Sure it's been eighty years in TV time since KLG's been on the tube (one year in real time is eight in TV time), but it seems like it's only been fifty. And it looks like she's barely aged thirty TV years. Maybe twenty. She looked great (though really, what was she supposed to look like?)
Missed it? Ok, the quick wrap: KLG and new co-host, Hoda Kotb, sit outdoors at R Plaza, with driveby appearances from Harvey Fierstein and anti-gravity guys (the Blue Man Group to the anti-gravity crowd, I suppose.) The ladies sit. The ladies chatter. You know, the usual - what movies they saw, like "Leatherhead" (KLG produces Frank's old helmet), plus dutiful sad comments about Charlton Heston, then a gift basket is brought out (tequila, hand sanitizer, yuk yuk). Hoda puts on Reeg mask, and then we learn "three things" the new co-hosts don't know about each other. (No, KLG was NOT almost a "Charlie's Angel.) An NYPD van roars by. Lotsa noise. "Excuse me," bellows KLG, "I'm making my debut."
All in all, what's not to like if you like KLG - or conversely, what WAS there to like if you already don't?
But sitting here, watching yet another morning show doing yet another how-I-lost-[name a weight north of 100 pounds] story, the mind starts to wander, adrift in a gauzy dreamland of deep thoughts about KLG and the meaning of her once-aborted, now-restarted career:
Here's one of those thoughts - that this show is a direct rip-of "Live with Reeg and KL." A near-perfect clone. Maybe Gelman should've turned up to congratulate the new-comers on their skillful if ill-disguised larceny. (But "Live!" ripped off "The Today Show," so maybe all the fourth hour of "Today Show" is doing here is ripping off "The Today Show.")
Second, KLG here seems like a bigger, and far more substantial personality than her on-screen helpmate.
Now...there's a bunch of words I never ever expected to string together in my entire life.
But it's true. Kotb's a perfectly fine and pleasant TV personality - though perhaps prone to being a little overly pleasant and accommodating. KLG always worked best when her co (Reeg!) was a file who sawed away at her many rough and occasionally profoundly irritating edges. That made her a "real" person on the one-dimensional TV screen,and a real person who learned that to laugh at oneself on TV is a pretty good longterm strategy; KLG, in other words, became her own best material.
That's why KLG needed Reeg far more than he needed her, and why "Live" has thrived for nearly a decade in her absence. Will KLG attract viewers to this moribund hour? Will Kotb become a genuine foil? Is there enough material to fill a fourth hour of "T" when the first three have already picked the low-hanging stuff?
Questions that - day one, hour one - would already appear to have answers.