'Loveline' carries on without Carolla

By: RANDY DOTINGA - For the (San Diego) North County Times
April 13

If you turn on the radio late one evening and hear someone exhale a huge sigh of relief, don't be alarmed. It's probably just Dr. Drew Pinsky of "Loveline," the nationally syndicated sex and relationship advice show.

"I miss Adam, but I'm relieved that he's gone," admitted "Dr. Drew," whose co-host Adam Carolla left the show a few months ago to replace Howard Stern on several West Coast stations.

After 10 years of spending five nights a week with the combustible Carolla, Pinsky is flying solo. He's on his own, providing advice to teens and young adults without Carolla's trademark blend of coarse comedy and annoying behavior.


"The bad news is the funny isn't there in the way it needs to be to make our audience happy," Pinsky said in an interview. "It's an interesting time. Things are in evolution."

The good news? "Loveline," long one of radio's most fascinating and entertaining, has survived crises before. Throughout its 23-year history, it's gone through a variety of co-hosts and time slots, not to mention a TV version.

And yet "Loveline" lives on, giving listeners an often-scary glimpse at the sex lives of young people. (The show is heard locally at 10 p.m. Mondays through Thursdays and 11 p.m. Sundays on 91X.)

When Pinsky first went on the show in 1983 as a young medical student in Pasadena, AIDS was just beginning and the sexual revolution was in full swing. Pinsky, recruited by some friends to appear on the late-night show for free, figured he was doing a bit of community service and having fun at the same time.

"I was 24 years old when this started, and I knew what 16-year-olds were up to because I was just one," he recalled. "Back then, there was an unrestrained sexuality; there was no understanding of the biological ramifications," like STDs.

The show got huge ratings ---- at one point, it was attracting nearly a third of all L.A. listeners during its time slot ---- and Pinsky finally got a paycheck. The show got syndicated, major celebrities began making guest appearances, and Carolla arrived on the scene in 1995.

Now Pinsky is a 47-year-old addiction specialist who juggles the show with his duties at an L.A.-area hospital and appearances on the Discovery Health Channel. He's married with 13-year-old triplets (two boys and a girl) and has become one of the nation's most well-known physicians.

As for the show, there are still a fair number of callers who can't figure out why they're having certain symptoms below the waist or wonder if you can really get pregnant from a toilet seat. But Pinsky said there are many more questions about dysfunctional relationships, many of them linking back to sexual abuse or missing parents.

"People are having grave difficulties with boundaries and being close to one another," he said. "The kinds of solutions that young people find to that problem are drugs and alcohol and highly arousing activities."

In one of the most striking things about the show, Pinsky and Carolla were able to immediately detect signs of childhood trauma. They often asked, "Where's your dad?" when they heard a grown woman talk in a little-girl voice; invariably (and creepily), the woman's father died or left the family.

The upswing in calls about relationships doesn't mean STDs are no longer a problem. While young people know more about the hazards of sex than in the past, "they're emotionally disconnected," Pinsky said. "They understand (the risk) intellectually, but it isn't going to happen to them."

Carolla, the pornography-obsessed former host of TV's raunchy "The Man Show," was always a mixed blessing to the show. On the one hand, his snarky, bitter humor attracted young listeners who might not tune in to just hear Pinsky, who often talks in $10 words and acknowledges being a "square."

But Carolla was also nasty and rude to callers (and to Pinsky), and his bluster sucked time away from callers.

Things have changed in a matter of months. "We take literally four, five times more calls than we took when Adam was on the air," Pinsky said. "We're talking to many more people, and it seems like we're dealing with more stuff, but I hope we have as many listeners."

While the show's future is uncertain as programmers search for a new co-host, Pinsky doesn't have any plans to go anywhere.

"Here's the bizarre thing: I'm excited about going in and talking to callers," he said. "I've been doing this since 1983, and either it's something that's very wonderful and good, or there's something very wrong with me."

Randy Dotinga is void where prohibited. E-mail him at NCTimesRadio@aol.com.

It can't be the same without Carolla.  Dr. Drew needs that coarsely funny kind of personality to bounce off him.  He was a great straight man to Adam (and more obviously) but I can't imagine him doing the show himself.