Arsenio Hall’s As Yet Nameless Show Debuts In March

Arsenio Hall has a new show and a debut date. The only thing he doesn’t have is a title.

“There have been a couple of people who’ve been trying to get me to use ‘Seinfeld’ for obvious reasons,” Hall said.

He’d like to call it “Then Came You,” but right now, Hall’s ABC sitcom, which has its debut March 5, is known as “The Untitled Arsenio Hall Project.”

Vivica A. Fox (“Independence Day”) is co-star in the half-hour comedy that’s pegged to “the cosmic challenges of a career and adjusting to the often unspoken nuances of modern marriage.” Translation: They’re newlyweds with good jobs.

Hall plays Michael Atwood, a motivated but still far from star announcer working for an all-sports cable network in Atlanta. Fox is Michael’s wife, Vivian, an attorney who has it a little more together than Michael but also brings a freeloading brother Matthew (Alimi Ballard) to the marriage.

Put them all together and it’s sort of “Mad About You … and Him.”

Nearly three years have passed since Hall has been seen on regularly scheduled television. He took his posse and went home in May 1994 after 1,248 hours of talk on “The Arsenio Hall Show,” which began in January 1989. He did much to change the dialogue, if not the dynamics, of late-night television.

He likened it at the time to “High Noon,” a shoot-out between comic gunslingers: himself, Jay Leno and David Letterman. And it did, indeed, get a little ugly, with a dog-eat-dog feud over celebrity bookings and an ill-advised, competitive pronouncement from Hall in which he promised to kick Leno’s butt.

In the end, it was Hall who took the fall.

Looking at the late-night landscape now, he appears more sanguine.

“It’s really cool,” said Hall. “because the guys have found their places. I think they’ve proven you can peacefully co-exist. … There are Letterman people and there are Leno people and somewhere there’s a guy saying, ‘I just want to watch (Jerry) Springer.’… All’s well in late-night, I think.” The time he has taken away from the tube, Hall said, has given him a healthier outlook.

Proposals and projects have come along, but a lot of the pitches have been high concept and outside his realm of experience. Hall was ready to do a movie until friend and DreamWorks exec Jeffrey Katzenberg told him it was a bad idea.

“What we need to do,” Katzenberg told him, “is put you in a situation - a world that you love, a world that you’re comfortable in, and I need to put you in front of a microphone and let you do your thing.” That led to the sportscaster route, a Bob Costas/ Ahmad Rashad vision.