The Late-Night ‘North Report’ Finally Airing : Fox’s Postponed Show Due Tonight

Fox Broadcasting’s “Wilton North Report,” the new late-night replacement for the company’s ill-fated “Late Show,” will have its first broadcast tonight, following an 11-day postponement.

A Fox spokesman said Thursday that the company’s president and chief operating officer, Jamie Kellner, had confirmed plans to put the show on the air (11:30 p.m. on Channels 11 and 6) following a week of uncertainty about the debut date.

“Wilton North,” conceived as a blend of comedy and news, was slated to debut Nov. 30, but eleventh-hour problems with its opening segment--a humorous news report--led executive producer Barry Sand to request more time to work on the show.

Sand said following that decision that he had requested the time to tinker with the opening segment and to allow the show’s hosts, the formerly Sacramento-based comedy team of Paul Robins and Phil Cowan, more time to work with the show’s writers. Robins and Cowan had been hired only 10 days before the original debut date.

Sand said through a Fox spokesman Thursday that the new “Wilton North Report” would still have an opening news segment featuring Robins and Cowan, but “it would not be as long and as complicated as originally planned.” The spokesman, Brad Turel, added that the rest of the show would remain basically the same and would maintain its original format as “an offbeat, nightly topical magazine show.”

The writing staff has not changed, he said.

Turel said that there was “no significance” to the company’s decision to introduce the show on a Friday rather than beginning with a full week of programs on Monday. “The show was ready, so we put it on the air,” he said.

Despite that disclaimer, it appears the decision to slip “Wilton North” into the schedule on a Friday with little advance notice is in keeping with earlier admissions by Kellner and Sand that they hoped to downplay the show during its first weeks on the air. They wanted to minimize the chance that the show, which is experimenting with a new format, might be publicly trashed before it had a chance to get on its feet.

Turrel provided no details on specific changes made in the opening segment. He said the “Wilton North” producers had found that the originally planned opening news segment was too time-consuming to produce on a daily basis. “They found that it took eight hours to put a six-minute piece together,” he said.

The segment had involved having the show’s staff writers create a “funny newspaper” each day that summed up the day’s news events. Robins and Cowan would then select items from that collection of news items to serve as the basis for their own commentary.

A “Wilton North” staffer who asked not to be identified told The Times following the postponement that Kellner and Barry Diller, chairman and chief executive officer of 20th Century Fox, had seen rehearsal tapes of the show and had told the staff they found some parts of the original show “just not funny” and “mean-spirited.” The staffer said Diller and Kellner had said the opening segment contained “cheap jokes about people’s looks” and other objectionable material.

During the postponement, Fox Broadcasting aired reruns of “The Late Show” featuring its latest host, comedian Arsenio Hall.