Rosie Puts Fun (and Funny) Back Into Daytime TV

Jerry Springer and Ricki Lake have met the antichrist, and she is Rosie O’Donnell, the booming stand-up comic and actress who is just the brazen fun that daytime TV needs to parry all the mutants.

Things look promising. “The Rosie O’Donnell Show” is a week old, and still no skinheads, Satanists or transsexual necrophiliacs. It’s either fresh or just seems so because most everything else in daytime syndication ranges from stale to rancid.

The host herself is surely distinctive, at times so noisy that you feel you’re in a tight closet with someone who keeps yelling, “FORRRRRE!!!” At times so likably earthy and palsy-walsy, though, that she could be your next-door neighbor. If your neighbor were a tuba with ooompahs of wicked wit.

O’Donnell’s series is wisely taking a screeching U-turn away from the grating daytime talkers of the ‘80s and ‘90s back toward some of the fossilized old standards: The host behind a desk instead of always in the audience with a microphone. Some singing, some dancing and lots of celebrity guests with books, movies, TV series and themselves to sell. And also lots of hugging and mutual love-yas.

Yet Mike Douglas and Merv Griffin were never like quite like this.

Each hour opens with a member of the studio audience setting the tone by introducing the show and its guests, all the more fun when one of these amateurs stumbles (as in Sarah Jessica Parker on Thursday becoming Sarah “Jessah” Parker). Then comes O’Donnell, who has perfected the sit-down monologue, thundering topical one-liners from behind her desk while flipping through a tabloid newspaper that she makes sure everyone knows is a prop.

Confident, assured and gifted enough to easily salvage bad jokes, O’Donnell is that rare daytime personality who not only tries to be funny but, as a bonus, actually is funny. During Week 1, she mercilessly ribbed herself, her own show and the fattest target of all, Kathie Lee Gifford.

If the week had a theme, it was People Who Talk Funny, with appearances by director Penny Marshall and “The Nanny” star Fran Drescher and, of course, there was O’Donnell herself.

Sometimes, however, the show falls off dramatically as soon as O’Donnell brings out her first guest, though it’s not her fault. “ER” star George Clooney and Marshall (with whom O’Connell appears in those Kmart commercials that she wrote), were clunkers, for example.

Yet that tap-dance sensation, Tony winner Savion Glover, and others from the cast of “Bring in ‘Da Noise, Bring in ‘Da Funk” tore up the place, despite the makeshift TV setting.

Also successful was Drescher, whose parents checked in by satellite with restaurant reviews from South Florida. They were livelier, at least, than David Letterman’s mother. As was O’Donnell when loudly wisecracking her way through Thursday’s audio problems that all but scuttled an important satellite interview with Miss Piggy.

“The inadequacy of your staff . . . suits you,” said actress Parker, who had been observing the sound problems from the green room while waiting to come on. “It makes you very funny, instead of just funny.”

O’Donnell was at her best later that episode when schmoozing with some 7-year-olds who had made paintings of her in their art class. She was generous with them, yet just a howl, the exotic images tailor-made for her ad-libs.

Bring in ‘da funk. ‘Da noise, most of it good, is already here.

* “The Rosie O’Donnell Show” airs weekdays at 3 p.m. on KNBC-TV Channel 4.