On Discovery, Koppel can be himself

Don’t cry for Ted Koppel: His hair’s the same and he’s got his own show. Whatever forces nudged him into an early retirement from the ABC franchise “Nightline,” Koppel and his former “Nightline” executive producer Tom Bettag have wound up with tenure-track professorships in the broadcast TV equivalent of a leafy liberal arts college in Maine or Oregon.

With the occasional “Koppel on Discovery” (as in the Discovery Channel), Koppel gets to do what he does best -- burrow into a subject with a mixture of journalistic probity and populist empathy. Then he holds a Koppel-esque town hall meeting to bring the story even closer.

Sunday’s show, “Living With Cancer,” airs at 8 p.m. and is largely about the disease-as-scarlet-letter, told through the cancer stories of two people, cyclist Lance Armstrong and Leroy Sievers, Koppel’s longtime globe-trotting producer. The town hall meeting to follow will feature Armstrong, Sievers and Elizabeth Edwards, who is currently staring at what it means to live with the disease while conducting a bruising presidential campaign with husband John Edwards.

All told, the broadcast is set to last about three hours -- an entire night of prime-time. On cable, Koppel can be Koppel, just as Dan Rather can be Dan Rather thanks to Mark Cuban, the eccentric billionaire who scooped up the wounded news lion for his HD network.

More interestingly, though, Rather, looking moist-eyed and wistful, keeps showing up in other venues such as talk shows and documentaries, a Shakespearean figure musing in the wings of his industry.

There is no such conflictedness in the genial, half-retired visage of NBC’s Tom Brokaw, who showed up on the “Today” show this week to do a hardish interview with former CIA Director George J. Tenet.

Tenet was making the talk-show rounds to plug a book and spill his side of the story on the buoyant decision to invade Iraq. With Matt Lauer in the midst of his yearly “Where in the World Is Matt Lauer?” trip, the Brokaw-Tenet sit-down had the unfortunate side effect of making the “Today” brass seem unsure about co-host Meredith Vieira’s newsperson bona fides.

That broadcast news is in a time of transitional stars means it’s also in a time of transitional authority. Yes, Rather’s fall from grace and abrupt exit as anchor of “The CBS Evening News” has given way to the showbizzy Katie Couric experiment. But even a show as hallowed as “60 Minutes” gave its Tenet exclusive last Sunday to the cartoonish and histrionic Scott Pelley.

On a network, “Living With Cancer” would probably have been squeezed for time (and maybe a little rightly, for the Armstrong segment drags, while the Sievers piece is moving, immediate and fulfilling).

But revenge for a long-form guy like Koppel is a dish best served in his own unhurried cadence, whether the subject is the war on terrorism or the ordeal of chemotherapy. Among the larger points of “Living With Cancer” is the way we tend to recoil from the diseased person as though he’s an alien, well-wishing to compensate for our discomfort in the face of mortality.

To that end, it’s not so much that Koppel conducts a great interview here, it’s that he has the journalistic instinct to take us into the empty hours during which Sievers, his old compatriot from the “Nightline” wars, sits in a chair getting chemo treatments, and then has the good sense to get out of the way.

paul.brownfield@latimes.com

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‘Koppel on Discovery: Living With Cancer’

Where: Discovery Channel

When: 8 to 11 p.m. Sunday

Rating: G