Your Mute Button Doesn't Stand a Chance

This TV-watching business is getting tough.

NBC's nationally telecast "Today" remains the class of its genre. But what a quandary it is settling on a two-hour local news program in the morning. Picking one over the other is just so difficult.

How do you choose between Quasimodo and the Elephant Man?

Not that it's written in stone that a morning news show must be gray or doddering and bent by osteoporosis. There's no law even that it be informative. TV's stew pot accommodates just about everything, after all, and starting the day with knee-slapping yucks, as local shows do, can be a welcome antidote to the strychnine of current events.

But get real.

"The KTLA Morning News" and KTTV's "Good Day L.A." are both rubber rooms. From their mouths to your ears, they hammer the airwaves with sonic booms of hee-haws. Be advised: Prolonged exposure may be dangerous to your brain. Before you know it, you're playing "Name That Fruit" along with KTLA or giving KTTV's Dorothy Lucey thumbs-up when she insists Michael Jackson is headed for more cosmetic surgery because "he wants to look like Elizabeth Taylor."

The people on these shows love making you laugh. Most of all, though, while gazing adoringly at the lens as if it were a mirror, they appear to love themselves.

For a few minutes at the start of each half-hour, these are standard newscasts, reading headlines, giving traffic updates from choppers and delivering routine stories from the field, with the KTLA program having the edge here because of its generally better, more experienced street reporters. Unlike "Good Day L.A.," it also has its own cyber maven and another specialist who gives Wall Street updates.

But this taste of actual news is foreplay for what these shows are really about.

On KTLA (which, like the Los Angeles Times, is owned by Tribune Co.), that means cutting up from anchors Carlos Amezcua and Barbara Beck. Especially, too, from weathercaster Mark Kriski, who seems to live for being the kind of fun guy you'd see hanging from a chandelier with a lampshade on his head at a cocktail party. And also from the show's beanbag with lips, show-biz groupie Sam Rubin.

On "Good Day L.A."--which only once has topped the older KTLA show in a ratings sweeps--you have a George Burns playing straight man to a pair of Gracies. That would be anchor Steve Edwards--whose long run in L.A. has shown him to be a bright, thoughtful man for all seasons--facing viewers between Hollywood gossip Lucey and weathercaster Jillian Barberie. Because no lobotomy scars are visible, Edwards is here, apparently, because they showed him the money.