TV: "Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me"

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: 'Wait' may soon get answer on TV vision : : What popular radio quiz show has cut a deal to produce a television pilot that could lead to fame, fortune and quite possibly a regular makeup artist assigned to Peter Sagal and Carl Kasell? : Wait, wait . . . don't tell you? : No, "Wait, Wait . . . Don't Tell Me!" : Following the lead of Chicago Public Radio stablemate "This American Life," "Wait, Wait" has moved a step closer to expansion into TV—or reduction, depending how big your screen is. : National Public Radio, which produces "Wait" with Chicago Public Radio, confirmed Monday it has an agreement with CBS Entertainment to produce a video sample to see how the wry decade-old quiz show with a weekly audience of nearly 2.7 million listeners on 450 stations might translate. : If the TV people footing the bill for the pilot are pleased, they'll pay NPR to help produce a series, although it's not yet known whether that would be for network television or syndication. : Right now, all CBS Entertainment and NPR have is an agreement and high hopes, along with host Sagal, judge/scorekeeper Kasell and creator/executive producer Doug Berman. Oh, and the title and irreverence too. : "We're excited," Margaret Low Smith, NPR's vice president of programming, said by phone. "For a long time, we've known 'Wait, Wait' had very special potential." : At one point, just to see what such a marriage of their radio show to something more visual might look like, the radio people taped it for themselves and quickly discovered they were very good—at producing radio. : "The radio show as just the radio show isn't a visual experience," Smith said. "They really are distinct media." : Turning radio shows into TV shows used to practically be the rule in U.S. television's early days. : It is hardly unprecedented in public radio, where Ira Glass' "This American Life," which Chicago Public Radio produces for Public Radio International, has run on CBS-owned Showtime. And "Car Talk," which also was created by "Wait, Wait's" Berman, this summer launched an animated PBS spinoff, "Click and Clack's As the Wrench Turns." : "The difference is that wasn't really taking ['Car Talk'] and translating it," Smith said. "It was using the guys and garage and transforming them to an animated fiction." : Disney once experimented with Michael Feldman's quiz show, "Whad'ya Know?" and Smith even recalls a TV adaptation of NPR's signature "All Things Considered," although details are sketchy, speaking to just how well it must have turned out. : But it's a tricky business knowing what parts of a radio show to include and what to drop for TV, making Glass' Peabody Award-winning Showtime triumph all the more remarkable, and raising the bar for NPR and CBS in preserving and enhancing what makes "Wait" worth the wait each week. : "At its core, the integrity and the smarts of the show are what has to, and will, sustain it," Smith said, "on television and on radio." : (ROSENTHAL/trib)

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