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Hall's markedly less daring return to TV came about as the result of a phone call from Jeffrey Katzenberg, one-third of the power triumvirate (along with Steven Spielberg and David Geffen) at the DreamWorks studio. Katzenberg, who, without a hint of irony in his voice, refers to Hall as a "national treasure," decided to lure the comic back to TV after catching his appearance on Late Show with David Letterman in November 1995. The mogul's first step was to dissuade Hall from doing a film he had conceived in which the comic would have starred as a two-faced rap impresario. "It was like Nino Brown meets Shecky Green," Hall explains. "Jeffrey didn't think it was right for me."
Hall also gave up on a film he had written himself about a retired Cleveland Browns football player who discovers he has fathered a child with a groupie. When the Browns moved to Baltimore, Hall, a Cleveland native, felt the script needed a major, time-consuming overhaul. "I don't have the confidence to stay out of show business for too long," he admits.
Even so, he rejected scads of previous sitcom offers. "I've been joking that I even got pitched 3rd Negro from the Sun," he says. One idea had him and Greg Evigan--a white actor currently playing a deranged gay hunk on Melrose Place--paired as two men who discover at middle age that despite obvious dissimilarities, they are brothers. Katzenberg's offer appealed because it allowed the comic the freedom to cook up the sitcom he desired.
What Hall wanted to do, he says, was create a show in which regular African Americans deal with regular problems, or what he calls "an integrated Friends." White acquaintances pop in and out of the action regularly on Arsenio. But while the cast may be racially balanced, the writing staff is less so. Only two of Arsenio's seven writers are African American. "I hire writers based on their material," the star says. "My thing is black, white, male, female, I don't know. What I know is, I gotta win. I know that black people will be mad at me if there are not enough blacks working for me, and they'll be mad at me if I ain't on the air."
Of course, what Hall really hopes for is another hit. ABC, which is paying an astounding $900,000 an episode for the series, a large chunk of which is going to its star, clearly hopes for one also. And despite the show's weaknesses, Arsenio may pull it off. His fans seem to number many. Over dinner at Los Angeles' stylish Mondrian hotel last month, he was barraged by passersby expressing their enthusiasm about his return. "We can't wait for you, man," said one. Arsenio returned a beaming thank you. It is hard to imagine that after The Arsenio Hall Show ended he thought he was ready to forgo the limelight for good. "For a minute I thought that maybe show business wasn't for me," he says not long before energetically racing off to JonValdi, whose owners opened up the shop for him past midnight.