Talking Telly: CNN and Piers Morgan will be brilliant or a disaster, no inbetween

For some reason, now that the whispers that have been going around for months that Piers Morgan would end up taking over Larry King’s slot on CNN have really blown up the past two days since The New York Times disclosed that somehow Morgan has managed to talk NBC into letting him work for both them and a competitor in primetime. Americans who aren’t addicted to America’s Got Talent are trying to figure out who the heck he is, and Brits are gobsmacked that we would want him.

The bit that’s been left out of most of the major market coverage of Morgan’s impending deal is the rise and fall of his British journalistic career in England, and how that could potentially be a warning sign to CNN that he could be trouble. He was fired from his job as editor of the Daily Mirror in 2004 for not only running fake photos of Iraqi prisoners being abused, but refusing to apologize for doing so and even refusing to admit that anything in the paper’s reporting was wrong.

Before that, he had editorial jobs for both The Sun and The News of the World, and still writes a column for the Daily Mail. So basically the disgraced king of the redtops would be looking for redemption for the Worldwide Leader in News, an organization that’s so ingrained in US journalism that they’ve established their own national news sharing network with local outlets that might be compared to the BBC.

But while they are succeeding on that side, the primetime ratings are suffering in a very public way. Which brings us to where Piers has found a measure of redemption, and it’s really not in the two “Got Talent” franchises (although Britain’s Got Talent is going to suffer without the Piers and Simon grumpy old men tag-team.) Where he has shone – yes, Charlie Brooker would smack me silly for saying that he has, which makes me feel strangely guilty – is in ITV1′s “Life Stories With Piers Morgan.” Generally, the show consists of Morgan bringing on either a beloved or a controversial British entertainer, giving them a bit of a “This Is Your Life” treatment and then interviewing them. Frankly, although the setup on a stage with a studio audience is different, the interviews aren’t so much different.

Except that while King has really not had any game for awhile and famously does no research, Morgan does pull out some investigative chops for his. He brings out the whole person behind the celebrity veneer, warts and all, asks them the tough stuff, somehow manages to keep them onstage but usually gets an answer out of them that sounds in the ballpark of real. And yes, he makes people cry. He made freaking Simon Cowell cry, and I figured he had his tear ducts removed during an eye lift years ago.

But the best interview I saw him do was with Michael Winner, a famous 70′s director who then became a food critic and is probably more disliked than, well, Morgan himself. He had not consented to a sit-down interview for years and had walked out on several. But Morgan disarmed Winner and whilst being straight to him about how horrible he was to work with when they were colleagues, he also got him to completely open up about almost dying with a food-borne septic infection, a neglected and unloved childhood, and how he had lost his directorial career by refusing to compromise on the violence in the films he did with Charles Bronson. In short, I learned a ton and actually felt like I knew about man, not his latest project or future plans or his PR take on being misjudged by the evil media.

In short, I do think that Morgan’s show could potentially be exactly what both he and CNN need to complete what they need from each other – Morgan couldn’t get much higher journalistic redemption than this. However, CNN will also need to have a strong executive producer who can deal with Morgan’s ego and not let him run away with stories in a way that would make Nancy Grace look restrained. Surely Morgan realizes the rules are different here than in the UK, and whilst he took great pride in the UK for saying he didn’t have to keep the BBC’s standard for reporting, that’s not going to be the case here.