‘Today’ Sends Wake-Up Call to ‘GMA’

TV or not TV . . .

COMEBACK: Looks like NBC’s “Today” show is really back in the race against ABC’s “Good Morning America.”

“Today,” hosted by Bryant Gumbel and Katie Couric, now has beaten “GMA” in three of the last four weeks measured by the Nielsen ratings firm.

True, “Today’s” latest victory--for the week of May 18-22--surely got a boost from attention paid on the morning series to Johnny Carson’s final days on NBC’s “Tonight Show.”

For that week, “Today” scored a 4.1 rating and earned a 20% share of the national TV audience; “GMA” had a 3.8 and 19%, and “CBS This Morning” trailed with a 2.4 and 11%.

But “Today” had been coming on strong in recent months, with the Gumbel-Couric team beginning to jell.

The smart money might still be on “Good Morning America” as a rock-solid powerhouse that could go on to another awesome ratings year: It didn’t lose a week during 1990 and 1991.

But the network wake-up competition is heated again.

The latest “Today” victory, by three-tenths of a ratings point, was its widest margin over “GMA” since Oct. 23, 1989.

JACKPOT: Carson’s last week on “Tonight” averaged a 39% share of the audience. During the past season, the average nightly share for the series was 17%.

A LITTLE NIGHT MUSIC: That number by opera star Kathleen Battle and saxophonist Branford Marsalis on the new “Tonight Show” with Jay Leno Friday ended the week on an upbeat note. “It doesn’t get much better than that,” Leno said of the two remarkable artists.

The best line of Leno’s first week came Friday from columnist-author Molly Ivins, who described Ross Perot’s voice on the phone: “He sounds exactly like a Chihuahua.” She also observed that President Bush “suffers from this sort of verbal dyslexia.”

Ivins’ easygoing presence gave the show a nice comfort level that would seem to call for a return invitation.

APPETIZER: “Jack’s Place,” a new series with Hal Linden (“Barney Miller”) as the host-proprietor of a neighborhood cabaret, got a surprisingly strong 24% share of the audience in its premiere on ABC last week.

ABC says the premiere of the one-hour entry earned the highest rating and share of any regular series in its 10-11 p.m. Tuesday time slot since the finale of “thirtysomething” a year ago. Preempted tonight for coverage of the primaries, “Jack’s Place” returns next Tuesday.

THE RIGHT STUFF: It’ll be tough going for ABC when it eventually launches its new magazine series against “60 Minutes”--but the network couldn’t have done better than choose Forrest Sawyer as one of the anchors. As a frequent guest host of “Nightline” and in solid reporting from the Gulf War, he established himself as a sure-fire TV presence.

LOVE IN BLOOM: ABC is simply running out the leftover episodes of the canceled “Anything but Love,” with Jamie Lee Curtis and Richard Lewis, but admirers of the witty sitcom will be happy to know the series will be repeated on the Lifetime cable network starting this fall.

CRITICS’ CHOICE: “Northern Exposure” was the runaway winner as best series of this season in a critics poll of the publication Electronic Media.

Following in the Top 10 were “The Simpsons,” “Murphy Brown,” “I’ll Fly Away,” “Seinfeld,” “Law & Order,” “Roseanne,” “Cheers,” “Civil Wars” and “Home Improvement.”

PADDED CELL: NBC is boasting about winning the May sweeps. Yeah, well, great. It won it in large part because of the big finales of series that are leaving the network: “The Cosby Show,” “Night Court,” “Matlock” and “The Golden Girls.” Sweeps help to set ad rates for local stations, so the lunacy of fixing prices based on shows that won’t be there anymore is straight out of Kafka.

LAST LAUGH: Fox TV, which announced its upcoming prime-time schedule last week, says that the late-night, 4-year-old “Comic Strip Live” series will also keep right on bopping along. A comedy showcase, it began as a local effort by Fox-owned KTTV Channel 11.

BOOK FAIR: Summer reading for couch potatoes:

* “The Complete Directory to Prime Time Network TV Shows.” The fifth edition of this encyclopedic work from Tim Brooks and Earle Marsh, it details programs from 1946 to now.

* “The Great One: The Life and Legend of Jackie Gleason,” by William A. Henry III.

* “Letters From Cicely,” based on “Northern Exposure” and written by Ellis Weiner. A colleague says the book is “every bit as funny and refreshingly offbeat as the show itself.” The letters are, naturally, from the characters of the series.

* “Here’s Johnny,” a breezy compendium of Carson’s 30 years on “The Tonight Show,” by Stephen Cox.

THE SPORTING LIFE: We kept telling you guys about CNN sports anchor Hannah Storm and how good she is, so it’s no surprise that NBC has snapped her up.

According to the network, she’ll join Jim Lampley as co-host of the late-night coverage of the Summer Olympics in Barcelona, Spain. And that should be interesting, because Storm’s CNN co-anchors sort of became invisible during her on-screen stints. She is, well, kind of devastating at one-upmanship. But Lampley knows the ropes, and--who knows?--they could be terrific together.

At any rate, Storm makes her NBC debut at Wimbledon and anchors the network’s late-night coverage of the tournament June 29-July 3.

TOGETHER AGAIN: Producer David Jacobs and actor Lee Horsley, who teamed for “Guns of Paradise,” will launch a new CBS police series, “Bodies of Evidence,” on June 18. They’ll take over the time slot of “Knots Landing,” which gets a summer breather.

THOUGHT FOR THE DAY: From Howard Stringer, president of the CBS Broadcast Group: “Our television version of Murphy’s Law, renamed Murphy Brown’s Law, is that when a politician gives millions of dollars of free publicity to your television show, he will do so after the program airs instead of before it.”

REEL LIFE: Producer Linda Bloodworth-Thomason (“Designing Women”) is an Arkansas buddy of Bill Clinton. Her new, fall CBS sitcom, “Hearts Afire,” stars John Ritter and Markie Post as aides to a conservative Southern senator. My, what opportunities.

BEING THERE: “THRUSH believes in the two-party system: the masters and the slaves.”--Napoleon Solo (Robert Vaughn) in “The Man from U.N.C.L.E.”

Say good night, Gracie . . .