KTLA’s ‘Morning’: Snap, Crackle, Pop : Offbeat Style Boosts Show to No. 1

Barbara Beck’s mother back in Mississippi didn’t quite understand what her daughter, the formerly ultra-serious TV anchorwoman, was doing out here in California. Was she working on a newscast or not?

“So I finally sent her a tape,” the co-anchor of “The KTLA Morning News” said with the sheepish chuckle now familiar to hundreds of thousands of loyal viewers, “and she said, ‘Oh, oh, it’s just like the funny show at night.’ I think she was talking about ‘Saturday Night Live.’ ”

“We’re a combination of ‘Saturday Night Live’ and ‘Nightline,’ ” chimed in Joel Tator, the show’s executive producer.

“Good Morning Dubuque,” as entertainment reporter Sam Rubin describes it, is probably closer to the truth.

Choose your own description.

This much is certain: “The KTLA Morning News”--with its mix of breaking local news, headlines from around the world, live helicopter shots of freeway smash-ups, the wacky antics of weatherman Mark Kriski and the constant jabs, gags and chatter among everyone on the set--is unlike any newscast ever seen in Southern California.

The ratings are equally unusual. Buoyed by heavy interest in local news during the February floods and the recent riots, the 11-month-old show already has exceeded the wildest dreams of the KTLA Channel 5 executives who put it on. During the last two Nielsen ratings sweeps periods, it finished first in its 7-9 a.m. time period, beating all three network morning shows.

In the May sweeps, “The KTLA Morning News” was seen in an average of about 220,000 homes a day, compared with 195,000 for “Today” on KNBC-TV Channel 4, 170,000 for “Good Morning America” on KABC-TV Channel 7 and 88,000 for “This Morning” on KCBS-TV Channel 2.

The floods and riots undoubtedly helped introduce the show to a wider audience. But Tator, who took over the reins in November and who formerly oversaw KCBS’ successful magazine series “2 on the Town,” notes that the program has managed to maintain the increases at each new plateau. The explanation, he believes, is simple.

“People, generally speaking, are more interested in what’s going on around the corner than they are in what’s happening around the world,” Tator said. He contends that KTLA’s live show will always be more relevant to local viewers than the network programs, which originate in New York and are shown here three hours after their initial broadcast.

While the KTLA morning staff professes to be serious about news--the program recently won an Emmy Award for a live report last November that showed the roof of a downtown warehouse collapsing on top of a group of firefighters--the show’s signature is the lighthearted elements that surround the news.

On a recent morning, Kriski--a try-anything clown--wandered off on one of his many tangents during a weather and traffic segment, remembering some recurring dream about “legless forkmen” chasing him. Later in the broadcast, someone left a fork at his spot on the anchor desk. Later, to the music of “The Twilight Zone,” a stagehand, adept at making shadow figures, flapped his fingers in front of the camera so that it looked on screen like a “legless forkman” was about to grab Kriski. He responded with a Jaime Lee Curtis look of terror and ducked under the desk.

The day before, Kriski invited Zsa Zsa Gabor to join him at the weather board, where she promptly slapped him as she might swipe at a Beverly Hills cop for messing up on his Memorial Day forecast.

Meanwhile, Rubin--a former reporter for the National Enquirer and the defunct Fox Entertainment News, whom KTLA news director Warren Cereghino has dubbed the enfant terrible of his newsroom--gossips about celebrities and--breaking one of the most sacred television taboos--even TV news personalities on competing stations. He pokes fun at movies and television shows and, in his incessantly self-congratulatory way, has even critiqued on the air Cereghino’s performance at KTLA staff meetings.

Beck and her co-anchor, Carlos Amezcua, both experienced big-city anchors, preside over all this like Mom and Dad at the breakfast table, guffawing at the burlesque prattle of their obnoxious adolescents, while trying to maintain some dignity and interest in the serious news of the day. Amezcua and Beck do the news straight, but they too are sucked into the ribbing and razzing. It seems that at least once per newscast, Beck can be seen putting her hands over her face in reaction to some of Kriski’s shameless daffiness, while Amezcua is frequently caught with a look that is half bemusement, half how-did-I-ever-let-my-agent-talk-me-into-this?

“We’re dealing with a lot of heavy bad news generally, and I think that people don’t want to be pulled down at 7 a.m.,” Tator said. “We don’t say, ‘Go out there and be funny,’ but when it’s appropriate, they are trying to have a good morning for everybody and for themselves.”

“I was in the store the other day,” Beck said, “and a man came up to me and said, ‘We watch your show because it puts us in a better mood. We need to get the news and it’s serious and depressing sometimes, but we’re hooked on it because we get the news and we’re in a better mood to start the day.’ ”

It wasn’t always that way. When the show premiered last July, KTLA, which has dominated the 10 p.m. news competition with a traditional, no-nonsense approach, intended to duplicate that in the morning. The first few shows were serious, straightforward--and dull.

Two hours was too long to present what Amezcua calls the “in-your-face, (KCBS anchor) Michael Tuck kind of delivery.” So he and Beck decided to drop their anchor personas and let their own fun-loving personalities out, and all the giggly repartee is a “happenstance of chemistry,” Cereghino said.

“We do the news, but we found that we just couldn’t do the Dan Rather look at news for two hours,” said Amezcua. He insists that they cut out the shenanigans and shift instantly into “that hard-news gear” whenever necessary, pointing to his and Beck’s all-day coverage of the Los Angeles riots as an example of their news skills and decorum.

Their irreverent blurring of the line between entertainment and news does not reduce their credibility as journalists, he said.

“You can’t take life or yourselves so seriously,” Amezcua said, “and it’s just that no one ever had the guts to put this kind of newscast on the air. If we were sitting around in our homes with all these people, we really would have a great time, laughing and cutting up and (saying), ‘Did you see this in the paper today?’ In essence, we’re inviting people into our living room and saying, ‘Here’s the news. And here’s a good time.’ ”