Do-gooder warms up to weird

Talk show host Rob Nelson is promoted as, “Finally ... a man who listens.” He may listen, but apparently not enough people were watching “The Rob Nelson Show,” so the 2-month-old daytime talk fest has been overhauled.

The result is like a menu makeover at the Olive Garden: More palatable but not exactly fine dining.

In its original form, the program, which airs weekdays at 11 a.m. on KTTV in the L.A. market, played up Nelson’s do-gooder nature as a Gen X Phil Donahue. In the 1990s, Nelson wrote the book “Revolution X: A Survival Guide for Our Generation” and co-founded the political group Lead ... Or Leave.

In its first six weeks, “The Rob Nelson Show” took the standard approach to such familiar topics as female body image and the dangerous lure of gang life, bringing half a dozen or so guests on stage to hash things out. It sent a positive message -- in a dull way.

New executive producer David Armour has quickened the pace and given the show a more colorful look with graphics, building each episode around a broad theme such as “selling out” or “secrets and lies.” The set has been redone and Nelson has traded in his sweater for a snazzy gray suit. To keep things hopping, he dashes around the studio getting interactive with the audience, Donahue-style, but most of all he has gotten in touch with his inner Jerry Springer.

The recent episode on selling out featured “Freck,” a man raising money on the Internet to cut off his feet with a guillotine; a mother who became a legal prostitute in Nevada; and a human guinea pig whose weirdest experience was testing an anti-narcolepsy drug for 10 days (“For six days you’re like, ‘Hey, I got a lot of extra hours in the day, more free time.’ By day, like, nine, I started seeing monkeys.”).

Streaming factoids come fast and furious -- some more illuminating (“the guillotine blade falls at 21 feet per second”) than others (“most amputees experience issues with body image”).

Nelson may have summed it up best at the end of the selling-out episode: “What’s your price?” he asked viewers. “I’m still trying to figure out mine.”