Plenty of Fluff to Go Around

There are things that are bad (Elizabeth Taylor marriages), and things that are really bad (street mimes). And then there are things that are bad in a different way, raising their own set of questions: Is the badness unintentionally bad enough to qualify as kitsch entertainment? (The Jerry Lewis telethon comes to mind.)

“Good Day LA” wants to be kitsch, but it announces this. The 7 to 9 a.m. morning show, which has been airing in some form or another on the Fox-owned KTTV Channel 11 since 1993, stars Dorothy Lucey, Jillian Barberie and Steve Edwards, who play themselves: Dorothy as the gossip maven, cheerfully lifting items from secondary sources and re-reporting them as TV factoids; Barberie as a sexed-up weathergirl with self-absorption issues; and Steve as the veteran broadcaster who finds himself, in the twilight of an otherwise respected career, between these two meshuggena women talking about Britney Spears.

Within TV industry circles, the trio has been jokingly referred to as “the old guy, the bimbo, and the other one”--which, when you think about it, suggests a more amusing sitcom than something called “Titus” or “Dharma & Greg.” Indeed, to come under the spell of “Good Day LA” is to find yourself, at 7 a.m., contemplating questions like: Do Jillian and Dorothy hate each other off-camera as tangibly as they seem to on-air? Why am I fascinated? Is there a chance, God forbid, that this thing can be picked up by Al Jazeera?

20th Century Fox Television, Fox’s syndication arm, last week began testing a slicker version of “Good Day LA,” called “Good Day Live,” on five Fox owned-and-operated stations: L.A., Phoenix, Austin, St. Louis and Atlanta. The show airs from 10 to 11 a.m. locally and goes out live to the other markets.

Bob Cook, 20th Century Fox TV’s president and chief operating officer, calls this a “regional incubation,” an eight-week tryout that he hopes will build momentum. “All of these kinds of shows take quite a while to get a following,” says Cook. “Even ‘Regis and Kathie Lee’ ... it took a number of years for it to ignite.”

“Good Day Live” is also the latest example of a fairly recent trend in broadcasting called “repurposing,” wherein large media companies distribute existing shows over growing empires of outlets as a cost-cutting alternative to creating new product (by acquiring rival broadcaster Chris-Craft Industries, Inc., earlier this year, the Fox television group became the most powerful in the nation).

“Good Day Live” is “Good Day LA” stripped of the local news, traffic and weather, and replaced by infotainment, video bites that are meant to devolve into vamping by the hosts. Hollywood, not the freeways, is the show’s backyard: The helicopter guy, who hovers over traffic from 7 to 9 a.m., circles celebrity homes at 10, pointing at Spielberg’s lawn.

Executive producer Josh Kaplan inherited “Good Day LA” in 1994 and brought in local broadcasting veteran Edwards to give the show some heft, thinking audiences wanted a morning show with positive stories, news of the day and lighter stuff.

As it turned out, he had the bar too high. What people wanted, evidently, was the incessant gaiety of morning shows, both on radio and TV, that assume we’ve awakened in a funk and have no will to live.

But Kaplan doesn’t apologize for the personality-driven animal “Good Day LA” has become. “My belief is, it’s honest and unique,” says Kaplan, who produces with Lisa Kridos. Nor does he betray concern that “Good Day LA” finished fourth in the just-concluded November ratings sweeps, behind its local morning show rival, the “Morning News” on KTLA (KTLA is owned by Tribune Co., owner of the Los Angeles Times). Kaplan points to the demographic battle for young viewers, a key to their overall win in the May 2001 sweeps (figures for November were not available at press time).

Overnight ratings from the first four days of “Good Day Live” indicate significant audience attrition over the hour in every market, including Los Angeles, although the show holds steadier here.

Unanswered, then, is why anyone outside of L.A. would want to befriend the “Good Day” klatch the way people live through Regis and Kelly or the chatty Kathys of “The View.”

To offer clues, Steve, Jillian and Dorothy came out of the TV to have breakfast, separately, with The Times the week before the “Good Day Live” launch.

Over high-fiber pancakes at John O’Groats, Edwards indicated that he would much rather be talking about Afghanistan, both over breakfast and on the air. He affected a Regis-like exasperation with his current job, but he’s done this “Thin Man” bit with other women in the past, including when he hosted “AM Los Angeles” on KABC-TV in the 1980s.

Of the love-hate reaction to “Good Day LA,” Edwards said: “A John Coltrane jazz solo cannot be listened to by someone who likes Mozart. But it doesn’t mean it doesn’t have its own improvisational genius. That’s a lofty way of describing what we do, but....”

