TELEVISION & RADIO - Is TMZ really cut out for TV?

Harvey Levin sounded, as he so often does, excited.

The co-founder of the celebrity-gossip site TMZ.com was sitting on a videotape that he knew could be explosive. "It involves a star doing a really crazy thing," Levin told me last week. "It was caught on surveillance. We haven't put this on the site yet."

Ooh, sounds juicy. Who is it, and what's this star doing? Getting pinched for drugs? Exploding in an anti-Semitic rant? Leaving an abusive voice mail for a supposed loved one?

"I'm not gonna tell you that," Levin said, tantalizingly.

Soon enough the world will know, however, because Levin is planning to lead with the tape on "TMZ," the new syndicated TV series that premieres nationwide today (in Los Angeles, on KTTV Channel 11 at 6:30 p.m. and 11:30 p.m.). Levin and Telepictures Productions -- the Warner Bros. unit that also makes "The Ellen DeGeneres Show" and "Tyra Banks" -- are about to discover whether America's No. 1 entertainment news site can be adapted for the brutal world of syndicated television, where original programming tends to drop like underage starlets who have over-imbibed.

TMZ, make no mistake, has been phenomenally successful in its Web incarnation. Even those who never visit the site are familiar with its handiwork, thanks to devoted digging from Levin and staff -- and also, some say, to an outsized checkbook, courtesy of Warner Bros. and partner AOL, that enables them to scoop up multimedia evidence of stars behaving badly.

TMZ.com posted the audiotape in which Alec Baldwin angrily addressed his 11-year-old daughter as "a thoughtless little pig." It was first with the video of Michael Richards' racial-slur-studded meltdown. And then there was the capstone of its tabloid achievement, breaking the tale of Mel Gibson's anti-Semitic tirade after a July 2006 DUI arrest.

The mix of salacious content and speedy posting has made TMZ a destination not just for gossip junkies but also envious rival journos, who inevitably find themselves using the site as a tip sheet. But that's the Internet, where users toggle at high speeds in deathless pursuit of whatever looks new, weird or lurid. A daily half-hour television series is another matter entirely.

"They have to be sort of cautious, because there's not someone going to rehab every day, there's not someone crashing their car every day," Frank Cicha, senior vice president of programming for the Fox Station Group, said, referring to "TMZ." The program is running on 25 Fox affiliates, representing about 41% of the U.S. (other stations will give the show 98% total coverage).