FOX Offers Another Late-Night Contender

[Zoneboy]

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Spike Feresten is about to be anointed, more or less, the great night hope for Fox — late night, that is.

The move has not attracted much notice, not amid the big late-night doings over at NBC the last two weeks, with Jay Leno announcing he was moving to prime time.

But the Fox network, which has tried before (with Chevy Chase, Joan Rivers and something called The Wilton North Report) but has never had a successful regular player in the weeknight late-television comedy game, is about to take at least a baby step in that direction, with Feresten doing the stepping.

Few fans of late-night television are likely to be aware of this yet, largely because most of them have little awareness of Feresten (pronounced FEHR-a-sten). But that has been part of the plan at Fox.

Three years ago the network quietly slipped onto the air a show hosted by Feresten, a former comedy writer for shows like Late Night With David Letterman and Seinfeld (where he made his reputation as the author of the memorable Soup Nazi episode).

Fox placed his half-hour show — which celebrated its generic status by calling itself Talkshow With Spike Feresten — on Saturday nights at 11 p.m., after the long-running but not terribly high-profile Fox late-night entry Mad TV.

That, along with the imposing competition from Saturday Night Live on NBC, has allowed Feresten to work out many of the typical late-night kinks in relative obscurity.

All that is about to change. Last month Fox announced that it was canceling Mad TV in January and that in its place it would expand Feresten’s show to an hour and give it a six-week trial run, sliding it up to 10 p.m., starting on Jan. 17.

As Feresten himself put it, “We’re going to see what I’m made of.”

Fox executives think they know, or at least are beginning to know.

Kevin Reilly, the president of Fox Entertainment, said the network definitely sees Feresten’s six-week experiment at 10 p.m. as a trial run for a future upgrade into the weeknight late-television battle.

“We want to find out if Spike can be a piece of late-night business for us,” Reilly said. “He’s been in the bullpen for us, getting better and better.”

If relatively few television viewers have noticed — Feresten has been averaging only about 1.3 million viewers per show, about a quarter of the number for the big late-night hosts — Talkshow has been slowly adding to its reputation, thanks to a series of popular clips on the Web site Hulu (hulu.com), owned by Fox and NBC.

One sketch from the show, about a woman in her 90s trying to figure out how to switch over from analog to the coming digital television signals, has proved to be enduringly popular, regularly ranking as the most-viewed clip on this rapidly growing site.

And Feresten has been trying to polish his own performance, this year adding an opening monologue. “It just looks right to see the host of the show come out at the beginning of the show and stand up and be funny,” he said. “I think the show was missing that in the first two seasons.”

Those were not really seasons as most weeknight late television shows define them. Feresten did only 16 shows in the first season, and because he taped them for use long in advance, they had to be what he calls “evergreen,” meaning they lacked the topicality that makes most late-night shows work.

And the second season was undercut by the writers’ strike. Only this season, he said, “have we and Fox figured out the show.” That has meant adding the monologue and more clips and sketches, to go along with the standard desk, couch and guests.

One moment that Feresten mentioned, which he said took advantage of his relative obscurity, was at this year’s Democratic National Convention.

“Generally, people have no idea who I am,” he said. So he was able to pose as a reporter from the Fox News Channel and ask delegates outside the convention questions intended to enrage them. For example, “Don’t you believe it’s really not torture if we’re doing it to Muslims?”

“I would keep going,” he said, “until I saw them making a fist.”

This was consistent, Feresten added, with the network’s marching orders. “Fox wants us to be edgy and out there,” he said.

In the six-week tryout beginning in January, he noted, that approach will be in evidence: “We’re going to be taking our best segments and turning the volume up a bit.”

The shows will still be taped in advance, but on Thursdays, two days before the Saturday air date, offering a chance to be more topical.

Some staff members, especially writers (the show started with four and now has 10), have been added to beef up the hour-long shows.

One thing Feresten says he knows he will be doing is repeating his Fox News impersonation at the presidential inauguration.

And if he does well in this relief performance? Reilly of Fox noted that with Leno, the late-night leader, leaving late night for prime time in September, the time period “might be more take-able.” But, he added, “Not this fall.”

As for Feresten, does he believe he can turn up the volume — and effort — enough to transform his show into a regular weeknight entry?

“Absolutely,” he said. “We think we can represent the Fox brand: scrappy and loud.”

[ryan423]

Haven't they already given George Lopez a talk show? That was the word a few months ago. What's happening with that?

[70s show watcher]

ive always liked spike and his show good luck to him