Was it only eight months ago that TV critics and the Madison Avenue crowd were clamoring to get aboard the Bette Midler bandwagon?
Her Wednesday-night CBS situation comedy was picked as one of the season’s audience and critical favorites, particularly after a promising, funny premiere episode that featured several celebrities, including Danny DeVito, playing themselves.
The series’ “can’t miss” gimmick: Midler essentially portraying herself, providing a spoof of her highly charged persona.
“You can’t create a character better than the one she’s been playing in her life for 30 years,” executive producer Jeffrey Lane noted before Bette premiered.
With such a format, the experts predicted, the Divine Miss M couldn’t miss becoming a major TV star. And she seemed to be on her way when the premiere half-hour outrated ABC’s Who Wants To Be a Millionaire.
I’ll admit it. I was jostling for space on the bandwagon – until about the third or fourth episode, when it became apparent that Midler, essentially playing Midler, still needed help from writers.
She never got it.
Wednesday was closing night for Bette. The phrase TV cancellation is now attached to her resume.
CBS shut down the series after airing 18 of 22 episodes ordered. Bette had been scheduled to be pre-empted this month because of schedule changes involving Survivor and the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament, but CBS decided Monday not to finish the season.
After its strong start, Bette’s ratings declined regularly. In a recent Nielsen national report, Bette drew only 7.1 million viewers, getting an 8 percent share of the audience.
Such failure is a vivid reminder that even strong personalities with marquee names can’t automatically find TV success if not surrounded by talented comedy writers.
In the opening show, Midler’s ego-centered, neurotic character, searching for something to ignite her career, whined: “Pretty soon I’ll have my own TV series and then I might just as well kill myself.”
While Midler won’t act out her comedic prophecy, she found out the hard way that a performer needs help when essentially playing herself on television.
An ongoing problem with the Midler show was the character of her husband, played by Kevin Dunn. Midler and producers never thought he fit the role.
So Wednesday night, Bette introduced a new husband character, portrayed by Robert Hays (Airplane!). His first appearance was his last.
There’s an item for you TV-trivia lovers.
High note: National overnight ratings in 49 key cities indicate that The Sopranos, in its third season, is off to its best start as far as audience response is concerned.
The two-hour season premiere registered a 7.9 rating and a 12 share in homes equipped with HBO. Putting such figures into a success perspective, that’s equal to the ratings and shares of such weekly network programming as Fox’s Boston Public and ABC’s Spin City. And HBO is only in about a third of the nation’s homes.
The channel swim: Bob Newhart may be testing the TV-series waters again. NBC wants to team him with rapper Sisqo (Thong Song) in a comedy series that would have a show-within-the-show format. Newhart would play himself. Sisqo and Newhart? No generation gap there. … Woody Harrelson, formerly of Cheers, also is coming back to network TV for four episodes of NBC’s Will & Grace, playing the new boyfriend of Grace (Debra Messing) during May sweeps programming. … A&E cable has renewed 100 Centre St., the Sidney Lumet cop-court drama, for 18 more episodes. Meanwhile, Lumet, a refugee from TV’s “golden age” of drama, is involved in another A&E project, May It Please the Court, a series based on landmark Supreme Court decisions of the past 60 years.
The local scene: KUSA-Channel 9 gets into the newsmagazine business, beginning at 7 p.m. March 23, with 9News on Assignment, a quarterly hour designed to go in-depth on local topics while showcasing the station’s reporters and photographers. Adele Arakawa and Jim Benemann will co-anchor. Channel 9 President and General Manager Roger Ogden views the series as a long-range project. … KRMA-Channel 6 looks back on Denver in the 1950s in The Way We Were, a locally produced documentary airing at 7:05 p.m. Monday. … Talk-radio fans with long memories can recall when Gary Tessler was the main man at 9 a.m. weekdays on KOA-AM (850) before being replaced by Mike Rosen. Tessler and his liberal leanings are back on KOA in a fill-in capacity in various weekend time periods. “The rebirth of a talk personality on the station – who knows?,” says program director Don Martin.
Today’s nostalgia: On March 8, 1973, CBS aired The Marcus-Nelson Murders, a widely watched cop movie starring Telly Savalas, which served as a pilot for the long-running Kojak series.
