Nightline Television Program

April 6, 1987. Nothing could have prepared me for what happened that spring night. I had just finished my first week as guest producer on ABC's "Nightline." And I got a quick introduction into the power of live television. Just a few words and neither the baseball world nor one man's career would ever be the same. I was the "Nightline" producer who first called Al Campanis, inviting him on the broadcast to honor Jackie Robinson 40 years after he broke baseball's color barrier.

This should be a new dawn for "Nightline." Instead, it could be good night. After years of lagging behind dueling late-night talk shows, the ABC news program is winning attention with a series of high-profile scoops and closing the viewer gap against "Late Show With David Letterman." But instead of celebrating, "Nightline" staffers are anxious. Six years ago, Walt Disney Co. tried to lure Letterman to its ABC network, a move that backfired and frayed relations with the news division.

ABC's "Nightline" got a lift from the writers strike in November, pulling past its benched competition, CBS' "Late Show With David Letterman," in ratings sweeps for the first time in seven years. The newsmagazine drew an average of 3.8 million viewers for the month, up 7% from November 2006, while 3.7 million people tuned into "Letterman" repeats, a drop of 18%, according to Nielsen Media Research.

In the beginning, Cynthia McFadden couldn't get Ted Koppel's voice out of her head. McFadden, one of the three anchors who in November took over ABC's "Nightline," the venerable late-night news franchise that Koppel pioneered, described succeeding the veteran newsman as "sort of like walking into a buzz saw." "At first we were really trying so hard, the show just felt a little stiff," she said. "I kept thinking, 'I can't be Ted Koppel.' " Critics didn't think so, either.

ABC's Bob Woodruff contributed to a "Nightline" report on North Korea on Wednesday, his first journalistic work since being seriously hurt by a roadside bomb in Iraq on Jan. 29. By telephone, Woodruff recorded a few lines to accompany the "Nightline" rebroadcast of a report he did about his visit to North Korea last summer. His voice-over tied the discussion of North Korea's closed society to its recent test firing of missiles.

Three years after narrowly surviving the ax, ABC's long-running "Nightline" is in jeopardy again. Network parent Walt Disney Co. is serious enough about replacing the late-night news show -- hosted by Ted Koppel since 1980 -- to have ordered executives to start devising alternatives, according to sources familiar with the plans.

It's long been fashionable to mock the synergy between Congress and Hollywood in which legislators invite movie stars to testify in Washington about issues dramatized in their films. The memory of Jessica Lange, Jane Fonda and Sissy Spacek telling a House hearing about the plight of small farmers is still an inviting target two decades later. Don Cheadle is unlikely to face such cynicism.

In the latest sign of the generational transition sweeping network news, Ted Koppel, whose judge-like gravitas and probing interviewing style have been the hallmarks of ABC's late-night news program "Nightline" for 25 years, will leave the network when his contract expires in early December, the network said Thursday. Koppel is leaving Walt Disney Co.

"Nightline," which stirred up controversy last year with its decision to read the names of the 721 U.S. military personnel who had lost their lives in the Iraq war, is going to do it again. The ABC late-night news program said Tuesday that it would devote its Memorial Day broadcast on Monday to reading the names and showing the photos of more than 900 service members who have been killed in Iraq and Afghanistan since May 1, 2004.

I sit outside the theater on the third street promenade in Santa Monica, dialing the same number over and over on my cellphone. "You have to come with me," I say to my friend and former "Nightline" colleague Rick Wilkinson. I demand. Then plead. "Please, I can't do this alone." We are talking about seeing a movie. "Hotel Rwanda." I am wondering if I can sit through it. Wondering if I will start sobbing the way I did in those cursed fields in Africa more than a decade ago.