He’s Talking --Are You Listening?

Martin Short is on the phone, saying that good shows, original shows, different shows need time to grow. Time to find their voices.

“We all loved the masturbation episode from ‘Seinfeld,’ but that was not the first season,” he says.

The “Seinfeld” masturbation episode, in fact, was from season four, titled “The Contest,” and it won an Emmy. Short, meanwhile, hosts a syndicated talk show that debuted in September and four months later is in danger of cancellation, based on the show’s poor performance in the November sweeps period and the sense that Short, however talented, is not connecting with viewers. Last month, the show suffered a blow in a key market, New York, when sluggish ratings forced WCBS to bump the show from 4 p.m. to 1:30 a.m, even though Short had corporate synergy in his favor (the show’s producer, King World, is owned by CBS, which owns WCBS). Publicly, King World welcomed the move, noting that “The Martin Short Show” does better as a late-night entry in such markets as Los Angeles, Miami and Detroit, where it doesn’t have to compete with the likes of “The Oprah Winfrey Show” and “Judge Judy.” But others are more skeptical about Short’s future.

“I think most people would be surprised if the show were back next season,” says Bill Carroll, vice president and director of programming for Katz Television, a consultant in the first-run syndication market.

A year ago, at the annual National Assn. of Television Program Executives convention in New Orleans, where a wide variety of syndicated programming is shopped to stations across the country, Short’s star power drew high hopes. After all, the actor-comedian has a resume that spans film, TV and the stage, as well as a proven track record in comedy, from his character work on “Saturday Night Live” to his memorable turn as a wedding planner in “Father of the Bride.” Instead of lowest-common-denominator television, Short would dare to be different--he would dare to do a talk show with comedy, on a daily basis, right there in the daytime mix of soap operas and judge shows and “Sally Jesse Raphael.”

About four months into what he calls “the grand experiment,” Short says he has no regrets.

“I didn’t come here because I couldn’t pay the rent,” he says. “The biggest question I’ve got throughout this thing is: Why are you doing this? I’m doing it because I love the looseness of television. I love that at 49 I’m doing a brand new chapter. If you read my book, there’d be a chapter called ‘My Talk Show.’ You wouldn’t see a chapter called ‘Movie No. 17.’ ”

For King World, one of the leading suppliers of syndicated product, including “Oprah,” Short represents another in a series of high-profile talk show gambles; with her current contract set to expire in 2002, Winfrey, it has been rumored, will walk away from daytime TV, and King World has been anxious to fill that void before she quits. King World was paying Short considerably less, says a source, than the reported $8 million the syndicator handed two years ago to Roseanne, only to see her flame out as a daytime talk personality.

But now, with the 2000 NATPE gathering set to convene Jan. 24, Short’s struggles have only strengthened the resolve that celebrity-based talk shows--particularly ones hosted by a show-biz insider like Short--don’t resonate with the public, while game shows and court shows are still all the rage.

In fact, there are no fewer than nine court shows being shopped at this year’s NATPE convention, including “Crime and Punishment,” “Moral Court,” “Relationship Court” and “See You in Court.” This year, the most talked-about new chat shows star, ostensibly, people and their relationships--one hosted by tough-love radio psychologist Dr. Laura Schlessinger, the other anchored by Eleanor Mondale, in a show being sold as a blend of “Politically Incorrect” and the self-help bestseller “Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus.”

Amid this yearning for populist entertainment, then, Short seems like a figure out of time--a celebrity welcoming fellow celebrities into his cozy, solipsistic world of shared restaurant experiences and film projects. It’s an approach that echoes vaudeville, Merv Griffin, and Friars Club camaraderie all at once. The insularity is meant to be extended to the viewer (you can call him Marty, too, as the “Caught Marty Yet?” billboards insist), but viewers apparently aren’t feeling terribly welcomed. One day, Marty’s swapping anecdotes with old pal Steven Spielberg, the next he’s appearing in prosthetic makeup as Jiminy Glick, his parody of a daffy Hollywood entertainment reporter and gadfly.

The character recalls Short’s days as a cast member on the brilliant Canadian sketch-comedy series “SCTV.” And yet, those days are over; today, Martin Short is a 49-year-old talk show host, and it can be difficult to separate the actual Marty from the self-parodying one. When he opens his show doing Bobby Darin’s “Splish Splash,” is it a goof or is it for real? “[T]here is a strange conflict going on within the Short persona that is not unlike the one that his first guest, Billy Crystal, had to struggle with,” wrote the New York Observer in an early review of “The Martin Short Show.” “Where he once lived to mock show business, he now has become show business.”

