Emmy Kicks Up Her Rating Heels

The prime-time Emmy Awards, all but dead in the TV ratings last year, roared back Sunday with a surprisingly potent showing in the nation’s major markets, overnight figures indicated Monday.

Both the Fox Broadcasting Co., which televised the show, and NBC reported that the three-hour Emmy show earned a 15.5 rating and attracted 26% of the audience in 26 top markets. The figures are expected to drop in the national ratings, scheduled for release today, because the smaller Fox network does best in big cities but has a weaker station lineup nationwide.

Nonetheless, Fox was ecstatic with its overnight ratings, which indicated that viewers were pleased with the provocative mix of racy humor, awards to traditional hits such as “Cheers,” overdue recognition of significant black stories and artists, and tributes to performers who died in the last year, including Michael Landon, whose family was present.

Fox beat all network competition for the three-hour period and piled up an old-fashioned Emmy success in the nation’s two biggest markets, New York and Los Angeles. In New York, the Emmys averaged a 22.5 rating and a 38% audience share. In Los Angeles, the show triumphed with an 18.6 rating and 32 share.

Fox, which averaged only an 8.2 rating and a 14 share nationally last year and said it was willing to turn the Emmys back to ABC, CBS and NBC, could only hope that this week’s national figures do not fall off precipitously from the overnights.

In the big cities, at least, Fox’s strategy paid off in virtually every way. Despite criticism that August was no time to broadcast the Emmys, which usually keynote the start of the season in September, the awards show clearly benefited from a lack of major, first-run competition on ABC, CBS and NBC. And the audience was there, vacation time or not.

Furthermore, executive producer Steve Sohmer’s choice of young comedians Jerry Seinfeld and Dennis Miller, along with Jamie Lee Curtis, to host the show turned out to be inspired. Seinfeld and Miller were superb, and Curtis was a delightful host who played to her strengths as a friendly and accessible comedy performer.

Miller, a former star of “Saturday Night Live,” got the Emmys off to a strong start with a sophisticated, yet earthy, monologue that was a knockout. Noting the Soviet upheaval, he cracked: “We’re coming to you from one of the few nations on Earth that still has a Communist Party.”

The sometimes rowdy atmosphere of the show seemed to reflect an attempt to go for Fox’s younger male audience.

Yet despite excesses, including comedian Gilbert Gottfried’s startling monologue about masturbation--which seemed to develop from his protest remark about Pee-wee Herman’s arrest in an adult movie theater--the rowdiness, with all its blue humor, gave the show a sort of party atmosphere that kept growing and was infectious in some ways. Gottfried’s monologue was edited out in the delayed West Coast broadcast and in Central time zone cities that used the same delayed feed.

ABC won the most Emmys, 26, while CBS had 15, NBC 13 and PBS 12 in the overall totals that included a non-televised ceremony for craft winners Saturday. But a new era clearly had arrived when a cable show, HBO’s “The Josephine Baker Story,” tied CBS’ “Murphy Brown” as the top program winner, with each entry winning five Emmys.

GOLD MINE: Those recent, Sunday prime-time reruns of “All in the Family” were so successful that they’re still paying dividends for CBS--and the show.

The Carroll O’Connor-Jean Stapleton series now will be rerun again on two Fridays, Sept. 6 and 13, at 8:30 p.m., as CBS uses the classic comedy to lure viewers for the new season.

In a clever move, CBS is also using the nostalgia value of the show to warm up the Friday time slot for the new comedy series “Brooklyn Bridge,” which debuts Sept. 20 and focuses on a 1950s family.

The solid ratings for “All in the Family” in its CBS summer repeats have also enhanced the show’s value as a syndicated rerun entry, with some stations giving it a better time slot and adding episodes.

What’s more, the notable 90-minute retrospective of “All in the Family” that was broadcast by CBS in February will be rerun Wednesday at 8 p.m.

BANKABLE: CBS has also signed up one of TV’s quiet phenomena, Sherman Hemsley, who put in two years on “All in the Family,” then ran for 10 years in “The Jeffersons” and five more in “Amen.”

Hemsley’s new CBS comedy series, untitled but with a 13-week starting commitment, will be developed for the 1992-93 season.

STATION BREAK: Look, says Joe Fowler, the former KCAL Channel 9 sports guy, he wasn’t let go or fired: “My contract was up this Oct. 30, and I asked out.” He wasn’t happy, he says, with the way the department was run: “I said, ‘Let me go as soon as you can.’ I wanted out in the worst way.”

ONLY IN HOLLYWOOD: Show business wags know why Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev was temporarily ousted by a coup: “Creative differences.”

GOLDEN GIRL: Latest prime-time twist on Marilyn Monroe: “Marilyn and Me,” a Sept. 22 ABC movie about the early years of the film goddess and her relationship with an aspiring screenwriter. Monroe is played by Susan Griffiths, who’ll have a tough time matching Catherine Hicks’ memorable TV portrayal of the actress. Other characters portrayed in the ABC film include Joe DiMaggio, studio boss Darryl Zanuck and columnist Walter Winchell.

DRAWING BOARD: A lengthy, continuing storyline about AIDS among teens will be a key part of ABC’s “Life Goes On” series this season. Chad Lowe will play the role of a high school student who tests HIV positive.

OASIS: With the networks fleeing from prime-time documentaries and plunging headlong into reality series, some of them tabloid-tainted, thank heaven for PBS’ “Frontline.” Now nearly a decade old, it has expanded its yearly schedule to 34 weeks of documentaries and launches its new season Oct. 15.

BEING THERE: “I’m very bad at firing people, Mr. Grant. I once had to move rather than fire a housekeeper.”--Mary Richards in “The Mary Tyler Moore Show.”

Say good night, Gracie. . . .