KMBC sits tight on its sitcom late night KC largest market not airing 'ABC News Nightline' on time

Everywhere else they call it "ABC News Nightline. " Here at TVKC, we like to think of it as "ABC This Morning With Ted Koppel." Until recently "AfterMASH" worked pretty well, too. On March 24, 1980, "Nightline," the expanded half-hour version of ABC's Iranian-crisis update "America Held Hostage," signed on for the first time. The local affiliate, KMBC, Channel 9, delayed it by 90 minutes so as not to disrupt its block of three syndicated sitcoms. Times change, ancient regimes topple, the Dow multiplies. But at KMBC, the three-comedy rule lives on, as ironclad as the "Nightline" 12:05 a.m. start time, almost certainly the latest in the entire Central time zone. Koppel, for one, is not amused. "I think it's irresponsible on the part of the station's management," he said. "I don't think they can point either to their own financial profit or to the public interest in Kansas City as justifying what they're doing." The Emmy- and Peabody-award-winning anchor interrupted his vacation to return a recent telephone call, a sign perhaps that, for all the success "Nightline" has enjoyed over the years, it still genuinely galls Koppel to know he's parked behind a Brett Butler repeat in a major market. "At a time like this, when there are nothing but major crises around the world, when the country itself may be facing a major constitutional crisis, to have three syndicated comedies on each night when there's a news program that tries to deal responsibly and seriously with issues that, I think, must concern the public - I don't think that is the mark of either a responsible business or responsible citizens," Koppel said. Just a few years ago as much as 40 percent of the country saw "Nightline" on a delay. ABC affiliates were able to flout the network's 10:35 p.m. airtime with impunity because, as ABC well knew, the time period following the late local news was when its stations could make a great deal of money showing syndicated programs. But in the early 1990s, as networks began relying more on profits from their news divisions, ABC started to push stations to carry "Nightline" on time. Financial incentives were offered if they complied. Koppel even showed up at an ABC affiliates meeting and announced that if "Nightline" didn't begin running live in more markets, he'd quit the show - a gesture he now admits was less effective in changing stations' minds than ABC's wheeling and dealing. Today, 86 percent of the country watches "Nightline" live. Why, though, did KMBC stand its ground? Channel 9's General Manager Paul Dinovitz was uncharacteristically terse, offering only a few comments for the record. "For the foreseeable future, we're going to be programming sitcoms," Dinovitz said. "The experience we've had, with phenomenal numbers in late fringe, is part of the station's history. We look at it continually. I'm not saying we look at it every other day, but we look at it, and we feel we'll do significantly better with sitcoms." In fact, it would be hard to argue with Dinovitz on this point. The KMBC late-night sitcom block, which predated Dinovitz by many years, is a ratings phenomenon. Nearly a quarter of Kansas Citians tune in, generating millions for the station every year. So powerful is KMBC's hold on late-night viewers that, even with a 12:05 start, "Nightline" consistently outperforms the national average in the Nielsen ratings. And Channel 9 does tip its hat to public service, offering "Nightline" live when it thinks the news story is sufficiently compelling, such as the president's address to the nation or Mark McGwire's 62nd home run. Still there are those who think KMBC's intransigence is less about money and more about upholding tradition. "There's more than one way to make money in the business of broadcasting and still try to serve the wide audience," said Ed Piette, the former WDAF general manager who now runs ABC affiliate KSTP in Minneapolis. "If you are dedicated to doing news in a responsible fashion - and that show is a very, very newsworthy program - you can work it out." Piette knows of what he speaks. Last week, for the first time, his station began running "Nightline" at 10:35 p.m. That means Minneapolis is no longer the largest market in the country to delay "Nightline. " Kansas City is, albeit briefly. (Nielsen Media Research is about to reshuffle its market rankings; when that happens, Kansas City will fall behind Milwaukee, where the ABC affiliate also postpones Koppel.) Dinovitz surely knows he has the clout to delay "Nightline" as late and as long as he likes. KMBC belongs to the Hearst-Argyle chain, the largest group of ABC affiliates in the country, and Dinovitz's boss, David Barrett, heads up the network affiliates' group. Koppel knows all this and remains unimpressed. "They have to understand that they are in a business where they are using the public airwaves. And as the broadcast media fragment even further, the degree of responsibility that a station's management demonstrates is - one of these days - going to be the only way that it can distinguish itself from the 300 other options that are out there. And by time they come to recognize that fact, it'll probably be too late for them." StarTouch: 889-7827 and enter 8852 (TVKC). E-mail: writeme@tvbarn.com.

