During his five-year tenure as host of his warm-vibe, late-night talk show, Arsenio Hall seemed like the sort of guy who had a natural instinct for what made him look good. One night he would fist-roll his way on stage in a sleek Armani suit, the next in Vegas sequins, another in a pair of chic ragtag overalls. These days, though, Arsenio appears to be taking few fashion risks. During a recent tuxedo fitting at Los Angeles' posh JonValdi clothier, the 40-year-old comic was accompanied by a personal stylist, Julie Mijares, who had dressed him that evening in the loose-fitting jeans and Hush Puppies he was wearing. "I just like whatever she tells me to like," Arsenio happily confessed. At that moment Julie was trying to get him to like some peg-legged tux trousers and a pair of clunky Prada loafers to match. "I don't know," Arsenio hesitated. "Won't this all make my feet look too big? I've got really big feet."
His wardrobe isn't the only place where Hall is now making more conventional choices. Having been on hiatus from show business since the end of The Arsenio Hall Show in 1994, Hall developed some potentially intriguing film projects, but he abandoned them in order to make his comeback in the world where he feels safest--TV. This week he debuts in his first prime-time sitcom, titled--with the help of input from focus-group research--Arsenio (ABC; Wednesdays, 9:30 p.m. ET). The show has all the flair of an Oxford shirt set off by a rep tie.
Arsenio plays an Atlanta sportscaster who lives with his beautiful, hardworking lawyer wife (Vivica Fox) and her Harvard-educated brother (Alimi Ballard). The plots are standard sitcom fare: he goes off to a bar with his buddies when she wants to cuddle at home; they fuss and make up. The writers have been culled from some especially bland series. Hall had a much publicized fight over "creative differences" with his former head writer, David Rosenthal, a veteran of Ellen, and replaced him with Timothy O'Donnell, who had worked on Dave's World and Growing Pains. Three other writers come from the defunct and spiritless Molly Ringwald vehicle Townies. Clearly, Arsenio isn't aiming for bite.
Watching the show, it is easy to forget that throughout the comic's late-night years he was a defiantly brave presence on TV. His cloying manner with guests could be maddening, but Hall kept up his earnestly ingratiating style at a pre-Rosie O'Donnell moment in pop-cultural history when sunny-eyed kindness wasn't all the rage. Going against the grain, he used niceness to build a hit show at a time--the late '80s and early '90s--when David Letterman's ironic distance set the standard for talk-show cool and a subversive little sitcom called The Simpsons first made its way onto the must-watch list of hipsters, secretaries and six-year-olds alike.