from the ABC/Paramount days -- John Travolta and Barry Diller, now at large in the interactive conglomerate world as head of IAC/InterActive Corp.

“By the way,” Eisner said to Diller in the middle of some sentence, “why are you taking the butler out of Ask Jeeves?”

That’s how Eisner talks -- he’s impatient and interruptive and cheerfully bullying. His show is kind of fun to watch, like maybe you’re in a meeting with him, although it’d be even better if he were at the Ivy, barking about some tentacle of his empire with food in his mouth.

That empire is no longer his, of course, after a long and controversial tenure during which he built up Disney into a multi-pronged entertainment giant before finally stepping down amid a putsch orchestrated by alienated members of his board.

What exists now, judging by “Conversations,” is someone who is part showman, part guy-with-time-on-his-hands, lousy with Disney stock and trying his hand at a TV chat show. He’s hardly the Robert De Niro character Ace Rothstein in “Casino,” turning to a cheesy variety show after his gambling empire is finally reined in. But “Conversations” does conjure something odd in a powerful man’s career, his Citizen Eisner-hood.

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‘Conversations With Michael Eisner’

Where: CNBC

When: 6 tonight, encore at 9 p.m.

Ratings: Not rated