The Long View.(Brief Article)(Column)

memo to: Bill Clinton

from: NBC Research

in re: Focus-group results: "Clinton in the Morning"

First off, everyone here in Research loves the show! It's funny and fast-paced and has all the elements of a franchise performer in the late-AM market. And we are especially grateful to you, Bill, for your willingness to make the changes and adjustments that the market research indicates. So many artists won't do that -- they see us here in Research as "the enemy" or "the suits" and they won't make the crucial revisions necessary to become "break out."

For instance, take the whole monkey situation. Early on, I think we all realized that the sidekick monkey idea was a winner. Some of the improvised stuff you and Pickles came up with -- totally spontaneous and unrehearsed -- was priceless, and I know that we all felt that the combination of Bill Clinton and Pickles the Monkey was a late-AM homerun.

But in the second pilot episode, when Pickles urinated on Liza Minnelli and tore off Matt Lauer's earlobe, we realized that the liability issues were too complex, and so a great idea -- and one that tested well in audience surveys -- needed to be rethought. And I think that the compromise of replacing Pickles with Louie Anderson was a good one.

Until the same thing happened with Louie, which comes under the heading of "Who could have predicted this?" But I think by the fourth pilot episode, we had all come to realize that Bill Clinton is enough -- Bill Clinton is his own co-host, in a sense -- and that you, just you, on a stool with a Matt Damon or a J. Lo or a kid from the Dell Computer ads, was more than enough to go franchise in the late-AM day part.