What do a couple of planets named Mars and Venus need with star power anyway?
     Likely less and less. Rumors ripen Hollywood-style that Cybill Shepherd is about to get yanked from her job hosting the syndicated talk show "Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus." 
   And no wonder. Ratings for the new show, never very encouraging, are settling to the bottom of the spittoon, in unhealthy proximity to those of "Dr. Laura."
     During November sweeps, "Mars" averaged only a 0.8 household rating, making it one of the lowest rated freshman syndicated series.
   But the question looms: If Shepherd does get the noose, will the show's fortune dramatically improve?
   It doesn't seem likely, as much as its producers would like to believe otherwise.
    "Mars" certainly suffers from star-itis, an ailment common in syndication these days, in which shows are launched on the mistaken belief that a big name is all you need to pull in viewers.
   But "Mars" suffers from other ills as well, and those are unlikely to be fixed and indeed might not be fixable.
     "Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus" was a hugely successful book for author John Gray, but that's no guarantee that the concept can work on TV.
    Its chief ill appears to be its split identity, as sort of a cross between "Jenny Jones" and "Oprah" but without any of the real drawing power of either. Which is to say it is a bit of everything and not much of anything.
     "It’s confused. It’s a mess," says Robert Thompson, director of the Center for the Study of Popular Television at Syracuse University. "It’s trying to cash in on the brand name of the title. But it reminds me of a confused theme party, where no one agreed on the theme."
  The program debuted in October as a relationship-advice talk show taking its name and some of its premise from the book by Gray, who also serves as an executive producer.
   But the formula seems cobbled together uncomfortably from very different genres, splitting the difference between lurid and feel-good without much success.
   "‘Mars-Venus’ and ‘Dr. Laura’ are not providing the explosive excitement and bizarreness of ‘Jenny Jones’ and ‘Jerry Springer,’ but they’re not Oprah Winfrey either," says Thompson. "I don’t know if it’s got enough of a concept that any tinkering will turn it into a hit."   
     Hiring Shepherd as host might have made sense at the time, but keeping her appears to little but mask the show's other weaknesses.
    For evidence that a famous host is no ratings trump card, just look to Roseanne, Howie Mandel, and Magic Johnson as star witnesses of this fact.
   "Often, star power seems contrary to success in daytime," says Thompson. "Cybill Shepherd is a star, but whether you can translate that star power into a daytime show has repeatedly been proven not to work. We’ve seen it with Roseanne, Magic Johnson, Donnie and Marie. And Cybill Shepherd has been a big star, but she’s not an up-and-coming new face."
  In fact, the former model and "Moonlighting" star wasn’t even supposed to be the host originally--that job belonged to former vice president Walter Mondale’s daughter Eleanor.
   But when the show was retooled this past summer, the producers hired Shepherd, who had recently published a tell-all autobiography.
   What Thompson says works in daytime is not star power, or even an original concept, but the creation of an interesting identity.
   "An awful lot of these shows that you think are in formulas at the saturation point do better longer than you would think. While their ratings seem more vulnerable, ‘Jerry Springer’ and courtroom shows are still doing well," says Thompson. "‘Jerry Springer’ knows what it is and it begins to deliver the moment it comes on the air."

-Elizabeth White is a staff writer for Media Life.

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