“I was getting concerned because these friends of mine come on the show, and I don’t want to feel like I’m getting cheesy, [calling them] ‘my very dear old friend,’ ” Short says. But his sincerity, he adds, comes through. People “buy that [I] know these people.”

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Actually, for longtime fans of his character work, the doppelganger effect is kind of intriguing--like watching “SCTV’s” “The Sammy Maudlin Show,” only not. Anyone who remembers Short’s wonderful turn as an agent in the 1989 film “The Big Picture” can’t help but be fascinated by how that character bleeds into the talk show host. But this is a very small tent of interested parties. Similarly, Short has earned well-deserved kudos for the Glick character, but the joke, steeped as it is in the hot air of a guy who’s spent a few too many evenings at the Palm, betrays another of the essential dilemmas for the show: Hollywood in-jokes aren’t traveling well lately. This isn’t a problem exclusive to Short; one of the bigger flops of the current network television season is the Fox series “Action,” set behind the scenes at a movie studio, while Albert Brooks’ last film, “The Muse,” similarly delved into the shallow machinations of the studio system, from a screenwriter’s point of view, only to leave audiences feeling excluded.

In fact, says Katz TV’s Carroll, there’s a good reason Rosie O’Donnell is the last talk show host to crack TV’s Reform Party, the syndication market. She’s fawning, yes, drooling over the famous and confessing to longtime crushes on the TV hunks of her youth. But by positioning herself as an unabashed fan (and not a full-fledged member of the club who at times seems uninterested in his guest), viewers feel connected to her.

“When you convey that to the audience, and the audience identifies with you, then it has a different dynamic. Howie [Mandel] and Martin and Roseanne and, to a degree, Donny and Marie, they are all celebrities,” Carroll says. “They’re celebrities talking to celebrities.”

Whoopi Goldberg exudes the same Hollywood cliquishness, but by packaging herself as the impresario on a new version of “Hollywood Squares,” she cloaks the insularity in a game show that always relied on a kind of “Dean Martin Show” swagger, anyway.

From the beginning, Short concedes, he had no real blueprint for his show--just a conviction that people like him, like his comedy, and that a talk show kept loose enough to accommodate sketches and characters and song and dance numbers from the host would play to his strengths. Sure, a talk show isn’t the edgiest form of mass entertainment. But how else could he share himself daily with the public?

“When you kind of feel like you’ve made a mark on some level . . . you can’t sit back,” he said in September, shortly before the show’s launch. “For me, if I looked at something failing or competition or any of those things out there, then you’d be frozen, you wouldn’t do anything. You’d say, ‘Well, what if it fails?’ And I think that the most liberating thing that can happen in your career is that you do fail. You kind of go, ‘Huh, I didn’t die.’ ”

Unfortunately for Short, his talk show has been hampered all along by the quality of the stations carrying it and inconsistent scheduling, with some markets airing the show in the morning, others in the afternoon and a few in late night, including Los Angeles, where the show runs at 11 p.m. on UPN, KCOP-TV Channel 13. As a result, Short has had to marry the soft focus of a morning chat show with the late-night edge of his character work. The conflicting mandates have taken their toll both in front of and behind the camera; early on, several writers were let go, and Kevin McDonald, one of the players in Short’s sketch-comedy team, quit, citing “creative differences.”

Though the ratings don’t reflect it, Short insists the marriage of styles has worked--or at least has been worth working on. “It’s liberating,” he says of having to be a late-night and a daytime show all at once. “If we had a gun to our head to say make it a 10 a.m. show, then that gun wouldn’t make sense. I’ve actually found, strangely enough, that the syndication experience has been less restrictive than network. It’s been the grand experiment. . . . Can daytime TV and its audience be fed something that is not pandering?”

Later this month, Short heads to NATPE to rally the troops--the stations carrying his show. He will have a tough sell on his hands. Says one general manager, echoing a commonly held view: “It’s a good show, and Martin Short is a talent, but I don’t think it’s a success story in any market.”

* “The Martin Short Show” can be seen weeknights at 11 on KCOP-TV Channel 13.