WHOOF! HERE HE IS AGAIN

By GINIA BELLAFANTE

During his five-year tenure as host of his warm-vibe, late-night talk show, Arsenio Hall seemed like the sort of guy who had a natural instinct for what made him look good. One night he would fist-roll his way on stage in a sleek Armani suit, the next in Vegas sequins, another in a pair of chic ragtag overalls. These days, though, Arsenio appears to be taking few fashion risks. During a recent tuxedo fitting at Los Angeles' posh JonValdi clothier, the 40-year-old comic was accompanied by a personal stylist, Julie Mijares, who had dressed him that evening in the loose-fitting jeans and Hush Puppies he was wearing. "I just like whatever she tells me to like," Arsenio happily confessed. At that moment Julie was trying to get him to like some peg-legged tux trousers and a pair of clunky Prada loafers to match. "I don't know," Arsenio hesitated. "Won't this all make my feet look too big? I've got really big feet."

His wardrobe isn't the only place where Hall is now making more conventional choices. Having been on hiatus from show business since the end of The Arsenio Hall Show in 1994, Hall developed some potentially intriguing film projects, but he abandoned them in order to make his comeback in the world where he feels safest--TV. This week he debuts in his first prime-time sitcom, titled--with the help of input from focus-group research--Arsenio (ABC; Wednesdays, 9:30 p.m. ET). The show has all the flair of an Oxford shirt set off by a rep tie.

Arsenio plays an Atlanta sportscaster who lives with his beautiful, hardworking lawyer wife (Vivica Fox) and her Harvard-educated brother (Alimi Ballard). The plots are standard sitcom fare: he goes off to a bar with his buddies when she wants to cuddle at home; they fuss and make up. The writers have been culled from some especially bland series. Hall had a much publicized fight over "creative differences" with his former head writer, David Rosenthal, a veteran of Ellen, and replaced him with Timothy O'Donnell, who had worked on Dave's World and Growing Pains. Three other writers come from the defunct and spiritless Molly Ringwald vehicle Townies. Clearly, Arsenio isn't aiming for bite.

Watching the show, it is easy to forget that throughout the comic's late-night years he was a defiantly brave presence on TV. His cloying manner with guests could be maddening, but Hall kept up his earnestly ingratiating style at a pre-Rosie O'Donnell moment in pop-cultural history when sunny-eyed kindness wasn't all the rage. Going against the grain, he used niceness to build a hit show at a time--the late '80s and early '90s--when David Letterman's ironic distance set the standard for talk-show cool and a subversive little sitcom called The Simpsons first made its way onto the must-watch list of hipsters, secretaries and six-year-olds alike.

Hall's markedly less daring return to TV came about as the result of a phone call from Jeffrey Katzenberg, one-third of the power triumvirate (along with Steven Spielberg and David Geffen) at the DreamWorks studio. Katzenberg, who, without a hint of irony in his voice, refers to Hall as a "national treasure," decided to lure the comic back to TV after catching his appearance on Late Show with David Letterman in November 1995. The mogul's first step was to dissuade Hall from doing a film he had conceived in which the comic would have starred as a two-faced rap impresario. "It was like Nino Brown meets Shecky Green," Hall explains. "Jeffrey didn't think it was right for me."

Hall also gave up on a film he had written himself about a retired Cleveland Browns football player who discovers he has fathered a child with a groupie. When the Browns moved to Baltimore, Hall, a Cleveland native, felt the script needed a major, time-consuming overhaul. "I don't have the confidence to stay out of show business for too long," he admits.

Even so, he rejected scads of previous sitcom offers. "I've been joking that I even got pitched 3rd Negro from the Sun," he says. One idea had him and Greg Evigan--a white actor currently playing a deranged gay hunk on Melrose Place--paired as two men who discover at middle age that despite obvious dissimilarities, they are brothers. Katzenberg's offer appealed because it allowed the comic the freedom to cook up the sitcom he desired.

What Hall wanted to do, he says, was create a show in which regular African Americans deal with regular problems, or what he calls "an integrated Friends." White acquaintances pop in and out of the action regularly on Arsenio. But while the cast may be racially balanced, the writing staff is less so. Only two of Arsenio's seven writers are African American. "I hire writers based on their material," the star says. "My thing is black, white, male, female, I don't know. What I know is, I gotta win. I know that black people will be mad at me if there are not enough blacks working for me, and they'll be mad at me if I ain't on the air."

Of course, what Hall really hopes for is another hit. ABC, which is paying an astounding $900,000 an episode for the series, a large chunk of which is going to its star, clearly hopes for one also. And despite the show's weaknesses, Arsenio may pull it off. His fans seem to number many. Over dinner at Los Angeles' stylish Mondrian hotel last month, he was barraged by passersby expressing their enthusiasm about his return. "We can't wait for you, man," said one. Arsenio returned a beaming thank you. It is hard to imagine that after The Arsenio Hall Show ended he thought he was ready to forgo the limelight for good. "For a minute I thought that maybe show business wasn't for me," he says not long before energetically racing off to JonValdi, whose owners opened up the shop for him past midnight.