Cooper Almost 24/7 As He Readies Talk Show

Anderson, the new syndicated daytime talk show from Warner Bros. Domestic Television starring Anderson Cooper, debuts just a couple weeks from now, on Sept. 12, on 199 stations nationwide.

While he’s doing that show, he intends to keep up with demands at his CNN job in New York, where AC 360 at 8 p.m. ET, is the centerpiece of the network’s primetime schedule. (CNN is also a unit of Time Warner.) He also intends to keep up with his commitment to contribute a handful of pieces to CBS’s 60 Minutes.

Cooper is now beginning to tape shows that may be used as “evergreens” in the event his CNN duties get in the way of the syndicated show and hopes to have 15 ready to use when the news calls him away from New York. Otherwise, he’ll tape five shows over three days close to the time they’ll air.

Even with those shows held in reserve, It could be a grueling schedule, especially for Cooper, whose signature style is to entrench himself at news sites.

His emotional reporting in 2005 from New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, and then in 2009 after the Haiti earthquake, defined his style for millions of viewers.

A few days ago as another hurricane was threatening to wreak havoc , this time on New York itself, Cooper talked about his new show with TVNewsCheck Contributing Editor P.J. Bednarski and discussed the tricks of juggling a syndicated daytime show with his nightly talk show.

An edited transcript:

You know, if this was 2005, you’d be in Louisiana covering Katrina. I’m wondering, if the syndicated show was debuting at about the same time, could you have stayed there? What would you have done?

A month is a long time in television. And I stayed a month in the New Orleans/Mississippi Gulf Coast during and in the wake of Katrina. I stayed a month in Haiti after the earthquake. I stayed in Israel for a month during the fight against Hezbollah.

But I think we will have enough shows on tape to cover any assignment that I need to do for CNN. It’s important for me to still be able to go out into the field and to still be able to cover breaking stories and important stories. So I think we will work it out.

A lot of these stories are stories that also would be of interest to a daytime audience if we can tell it in the right way and some of the stories have resonance with a daytime audience. We will certainly incorporate them into a daytime show. I think we’ll make it work.

You could go live with a show but because your show will air at different times all over the country, I’m guessing that can’t be done easily.

We can go live if we need to go live on that day. We would probably need some overnight time to make it work, but I am able to go live on anything at pretty much any time. So, we will be very nimble and very able to respond to the things that are happening. But it’s not a news show.

When you say it’s not a news show, it makes me curious. What’s a prototypical Anderson show? Who’s the guest on a prototypical Anderson show?

The commonality they all have is that they will have my personality throughout and my engagement and my interest throughout and the audience will be also an important part of every show.

I don’t think a lot of shows are really using the audience much anymore except to applaud in and out of commercial breaks. I want to be in the audience, I want to be talking to the audience and that also includes the audience at home via Skype and online, but I think there’s not going to be a prototypical show. We want it to be entertaining and informative. Those are the two things that we want our shows to be. Whether the topic is a provocative social issue, whether it’s a big celebrity interview, whether it’s an interesting pop culture phenomenon, we want it to be informative and entertaining.

It sounds in some ways like a hybrid of Phil Donahue and Larry King.