After a while, you cannot help but wonder: Is this perhaps not Connie Chung, but Connie Povich we are looking at? I'm referring not just to the choice of topics, but the kind-yet-wise-yet-blithely-aloof host persona that is so ubiquitous on daytime TV. As Chung interviews overweight fliers who are suing Southwest Airlines for forcing them to buy additional seats on the plane, the woman, recalling the humiliation, starts to cry and Connie calls out to her staff several times for a tissue. Next, she brings on "someone on the other side of the story," a man who sued Delta after having been forced to share his seat with roughly half of a very large row-mate. The man explains that he filed the suit against the airline "on a contract theory that I did not get what I paid for: namely, a seat."

"Mr. Schaeffer," Connie replies, as if suddenly awakened from her nap, "obviously you have a big problem with people who are overweight."

Mr. Schaeffer's jaw drops. He begins to explain that he is talking about corporate responsibility, and that he applauds Connie's overweight guests for taking action against Southwest. Chung is too busy readying herself for another flying leap off the deep end to listen. "Why are you filing a lawsuit and making, as some people would say, a mountain out of a molehill?" An unfortunate choice, as some people would say, of cliché, given the topic at hand. But even this gaffe pales in comparison to the incongruity of the graphic placed directly beneath Connie's guests, which reads, "Flying While Fat." It's a wonder they didn't go with something more tasteful, like "Blubber on Board" or "On a Wing and a Lard Butt."

Not to say that Chung is not her very own, slightly disconcerting person, but the Povich moments are many and memorable. During her debut story on the Arizona wildfire, for example, Chung gently nudged into tears a mother who had been separated from her children. "It must be so difficult to be without your boys," she said. The mother confirmed this but remained composed. So Chung wondered what it felt like to lose cherished, irreplaceable objects, such as one's children's baby books. When the woman began to weep openly, Chung moved in with one of her signature homespun consolations. "Oh! But you do have your family!" she said smiling. "And that's a blessing." You half expected her to hand the woman a casserole.

Of course, Connie Povich would never laugh in disbelief if a guest claimed to have relatives who live in trailer parks. Nor would she repeatedly challenge this assertion, on the unspoken grounds that, because he is a fellow television professional, this couldn't possibly be true. This is what happened when guest Anderson Cooper went on to talk about Anna Nicole Smith's upcoming reality show and said something about his trailer-park family. He insisted he wasn't kidding, and in the end the question remained unanswered.

This sort of thing has already become a hallmark of "Connie Chung Tonight": When she is not stunning her guests with bizarre queries, cutting them off or apparently ignoring them, she implies stuff. Weird stuff. Like, speaking with a Milwaukee detective whose job it is to pose as a 13-year-old girl in chat rooms in order to lure potential pedophiles: "I have to believe that your wife and children ... I don't know ... think it's strange that you're sitting at your computer at night, posing as a child ... And you do the same on weekends!"

The embarrassments of Chung's first week on the air were widely ascribed to first-week jitters. Now a few weeks old, however, the show doesn't seem to be calming down any. On Monday, Phil Donahue's debut show beat her in the ratings by 300,000 viewers, according to USA Today. The paper also reported that Chung lost 8,000 viewers from her average last week. Both shows are famously going up against "The O'Reilly Factor," which is up by 300,000 since last week.

But all this could change, as it looks as though "Connie Chung Tonight" is well on its way to becoming CNN's first breakout comedy hit. In fact, first-night guest Jon Stewart nailed it when, at the beginning of their now infamous chat, he thanked her with what appears to be sibyl-like foresight. "It's an honor to be here," Stewart said, "especially following arson and pedophilia." Chung, sadly, has not proven to be nearly as astute. Not only was Stewart's name misspelled in the graphic that identified him (not her fault), but Chung failed to grasp an Xbox reference, misinterpreted a remark he made about Sept. 11 and asked him, without a hint of irony, whether he'd been approached to replace Dan Rather or Peter Jennings.

"Are you serious?" Stewart asked, amazed.

"You're very good at anchoring," she purred. "I'm telling you, you really are. You do it very well."

OK, maybe she'd never seen his show. Or maybe she had, and there was some wistfulness there, a melancholy dollop of "if only I could say the same for me" longing. Who can say. Maybe -- not that I'm implying weird things about her -- the explanation can be found buried deep in another of Chung's gnomic exclamations:

"I don't drink beer that often. I drink hard liquor!"

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