That's Entertainment? E.T. Gets a New Challenger, and Show-Biz Fluff Triumphs Again

By Richard Zoglin

Journalists are not known as a self-effacing bunch, but for flagrant self- promotion, there is nothing quite like TV's entertainment-news shows. "Now an Extra exclusive!" boasts the latest entrant in the field, hyping a visit with Michael Douglas on the set of Disclosure. "Only on Entertainment Tonight," trumpets its competitor, "can you get an exclusive look" at the new Star Trek movie. "You won't see it anywhere else . . ." "Now, only on Extra!" -- the reporting coups come faster than commercials during the Super Bowl.

Well, somebody's got to get people's attention. Entertainment news on TV is hopping as never before. There's an entire cable channel devoted to it, at least four daily "newscasts" cover it, and a host of more traditional outlets -- from the network morning shows to the prime-time TV newsmagazines -- are paying increasing attention to it. And there's a war going on: between Entertainment Tonight, the bubbly, 13-year-old show distributed by Paramount TV to 167 stations, and Extra -- The Entertainment Magazine, a newcomer from Warner Bros. television, which started early this month on 125 outlets.

Not that the shows' producers will acknowledge that anything as undignified as a battle is taking place. The Extra folks are positioning themselves as a companion, not a competitor, to Entertainment Tonight. E.T.'s producers, meanwhile, barely admit to noticing their upstart rival. This despite the fact that E.T. has introduced a new set, jazzed up its visuals to match the more frenzied (and supposedly younger-oriented) style of Extra, and now plasters its logo on the air constantly, to make sure viewers don't forget which show they're watching.

E.T.'s style is hard to mistake. After a flirtation with harder-edged coverage a few years ago, the show has dropped almost all pretense of being anything but an arm of the Hollywood publicity machine. It fills the air time with goggle-eyed "behind-the-scenes" visits to Hollywood sets, fawning interviews with stars, and other fluff indistinguishable from advertising. Sometimes it is advertising. An "exclusive first look" at a new movie on E.T. (last week's story on the new Schwarzenegger comedy Junior, for instance) often turns out to be nothing but the studio-made trailer for the film. E.T.'s anchors and reporters cozy up to stars like old friends; they're all part of the same world. Last week E.T. visited a recording session for a new album of lullabies -- sung by none other than co-host Mary Hart. E.T. reporters want to be loved by stars; they want to be stars.

Rather than fill the obvious niche that E.T. has left open -- covering real news -- Extra has done the seemingly impossible: it has made Entertainment Tonight look like journalism. The new show has a pair of hosts, Arthel Neville + and Dave Nemeth, who giggle and banter even more shamelessly than E.T.'s anchors, and the show seems to work harder to hype even less. For a two-part interview with Sharon Stone, Extra devoted more time to teasing the story (countless shots of the infamous leg-crossing scene from Basic Instinct) than to Stone's perky but paltry "revelations." The show has closely copied E.T.'s format, but it can't match the original for sheer doggedness. In its coverage of the Emmy awards, Extra followed around one nominee, NYPD Blue's Nicholas Turturro, on the day of the awards ceremony. E.T. did the same thing with nine nominees.

Is this all TV viewers want from entertainment news? Tabloid shows such as Hard Copy and Inside Edition, for all their voyeuristic overkill, have demonstrated that there is an audiencefor news about celebrities that isn't publicity pap. CNN's Showbiz Today, in its somewhat plodding plain-vanilla style, at least picks up on real trends and occasionally flirts with controversy. (During the recent influx of Cuban refugees, only Showbiz sought the reaction of such Cuban-American entertainers as Gloria Estefan and Andy Garcia.)

For a brisk, not too smarmy recap of the day's entertainment news, the E! cable channel's little noticed E! News Daily gives the most bang for the buck. The show last Tuesday, for example, covered everything important that its rivals did (the death of songwriter Jule Styne, Katie Couric's interview with O.J. Simpson's grown children). But it had several other newsy tidbits too, from Elizabeth Montgomery's suit for $5 million in residuals from Bewitched to a piece on the pollution problems caused by Woodstock. E! of course has plenty of publicity fluff elsewhere; it devotes whole shows, not just segments, to behind-the-scenes reports from movie sets. But at least its hosts don't moonlight by singing lullabies.

With reporting by Tara Weingarten/Los Angeles