Vinick Sways Voters, er, Viewers on 'West Wing'

"West Wing" producers and NBC look for a way to create "West Wing" event programming during the November sweeps to help goose ratings on the show, which has struggled mightily since being shipped to Sunday. How about a live debate? Great idea, they say, though Smits hasn't done much live performing and doesn't do well with improv, as he himself noted during a pre-debate phone news conference. How hard can it be, execs ask? Sure, it's live, but it'll be scripted and we'll give Smits lots of heroic lines such as: "What did liberals do that was so offensive to the Republican Party? I'll tell you what they did. Liberals got women the right to vote. Liberals got African Americans the right to vote. Liberals created Social Security and lifted millions of elderly people out of poverty. Liberals ended segregation. . . . So when you try to hurl that label at my feet, 'liberal,' as if it's something dirty, something to be ashamed of, something to run away from, it won't work, senator, because I will pick it up, and I will wear that label as a badge of honor."

Debate: Alda debones Smits.

Morning after: Numbers not so great and young viewers now strong for Alda to get presidential role next season. Great sweeps stunt turns into NBC headache.

Zogby rep Fritz Wenzel told The TV Column yesterday that the poll results show Smits "is a better scripted actor" and that Alda's Vinick "has a relatability" that Santos lacks.

Vinick "did much better than Santos" in the debate, Wenzel said, but even he was surprised that "there was so much movement in the numbers" in Vinick's favor.

"The other example we've had of an actor in the White House was right along the same lines as Vinick last night. Ronald Reagan was called the Great Communicator for a good reason. He was able to relate to people and not so much issue-to-issue but person-to-person."

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TV years later, Connie Chung and Maury Povich have brought back from the dead their plans to do a show together.

This time for MSNBC, Saturday mornings, for 30 minutes. Starting Jan. 7.

MSNBC officially announced yesterday that the as-yet-unnamed Chung-Povich show will touch on "everything from politics to pop culture," "cut through the spin and get to the truth," "explore all sides of a story as only two people who have been married for 20 years can do" and "leave no cliche unused."

Okay, I made up that last one.

Chung and Povich tried before to launch a half-hour news and information series in 1996 with the then-new and ever-so-hot DreamWorks SKG, whose partners included the too-hip-to-live Jeffrey Katzenberg, David Geffen and Steven Spielberg. It was announced with great fanfare, but the syndicated show died before it was born, the victim of widespread lack of interest.

Nearly a decade later, according to a source with knowledge of the situation who did not want his name used because he has bills to pay and needs to keep his job in order to accomplish that, Povich's reps brought up the Chung-Povich idea earlier this year when negotiating his new contract to continue his syndicated show for NBC Universal Domestic Television Distribution. Povich's show is ranked fourth among talk shows, behind "Oprah," "Dr. Phil" and "Live With Regis and Kelly."

MSNBC President Rick Kaplan, who can sometimes be quite sane, yesterday told the New York Times that Povich and Chung are the Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn of TV.

For those not old enough to have met Hepburn or Tracy, she is the chick played by Cate Blanchett in the Martin Scorsese flick "The Aviator" who was the mistress of Leonardo DiCaprio and an actress born with a silver spoon in her mouth; Tracy was the guy Blanchett left DiCaprio for not long before DiCaprio started locking himself naked in his projection room and saving his urine in bottles. On-screen, Hepburn and Tracy defined witty, urbane, pretty and enormously talented; off-screen they were an item for a gazillion years, though Tracy was married to someone else.

In yesterday's news release, Povich and Chung did their best Tracy & Hepburn:

Povich: "It has taken me the last two decades to establish myself nationally as 'Maury Povich.' Something tells me I'm about to become 'Mr. Chung' once again."

Chung: "Maury's been on my case to get out of the house and get back to work, but I didn't want to until he came up with this idea. The question is not whether the program will last. . . . The question is 'Can our marriage survive?!' "