According to one widely reported rumor popularly deemed too weird not to take seriously, Charlie Rose has a comeback show in the works.
Here’s the pitch: Rose, who was once famous for thoughtful, probing TV interviews of leading luminaries, is now better known for padding around his beach house in an open robe and creeping on the women who worked for him.
On the new show, he’d thoughtfully and probingly interview the other fallen media men—and they are legion. Louis C.K. and Matt Lauer, two of the high-profile harassers outed in the Great Pervnado of 2017, are named as prospective guests.
When he’s not puttering awkwardly around the Upper East Side or hiding out in the sleepy Long Island village of Bellport, Rose dines with allies like Harvey Weinstein’s super-lawyer David Boies and rakish moviestar Sean Penn—who himself could come up with plenty to atone for on Rose’s new show.
Booking interviewees is going to be easy. From Lauer and C.K. to Garrison Keillor and Kevin Spacey, Rose would have a wealth of interviewees to choose from. It’s actually finding someone to produce the project, however, that may prove more of a challenge.
Publisher and editor Tina Brown, who’s not a TV producer by trade, confirmed the rumor Wednesday, telling Page Six that she’d been pitched the producership but turned it down. She didn’t remember, or had forgotten, what network or streaming service was behind the project.
All of this prompts the natural speculation: What right-minded, or remotely reputation-conscious, company or individual would back Redemption Hour with Charlie Rose?
“It is a loathsome idea,” one veteran TV executive, who asked not to be named, told me in a phone interview Thursday. “I can’t imagine that anyone would distribute that—or that any of the named participants would be dumb enough to participate.”
Such a project would require to “a redefinition of chutzpah,” this executive said.
I also asked about the likelihood of a “Redemption Hour” panel at the 92nd Street Y. This, an incredulous TV producer had told me earlier that day, was a more feasible alternative to the idea of an interview show—which he’d called an out-of-control “cocktail party rumor” that “didn’t pass the smell test.”
The executive scoffed: “I don’t think there are enough rotten vegetables in Manhattan.” Rotten vegetables with which to pelt the penitent perverts, that is. He just doesn’t buy it, and he’s not alone. “Even these people, and these are extreme narcissists, can’t be that tone-deaf.”
If whoever’s backing the project wondered whether it was too soon for a redemption tour, and what degree of outrage such a project might attract, they have their answer in the dozens of disapproving news blogs blasted out in the last 18 hours. And Rose—who’s reportedly out-of-touch with the reality of his reputational losses—doesn’t technically need risk-averse producers, or network executives with advertisers to answer to, in the era of Facebook live.
Whatever form they take, there probably is a wave of #MeToo comebacks on the horizon. An ensemble project makes a certain amount of sense too. Since everyone fired or blacklisted because of serial depredations that appalled the public and embarrassed their friends, colleagues, and employers, none of them has a ton going on right now. The magnitude of the out-of-work egos lends a project like Rose’s rumored show a certain inevitability.
