WSJ A Flightless Bird
Connie Chung's new show is a turkey. BY TUNKU VARADARAJAN
Saturday, June 29, 2002 12:01 a.m. EDT On watching Monday's debut of "Connie Chung Tonight," my first thought--admittedly wicked--was to ask myself how much Roger Ailes, the CEO of Fox News, had paid CNN for the favor. Ms. Chung's new show on CNN goes head-to-head at 8 p.m. EDT with "The O'Reilly Factor," and after tuning in to her for the first two nights I cannot help but think that Bill O'Reilly--a competitive, swaggering bruiser with not an ounce of tendresse on his elongated frame--is readying his broiler to burn this turkey to a cinder. This much I'll say: Ms. Chung wasn't as awful on her second night as she was on her first, when she turned in the tackiest, most emetic performance I can remember having seen on "serious" TV. From the opening sequence that first night, in which one got a series of seductive freeze-frames--did I hear anyone say that the looks of female anchors don't matter?--to the very end, in which she said "Goodnight Maury and Matthew," to her husband and son respectively, one was treated to a display of such overpowering solipsism that one had to wonder why any of the guests on the show had even bothered to turn up. Mercifully, on night two, Ms. Chung elected not to bid goodnight to the family. Which makes me ask why she did it in the first place. Was it to show the world that she was a great mom and a great professional? Which makes me ask, also, how we would have reacted if Aaron Brown had said night-night to the folks back home on his debut. (Of course this is hypothetical; Mr. Brown, I'm sure, would rather die than be so gaudy on air. Ms. Chung, however, assumed we'd think it was cute.) On night two, Ms. Chung showed such a degree of improvement as to suggest that the executives at CNN were so alarmed by her first outing that they pulled out all the stops to make the second one work a little better. To be fair, President Bush's speech calling for a democratic Palestine, delivered late on Monday morning, must have upset Ms. Chung's carefully constructed first-night plans. She had hoped to kick off with her prize "get"--TV jargon for desirable catch--the brother-in-law of Terry Lynn Barton, the Forest Service employee accused of starting a huge forest fire in Colorado. Instead, she had to scramble together a segment on the Middle East, and her underpreparedness showed. The brother-in-law fella, when he did come on, was out of his depth on national TV--and one felt sorry for the guy. But to the Connie Chung school of audience enlightenment, he was the perfect guest. Nervous and vulnerable, this bit player in a larger tragedy was just the kind of interlocutor Ms. Chung cherishes. He enabled her to lean forward and ask, "What do you really think?" This is a variant on that other incisive question--"How do you really feel?"--that Ms. Chung has made her trademark, allowing her to assume always that patented look of impeccable earnestness. Ms. Chung empathized her way through this and other segments. She talked to a potential pedophile, who'd been turned in to the cops by "Dear Abby," to whom he'd written in despair. ("Do you actually experience fantasies?" Ms. Chung asked.) And she talked to the parents and girlfriend of a teen who'd died from too much heroin. "What's the hardest thing about his death?" Ms. Chung asked the girlfriend, who looked about 16. Precociously, she answered: "The nights are the hardest. I'd go to sleep in his arms, wake up in his arms." Cut to Connie, pain etched on her face, eyes narrowed in well-versed condolence. If other viewers were as unimpressed by this as I was, "Connie Chung Tonight" is in a black hole. The better moments of her show came in the segments where she had the really big "gets." Luciano Pavarotti, interviewed by Ms. Chung at his villa in Italy, was, as you'd expect, hefty and vulgar and good value. Perhaps eager to see Ms. Chung back on a plane to New York as quickly as possible, he threw a scoopette her way, saying he'd retire from opera in three years. Bear in mind that he'll be 70 in 2005, an age at which you'd expect him to be pitting his dentures against plates of gnocchi, not belting out Puccini at the Met. But on hearing Mr. Pavarotti say, "In three years I'll retire," Ms. Chung jerked to the edge of her seat like some overeager Gidget and purred, "Honestly?! You will? You have never announced your retirement!" "Yes," confirmed the big man, to which Ms. Chung, oozing more excitement than is good for a lady of her composure, said, "You will! Do you promise? Will you hold to that date?" Mr. Pavarotti smiled. Ms. Chung beamed. America winced. Oh dear, I thought. Poor Connie Chung. Poor, poor CNN. Lucky, lucky, lucky Bill O'Reilly. Mr. Varadarajan is deputy editorial features editor and chief television and media critic of The Wall Street Journal.

-- Anonymous, June 29, 2002