Talk Shows: Broadcast Joe

As he waited backstage for the premiere tape to roll, his personal barber smoothed his curls, and Pierre Cardin’s New York general manager fitted him into a double-breasted custom jacket. Then, as he headed onstage, another aide added the final touch: he refilled the star’s coffee mug. Even those in the back of the studio audience heard the clink of ice cubes in his cup. Iced coffee, an associate suggested, but surely the whole house knew damn well it was Johnnie Walker Red Label. As the clap board proclaimed, this was the Joe Namath Show, Take 1.

Thirty minutes and one program later, Joe had brazened his way to one of the biggest TV surprises since his New York Jets won football’s Super Bowl. Television, after all, is already surfeited with football, with talk shows and lowbrow entertainment. The Playboy After Dark series, by another TV interloper. Hugh Hefner, is all pretension and forced fun. Yet somehow, as U.S. viewers discovered in the premiere last week, Joe’s show had an insouciance, a spontaneity and a genuine joie de vivre that even congenital Namath haters must have found infuriatingly engaging.

Second Banana. The show was conceived by Co-Producer Doug Schustek, and he was so sure of success that a pilot was never shot. All Namath did was an eight-minute presentation film, trading unrehearsed gags with the program’s second banana, Writer Dick Schaap (TIME, Sept. 19). Executive Producer Larry Spangler claims that within 24 hours after putting the show on the market, he had signed up sponsor Bristol-Myers and peddleda 15-week package to 38 U.S. TV stations. Seven have been added since; a non-network syndication show has rarely, if ever, caught on so fast.

The opener last week proved the buyer’s wisdom. The show was introduced by a miniskirted blonde, one Louisa Moritz, a sort of Goldie Hawn with a Judy Holliday accent. Louisa sashayed through the rest of the program all too obviously deepening her rapport with the host. Next, in what is to be the series’ standard format. Namath and Schaap quipped and kibitzed through film clips of the Jets’ latest game. Dick reveled in the miscues, while Joe extolled the “pure grace” of his own passing style. Namath was more modest about his fluffs as a TV rookie. He kidded about his troubles with cue cards and his muff of the first commercial lead-in, joshing: “1 did that good, didn’t I?”

Joe’s opening-week guests were Mets Pitcher Tom Seaver and the latest star of Broadway’s The Great White Hope, Yaphet Kotto, whose name Namath mispronounced even though he had inked it phonetically on his palm. Most of the interrogation and badinage revolved around Joe’s booze-and-broads approach to athletic training. Namath suggested that they drop the subject when he spotted Mrs. Seaver in the audience.

Schaap kept the show moving. When Guests Seaver and Kotto began going on about their California boyhoods, he peremptorily cut them dead with “I’m glad we found that out.” Clearly, he and the producers seek to make the program engrossing for viewers who aren’t hard-core sports fans and to exploit Na-math’s draw with women. Louisa, the regular girl on the show, earns some $100,000 a year posing for Ajax, American Motors and Ultra Brite commercials, and Executive Producer Spangler originally figured, “We couldn’t afford her. But then,” he recalls, “she got one whiff of Namath, and I thought she’d pay us.”

The guests, generally one each week from the sports world and one from show business, should also broaden the appeal of the series. Just about everyone in either area is a drinking partner of Namath’s or is transcribing a tape-recorded book with Schaap. For this week, for instance, they have scheduled Muhammad Ali and either Faye Dunaway or George Segal. On deck are Frank Sinatra, O. J. Simpson, Retired End Bernie Casey and Woody Allen. “Joe wouldn’t get uptight,” boasted Schaap after the taping last week, “if we had Nixon and U Thant.”