The TV Zone

Ahhh...for the good old days.

I pulled myself away from the Rosie O'Donnell conference call because the good people at NBC will produce a transcript of this later...Chat was for the variety show to air T'giving eve on the Peacock, "Rosie Live!"

But let me just say...Whoooboy.

Rosie: God love her, but this woman can talk, and talk about ANYTHING you ask her - prop 8, gay marriage, the last eight years, even variety shows. She is voluble, no-holds-barred, say-it-like-it-is, and (contrary to what you may have heard) very civil. There's so much ground to cover here, so I'll just go straight to some bulleted items.

* If picked up, next week's variety show will become part of a six-episode order - that is, NBC will have the right to buy six episodes of her variety show, at a clip of six each. (Of course, NBC will give the green light only if the numbers bear that out...)

* Yeah, she adored the variety hour format as a babe growing up on the Island, and said that "they totally defined my desire to be an entertainer..."

* The opening number will a duet with her and Liza Minelli; she wouldn't say what the song will be other than from Minelli's '77 "The Act."

* No love lost with "The View." Quoth she, "there was not a lot of overall off-camera camaraderie...what happened on the show was a personal argument with a friend [Babs] that was publically displayed. What happened was personal. Not political. I didn't want to be paid to fight.

* She doesn't really know WHAT happened with MSNBC (remember? She was gonna do the talk show that's since gone to Rachel Maddow.) "When I decided to not go back [to 'The View'] I had a meeting with Jeff Zucker and the people at NBC - we had come to a deal at the time" and said she wanted to do the talk show cuz of the impending election and "felt it was important for a voice like mine [to be heard.]...But it never came to fruition and the reasons why are even unclear to me [now.] It turned out to be a blessing..." Both deals were separate - she had a conversation with Ben Silverman, and...

* No, she doesn't see any problem with her outsized political opinions - which have come to define her in the public eye, as I observed to her - and her new role as variety show impresario. "It's not a show about Guantanamo...no production number about torture," she said. She took the "View" gig, she added, knowing "that was the job description....Your perception of my career may be skewed by that show. It was conversation that needed to be had, and I started the ball rolling. For that show to be taken seriously as a political show, I had to fight long and hard to get them to address [the Big Issues] and they wanted to be talking about lipstick shades."