News Nuns And Media Monks

By MARGARET CARLSON

Al Franken's comic genius is that even though he's made it to prime time, he will never seem ready for it. In NBC's new comedy Lateline (Tuesdays, 9:30 p.m. E.T.), a spoof of Nightline, the Saturday Night Live veteran (Remember "I'm good enough, I'm smart enough, and doggone it, people like me"?) plays the indefatigable correspondent Al Freundlich as a mixture of Jeff Greenfield's best-boy-in-class earnestness and Sam Donaldson's bouncy intensity. In this week's premiere, under the mistaken impression that he's replacing narcissistic anchor Pearce McKenzie (appealingly pompous Robert Foxworth), Freundlich orders up the Pope as his first guest and decides to jettison his longtime producer Gale (Megyn Price). He presents his Machiavellian decision as a favor to her. "You work here, what? 9 a.m. to midnight. When you go home, who's waiting to hear about your day? A cat. You are what the guys in our business refer to as a 'news nun.' You may hate me right now, but someday you'll understand that I care less about my own shot than I did about your having a life."

At a special Washington screening of the series, that scene got a big laugh. Well, what do you expect from an audience of news nuns (and monks) and the politicians they cover? To expand the show's appeal to normal people, Franken recruited his old friend John Markus, who won an Emmy for his six years as writer and co-executive producer of The Cosby Show, to be his co-writer and executive producer. Franken, who knew a lot about political humor (he's the author of the best-selling Rush Limbaugh Is a Big Fat Idiot and Other Observations) but nothing about the half-hour format, says: "This would have been a nightmare without John." After three years of work, they're so close and eat so many meals together that Franken knows what to order for Markus and how to tease out his life story ("John, tell how you enrolled at Stanford because you thought it was near Hollywood"). To perfect the new show's details, Markus and Franken became flies on the wall at Nightline. "It's amazing how much access you can get when you bring a dozen cappuccinos and a box of muffins," says Franken.

The immersion paid off. The atmospherics are right, down to the heraldic theme music, the swooping graphics and the story meetings ("Get me a show, people. Anything but same-sex marriage"). By keeping the pol-vs.-pol scenes brief, Markus has made the show specific enough to Nightline to satirize the genre but general enough to life to tap the comic angst of the human condition. Watch, and you'll see one from each of the major office types: the tightly coiled executive producer (played by Miguel Ferrer of Twin Peaks), who humors Freundlich with drunken promises of future anchordom written on a cocktail napkin; the booker (Sanaa Lathan), who reports that the Pontiff is unavailable but she has on hold the guy who shot him. There's Gale, who ridicules Freundlich's melodramatic pauses but turns down an on-air spot with another network because it is not as dedicated to journalism as he is. And there's Mona (Catherine Lloyd Burns), McKenzie's personal assistant, so toadying that she wears a lint brush around her neck.

While there's little sharing and caring, no cliff-hanging weddings or births, Markus does write in some heart, which he occasionally hangs on Freundlich's sleeve. After Freundlich realizes that his napkin is just a napkin, not a contract on watermark bond, he limps back to his grotty office, his dachshund face hanging in folds, imploring Gale, whom he had abandoned in his triumph, to comfort him in his defeat. Egocentric anchorman McKenzie has enough conscience to forgo a date and honor a promise to appear at a charity event to raise money for the Jewish Burn Center ("You don't have to be Jewish, you just have to be burned"). In Gale, Markus has created a near perfect balance of intellectual armor and good-heartedness without the cloying, annoying affectations of Ally McBeal.

Regretting that reality outpaces satire--the series wrapped before Monicagate--Markus and Franken took a full-page ad in the New York Times this week in the form of an open letter to independent counsel Kenneth Starr. "Dear Ken: Please subpoena us. We know things," it boasted. Oh, to do the perp walk up the steps of the federal courthouse. That could get this richly rendered comedy Seinfeld's spot.