They say "Goodnight, America" now at the end of "Nightline." All three of the new anchors say it -- Cynthia McFadden, Terry Moran, Martin Bashir -- they trade off. They also sometimes say: "Jimmy Kimmel is next."
It is a symbolic if small shift in the post-Ted Koppel broadcast. Koppel, a guardian of the firewall between the news and entertainment divisions at his former network ABC, wouldn't tease to Kimmel, just as he didn't tease to "Politically Incorrect With Bill Maher" in the years that Maher's more compatible series followed "Nightline."
After 25 years, Koppel signed off his last broadcast, Nov. 23, saying to viewers, "You've always been very nice to me, so give this new anchor team at 'Nightline' a fair break. If you don't, the network will just put another comedy in this time slot. And then you'll be sorry."
Is two weeks a fair break? "Nightline," a slicker-looking news package piloted from Times Square in New York, isn't some end-of-the-world devolution from Koppel. But it's just a respectable if slightly overheated newsmagazine now, well produced, with good bookings.
They cover two or three or four stories where Koppel would burrow into one. The result is faster and less substantive, lacking a voice. It opts for movement from hard news into features, the involving story about female soldiers dealing with post-traumatic stress disorder gliding into the sit-down with George Clooney about his film "Syriana," McFadden asking the movie star teasingly: "Is George Clooney trying to save the world?"
It turned out he isn't.
Two weeks ago, accompanying "Nightline's" new debut, the show dispatched Moran to Baghdad to file a week of segments on whether the U.S. should stay in Iraq or pull its troops. But it did this without also delving into the renewed political heat this question has on Capitol Hill. Moran, meanwhile, did a day-in-the-life piece on U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Zalmay Khalilzad, went on a hunt for insurgents with U.S. troops and Iraqi police in Baqubah -- a policeman in a lead vehicle was killed by a roadside explosive device -- and held a "town-hall" meeting in the U.S.-controlled Green Zone in Baghdad.
It was serviceable -- feature stories with raw feeds, at times slightly oversold (a "historic TV gathering," "Nightline" trumpeted the town-hall meeting).
Friday night, McFadden moderated an hour with Ohio mothers of fallen soldiers. But it's hard to imagine this show reading off the names of the war dead in Iraq, as Koppel did last year, prompting the conservative Sinclair Broadcast Group to pull the episode from affiliates.
