Your Mute Button Doesn’t Stand a Chance

This TV-watching business is getting tough.

NBC’s nationally telecast “Today” remains the class of its genre. But what a quandary it is settling on a two-hour local news program in the morning. Picking one over the other is just so difficult.

How do you choose between Quasimodo and the Elephant Man?

Not that it’s written in stone that a morning news show must be gray or doddering and bent by osteoporosis. There’s no law even that it be informative. TV’s stew pot accommodates just about everything, after all, and starting the day with knee-slapping yucks, as local shows do, can be a welcome antidote to the strychnine of current events.

But get real.

“The KTLA Morning News” and KTTV’s “Good Day L.A.” are both rubber rooms. From their mouths to your ears, they hammer the airwaves with sonic booms of hee-haws. Be advised: Prolonged exposure may be dangerous to your brain. Before you know it, you’re playing “Name That Fruit” along with KTLA or giving KTTV’s Dorothy Lucey thumbs-up when she insists Michael Jackson is headed for more cosmetic surgery because “he wants to look like Elizabeth Taylor.”

The people on these shows love making you laugh. Most of all, though, while gazing adoringly at the lens as if it were a mirror, they appear to love themselves.

For a few minutes at the start of each half-hour, these are standard newscasts, reading headlines, giving traffic updates from choppers and delivering routine stories from the field, with the KTLA program having the edge here because of its generally better, more experienced street reporters. Unlike “Good Day L.A.,” it also has its own cyber maven and another specialist who gives Wall Street updates.

But this taste of actual news is foreplay for what these shows are really about.

On KTLA (which, like the Los Angeles Times, is owned by Tribune Co.), that means cutting up from anchors Carlos Amezcua and Barbara Beck. Especially, too, from weathercaster Mark Kriski, who seems to live for being the kind of fun guy you’d see hanging from a chandelier with a lampshade on his head at a cocktail party. And also from the show’s beanbag with lips, show-biz groupie Sam Rubin.

On “Good Day L.A.”--which only once has topped the older KTLA show in a ratings sweeps--you have a George Burns playing straight man to a pair of Gracies. That would be anchor Steve Edwards--whose long run in L.A. has shown him to be a bright, thoughtful man for all seasons--facing viewers between Hollywood gossip Lucey and weathercaster Jillian Barberie. Because no lobotomy scars are visible, Edwards is here, apparently, because they showed him the money.

These are assigned roles, the women’s to gush about trivia and themselves incessantly, and Edwards’ to seem dazed, helpless and unable to complete a sentence without being cut to pieces by this withering cross-fire of woo-woos and hubba-hubbas.

“I heard someone say there is an anchor host on this show,” Edwards said on the air this week with a straight face. “And I watched the show, and there is none.”

That’s because each woman is very quick and has such a mouth, Barberie’s stream-of-conscious-ness banter earning her a brief shot with Regis in the post-Kathie Lee era, and her own interactive talk show, “The Test,” scheduled to begin next month on cable’s FX network.

At a relatively tender age, Lucey has become local TV’s doyenne of rumor and innuendo, to say nothing of general blather. No safety nets. To Edwards and Barberie: “What the hell were we talking about?” Trust me, it doesn’t matter. If the show profiled Albert Einstein, she’d focus on his hair.

On Monday, the day after the Screen Actors Guild awards that Lucey attended, Edwards began reading a story on children born out of wedlock when she piped in: “As much as I love this topic, can we talk about how great Calista [Flockhart] looked last night?”

Coming out of an Edwards-read story speculating about whether swifter medical response could have saved Princess Diana, Lucey was mentally elsewhere. “The damn award season. Will it ever end?” Because no one on the planet could be this shallow, it has to be an act.

Her gripe? Take those SAG Awards. “It was another night,” Lucey lamented, “for Hollywood to say, ‘I’m just so honored . . . to be me.’ ” She’s right about the entertainment industry’s narcissism, of course. On the other hand, the celebrity culture she regularly mocks is the same one that keeps her employed.

In the peculiarly misleading way that TV renders all things equal, the KTLA and KTTV shows stamp out lines separating the silly and the somber. One moment Lucey and Barberie are schmoozing nonstop about sweaters and people who supposedly threw drinks at a famous actress--with Edwards looking straight ahead like Stan Laurel--the next, their show is updating the Sean “Puffy” Combs trial.

Ditto “The KTLA Morning News.” Subbing on that show for Amezcua on Wednesday, Emmett Miller had to suggest that someone in control halt the happy music being played during a story he was reading about a sports star’s serious illness.

Meanwhile, Kriski’s topics ranged from his crab grass to his body fat.

And Rubin was being Rubin, someone who has become the one thing, more than any other, that “Good Day L.A.” is unable to match. Adding to his many other pressing duties, he is now also a media critic.

Take what happened recently, when he and Kriski shredded a copy of the Los Angeles Times to protest a paragraph in a Calendar story noting that the KTLA show’s ratings win over its KTTV competitor in February “was not total” because its audience was down 10% from the previous year.

Frankly, I was heartened that Rubin was tackling a topic that hadn’t been pitched to him by a Hollywood publicist. Also, I was awed to hear that his show’s audience was increasing even as he spoke. After acknowledging in one sentence that it was “almost tied for first place” in L.A. behind NBC’s “Today,” he added in the next, “We’re in first.” That, my friends, is fast growth.

It parallels ads KTLA has been running in The Times, boasting of its morning news having “Ten years as L.A.’s number one choice!” Excluding, that is, the show’s November ranking behind “Good Day L.A.” and second-place finish here behind “Today” in the February ratings.

Rubin went on to describe Calendar coverage of local media as an “unspeakable embarrassment,” adding about The Times: “You bring us such shame!”

Hearing this from KTLA was like a surgeon getting criticism from Jack the Ripper. As a Times employee, though, I felt darned rotten about being such an embarrassment to our corporate partner. To be letting down Hal Fishman was the pits. But most of all, I was in the dumps for having added to Rubin’s shame burden.

As someone who once had his column ripped up on KABC’s “Eyewitness News,” and learned from it, moreover, I accepted Rubin’s stern lecture as the constructive assistance he meant it to be. After all, he said he had been a “print reporter” himself.

So I watched “The KTLA Morning News” more intently than ever this week, hoping to learn from his and the show’s example.

I was impressed by how it opened Tuesday by announcing that a famed former talk-show host had died, and then withholding his name (Morton Downey Jr.) for 10 minutes.

I was impressed by the number of show-biz items that Rubin spewed without naming sources. I was impressed that he had “gone all the way to New York” to interview Jennifer Love Hewitt at a press junket for her movie, “Heartbreakers,” and was impressed by his tenacity in dwelling so long and in-depth on the subject of her breasts.

Most impressive of all was the giddiness in the studio, the mugging, stunting, whoop-de-doo and self-absorption by TV folks.

Just so honored to be them.

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Howard Rosenberg’s column appears Mondays and Fridays. He can be contacted at howard.rosenberg@latimes.com.