Before Tuesday's debut of "The Chevy Chase Show," there was a great deal of doubt about whether Chase was capable of handling a late-night talk show.
After that debut, there's no question any more.He isn't.
Chase's lame, pathetic performance only made a few people happy. People named Jay, Dave and Arsenio.
"I love to make a fool of myself," he said early on.
Good thing. Chase is to late night what the Mets are to major league baseball.
Expectations for the show were remarkably low, but Chase failed to deliver on even those. This was one dreadful hour.
Chase had openly admitted that he wasn't a stand-up comedian, but that didn't stop him from making a feeble attempt at a monologue. His big "joke" was about all the hype involving late-night television last week.
"You know something? It just isn't funny," Chase said. "I didn't laugh once. I just wasn't funny. I predict right now that I'm going to kick Ted Koppel's a--."
He should be so lucky.
The alleged comedy bits were so predictable that even the studio audience could manage nothing more than tepid laughter. Was there any viewer anywhere who didn't know that Chase was going to fall into the cement he was supposedly going to put his handprints in?
The Fox hype-meisters have been saying that we'd see a whole other side to Chevy once he got down to interviewing. Actually, what we saw was the same inept, nervous and uncomfortable man who bungled the rest of the show.
(His segment with Goldie Hawn was painful to watch - and she's supposed to be his close personal friend. How is Chase going to handle people he doesn't know?)
We're talking basic incompetence here. He couldn't read the cue cards. He didn't look into the right camera. He couldn't read the jokes during the News Update.
And that segment - which was supposed to be the crowning glory of the show - was a disaster. Eighteen-year-old jokes about Francisco Franco. Childish and tasteless lines. Picking his nose.
He pretended to be uncomfortable at the end of the segment but looked pretty much the same as he did during the rest of the show.
Bad omens abounded. Chevy's attempt to sink a shot in the basketball hoop at one end of the stage went awry. The bandleader for the show is Tom Scott - who performed the same function for the ill-fated "Pat Sajak Show."
And among the first-night guests was Whoopi Goldberg, who lamely chatted with Chase about the cancellation of her own late-night talk show.
To his credit, Chase apparently recognized how badly things were going. "So, what are you doing now that your show has gone the way my show is going to go?" Chase asked Goldberg.
And when Whoopi called Goldie back out on stage, Goldie said, "I was on my way out."
"I'm on my way out, too, so what the heck," Chase said.
What's so difficult to understand is why Fox put Chase in this position. First of all, his television experience consists of one season on "Saturday Night Live" almost two decades ago and innumerable appearances as a guest on other people's talk shows.
And why did the network that so avidly pursues young viewers choose the oldest late-night host on the air? (Chase will be 50 next month.) And as he demonstrated so vividly, Chevy is no longer the hip, irreverent guy he was back in the mid-'70s.
On the bright side, "The Chevy Chase Show" is a sure cure for insomniacs.
And with this kind of pathetic performance, the show won't be around long. Then maybe we can get "Star Trek: The Next Generation" reruns back on at 10 p.m. locally.