Television : Small Ratings End Medium Life of ‘San Diego at Large’

What must be San Diego’s longest-running experiment in daily local television programming will end, after 3 1/2 years, at 7 p.m. May 27 with a one-hour special of “San Diego at Large” on KFMB-TV, Channel 8.

Not since “The Attack of the Killer Tomatoes” have so many actors with so little talent gathered together in one place to create something so . . . different.

But “At Large” will be neither at large nor different any longer. Static ratings have convinced station management to pull the plug on the eccentric comedy show. The bottom line on “At Large,” said the show’s originator and executive producer Jim Holtzman, is that the public failed to accept original programming.

“The show made money, all television shows make money,” Holtzman said. “It’s a matter of whether you can make more money doing something else. The big problem is that people are too used to Hollywood-type slickness.”

“If I’m disappointed at anything,” Holtzman said, “it is with the people of San Diego who didn’t embrace the show for what it was--a fresh, funny and good look at San Diego every night. “

Larry Himmel, 42, the show’s star and lead writer, believes “At Large” was brought down by the combination of competition from rival stations and internal politics at KFMB.

“Our budget was $625,000 a year,” Himmel said, “and I guess station management thought they could make more money putting ‘Entertainment Tonight’ in our 7:30 time slot. Our ratings dropped, especially during the Winter Olympics. They moved us to 11:30 p.m. for a month before dropping us completely because they didn’t want our loyal followers to storm the station.

“At Large” certainly has its followers and fans. There is a native charm to the show’s hand-hewn format, despite its obvious lack of professional polish.

“Our show had a ‘Let’s get together and put on a show in Daddy’s garage’ feel to it,” Himmel said. “But writing 23 minutes of television a day, five days a week was no easy job. To know if I could do it, all you had to do was watch the show. People said what we did was in bad taste. I didn’t have time to decide if something was in good taste. I just threw things on the air and let the viewer decide about taste.”

Nearly everyone in the show is an amateur. Himmel even cast his mother, Verna McHugh, as--who else?--his mother. But Himmel is sensitive about the opinion that his mother is funnier than he is.

“Who do you think wrote her material?” he said, defensively. “I did. I made her. It’s funny, though, to watch your own mother develop an ego. After a while, she started saying, ‘Larry, I won’t do this’ and asking for rewrites.”

The show’s most popular segment is probably “The Adventures of Biff & Skippy,” a continuing soap opera about a pair of beach nerds. Biff (Himmel) and Skippy (stand-up comedian Rick Rockwell), live in South Mission Beach with Andrew (Gaye Straza) who made up for what she lacked in acting talent with a body that belongs in a bikini, and often is.

“We first saw Gaye modeling bikinis for an ad at the station,” Himmel recalled, “and we told them we wanted her. We didn’t have a role for her, but we knew we’d figure something out.”

Nearly everyone else in the show was cast with the same careful planning, save one.

Kathy Stanton--who delivered Erma Bombeck-style monologues on the state of modern women and wrote and acted in a short continuing segment titled “Woman’s Night Out”--stood out because she seemed to possess talent. She was funny, smooth and had stage presence. She was formerly a television news reporter and writer, but “San Diego at Large” marked her acting debut in front of a camera.

Himmel said he will stay at Channel 8 after “At Large” bows out, doing short commentaries twice a week on the evening news. But he’s not giving up. He is shopping a weekly version of “San Diego at Large” around at several other stations.

Holtzman said he doesn’t believe a weekly show will work.

“The costs of a weekly show will be almost as high as a daily,” he said, “but you cut the amount of money the show can make.”

The perennially optimistic Himmel is holding out hope that the show will get an eleventh-hour reprieve on Channel 8. But even he noticed the discouraging signs.

“They’ve taken my name off my parking space, and already people are fighting over who’s going to get . . . my desk and typewriter,” Himmel said. “So, I guess this is the end.”