A LEAGUE OF HER OWN

By GINIA BELLAFANTE

As they file into studio 8g at Manhattan's Rockefeller Center, audience members are treated to the sort of freebie they would not be given had they ordered tickets to the Richard Bey Show. Resting on each of the 175 seats are a pint of milk (low fat) and a snack-size package of Drake's cakes. This is the Rosie O'Donnell Show, and the gimmick is apt. The actress and comic, part brassy New Yorker, part perky den mother, has come to TV to serve up the daytime talk show as comfort food.

There is nothing on the Rosie O'Donnell Show to upset the stomach--no ill-kempt yokels flaunting their unseemly moral transgressions ("Stripped at uncle's bachelor party"). O'Donnell has modeled her syndicated show, which was launched last week to winning ratings, partially after those of cozy entertainers Dinah Shore, Merv Griffin and Mike Douglas. "What I liked about Mike Douglas," O'Donnell says, "is that everyone who came on his show appeared to be his friend. No one looked nervous." And indeed, O'Donnell is anything but intimidating.

Her set is a colorful candy land; her bandleader, John McDaniel, upbeat and affable. O'Donnell opens the one-hour show with a brief monologue, then takes a seat to joke her way through the morning papers and play host to an impressive line-up of celebrities and musical acts. During her first week she introduced nearly every one of her guests--who included Penny Marshall, Fran Drescher, George Clooney, Toni Braxton and Dennis Franz--as "my buddy."

Such behavior might seem cloyingly disingenuous were Rosie's persona not built in part on a seemingly real reverence for show business. She is insider and Everygal all at once. For although O'Donnell has purchased Helen Hayes' former New York estate and pals around with Madonna, she can still work up a Nebraska housewife's enthusiasm for soap-opera star Susan Lucci, with whom she passionately discussed All My Children plot lines from more than 10 years ago on her premiere show. Unlike David Letterman, O'Donnell doesn't seem to be forcing a good mood; nor does she exploit guests as foils for her own comedy. She can talk to them rather than at them because she actually goes to the movies and watches TV; when Donny Osmond comes on she can belt out Osmond songs that even he doesn't remember.

The show, however, is not without flaws. For a sharp stand-up comic, O'Donnell makes some disconcertingly lame gags. Whenever she mispronounces anything, she comes back with a Wheel of Fortune joke: "I'd like to buy a vowel!" This was tired after just four days. And the formatted topical comedy, as it turns out, is too predictable. A joke about Julie Andrews declining a Tony nomination ended with Rosie claiming she'd turn down the Nobel Peace Prize. That's the sort of one-liner that people who have never even appeared on Star Search have been using around the water cooler for weeks (not to mention the fact that it was the conceit of a humor column in the New Yorker almost a month ago). And what might the punch line be of a joke that begins, "Archaeologists in Los Angeles are excavating a red-light district to see how prostitutes lived at the turn of the century"? You guessed it: "Charlie Sheen."

That was about as family-unfriendly as the Rosie O'Donnell Show got during its first week, as the 34-year-old host easily established herself as the poster girl of the campaign to clean up daytime talk. But O'Donnell's efforts to re-create the talk shows from her youth may work a bit too well. The show has a sanitized, regressive feel. Camera pans of the audience reveal a polo-shirt-wearing, almost entirely white crowd. Whatever sense of freshness the show achieves can peel away when Rosie has people like Joan Lunden coming on to whip up a zesty Oriental chicken salad.

Perhaps things will reshape themselves. "We're still trying to get a feel for what the show is definitively," says Daniel Kellison, O'Donnell's fresh-faced 31-year-old producer and a former segment producer for Letterman. "You know how sometimes you see something new, and it's so awful you just wince? Right now that's the moment we're trying to avoid." Good-natured and fun, the Rosie O'Donnell Show is more than full of promise.