Ample Targets for the New ‘Not Necessarily the News’

George Bush, the horseshoe President, clunks his wife Barbara in the head with an errant toss. . . .

A promo for Fox Broadcasting features a murderous fugitive who was profiled on Fox’s “America’s Most Wanted,” captured on “Cops,” convicted on a new show “Trial” and is about to be electrocuted on another new Fox series, “Execution of the Week”. . . .

Fed up with scouring oil-caked rocks on the beaches of Alaska and its ongoing image problems, Exxon decides to kill two birds with one stone by giving away the blackened rocks as paperweights to its customers at gas stations. . . .

“Not Necessarily the News,” Home Box Office’s award-winning series of political and social satire, is back with a new cast, a regular weekly time slot and its tongue still planted ever-so-caustically in cheek.

Beginning at 10:30 tonight, the latest incarnation of the long-running program will be taped on the day of broadcast, allowing the writers the opportunity to poke fun at the people in the headlines that very day.

“We have always been frustrated that we had to tape and edit the show long before it aired,” said John Moffitt, the show’s executive producer. “And that meant either we included a topical piece that was stale by the time it aired or we missed something current. This will really help us to be more biting, to really get in there and be sharp with all our barbs.”

Though the original “Not Necessarily the News” had always been a darling of the critics and had won more ACE awards (cable’s equivalent of the Emmy) than any cable series in history, the show had never been a huge popular success--even by pay cable standards. HBO decided it needed some shaking up.

“I think it’s inevitable that after six years a show gets a little stale,” said Michael Fuchs, chairman of HBO. “And we felt that this was an important program that deserved more attention than it was getting. I think sometimes in pay television it’s hard for a show to be as big a hit as it should be. We don’t get the cover of TV Guide or the cover of People.

“I do think people have to be told what’s a hit in this country. (Bill) Cosby does a series and he’s on every magazine and everyone says it’s a hit and it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. We don’t get that kind of topspin from our series except at the very beginning.”

“I think it’s good that they’ve given us a regular weekly spot,” said Matt Neuman, the show’s producer and head writer, who has been with the program since it began in 1982. “Part of the problem was that people who liked the show never knew when it was on. But I don’t think it was necessary to revamp the whole thing. It’s like in baseball, they fire the manager when the owner can’t think of anything better to do.”

Moffitt, a director from the early days of “Saturday Night Live” and the creator and producer of the ABC late-night series “Fridays,” based “Not Necessarily the News” on “Not the Nine O’Clock News,” a British series that used footage from the British Broadcasting Co. to lampoon the world’s political leaders. Moffitt and his business partner, Pat Tourk Lee, pitched the program to ABC, but the network turned it down, so they went to HBO.

But while Moffitt and Lee take seriously their role as the loyal opposition against the longtime Republican administration in Washington, the show has never been just an endless onslaught of political satire. Some of its best and best-loved bits have been its commercial parodies and fake interviews with famous people, in which a “Not Necessarily the News” actor asks his or her own questions to edited sound bites from a real news interview. In this way, an innocuous Marilyn Quayle interview can be twisted into a conversation about supposed sexual liaisons with half the politicians in Washington.

Though the new version of the show will resemble an actual newscast with two anchors sitting at a news desk, it will also retain most of these other elements. An upcoming episode, for example, will include a spoof of the movie trailer for the new film “Batman,” featuring Batman and his new boy wonder, Rainman.

The new program will also include reports and sketches from political and social satirists Harry Shearer, Merrill Markoe, Will Durst and Richard Rosen. Also making guest appearances will be former regular Lucy Webb, who has won the ACE award for best comedic actress four years in a row.

Anything and everything, the producers say, is fair game--from Connie Chung and Maury Povich to Jim Wright and Yasser Arafat.

Moffitt and Lee did veto a commercial parody a few years back that played on the shooting down of the Korean airliner over the Soviet Union. The idea was to do an ad for Samsonite luggage, showing an undamaged suitcase floating amid human limbs and the wreckage from the plane.

“We wouldn’t do that because we really weren’t making any point,” Lee said. “But as long as we can find some message, anything is up for grabs.”