Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: MONDAY, July 23, 1990                   TAG: 9007210198
SECTION: EXTRA                    PAGE: 3   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: TOM SHALES
DATELINE: LOS ANGELES                                LENGTH: Medium

ANOTHER STEP IN THE DE-NEWSING OF THE NEWS

"Real Life," which airs again Tuesday, is a mostly lighthearted and largely lightheaded look not at the state of the nation or the woes of the world but at we, ourselves and us. Though technically a news-division product, "Real Life" is not Real News. It's You News, the kind that tries not to tell you something but to make you feel good about yourself.

It's more marketing than journalism.

With shows like this, NBC News continues to back away from the mandate to inform and enlighten and concentrate instead on the soothing stroke and the friendly mollycoddle. The point of "Real Life" is to comfort us in our cocoons.

Thus on the premiere, Pauley introduced a monumentally boring piece about overworked couples by telling viewers, "In their stories, you may see a lot of yourself." Is that what we turn on our TV sets to see - a lot of ourselves? Is that all we're curious about anymore? TV news seems to operate on the assumption that it is.

Maybe they're right. The premiere of "Real Life" scored much higher ratings than its competition on the other two networks, which consisted of a "thirtysomething" rerun on ABC and a movie rerun on CBS. Pauley drew a 23 percent share of the available audience, while the other two shows only earned 15's.

No one can say Pauley isn't pleasant, and she comes across pleasantly on the show. But there's a little too much of wanna-be-liked creeping in, the way comics want to be liked when they turn up on talk shows. We already like you, Jane. Let's move on from there.

Her questions to the overworked couples, during the interview segments, were perhaps meant to come off as down-to-earth, but they sounded a little fatuous: "Are you ever tired?" "Is your life out of control?" "Do you feel guilty?" The overworked people seemed so happy to be on camera that they scarcely registered even a groan of complaint.

There was little or nothing in the segment about hard, cold changes in the American economy that have brought this era of two-job households about. If you get into economy stuff, the reasoning must go that viewers will head for the hills or at least the other channels.

The third segment, the only good one on the premiere, was a heartbreaking story about a 25-year-old Annapolis woman, adopted at birth, who set out to find the real mother who had given her away. The mother turned out to be a homeless schizophrenic living on the streets of New York.

Even this moving piece was unnecessarily schmaltzed up, however, partly with Hollywood background music to hype the emotions. We learned that the mother, now indigent and ill, died soon after the reunion with her daughter. "I have a new sense of confidence in who I am," the daughter said, helping the producers supply a transparently happy ending.

"Real Life" is another small step in the de-newsing of the news. CNN recently announced another. Soon viewers of CNN's late news will be able to dial a 900 number and vote on the story of the day they'd most like to see repeated. And CNN will oblige.

To close the first edition of her show, Pauley announced that "every hour in the United States, people eat three acres of pizza," one of the innumerable meaningless statistics the program doled out. Pauley went into "Real Life" looking like nothing could tarnish her golden glow. After just one installment, she's already beginning to look a little green around the gills. Washington Post Writers Group