Even before seeing it, you knew that “The Magic Hour” was an optimistic name for Magic Johnson’s new talk show.
About the best producers could ask for, given his past track record as less-than-adept basketball announcer, was “The Not Embarrassing Hour,” or, “At Least Twenty-Five Minutes of Tolerable Competence, Hopefully.”
Two weeks into the run of the show (11 p.m. weeknights, WFLD-Ch. 32), even those titles seem too much. It’s better than would be a “Larry Bird Show” or Tom Snyder’s jumpshot, but “The Magic Hour,” an attempt to update Arsenio Hall’s urban-hip talk format, but with an athlete, rather than comedian, as host, still lurches along like a game between the New York Knicks and the Miami Heat.
Johnson has a cheery, winning personality, and he is considerably more polished than during his brief prior stint with a microphone, but the show seems mostly designed to hide the ex-basketball player’s weaknesses.
The format is the overfamiliar late-night talk show one: bandleader, celebrity guests, studio audience, pretaped attempts at comedy. His Ed McMahon, a grinning fellow named Craig Shoemaker, is a comedian, and it is Shoemaker who essentially does the monologue. In addition, a number of the questions for guests come from starstruck folks in the audience.
If the host gets help with the monologue and questions, what is left for him to do? In Johnson’s case, it is to hug and handshake the guests, which he does with gusto, to lead the audience in rounds of applause for his guests’ achievements, giving the program elements of a motivational meeting, and to compliment his bandleader, Sheila E., a relative of Alejandro Escovedo and an ex-stablemate of the Artist Then Known As Prince.
It is probably unfair to review a first-time talk-show host during his first week in the armchair, and even his second week is jumping the gun a bit. Like a newspaper columnist, he needs time to settle into the role.
But there ought at least to be some early portents of the host and show that could emerge. And in Johnson’s case, neither appears likely to become particularly interesting. The show seems necessary only in that two recent talk shows oriented toward African-Americans, “Keenen Ivory Wayans” and “Vibe,” have been cancelled.
You can’t blame the former Los Angeles Lakers star, one of the top basketball players ever, for wanting to expand his fame from the physical to the verbal. Certainly he could look at the public record and think that everybody in America, sooner or later, gets his own talk show, so why not him?
June through September is the time of year that provides the most support for this theory. In addition to “The Magic Hour,” this month has already seen the debut of a daily hour featuring radio personality Mother Love, airing here at 9 p.m. on WPWR, though “Forgive or Forget” is more of a daytime show, focusing on people who have transgressed and seek forgiveness from their victims. Monday will bring an afternoon talk show by determinedly wacky comedian Howie Mandel (4 p.m., WGN-Ch. 9).
Jerry Springer’s long-running show, meanwhile, is making news of its own by moving over from WMAQ-Ch. 5 to WFLD (9 a.m. and 11 p.m. weekdays) and, more important, by squelching the flying chairs and fisticuffs. If you have seen any of the shows since it changed channels June 8, you have realized that a “Springer” that limits its violence to words is like a circus sideshow featuring a one-headed cow and a bearded man.
Ho and hum, and count the days until the Jerry Springer burst of fame seems merely like a bad piece of fish the culture had one night.
In September, with the official start of the fall season, other new talk entries will incude a Donny and Marie show, Roseanne’s attempt to be the next Rosie (O’Donnell) and, of all things, Whoopi Goldberg taking the role once held by Paul Lynde as the new center in a new “Hollywood Squares.”
With a number of these folks, the question has to be, why? As in, why, if you are Whoopi Goldberg, would you want to commit to a program that featured celebrity second-teamers even when it wasn’t a retread?
Familiarity with a camera, or even with the guests or audience, does not necessarily make a good host. For every Charles Grodin who proved to have a quirky and intriguing personality (his CNBC talk show was recently cancelled), there are many more Lauren Huttons and George Hamiltons who get a microphone and a quick cup of coffee on national TV before fading away again. (Luckily for their future employment prospects, both “The Love Boat” and “Fantasy Island” will be back on primetime this fall.)
This seeming randomness of talk-show success may be what led the producers of “The Magic Hour” to think that Johnson might click as a host.
More likely, though, it was a kind of L.A. provincialism: Hey, everybody in Los Angeles thinks Magic was a great guy justifiably celebrated for his accomplishments with the Lakers, so why wouldn’t the rest of the country naturally want to spend an hour a night with him?
Give Johnson credit for trying hard, and for not trading on the potential sympathy in his status as an HIV-positive man. But the producers, the host among them, should be informed that when it comes to the crowded world of talk shows, a winning smile and a status as a hero in another realm aren’t nearly enough to bring to the party.