And the Emmy doesn't go to the Emmys Drawn-out telecast is just one problem facing ceremony in its 50th year

Television's trophy event, the Emmy Awards, turns 50 this year, and it seems like a half-century that people have been complaining about it. Granted, the Emmys do seem to have turned into a sick amalgam of a high school homecoming parade and "Groundhog Day." Every year, the same four or five shows take turns being crowned Best Drama or Best Comedy. HBO stacks the movie and miniseries categories. Dennis Franz has won Best Actor three times. But is that such a problem? Does anybody actually dispute that "ER," "NYPD Blue," "Law & Order" and "The X-Files" - all nominated four years running - are four of the top five dramas on TV? Aside from its fans, does anyone really mind that "Home Improvement" hasn't been up for Best Comedy since 1994? And doesn't every non-statuesque viewer rejoice when Franz takes home another statuette? So let's leave that non-issue aside and turn to the real problem with the Emmy Awards: the telecast. At four hours, the Emmys are longer than any program in any category that doesn't have the word "miniseries" in it. And this despite the fact that only a handful of the total number of trophies will be awarded Sunday night, beginning at 6 p.m. on KSHB, Channel 41. The "creative" Emmys already were handed out in a ceremony that was condensed to one hour and aired Friday on TV Land, a cable channel most Kansas Citians don't get. Imagine: 60 trophies in 60 minutes. Sunday's broadcast will hand out 28 trophies. You could give them all away in an hour and still have time for a rendition of "You're Checkin' in (A Musical Tribute to the Betty Ford Center)" from "The Simpsons," this year's winner in the best music and lyrics category. As for nominations, the other networks are fussing again over HBO. This time it's over HBO's decision to enter "From the Earth to the Moon" in the miniseries category instead of the drama series category. Twelve episodes of the $ 60 million Tom Hanks-produced space odyssey were made, more than the total output of some dramas last season. The networks claim HBO has an unfair advantage over them. Actors in HBO movies can swear and take off their clothes. HBO spends big bucks at Emmy time, loading up academy members' VCRs with fancy "for your consideration" videos. They have a point. In the miniseries category, for instance, my choice would be "George Wallace" for TNT, featuring Gary Sinise's stunning portrayal of the title character. But "Wallace" likely doesn't stand a chance against "From the Earth to the Moon." And HBO's crowd of nominees in the TV-movie category (this year three out of five, last year four out of five) always seems to be one too many. This year, the academy nominated HBO's dreary adaptation of "A Bright Shining Lie," a movie that managed to reduce Neil Sheehan's prize-winning book about military intrigues in the Vietnam War to a sordid tale of John Paul Vann's sex life. On the other hand, looking back over the HBO-winning films over the years, the academy has shown pretty good judgment. Past Emmys have gone to "Miss Evers' Boys," "Truman," "Indictment: The McMartin Trial," "And the Band Played On" and "Barbarians at the Gate." This year, if the voters choose wisely, they'll pick "Don King: Only in America" and reward Ving Rhames' thoroughly entertaining performance as the colorful boxing promoter. The drama and comedy categories each have one new nominee this year. "Ally McBeal" takes the place of "Mad About You" in Best Comedy, with Calista Flockhart nominated for Best Actress in a Comedy, a category with previous winner Helen Hunt and sentimental favorite Ellen DeGeneres in it. And "The Practice" makes the first of what could well be several appearances in Best Drama. Both shows are from producer David E. Kelley, who seems to be on track to succeed Steven Bochco as Emmy's darling. Kelley has already taken home plenty of hardware from his earlier series "Picket Fences."

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C-SPAN2 expands its coverage of literature and literary events to the entire weekend when "Book TV" launches today. Beginning with the author-interview hour "Booknotes," the junior channel from Washington has continued to add lectures and seminars featuring authors and journalists discussing their works and the practice of writing. Now Saturdays and Sundays will be devoted to book talk all day - provided the U.S. Senate doesn't call an emergency session. Also tonight, the season premiere of "Cops" at 7 on Channel 4.

Remote patrol

The creators of "Murphy Brown" launch the execrable "Living in Captivity" at 7 tonight on Channel 4. This unpleasant race-relations comedy features a successful black deejay (Dondre T. Whitfield) who moves into the suburbs and encounters the local muffler king and resident bigot, Carmine Santucci (Lenny Venito). Fox wants us to believe that Carmine is "a cross between Archie Bunker and Al Bundy," but Archie and Al were more lovable, probably because they had smaller incomes. A spineless writer (Matthew Letscher) and his social-climber wife (Melinda McGraw) are the neighbors. Save your energy for tonight's "Millennium" at 8, an amusing repeat in which four devils dressed as grumpy old men sit around a doughnut shop and talk about Frank Black (Lance Henriksen).

Public access TV? Not anymore in KC Time Warner takeover results in loss of last community-oriented outlet

Here's one channel that won't be coming to Time Warner Cable anytime soon: ours.

