`Seattle Today' Gets A Fresh Format -- Ratings Are Rising As Finley, Chester Join Lenz

Is it a hit? Or a fizzle?

After two weeks, the honeymoon is still on for KING-TV's revamped ``Seattle Today'' show. Now hosted by the troika of Pat Finley, Colby Chester and Cliff Lenz, the show this week is pulling in ratings higher than it did last July under the two-host format with Lenz and Susan Michaels, who left the show last summer. And Wednesday, ``Seattle Today'' beat ``Geraldo,'' carried by KOMO in the same time slot (9 a.m.).

Will this unusual marriage of familiar TV faces (something old), a revised format and sets borrowed from Santa Fe (something new), and a focus on true-blue community issues, last?

``Let's face it,'' said Finley, ``the show was the fourth out of four shows in this time slot. It had nowhere to go but up. It had to change.''

Finley, reared in the Northwest and a veteran of stage, screen and TV here and across the United States, has returned as co-host after 3 1/2 years living in Europe, traveling, and indulging her passion for cooking and gardening.

``Talk shows as a genre are an endangered species,'' said Lenz, who has been the show's co-host for 15 years - making him the senior talk-show host in the nation, he claims. ``We were number two in the marketplace last November. By May we were last.

``We are in the toughest time slot, against national shows with enormous resources. But we also were without a senior producer, basically rudderless, for six months. Now, with (new senior producer) Anne Boa, we can take some risks, try new things.''

The new things involve his stepping out into the community on ``remotes'' to act as the umbilical cord to new in-studio hosts Finley and Chester. In addition, there's no audience in the studio, although viewers are welcome to come and watch Cliff do his live segments around the area, from Alki Beach to Green Lake (his next location is announced on each day's show).

The show starts with a half-hour treatment of an issue of community concern, from religious freedom through environmental threats to realistic body-reshaping programs, followed by 30 minutes of fashion, food, gardening or trends.

Boa, hired in April, said, ``Our viewer survey showed people wanted more news, information and a sense of what our community is thinking and doing. Active involvement. You can't just slough off doing celebrity gossip.

``Why be small-town, if you don't have to? We want to be a success on a national level.'' (``Seattle Today'' is now edited for presentation as ``Pulse'' on the Nostalgia Channel, aired in the Southwest.)

Therefore the new set - sponged apricot and sage-y surfaces, with creamy chairs, Southwest pots and pediments on a stage a theater would envy. New music. And a new opening logo - Italian-designed, and very today.

The new element people want to know most about is Colby Chester, a two-year Seattle resident who commuted to L.A. until last May to co-star in the soap ``The Young and the Restless,'' between writing a mystery script and rearing two daughters. He replaces Lenz as ``Seattle Today'' studio host.

``I have done lots of stage work,'' Chester said, ``but never live TV. I've never played myself. Never. I only have played roles, although those Northwest Ford commercials I did allowed a little of myself to come out.

``Two things the soaps taught me, though: What this cathode-ray medium was about, and that I could be bad, now and then - and that you could give a bad performance and it was OK, you could live through it.''

He spoke sheepishly about last month's rehearsals for the Seattle show. He misread a director's hand signals to cut as a pat on the back, implying he was doing great, and should just go on and on.

Finley, who has been acquainted with Chester professionally in New York and L.A. for nearly 20 years, said she thinks the two of them are perfect foils in the studio. He brings passion about the environment, the homeless and other issues viewers care deeply about, and energy borne of ``the hope that he can make a difference,'' Boa said.

For Finley, too, making a difference is important.

``I was in Seattle again last fall,'' Finley noted, ``and my mother - a mover and shaker in her own right - asked how I was going to account for my life, when I was going to justify my existence on the planet.

``I joked, `I gave at the office,' '' said Finley, who, in her previous stint with Lenz on ``Seattle Today'' from 1984-1987 helped start KING-TV's ``People Making a Difference'' program honoring outstanding volunteers.

But her mother's question lingered.

When Finley returned from France last spring to sell two houses she had bought here, she gave a speech for the Variety Club in which she talked about the ``Cash for Kids'' project.

Around that time (``Destiny didn't allow those houses to sell, to keep me from moving back to France,'' she believes), KING-TV programming executive Debby Messana called Finley.

KING executives knew the old show was failing and wanted to make changes, Boa said. They heard the former co-host was in town, and courted her input, if not her. Finley liked the new ideas and the new producer, and suggested Chester as co-host ``because he is so energetic, witty, and caring about issues affecting us all, and he is far better read than I am!''

Chester is delighted playing opposite Finley, whom he calls his ``anchor, but in the positive sense, of grounding me.'' He said he welcomes this chance not to worry so much about ego, as an actor, but about issues (though he said there was a time when he was ``shallow, insensitive, your basic jerk'').

Lenz, apparently growing more comfortable in his new role talking with people out in the community, rather than on the set, is taking the change with his characteristic dignity. He said working as a duo was ``like dancing a duet, or walking a tightrope where you have to balance, yet always take care you get seen.''

``We were interested in Colby not because he was Pat's friend or a handsome guy from the soap, but because he was involved in the community and had made the commitment to it by moving his wife and kids here,'' Boa said. ``Cliff is involved, too. But when you make a change, it has to be dramatic!''