Chung and Povich? Together??? Be still, my beating heart
The great news is that Connie Chung is coming back to TV in an MSNBC program that she will co-host with her husband, Maury Povich. According to the NYTimes article:
Mr. Povich said he had several reasons to do the show, not the least that he hoped to give viewers a glimpse of spirited discussions that, for the most part, have only been seen by dinner guests at their apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.
I've been dreaming in vain for years of being invited to dinner at the Chung/Povich household, ever since the night a few years ago that I saw the last fifteen surreal minutes of an episode of Chung's CNN show. Having already done an interview about a bear attack, and then gotten birthday greetings from legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin, Chung was now asking a golfer Rich Beem about his 2002 PGA tournament victory over Tiger Woods, taking pains -- I'm serious -- to point out that her prep for the interview had been a conversation with an apparently hyperactive Povich:
Good for you. And then there were two critical holes that my husband was telling me about, the 11th hole and the 16th, right?
After the "interview" ended, Chung went to her final commercial break, and upon her return, she was dialing the phone on her desk. All of this comes directly from the CNN transcript:
CHUNG: And we'll be right back.(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
CHUNG: So I'm calling my husband because I want to find out what he thought of the interview with Rich Beem. What do you think? With Rich Beem.
You did? Really? You won't believe what he said. OK. Good.
OK. Rich Beem has a chance to do it all over again, beat Tiger Woods. Good night.
Yes, that's right, Connie took the last few minutes of her show to call and chat with her husband while closing out the show. We didn't hear Maury's trademark croak, fortunately, but other than that, I really felt that I was actually rudely interrupting a private moment. Except that she was on the air and was actually telling us, the viewers, that she was going to take a moment to call her husband to ask how he liked the interview she had just done with Beem.
Again, this isn't as good as being over to their house, but I thank God they realize that I'm far, far more interested in their lives than I am in sports, or the "criminalization of politics," or some stupid Iraq War thingy. I didn't think that anything could replace Bill O'Reilly as the televised Nietszhchean abyss that you can feel staring back. But I believe that I stand corrected.