MSNBC fired Phil Donahue recently, a move sadly reminiscent of the lowly 1935 Boston Braves releasing Babe Ruth. Yet Phil can hold his head high; he will always be remembered for perfecting the art of influencing a nation by running up stairs to a television audience with a microphone.
Jesse Ventura, up next and probably last for MSNBC, is the one who should be sweating history. For while Ed Wood needed a generation before he was universally acknowledged as the worst film director ever, Ventura will need to host only a few episodes of his upcoming, oft-delayed national talk show to join Wood as the worst in his new oeuvre.
The latest beneficiaries of Ventura's magical ability to fail upward are those Donahue-firing brutes at MSNBC, who are paying Jesse $2 million a year for . . . no one is sure. And now, programmers at the troubled network have realized they've bought a lox, only months after they were ordered to catch Fox News and CNN by their parent company's angry CEO, even if that meant televising "clowns jumping out of airplanes."
Though playing ringmaster to that kind of geek show might seem a Jesse natural, those programmers who bought him may soon be doing the jumping. MSNBC didn't even bother to call a press conference to announce Jesse's signing; so much for their former forecast that he would lead the resuscitated network.
"It's just one hour," said MSNBC President Erik Sorenson of Jesse's program, underwhelming a reporter after the nonannouncement. "It's like saying, 'The Cincinnati Bengals can get one good football player and win the Super Bowl next season.' "
Jesse himself had to ring his own bell to spread the news, never seemly for a true star. He then wordlessly disappeared, as silently as a Batista out of Cuba. What happened? How had Ventura gone from MSNBC's two-outs-in-the-ninth Casey at the Chat, into whatshisname with "just one hour"? MSNBC executives probably realized they'd immolated themselves during the uncountable fruitless film tests they've run on Jesse over the months, trying to figure out how to package him as the talk show Everyman. Maybe, as MSNBC President Sorenson said, Jesse would host a live show from the megamall. Or maybe Florida. Or maybe California, where Jesse may be moving.
"We have the discussions about audience or no audience, on the road or in a studio, newsmaker interviews or no newsmaker interviews," Sorenson said, leaving out only a scenario where a former professional wrestler becomes governor, then morphs into a flying nun. Meantime, and for the foreseeable future, Ventura's show is lamely on hold, says MSNBC, because an Iraqi war might upset a successful launch.
This looming disaster could have been saved with a little gumshoeing in Minnesota. All somebody in New York had to do was put down their cassettes of Jesse's spontaneously planned gubernatorial sound bites and get a batch of his unintentionally hilarious radio program on KSTP-AM before his campaign. He is still missed by those who liked a bowl of surreal with their coffee each morning. You could tune in certain to hear Jesse desperately trying to kill time with Dada-esque riffs on JFK assassination conspiracies, hemp legalization, and fascistic politicians who make millionaire former wrestlers pay Jet-Ski taxes.
So, disaster looms. Not even Alan Thicke or Pat Sajak's talk shows brought down an entire network. The problem is that, left alone, Ventura often sounds like the village idiot. He needs someone to keep him on track of the substantive things he actually has to say.
He's always needed a partner. He was a terrible wrestler, but became a World Tag Team champion by pairing with the unbeatable Adrian Adonis. While Adonis did all the wrestling Ventura did what he does best -- incite the crowd. It worked; Jesse "got over," parlance for a wrestler who develops his own cash-paying following.
On KSTP-AM, reporter Jennifer Waters reeled him in from Pluto, and when he became governor, bills got passed and quashed, just as when Harold Stassen was in the statehouse, because he hired real politicos, many young, on the make, with their own professional agenda, to do his bidding. They got theirs; the governor got weekends off.
And now, with the right partner, he could even succeed as a talk show host.
His partner this time should probably be a George Stephanopoulos-type, someone who may not have been a governor, but actually knows what's going on in the world, a journalist like the Los Angeles Times' Ronald Brownstein (seen on CNN) or Newsweek's Jonathan Alter (more conveniently, already on MSNBC). These guys, or someone like them, could make him seem as smart as Ventura was on his best day as governor by keeping the conversation off Dealy Plaza.
With that, he could actually "get over." Even if he failed, his talk show just would be forgotten -- who remembers Joey Bishop's chat-fest? And that would be OK. Ed Wood's show, after all, was not forgotten.