Following Mary

Caught in a breakfast-nook indiscretion with a local cop, Mary Hartman begs Husband Tom for forgiveness. Meanwhile, Mary's neighbor Loretta tells Bedmate "Baby Boy" she is postponing her country-music career to become a missionary. Suddenly, the traumas are interrupted by a series of boffo bulletins. "Tonight, we'll tell you more about Howard Hughes' sex habits ... We'll chase a runaway baboon at the airport ... and check out wedding bells behind prison walls ... Be informed and have fun, beginning in three minutes on Metro News, MetroNews."

More than half the 450,000 or so people in Los Angeles who watch Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman usually stay tuned to KTTV's MetroNews, MetroNews. Their loyalty is understandable; most of what they will see and hear could have come straight from Mary. Instead of repeating the substantive news stories other stations serve up at 11 p.m., Los Angeles' Metromedia affiliate courts its carryover MH2 audience with an 11:30 extravaganza it forthrightly calls "news for people who don't like news."

"Our goal is to keep hip, antinews types from going to bed or switching to Johnny Carson," says KTTV News Director Charles Riley of the 30-min. show. "If we offered straight news after Mary Hartman, all you would hear is the sound of sets clicking off." Instead, MN2 is clicking with an audience that has doubled since the program went on the air three months ago. It now tops Los Angeles' five other independent stations in its time slot and is challenging ABC and the CBS late movie.

Seedy Set. In the irreverent MN2 mix, serious news is usually engulfed by the fanciful. Stripper Fanne Fox once delivered the weather report; Disc Jockey Wolfman Jack analyzed the New Hampshire primary results; Actress Terry Moore submitted to a polygraph test about shipboard sex with Howard Hughes. Porn Queen Amber Hunt and Mobster Mickey Cohen both graced one of last week's shows with filmed interviews, she on what thrills, he on forged wills. The zest of MetroNews comes from the ham and hard-boiled-egg match-up of extrovert Anchor Man Charles Rowe, 37, and Reporter-Inquisitor Charles Ashman, 40. A bionic-perfect baritone, Rowe is the ideal foil for Ashman, a sardonic "everyman" who shows up each night with yesterday's stubble. Operating in a seedy city-room set torn from The Front Page, they go about earning the sobriquet given them by miffed competitors: the "outhouse news."

But MN2 offers inside news, too, thanks mainly to Ashman, a former attorney-author who has produced noteworthy scoops. Among them: disclosure of the partial Government subsidy of Nixon's trip to Peking; Barry Goldwater's rapprochement with Nelson Rockefeller; a six-part series on the American Escape Committee, which is responsible for arranging two recent breaks from Mexican jails. Ashman, who admits to some qualms about the MN2 format, notes: "Two minutes after I broke the story on Nixon's China trip, I was reporting from inside a nudist camp, and four minutes later I was interviewing a goat."

And Rowe has his moments of worry. At first he thought MN2 would prove to be a "highly perishable commodity." Now he just wishes the show had a bigger staff. Its needs? "Either a street reporter or a comedy writer."

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