Since Sept. 11, Edwards’ experience has enabled “Good Day” to make the jarring segue from the war on terrorism to a Barberie “Style File” segment.

“I never thought on this show that I would ever say the name of the country Afghanistan, much less have moments to talk about the problems between the Christians and the Tajiks and the Uzbeks and the Hazaras.”

Over an omelet at the Early World cafe in Brentwood, Barberie was not terribly interested in the Afghans or the Uzbeks. Not even in the Hazaras. There is too much Jillian to cover. She speaks quickly and hardly flubs a line: Her breasts are real. She’s found her birth parents. It’s a hard sell, but L.A. is one giant Schwab’s Pharmacy of Jillians. This one was wearing a BCBG skirt, black tank, and Ultrasuede jacket. It was a little chilly outside.

“Gift, gift, gift, all my viewers send me gifts,” she said, pointing to other accessories, including a necklace with a pendant in the shape of a large J.

She would only not discuss her husband, the former pro baseball player Bret Barberie, from whom she is separated.

“The fact is, if you go through my fan mail, most of my viewers are women. They wanna know about my breasts, they wanna know about where I get my highlights, they wanna know what makeup I use. They also wanna know: I was adopted, I found my birth family. They’re interested in that. I was molested as a child, I’m pretty honest about that. They wanna know how to get help. I speak with foster care children; I was in foster care. I’m a walking ‘Jerry Springer’ episode.”By any reasonable estimate, there would be no “Good Day Live” without Barberie. Fox, which has her in a development deal, continues to try to franchise her--whether on its NFL pregame show or various talk shows, including “The Test,” which was canceled after a brief late-night run on cable’s FX.

So far, local news remains her milieu. Like Suzanne Stone, the preternaturally ambitious weath- ercaster played by Nicole Kidman in the 1995 movie “To Die For,” Barberie says she began her professional career doing the weather to an automated camera--in Barberie’s case, for the Weather Network in Canada, after getting a broadcast journalism diploma from the Mohawk College of the Applied Arts and Technology, in Hamilton, Ontario.

“She was extremely ruthless and calculating, OK?” Barberie said, asked if she sees herself in Suzanne. “I’ve never stepped on anybody. I’m not that ruthless and ambitious, you’ll find.”

The “Good Day LA” people had arranged for Lucey to arrive at the Early World an hour before Barberie. Producers love that the on-air spats seem real--as when Lucey, who has a 3-year-old son, expressed motherly concern about Spears’ image, while Barberie defended the performer.

Of the notion that the two women are competing for camera time, and Barberie usually wins, Lucey said: “I don’t want the same things Jillian wants. So it’s very easy for me to be happy for her.... I’m not even positive she understands that, because we are at such different places.”

Lucey got her first break at the ABC affiliate in Scranton, Pa., covering snow and fires, she says. Twenty years later she’s in a suede miniskirt and tight-fitting Fred Segal top, passing along gossip about J.Lo.

But in a local news market that recently featured KTLA anchor Sharon Tay modeling slinky clothes from the WB show “Charmed,” Barberie, not Lucey, is now the ratings bellwether.

“Everybody dresses differently, including me, because of her,” Lucey said. “I came back from having the baby, and I had a little suit jacket on, and somebody in management said, ‘You know what, you look like you’re in costume, like you’re doing a period piece.’ ... It doesn’t mean I’m going to have to wear a halter, but it has changed.”

Lucey files her entertainment stories from the newsroom, meaning Barberie gets more face time on the main set. It was in the newsroom that Lucey could be found last week, at around 9:30 a.m. It was Tuesday, “Good Day Live’s” second day out. Edwards and Barberie were somewhere else. The show’s material is thrown together by hard-working people behind the scenes between 9 a.m., when “Good Day LA” ends, and 10, when “Good Day Live” begins. The scene looks like a lot of newsrooms across the country--teases hastily written, live remotes prepped, fattening food rotting on someone’s desk.

On this Tuesday, there was an O.J. story in Florida and an anthrax scare in Santa Clarita. There was better video with a story about a Web site featuring naked anchors. The script, after all, is there to prompt the comedy. So what if it doesn’t always work? People seem to like Dorothy, Steve and Jillian. They seem to know them. You know, the way personalities exist, but only because they’re on TV?

*

“Good Day LA” airs weekday mornings 7 to 9 a.m. “Good Day Live” airs weekdays 10 to 11 a.m.