Rosie O’Donnell and cast members rehearsing “Rosie Live,” to be broadcast on Wednesday.
Rosie O’Donnell and Denis Jones, her choreographer, at work.
The Thanksgiving-eve audience will see an attempted revival of the variety show format, a staple of television in the 1960s and ’70s. Taking pages from Carol Burnett, Ed Sullivan and Sonny and Cher, the show will serve up Broadway dancers, celebrity appearances, musical acts and comedy sketches. Rosie O’Donnell, an executive producer and the host, sees a template for a weekly series.
“For about the past five years I’ve been pitching this exact show,” she said last week, taking a break from rehearsals at the Ripley-Grier Studios on Eighth Avenue, in Midtown Manhattan. “I’ve done it a million times in my head already.”
Ms. O’Donnell isn’t the only variety host in waiting. The broadcast networks are making expensive bets that the format is finally ready for an encore.
“The entire industry has been trying to figure out a way to bring back variety in some way,” Mike Darnell, the president of alternative programming for Fox, said in an interview last summer, when the network signed Ozzy Osbourne’s family to star in a variety show. The untitled Osbournes show does not have a premiere date.
Competitors will be watching to see whether the NBC special succeeds. The singer John Mayer is reportedly in talks to host a variety show for CBS, although the network has not confirmed that the show is in development.
Against a bleak economic backdrop that reminds some of the ’70s, television executives said they were hoping that families would gather in the living room for an upbeat hour of comedians, musicians and surprises.
“I think it’s fun, it’s celebratory, it’s light and breezy, and it’s a good showcase,” said Ben Silverman, the co-chairman of NBC Entertainment, who accepted Ms. O’Donnell’s pitch for “Rosie Live” earlier in the year.
What Mr. Silverman didn’t say was that given the sorry state of NBC’s prime-time schedule, “Rosie Live” could be a desperately needed shot in the arm. Promotions for the show remind viewers that “anything can happen”; in a decade of time-shifting and fast-forwarding, “live” is an important sales pitch.
It’s not only “American Idol,” the nation’s most-watched show, that proves the point: NBC’s only show among broadcast’s Top 20 for the week ending on Nov. 16 was Sunday’s live N.F.L. game. And the network’s most storied franchise, “Saturday Night Live,” has had a robust year.
While “Rosie Live” commercials have run frequently on NBC, the show’s host is herself a walking, talking promotion. When Ms. O’Donnell says that the show will consist of “no politics, no feuds, no fighting, just one hour of entertainment,” every celebrity magazine reader knows she is referring to the year she spent on “The View” and the animosities that may or may not remain.
The supposed feud between Ms. O’Donnell and Barbara Walters, one of the other “View” hosts, re-emerged in a conference call last Wednesday when a reporter asked Ms. O’Donnell about her opinion of the program. Ms. O’Donnell’s comment about a lack of camaraderie among the current hosts prompted Ms. Walters to spend a minute on Thursday’s show chastising “ladies” who criticize “The View.”
The spat was good for scores of press mentions, conveniently published days before Ms. O’Donnell’s show. (The two women share a publicist.)
On Friday morning Ms. O’Donnell waltzed into the rehearsal room, donned a black top hat and recounted her most recent exchange with Ms. Walters for her group of dancers. “Call me ‘lady’ from now on,” she joked.
After switching from boots to high heels, she practiced the show’s opener, a rendition of “City Lights” from the 1977 Broadway musical “The Act,” with its original star, Liza Minnelli. After about 10 rehearsals, the scene seemed stage-ready.
“I did it, Denis,” Ms. O’Donnell exclaimed to her choreographer, Denis Jones. “I didn’t think I could do it.”
The one-hour special amounts to a re-emergence for Ms. O’Donnell, who hosted a daytime talk show from 1996 to 2002. On Wednesday she will deliver a monologue, introduce musical performances by Alanis Morissette and Ne-Yo and chat up the “30 Rock” cast members Alec Baldwin and Jane Krakowski.
Surprise guests, comedic skits and a pair of tap dancers will lead up to a finale by the singer Gloria Estefan. The show’s other executive producer, David Friedman, calls it “very old-school variety.”
“There really isn’t anything like it on TV,” he said.
Wednesday night will test whether viewers want to watch. Series like “The Carol Burnett Show” and “The Sonny and Cher Comedy Hour” were ratings hits in the three-network era. But by 1980 they had all but vanished from television.
“I think partly they died because they were sort of stuck” in the past, Mr. Darnell said. “If you look back at them, they look very much of the era. They don’t translate well. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t a new way to present them.”
Ms. Burnett, for one, is ready for their return. “I’m happy that the V word isn’t so nasty anymore,” she said in a telephone interview on Monday. “It’s a genre that I think is sorely missed.”
Ms. Burnett’s show ended in 1978, but it remained popular in syndication, on VHS and DVD and more recently on YouTube. A retrospective that CBS showed in November 2001 drew almost 30 million viewers.
A number of producers have tried to bring the variety format back, often with a sketch comedy bent, with little success. But the format is evident in “American Idol,” “Dancing With the Stars” and other reality hits. The talent competitions are variety shows, Ms. O’Donnell observed, “only without a lot of variety.”
Ms. O’Donnell said she believed the timing was right for a variety revival, partly for practical reasons. “It’s a lot less costly than a one-hour drama, people are getting fed up with reality, and sitcoms don’t seem to be working,” she said.
The one-hour special is being produced with an eye toward a regular series run. Ms. O’Donnell’s contract calls for episodes to be ordered in batches of six. Mr. Silverman isn’t ready to commit yet, but he said, “Hopefully, the audience will be as excited as we are.”
Broadway — Ms. O’Donnell calls herself its “ultimate fan” — will surely be watching. As Ms. O’Donnell sat on a bench outside the rehearsal hall and reminisced about previous variety shows, a dancer interrupted and said, “Thanks for bringing it back.”
Ms. O’Donnell smiled and answered, “I’m trying.”
"Comedy is tragedy plus time."
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