When Time Warner Cable took over TCI of Overland Park's operations Aug. 31, few people seemed to notice, or care, that it shut down TCI's Channel 15B, the last attempt by an area cable company to produce community-oriented TV shows.

Public access television - TV by the viewers and for the viewers - hasn't been heard from much around here since the early 1980s, when hundreds of volunteers learned to operate cameras, run control boards and edit video at American Cablevision's $ 275,000 public access facilities. They created shows that made a point rather than a profit, shows as unpretentious as their titles: "The Elderly," "Getting Help," "Women in Jazz." Along with millions of others across the country, these public access pioneers thought that TV, once the great isolator of Americans, might be used to knit communities together.

And in hundreds of other communities that idea continues to find a home. But not here. Cyd Slayton, who directed American Cablevision's community programs in 1980 and 1981, remembers staying up countless nights with producers, shooting and editing tape. "These volunteers were so excited about the ability to raise community issues on television, without pay, without even recognition," Slayton says. Viewers could watch art students creating video montages, physicians lecturing on health care, senior citizens chatting about aging.

But locally and nationally, the novelty began to wear off. Interest in American Cablevision's public access channel in Kansas City already had faded 10 years ago when a hate group showed up wanting to do a show. Then-councilman Emanuel Cleaver led a charge to take the channel off the air. It didn't entirely succeed, but later, as mayor, Cleaver saw to it that public access was written out of the city's cable franchise.

"I liken it to the Internet," says Carol Rothwell, the longtime public affairs director for American Cablevision, which joined with TCI of Overland Park and is now called Time Warner Cable. "People get so excited - 'Oh, let's get on the Web. Let's get e-mail. ' Then they get bored and move onto something else. The idea had its time, but that was in the '70s, possibly the '80s."

Meanwhile, in the '90s and about a two-hour drive west, it's a different story. In Salina, Kan., a city of 43,000, public access is more than an experiment in cable. It's the one TV station residents can call their own. Access Salina airs at least seven hours of programs every night. More than 100 volunteers this year will produce hundreds of hours of new shows, from talk to performance to religious to the eclectic.

On a Wednesday evening you might find Eloise Lynch and her crew of seniors doing a live broadcast. Her program, "Oh Say," is the kind of community-service talk show a typical commercial TV station would hide in some early-Sunday-morning time slot. On Access Salina, it airs in prime time. "I can't believe Kansas City doesn't have a community access station," the show's director, John Chalmers, says when told the news. "You could have a better station than any of the commercial stations there."

It's easy to point to the disparity between media-rich Kansas City and media-thin Salina, which has no local network affiliates and receives all its television from Topeka and Kansas City. But the most crucial difference between the two cities may be organizational. Kansas City's public access facility was owned by the cable company. Salina, like many cities with successful public access, set up a nonprofit entity to run its channel. Access Salina doesn't take the heat when there is a cable outage or rates go up. And since it essentially acts like any other nonprofit arts group, recruiting actively in the community and building good will, it has been able to weather the storms caused by controversial shows.

That didn't happen in Kansas City in 1988 when a local white supremacist group announced its plans to create a public access show on American Cablevision. After Cleaver led a 9-2 City Council vote to kill public access, he declared that Kansas City had put itself "on a mountain of visibility because we dare to say 'no.' " He was right.

To this day the tale of Kansas City is taught in public access training seminars across the country as a case in how not to handle controversy. "It wasn't the Klan that was the problem. It was the well-meaning councilmen who are African-Americans like me," says Anthony Riddle, who directs New York City's vast public access facility. "You don't want to stop the Ku Klux Klan from speaking. You want to stop them from setting up paramilitary camps in the woods."

"Intellectually, I agree with that kind of lofty reasoning," Mayor Cleaver says now. "But there are still many, many individuals who need only mild encouragement to release their racist attitudes on an unsuspecting public."

Kansas City still has a government channel which, unlike public access, has flourished, thanks in part to $ 400,000 in new equipment from the cable company. And as Rothwell points out, it's not like you can't still produce a show for Time Warner. There are, however, a few catches: You'll have to pay for the airtime. The show will air on Time Warner's Channel 4 when infomercials aren't running. The cable company may demand you take out the same $ 1 million insurance policy it requires of the infomercial makers. And because Time Warner's studios aren't open to the public, you'll have to provide equipment and a place to tape.

Remarkably, a few local producers still turn out shows despite these obstacles. Perhaps the most ambitious are Taju and Aquilla Tubbs, who have now begun airing a daily hour of Kansas City jazz and blues. It's seen on Time Warner's Channel 4 at the untimely hour of 8 a.m.

The irony is that the Tubbses - whose show promotes the integrated local music scene - have to pay to be on TV because the city decided a free channel posed a threat to racial harmony. Taju Tubbs says he has sponsors lined up to pay him to do his shows full time (and, he says, Time Warner dropped the insurance requirement after he protested). But he's done public access TV in other cities, including Oakland, Calif., and Atlanta, and wishes it could be done here as well.

