THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, March 17, 1996 TAG: 9603150075
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: LARRY BONKO
LENGTH: Medium: 85 lines
THERE WAS a crew from NBC in Norfolk the other day to do a story for ``Dateline'' about the surge in the popularity of figure skating.
The ice is on fire these days.
Chances are good that some of the Scope footage will be seen on ``Dateline'' tonight at 7 when producer Tim Gorin's piece on Olympic gold medalist Ekaterina Gordeeva unfolds. Her husband and partner, Serge Grinkov, recently died of a heart attack while skating.
And come Tuesday on ``Dateline,'' there will be more figure skating and perhaps another glimpse of Scope's Nervi dome under which the ``Stars on Ice'' performed recently.
Starting tonight, ``Dateline'' grows to four hours a week, and tonight the TV magazine that has become one of NBC's big money makers takes on ``60 Minutes'' on CBS.
Watch out, Mike and Morley.
NBC says it's come to the Sunday at 7 p.m. time slot to kick butt. ``I'm pretty confident that we can be successful,'' said ``Dateline'' executive producer Neal Shapiro when he met with TV writers in Los Angeles not long ago.
CBS has basketball on the schedule tonight - the men's NCAA tournament - so it's a pretty good bet that the sign-on of ``60 Minutes'' will be delayed. That's an advantage for ``Dateline.''
When the NBC brass scheduled ``Dateline'' for a fourth night on Sunday, there were signs that the good, gray ``60 Minutes'' was losing its hold on the audience at 7. The show, now in its 28th season, fell out of the Top 10.
Lately, ``60 Minutes'' came back to finish seventh in the latest Nielsens. A new segment featuring social critics Stanley Crouch, P.J. O'Rourke and Molly Ivins will soon appear to liven up some of the tick, tick, ticks in the CBS hour.
``Dateline, Schmateline,'' says ``60 Minutes'' producer Don Hewitt.
Nobody is running scared at CBS.
At ``Dateline,'' you can't blame co-anchors Jane Pauley and Stone Phillips for beginning to feel like hostages to primetime. ``To be quite honest, I wonder if we can do this show four nights a week and still have time for any kind of lives,'' said Phillips when he met the TV press.
At that same press conference, Pauley said she will not sacrifice her family life just to be on primetime one more hour. ``I know how much energy I have. I know how much time I can afford away from my family. I am not shy about saying, `I can't do this.' I won't shrink from this challenge, but I won't do `Dateline' at my family's expense.''
Pauley likes to refer to herself as Duncan the Wonder Horse because her career at NBC has had a long run without a break - a marathon. There were all those years on ``Today,'' ``Real Life With Jane Pauley,'' substituting for Tom Brokaw on the nightly news and lately ``Dateline'' three times a week.
``The secret of my endurance has been my ability to conserve my resources,'' she said.
Producer Shapiro will give his ``Dateline'' co-anchors a breather once in a while. He'll call on Brokaw, Katie Couric, Bryant Gumbel and Maria Shriver to step in, mostly on Friday nights.
``I was told in the past that we couldn't do two and three shows with just one staff. We did it. And I'm confident we can just as easily do four shows.''
Will the Sunday ``Dateline'' be stronger than the three others because it is going up against ``60 Minutes''? Will Shapiro save his best for Sunday, use on that show the ``gets,'' as producers call stories the competition does not have?
``We'll put some good stuff on Sunday,'' he said. ``Stories about family relationships, about discipling children and issues involving education may play very well on Sunday because that's a night when families watch together.''
Nothing like that on the first Sunday ``Dateline.'' There is the piece on skating and a two-part report on how not to run an emergency room.
Look out, ``60 Minutes,'' says Phillips.
``If they weren't worried about competition from us, would they be canceling summer vacations and bringing in the new elements?''
It wouldn't surprise me if on Sunday's ``60 Minutes'' Andy Rooney has something to say about the challenge from Shapiro, Phillips and Duncan the Wonder Horse. ILLUSTRATION: Color photo
NBC
JANE PAULEY
by CNB