THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Thursday, November 2, 1995 TAG: 9511020060
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: LARRY BONKO
LENGTH: Long : 103 lines
IN ``NEW YORK NEWS'' on CBS, editors weep when they read Jack Reilly's columns because they are so good. On this newspaper, editors weep when they read my columns because of all the words I misspell.
Reilly, played by Gregory Harrison, dresses better than any columnist I've ever seen. Come to think of it, Columbo dresses better than any columnist I've ever seen.
In ``New York News,'' the newsroom is as noisy as the assembly line at the Ford plant. Everyone is so intense.
In real life, newsrooms quieted down a great deal when computer keyboards replaced typewriters. As for intensity in a modern newsroom, I can't remember the last time I saw a reporter dash up to the boss and say that he or she expects to be on Page 1 every day. It happens all the time on ``New York News.''
And I never heard of a reporter spending $268 for a working lunch. Bossy gossip columnist Nan Chase (played by Madeline Kahn) gets away with it all the time on ``New York News.'' Where's her notebook? Her tape recorder? Where is anything to help her round up the quotes she needs for her column?
``New York News'' makes its greatest leap from fact to fiction by involving the newspaper's reporters, editors and photographers in the stories they cover. They move from the press box to the playing field.
They do such outrageous things:
A black photographer considers murder to avenge deaths that took place decades ago in the sometimes bloody birth of the civil rights movement. He dashes from the newsroom to confront an aging segregationist.
When columnist Angela Villanova (played by Melina Kanakaredes) isn't pretending to be a 911 operator, she's hip-deep in a controversy that involves an ex-con returning to his old neighborhood. Or she's mixing it up with a deadbeat dad - taking his crime of neglect personally.
Why doesn't Reilly interview Villanova? She'd make a heck of a column. And why isn't Kanakaredes better at playing a reporter?
She's been here before. She was a reporter on ``NYPD Blue.''
``I've done some research,'' she said. Do more, Melina.
And there's one more thing about ``New York News'' that gripes me. The reporters on the tabloid, The New York Reporter, often get scooped by television reporters.
Now that is fantasy.
``New York News'' is to journalism what ``ER'' is to emergency-room medicine and ``Murder One'' is to lawyering. It takes the every-day grind of the job, brings it up to something just under warp speed and puts a thin layer of gloss on it.
Don't expect us to tell it like is, say the producers. ``Do you want us to show reporters taking notes? Making calls?'' they ask. That would be boring.
``There is a difference between reality and television. On this program, we are doing entertainment,'' said Michelle Ashord, the series' head writer and one of three executive producers.
She spent exactly a week hanging around a New York City newspaper before she wrote the first script.
Joe Morton, who came to the cast late to be Mitch Cotter, The Reporter's managing editor, closed his meeting with the Television Critics Association in Los Angeles recently by inviting us to talk about our bosses in the newsrooms.
Tell me all about them, he asked.
Morton says he plays The Reporter's managing editor as ``a man consumed by angst and anxieties.''
That's the one thing they did get right on ``New York News.''
Senior editors are bundles of anxieties.
Kahn said she never gave a second thought to the reporters who covered her on the show business beat until CBS signed her to play a gossip columnist.
``I used to run the other way when I saw the reporters coming,'' she said. ``I've come to realize that these people are there to do a job while working at all hours of the night. Now I find that reporters intrigue me.''
And many others, obviously. With ``New York News,'' there are almost a dozen shows in primetime that have at their core the business of reaching people by radio, TV, newspapers or magazines.
In its impossible time slot - up against ``Seinfeld'' on NBC - ``New York News'' has but a 6 percent share of the audience, finishing No. 73 in recent ratings. CBS will put the show on again next Thursday at 9, and then it will disappear from the schedule until who knows when.
CBS isn't commenting about the series' future.
As a TV show about putting out a daily newspaper, ``New York News'' has yet to produce any newsroom personalities as likable as Joe Rossi and Billie Newman of ``Lou Grant,'' now seen in reruns on A&E, or as irresistible as Lois and Clark in The Daily Planet newsroom over on ABC.
Mary Tyler Moore, America's television sweetheart, is mellowing of late in her role as The New York Reporter's editor-in-chief, Louise ``The Dragon'' Felcott. But she has a way to go to be even half as appealing as that old prune of a publisher, Margaret Pynchon, on ``Lou Grant.''
That is precisely how Moore wants it, to be a dragon lady. ``I have decided that I will no longer play characters with whom the audience is familiar,'' she said. ``It does not interest me to play very nice, very likable, somewhat naive, vulnerable, adorable ladies.''
This Mary Tyler Moore is not the Mary Tyler Moore who in the 1970s worked in the WJM-TV newsroom and turned the world on with her smile. ILLUSTRATION: Color photo
CBS
Mary Tyler Moore stars as the editor-in-chief and Joe Morton as
managing editor of a newspaper in ``New York News.''
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