TELEVISION: A LEAGUE OF HER OWN

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That was about as family-unfriendly as the Rosie O'Donnell Show got during its first week, as the 34-year-old host easily established herself as the poster girl of the campaign to clean up daytime talk. But O'Donnell's efforts to re-create the talk shows from her youth may work a bit too well. The show has a sanitized, regressive feel. Camera pans of the audience reveal a polo-shirt-wearing, almost entirely white crowd. Whatever sense of freshness the show achieves can peel away when Rosie has people like Joan Lunden coming on to whip up a zesty Oriental chicken salad.

Perhaps things will reshape themselves. "We're still trying to get a feel for what the show is definitively," says Daniel Kellison, O'Donnell's fresh-faced 31-year-old producer and a former segment producer for Letterman. "You know how sometimes you see something new, and it's so awful you just wince? Right now that's the moment we're trying to avoid." Good-natured and fun, the Rosie O'Donnell Show is more than full of promise.