Bad Early Show

After a season full of chatter about the "battle" between NBC's chirping "Today" and ABC's gauzy "Good Morning America," I thought it would be instructive or enlightening to click down to Channel 2 and greet the day with "The Early Show." The Nielsen and public-image duel between Katie Couric (an erstwhile cutie-pie turned, say her critics, to showboating minx) and Diane Sawyer (soothing, steadfastly winsome) is a two-way fight. Those among the opinion-makers who have bothered to form an opinion of CBS' morning offering have, more or less forever, regarded it as beyond pathetic and beneath notice.

But how bad could it be? What can "bad" mean in the context of breakfast-time happy talk?

I woke up, put the show on, quelled some mild revulsion at its orangey opening graphics and wondered why the set looked like a cross between an old man's den and a large iguana's terrarium. I jotted down some rough snark about co-anchor Julie Chen and her husband and her hairdo, the former being her boss and the latter a kind of Arizona-beauty-pageant semi-bouffant with bangs. I was back in the arms of Morpheus before they had told me the temperature.

Some days later, I made coffee first, repeated the experiment and eyeballed the full two hours. "Bad," in this context, means irrelevant to the point of clueless and drab beyond understanding. They made an interview with the kid who plays Harry Potter seem somber. Dry but unserious, punishingly earth-toned, "The Early Show" reads as if its producers are aiming to deny any potential for chemistry among the show's four hosts-Chen, Harry Smith, Hannah Storm and Rene Syler.

They have even confiscated the pep of Dave Price, who once added new depth and color to the role of the wacky weatherman on Fox's surreal "Good Day New York." One of the basic functions of the morning news is to assure you that the world's still going on out there, and the CBS program, so detached as to seem hermetically sealed, fails even that test.

Any sensible person with a Time Warner cable box knows that the a.m. action is on New York 1. Your girlfriend probably has a crush on its morning host, Pat Kiernan, and why not? His tone is skeptical but encouraging. The real beauty of NY1 is its chintz-the low-budget graphics, the 1-800-Mattress ads. Seriously, "Travels with Val"? The channel feels "local" in a way that few products of Manhattan media do. Just as "Today" and the other network corn puffs mean to buck up people, NY1, by seeming to be not quite in the big leagues, does its bit to make Gotham look manageable and help us face the day.