After seven months in the TV programming ghetto called Saturday night, Connie Chung finally is getting a chance to confront a prime-time audience larger than the paltry 7 million households she usually commands.
It is an exercise she wouldn`t at all mind repeating on a steady basis.
”Saturday Night With Connie Chung,” rechristened ”Face to Face With Connie Chung” for the occasion, will be seen at 9 p.m. Monday and again May 14, in a bid by CBS to hype ratings for the May sweeps and, at the same time, perhaps win a few converts to Chung`s brand of newsmagazine. Chung took on the two specials in addition to the regular show, which will continue in its Saturday timeslot.
”Saturday night is a bad time, especially for a news program,” she said. ”The network is giving us an opportunity to expand our viewership to those who haven`t seen the Saturday program.
”Sunday and Monday are CBS` best nights, but, of course, `60 Minutes` is on Sunday so they can`t put another magazine program there. On Monday, coming out of `Murphy Brown` and `Designing Women,` there is a huge audience.”
Asked if she would like her show to remain on the Monday night slate, or in any timeslot better than the one it now occupies, she said, ”Sure, but we`re doing much better (on Saturday) than we did last fall in terms of viewership, and we`re profitable.”
”Profitable” is the operative word.
”Saturday Night” ended the current season near the bottom of the Nielsen ratings heap, with a rating of 7.5 and an audience share of 14 percent (a single rating point represents 921,000 households, and a share is the percentage of total audience tuned in).
For the average prime-time program, such numbers would add up to nothing short of cancellation. But a magazine format is so much cheaper to produce than entertainment that it can usually turn a profit whatever its rating may be. Accordingly, Chung said, management has already assured her the show will be on the fall schedule when CBS announces it May 21.
”We`ve been renewed, and we`re all set for fall,” she said. ”They`ve already asked me to shoot promos for the season. The folks at the network tell us they really like our program and they like the way we`ve evolved and what we`re doing.”
TV critics have not been equally kind.
Chung, who took the helm of what had been ”West 57th” after CBS lured her away from NBC last year, has been mauled in print for the show`s use of re-creations, in which actors depict a scene for which no film or videotape exists. She said she and executive producer Andrew Lack have diminished the number of re-creations, but only because of the difficulty of their production.
”We haven`t dropped them, and I think we`ll have some on next season,”
she said. ”They take a long time to produce-four to eight months, depending on the subject-so they`re expensive.
”But I believe in them, and I still support them, despite what the critics have said. I think they`re innovative and a terrific way to tell a story.”
Chung`s Monday special will feature the first interview Gene Wilder has given since the death of his wife, Gilda Radner; the first prime-time interview ever done with comedian and talk-show host Arsenio Hall; and a return to the trial and conviction of child killer Joel Steinberg, with five members of the split jury that eventually found him guilty. That obviously was Chung`s favorite.
”It`s like `12 Angry Men,` ” she said. ”It came down to a personality clash between the foreman and the lone holdout who wanted to acquit Joel Steinberg.
”There were four initially, but they broke each of them down until they got to the lone holdout. It`s a marvelous study in human dynamics.”
Features being considered for the May 14 special include interviews with TV stars Dixie Carter of ”Designing Women” and Jimmy Smits of ”L.A. Law”; investigative reports on cosmetic-surgery junkies and the Nutri-System chain of weight-loss centers; a story about Johnny Lee Wilson, who is serving a life sentence in Missouri`s state penitentiary for a murder someone else has confessed to; and a piece on David Letterman.
Chung said the new title for the specials grew out of an evolving
”intimacy” from ”Saturday Night.”
”Someone said they felt that I am very intimate with the viewer when I`m introducing the story, and that when I do the interview, it`s very intimate as well,” she said. ”That`s why we decided to call the specials `Face to Face`- as in nose-to-nose, eyeball-to-eyeball.”
