TV REVIEW : Satz’s ‘Night Rap’ Is Bad Comedy

KABC’s Eyewitness News did more damage than they realized when they parted company in 1987 with their star investigative reporter and media gadfly, Wayne Satz. Best-known for breaking the McMartin Pre-School story, Satz and his subsequent in-house commentaries on TV (including KABC) news coverage ultimately became too hot for his bosses. Things hit the boiling point when a Satz commentary charged Eyewitness News with exploiting a ratings sweeps period for their own gain.

But as deep in the soup as Satz may have been at his old station, he’s up to his neck in dreck at his new home, HBO, where his weekly mock-newscast, “Night Rap,” premieres tonight at 11:30 p.m.

Most of “Night Rap’s” 30 minutes play like bad deja vu of the most hobbled “Saturday Night Live” skits on media, but there’s a creepiness to the whole enterprise that takes it far beyond (and beneath) “SNL” nudge-nudge wink-wink humor.

Satz adopts a kind of disguise for “Night Rap” as “W.T. Satz,” but at the same time wants to unmask TV news as a process of staged events posing as journalism. His first segment pretends to be an expose on how the networks and the Pentagon set up phony desert battles near Palm Springs to provide desperately needed war footage during the Persian Gulf War. The only thing unmasked, though, is Satz’s own contempt for TV reporting.

Hate can breed comedy, but it usually--as it does here--comes off as merely hateful comedy. Satz’s disgust for celebrity pieces is why an item on a certain Saul Fleishman, claiming that he used to be Madonna’s Jewish “guru,” comes off as a mess, not really satirizing the Material Girl. As with a subsequent “Nightline”-type segment on “the Ted Bundy gene”--and how those who carry the anti-social gene, like Charlton Heston and three of the Keating Five, are potential mass murderers--bad taste and bad acting go hand in hand. A final bit on breasts isn’t for the kids, or thinking adults. It may not be too good for Satz’s career, either.