Harvey’s new talk show brings late night to daytime TV
Memo from Steve Harvey (no, not “that” memo): His new talk show will aim to bring a late-night sensibility to daytime.
The omnipresent personality drops his last name from the title of “Steve” — which premieres in nationwide syndication Tuesday (10 a.m. on WCVB) — but the series still will be quintessential Harvey, with his comedic and pointed takes on a variety of topics. He’ll surely have famous guests, especially since the program is based in Los Angeles instead of its predecessor’s Chicago, but he vows they’ll be there for reasons other than to hawk their latest projects.
Harvey also says he won’t have standard daytime-talk segments. “People don’t care about the Coupon Queen no more,” he maintains. “You put on a daytime show and there’s a cooking segment, and the host stands around, and they like everything they cook. Who the hell likes everything they eat, that some strange person you don’t even know is cooking?”
With his many other current television jobs, Harvey foresees “Steve” as an amalgam of all of them: “When I’m on ‘Little Big Shots,’ I’m dealing with kids, which I’m really good at because I got seven of them myself. And then I do just enough jokes that’s right over the kids’ heads that just slams their parents in the mouth, so everybody gets to have a good time; I take that with what I do on ‘Family Feud.’ (And) I take that with what (I did) years ago on ‘Showtime at the Apollo.’ I’m going to combine it.”
While he wants “Steve” to be funny, Harvey intends to stand by some serious topics that long have been causes of his. He notes, “I’ve championed women on my show ... whether it’s dating, whether it’s advice, whether it’s just talking about how powerful and wonderful they are. I’m not going to stop doing that on this show. If you take that and you put real funny on top of that, you got a chance at something really special.”
And about that now-infamous memo, in which Harvey told the staff members of his previous talk show not to approach him without an appointment?
“I learned two things from that email,” he says now. “I can’t write, and I should never write. It was something I wrote a year ago. Somebody didn’t get a job coming to L.A. (for the new show) and they got (angry). And I was OK until I saw it on CNN. And that’s when I knew I was in a lot of trouble.
“I’m not really a mean-spirited guy at all,” insists Harvey. “I’m really a congenial guy, but it’s kind of like if you go home every day and all your kids is in the kitchen waiting on you and start hammering you, you just need a moment. That’s all it was. It’s really not that big a deal. I thought it was cute. You all didn’t, but ... . ”