TELEVISION: BRYANT GUMBEL: AFTER THE BREAK...

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First, let it be known that Bryant Gumbel doesn't spend every hour of the workday in the nattiest Joseph Abboud suit. On a midsummer morning at CBS's Manhattan studios, he is wearing slightly wrinkled cotton trousers and a golf shirt as he heads an editorial meeting for his new weekly prime-time newsmagazine show, Public Eye with Bryant Gumbel (CBS, Wednesdays, 9 p.m. E.T.).

Gumbel seems like a fun boss (Hey, there's a plastic humanoid M&M behind his desk). He tosses a paper ball in the air as his producers pitch story suggestions, and even digresses from the matters at hand to suggest a movie rental (the Belgian crime drama Man Bites Dog). But he displays no loosey-gooseyness about what he wants. He quickly rejects stories that sound even remotely as if they could spring from the mouth of Steve Dunleavy. During the past months, he has told the world in almost mantra-like fashion that he doesn't want his show tainted by the whiff of salaciousness. "There are a lot of other people doing those stories," he reasons. "Commercially, it's not viable. It's a crowded arena. If someone wants to say that's a crass, commercial decision, well, fine. Fine."

A crowded arena, indeed. Public Eye, which makes its debut this week, will battle it out for viewers and good stories with no fewer than five other TV newsmagazines that are already cramping network television's prime-time schedule. If, during his 15-year tenure on the Today show, Gumbel did not always display the intellectual heft or consistent coolheadedness of such newsmen as Tim Russert or Ted Koppel (the interviewer with whom he is too often favorably compared), he did manage to brand himself as television's most engagingly willful journalist. And beyond offering the intense presence of Gumbel, Public Eye will distinguish itself as TV's only live newsmagazine. It will regularly feature real-time interviews; Primetime Live, despite its name, does not.

How big a draw the live element will be, though, is questionable. And other than that feature, Public Eye does not appear to be different from its peers. The show's producers and regular correspondents (among them, veteran Bernard Goldberg and the young, powder blue-shoe wearing Alison Stewart) come mostly from other CBS newsmagazines, such as 48 Hours and the network's mercifully short-lived Coast to Coast. Taped segments will cover the usual mix of hard and soft news, with stories ranging from Bosnian war criminals to incompetent telephone operators. Hidden-camera reports, producers say, will occasionally be used in the broadcast.

The plans for Public Eye may seem formulaic, but just how stressful launching such a venture can be was obvious two days after Gumbel played host to the Emmys in Los Angeles and was back on the East Coast in a CBS wardrobe room getting prepped for a photo shoot. As network staff members dropped by to compliment him on his performance, he was yukking it up with the hair and makeup women, telling them how he had thought about helping Gillian Anderson on stage because she looked so immobile in her tight dress. But his spirits quickly shifted, when he started talking to Public Eye's spokeswoman about his discovery that part of a prized Peter Van Sant piece, shot in North Korea and scheduled to air on PE's first episode, had been borrowed by CBS Evening News. "You want to know what pisses me off?" he exclaimed. "That f______ pisses me off!"