For Non-Humans, They’re Not So Bad

My suspicions were overpowering. I had to find out the truth.

So I went to the White House press room and looked into the perfectly green eyes of the perfectly elegant NBC correspondent.

“Are you an android?” I asked.

Brian Williams was surprised, but recovered quickly. “Not that I’m aware of,” he said, in his perfect baritone. “I can deny the existence of a factory in the American Midwest that puts out people like me.”

Of course, he might have been programmed to fend off this kind of query with deadpan humor.

Williams, the 36-year-old hair apparent to Tom Brokaw, looks like the love child of Brokaw and Peter Jennings. I was struck by this remarkable bit of NBC morphing the first time I saw him manning the Saturday night anchor desk.

Then I tuned in to CBS on Sunday night and saw the guy that network was grooming as an anchor, John Roberts. He looks exactly like Dan Rather, minus that mesmerizing don’t-take-your-eyes-off-me-cause-I-might-crack aura.

But I really began to get those “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” chills when I realized that the substitute anchor on “Entertainment Tonight,” Bob Goen, was a dead ringer for square-jawed, white-toothed John Tesh. Definitely a pod person.

I mean, weren’t we supposed to have TV news programs that looked more like America as we hit the millennium? Why were we suddenly overrun with anchor clones?

I got a copy of Goen’s official biography, which includes his astrological sign (Sagittarius) and shoe size (9). Now does this sound like the resume of a real person?

Prophetic Career Twist: Goen modeled as a groom in a 1984 issue of Bride Magazine with Leeza Gibbons as his bride.

Personal Life Philosophy: Never have seconds of three-bean salad before interviewing Janet Jackson.

John Roberts laughed off the accusation that he’s a 39-year-old yuppie replicant of the 63-year-old Rather. “I don’t think they’re casting by looks,” said the former co-host of “Canada A.M.” “I think they’re casting serious, Type A, aggressive personalities.” Klaatu Barada Nikto.

Brian Williams made a far better case for being human. “My nose is crooked from a high school football accident, so I’ve always used that to refute the android theory. I’m losing my hair. I have to do miles on the treadmill to keep my weight from ballooning to 300 pounds. And I spend Sundays, my day off, the way most Americans do, as an unshaven slug on the floor of the den, watching football and playing with my kids.”

Indeed, he’s eerily human for a TV star. He does his homework. On the road, he hangs around with lowly print reporters and White House advance staff. He picks up bar tabs for tables of 20. He’s so funny, reporters think he should succeed Jay Leno, not Tom Brokaw. And he’s courteous to fans - when they can’t quite remember his name, he prods, “Oprah Winfrey.”

Leno hailed Williams as “NBC’s stud muffin.” But Howard Stringer, the former CBS president, misses the old idiosyncrasies.

“In the old days, the Collingwoods and Sevareids were recruited from radio,” he said. “Cronkite was a wire-service reporter. It didn’t matter what they looked like. But that pool is drying up. Everyone’s now got it glued in their minds that an anchorman or woman must look like a Greek demigod.”

Joe Angotti, a former NBC vice president who now teaches at the University of Miami, reassured me that we were not suddenly being invaded by anchor clones from outer space.

“Cloning is a proud television tradition,” he said. “Successful entertainment formats are almost always cloned. Seinfeld’s roots go all the way back to Danny Thomas. Mary Tyler Moore begat Murphy Brown. In the minds of television executives, newscasts are the same as sitcoms. So Dan Rather gets the same considerations as ‘Beavis and Butthead.”’

That must be why I feel as if I’m watching “Friends” no matter what time I turn on the TV.

I was working up to a good diversity fit when John Tesh told me that even he is tired of “vanilla” and wishes the networks would get some “really wild-looking people to do the news - like Howard Stern.”

That stopped me. Maybe replicants aren’t so bad after all.

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