Mostly it's kitten time. "You're so charrrrmmming," Hewitt blurts out the minute she sits down on a recent show. She looks like she wants to eat Ferguson with a spoon. He appears to be looking for a fork.
So yes, somehow he's charming: handsome in a shopworn and pocky way, at 42; blue-eyed, dark hair askew, deeply dimpled; slouching happily onto the set in a 6-foot-2-inch frame, that, if, say, a skit calls for him to perform a "Flashdance" routine in a ripped sweat shirt, leotard and leg warmers, reveals itself to be a bit thick.
"Some nights I'll be doin' a bit, and I just really wish we could show the last night's show," Craig Ferguson, new host of CBS's "Late, Late Show," says of the hit-or-miss nature of the comedy sketches.
(Kevin Winter -- Getty Images)
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Rogers comes on to talk about a TV movie she's done with Tom Selleck and frankly you could care less, until Ferguson learns that she dated Selleck back in his "Magnum, P.I." days.
"You had him at the top of his game," he says. "He's a pretty hairy man, isn't he?"
"The right amount," Rogers says, and wonders if Ferguson will open his shirt a button or two for a comparison.
"Oh, no, I'm like a dolphin," he says. "I've got nothin' -- I've got the landing strip, and that's it."
He addresses viewers at home as "my lovelies" or, better, calls them "cheeky wee monkeys" and does a regular bit where he pours himself a cup of tea from a proper silver tea set, inviting the audience to ask questions. The show leaps at you -- at 12:35 a.m., an ungodly hour for anyone past their Jesus year, age 33 -- with a jaunty, Electric Light Orchestra-ish theme song ("Mr. Blue Sky" maybe?):
But hang on leave the TV on
And let's do it anyway (hey, hey)
You can always sleep through work tomorrow,
Tomorrow's just your future yesterday.
Growing Pains
Ferguson's ratings are up just slightly from Kilborn's a year ago, to about 1.9 million viewers, and still somewhat below "Late Night With Conan O'Brien" on NBC, which draws 2.5 million. There are odd little pops in Ferguson's first demographic returns -- men over 54, for example, are watching in greater numbers, and so are women that age. (With other spikes in younger female cheeky monkey departments.) Yes, this is just another man in a tailored suit and expensive necktie sitting at a desk with a fake window view of twinkling lights behind him, in a post-post-post-post-Carson era. But it's also some elusive other thing, a lark: "This is a show that's being born on the air," Ferguson says. "There were no trial shows -- this is it, so the comedy is honest-to-goodness birth pains."
CBS really just threw this man on the air, with only two auditions and a few weeks' notice -- a man viewers knew only from his role as Nigel Wick, the unctuous boss on "The Drew Carey Show"; a man some viewers might not literally understand.
To really work, late-late talk shows (12:30 is so very different from 11:30) must feel somehow illicit, but not nasty; smart, but not cerebral or vital; they have to feel like secret entree into the world of adults but also remain childish. They need guests who are either coming or going from fame. They are successful only when they make you feel like a child getting away with impermissible viewing.
