After Oprah, local show will take slot here

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July 21, 2010; BY LEWIS LAZARE Sun-Times Columnist

Can lightening strike twice? ABC-owned WLS-Channel 7 general manager Emily Barr believes so. Barr said Tuesday that she plans to replace the hugely successful “Oprah Winfrey Show” when it concludes in the fall of 2011 with a locally produced daily show filmed in front of a live audience. The working title for the new show is “Morning Rush.”

From the moment talk show diva Winfrey announced earlier this year that she would bring down the curtain on her nationally syndicated talk show after a 25-year-run, speculation began about what Barr would do to fill the 9 a.m. hour.

Perhaps sensing an opportunity to replicate history and establish her credentials as one of the city’s — if not the nation’s — savviest TV general managers, Barr has opted to develop a locally originating show that she wants to be fun, smart and surprising — a tall order for a program that, as yet, has no official title, no executive producer, no set and, most importantly, no on-air talent attached to the project. All Barr has is a three-minute video position paper of sorts she used to sell the concept to her bosses at ABC.

But Barr is working from a position of strength in the Chicago market, which at least gives her a better-than-average shot of pulling off this feat. From a ratings standpoint, WLS dominates the daytime hours in Chicago, so viewers may be pre-disposed to give Barr’s new talk show venture a chance to succeed at 9 a.m.

“I think we do local TV really, really well, and I believe we can take that and capitalize on it,” Barr said Tuesday.

But much may depend on getting the right host or hosts.

“We haven’t decided whether there will be one or multiple hosts,” said Barr.

Her first order of business is finding an executive producer, which she said could take a couple more months. Barr would not say how many people the new show would eventually hire, but she suggested it would probably be fewer than 50. The show is expected to debut very soon after Winfrey’s final show.

In 1983, when Winfrey landed in Chicago to host WLS’s “A.M. Chicago,” a lowly rated and unprepossessing precursor to what Barr is planning to launch, practically no one expected Winfrey would quickly morph into the talk show diva she now is a quarter century later. But something about Winfrey in front of the camera clicked with vast numbers of women — first in Chicago and then the nation. And Winfrey quickly left behind “A.M. Chicago” and launched the syndicated talk show that would include a steady diet of glamorous movie stars and pop singers.

Barr said she plans to keep the focus local in the show she is developing. But if audiences in large numbers are going to be fascinated enough to keep watching a cavalcade of locally focused fodder — no matter how smartly produced it is — the material almost certainly will have to be fed to them by a host(s) who can command their attention. But in an interview Tuesday, Barr repeatedly knocked down the suggestion her new show’s success would hinge on her choice of host(s).

“I am not looking for the next Oprah Winfrey,” insisted Barr.

Some might say there’s a bit of hubris in Barr’s bold move to develop another local show to fill the footprint left by Winfrey and potentially create another TV daytime superstar. Barr’s local news casts have long dominated in the local ratings, and WLS is clearly the go-to station for big breaking events in the city. Now Barr has the chance to add another feather to her crown.

Though Barr and WLS have made it seem easy for the past couple of of decades in Chicago, winning isn’t easy in television. This yet-to-be realized new morning show on WLS will be Barr’s most daring attempt yet to prove her mettle and determine her place in Chicago broadcast history.