"If the people don't have a means of expression, then we're letting the corporations speak for us," Tubbs says. "Then we don't have what this blues and jazz show is all about - freedom of spirit."

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"Into the Rising Sun," adventurer-filmmaker Luc Cuyvers' retracing of the East-West trade routes , continues at 9 tonight on Channel 19. Part 3 highlights the journeys of Vasco de Gama, as chronicled by one of the Portuguese explorer's crew members. Sumptuous murals of the Cape of Good Hope and east African coast are juxtaposed with readings from the centuries-old diary that follows de Gama into India and launches the age of Indian colonialism. Also tonight, "Biography" (7 p.m. on A&E) profiles radio rascal Don Imus, who'll air his morning show live from the Gem Theater Sept. 17.

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The Fox network unveils its new shows this week, starting with "Costello" (7:30 p.m. on Channel 4, after the season premiere of "King of the Hill"), the latest attempt to float a sitcom starring comedian Sue Costello (left). (Don't remember the previous attempts? They never made air.) No stereotype about women, relationships or psychotherapy is too primordial for this mean, South Boston-based comedy about a working-class gal turning her back on her working-class life. "Costello" might better be titled "Ill Will Hunting. " Also tonight, "Inside Story" (8 p.m. on A&E) revisits the twister that flattened parts of Nashville earlier this year.

Take note

WDAF's late-night shuffle Now that "The Magic Hour" is off the air for good, WDAF, Channel 4, is unveiling a fall lineup of late-night programs that look to give KMBC's three-headed monster a scare. "MASH" repeats, organized by theme, will air from 10:30 p.m. to midnight for two weeks, beginning tonight. On Sept. 21, "MASH" will move to a single showing at 11:30 (putting it opposite "Cheers" on KMBC) and two episodes a night of "Friends" will air beginning at 10:30. WDAF general manager Stan Knott said that last spring's cliffhanger wedding episode, starring Jennifer Aniston and David Schwimmer - will air shortly before the situation is resolved in the fall premiere. After midnight, WDAF airs "Real TV," a repeat of the 10 p.m. news, "Cops" and the new justice on the block, "Judge Joe."

Heigh-ho, heigh-ho, it's off to work for PBS

The Wall Street roller coaster has been America's hottest ride this summer. But don't be seduced by the excitement: The economy is still carried on the shoulders of 100 million working men and women. Fittingly, we observe that fact today with a new installment of "Livelyhood," the lighthearted but earnest PBS series about the American work force. This hour the focus is on people who take the matter of employment into their own hands, either through solo entrepreneurship or by joining with co-workers to buy their company. Hard hats off to Channel 19 for airing this installment of "Livelyhood" in prime time (8 p.m., repeating at midnight), and a friendly blast of the shift-change whistle for showing encores of the first two "Livelyhood" installments at 1 and 2 p.m. Comedian Will Durst, the show's amiable host, introduces us to a fast-talking franchiser who's building a chain of portable car-wash businesses; a Hopi Indian who quit her high-powered career to install solar energy units on the reservation; a cab company that seems to be a magnet for nonconformists; and a private eye whose offices are 200 feet below ground level in a mine shaft. Entrepreneurship is a funny industry; it's perfect for people who don't fit in, yet to really succeed you need to know your clients almost better than they know themselves. Despite a high failure rate, 22 million people work for themselves, and more than 10,000 businesses are employee-owned. Durst, who by his own admission has held more than 100 jobs, is one of them. In one amusing segment, he works the night shift at a convenience store, part of it cleverly filmed through a security camera. "There's a lot of pieces that make up the American dream," Durst says. "But the chunk that gives us control of our own destiny, well, that might be the most enticing one." In the show's second half-hour, the emphasis shifts to employee-owned businesses and takes on a more serious and conventional tone. A textile mill's existence is threatened by corporate cutter Al Dunlap, leading to an employee buyout. A profit-sharing plan at a Montana aluminum plant goes sour when management doesn't uphold its end of the deal. Throughout, the writing and production are superb. Why PBS doesn't just yank a "Frontline" repeat every month or two and put this show on instead is beyond me. It's the most original thing public TV has put on in years. "Livelyhood" 8 tonight Channel 19

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"Monday Night Football" returns at a new time of 7 p.m. on Channel 9, one hour earlier than before. This may be the first TV show with two Boomers, as former quarterback Boomer Esiason steps into the announcers' booth and Frank Gifford joins Chris "Boomer" Berman on the pregame and halftime reports. Esiason and Dan Dierdorf will be expected to joust good-naturedly without stepping on Al Michaels' play-by-play. Gifford and Berman will originate their show from the new ESPN theme restaurant in Baltimore.