The response isn’t great, and sometimes the programs aren’t either. “I don’t get a lot of reaction from it, but I get some,” says Jehlen of her show. The camera captured Wolf looking downright surly before she switched on her smile for the June program, and Toomey’s most recent show was torturously dull: he interviewed the state fire marshal about topics like safety regulations for space heaters. “We’re not 60 Minutes or anything,” says Capuano. “We’re not even the nightly news. We’ve tried to take national issues and put a local face on them.... I don’t think most people are searching the cable shows waiting for Mike Capuano to show up, but my hope is that when they come across it, they find it informative.”

Politicians without the Larry King gene prefer to limit their appearances to other people’s shows. Politically themed programs offer a particularly good way for candidates to get noticed by opinion makers. “If they’re district councilors [seeking higher office], they might not be as well known citywide,” says Sam Tyler of the Boston Municipal Research Bureau, a government-watchdog group. “It gives them an opportunity to get more exposure, and give people a better sense of their positions and personalities.” Councilor Dan Conley of Hyde Park, who’s running for Suffolk County district attorney next year, agrees: “It’s a great way to get exposure in other parts of the city where I’m not as well known, and I’ll try to take advantage of that as much as possible.”

Boston’s half-hour Neighborhood Network News, with studios at Boston University, provides a snapshot of local issues with original reporting and interviews. Another popular choice was Koocher’s now-defunct program in Cambridge. “We had every member of the city council and school committee, the city manager at least once a year, the police chief, the fire chief,” he says. “Councilors would call us up and say, ‘I haven’t been on for a while, I want to come on.’” Even pols from outside Cambridge, like then–House Ways and Means chairman Tom Finneran, would stop by. “The secret was, we were good amateurs,” says Koocher. “We were amateurs and we knew it. Doing local broadcast journalism was a sort of Walter Mitty fantasy....We never thought, ‘Let’s send this over to [Channel] 56 and see if they need a weekend anchor.’”

Koocher’s Boston counterpart, Joe Heisler, just marked the fifth anniversary of Talk of the Neighborhoods. With a three-person production staff, three cameras, and a snazzy opening-credits sequence featuring scenes of Boston life, the show has a more professional look than most local-access programs. It also has a bigger audience. “I think the best of the best is Joe Heisler,” says former Boston City Council candidate Greg Timilty. “He’s got a wide audience. I watch it every Tuesday.”

A former reporter (he edited the Hyde Park–Roslindale Gazette), candidate (he unsuccessfully ran against State Representative Shirley Owens-Hicks in the 1992 Democratic primary), and political staffer (for a legislative committee on Beacon Hill), Heisler knows his way around local politics. Though they were skeptical at first, local pols are now eager to come on the show. He’s even managed to score the kinds of interviews that make mainstream journalists jealous. “For over a year, I was working on getting Governor Paul Cellucci,” he says, “and the timing was exquisite — it was the first in-depth interview after he announced he was leaving to become ambassador to Canada.” But the format has its challenges: Heisler regularly must walk the line between bulldog and lapdog. “As a newspaper reporter, I asked a lot harder questions, questions with an edge,” he says. “But you can’t do it at this level, with this market, on TV.... If you do that, they’ll never come back.”

Perhaps most important, pols use local cable to reach out to casual voters who aren’t involved in the nitty-gritty of political life. “It’s another forum to reach people,” says Democratic political consultant Susan Tracy. “If they’re not at the VFW on a Tuesday night, you’re never going to meet them.” Jehlen talked about motherhood on SCAT’s Real Mothers. Menino appeared on the gay-interest show SpeakOut. State Representative Gloria Fox of Roxbury even showed up on Lupus Answers. Targeting by ethnic or affinity group can be a valuable campaign tool. “It’s a statement that ‘I want to reach out to that constituency group, the people who watch that show,’” notes Tracy. “It’s grassroots politics in the media age.”

Councilor Chuck Turner of Roxbury, a liberal activist who’s appeared on programs such as Neighborhood Network News, Bob Terrell’s City Journal, and Talk of the Neighborhoods, agrees. He finds local-access shows “less conservative than the major-media broadcasts” and “more community oriented,” with their practice of inviting guests to call in and ask questions. David Mills, a gay lawyer from Danvers, hosts the weekly SpeakOut two or three times a month. Though the show has hosted politicians — Davis-Mullen, Menino, State Representative Jarrett Barrios of Cambridge, State Senator Cheryl Jacques of Needham — Mills doesn’t see it as overtly political. Rather, he views it almost as a form of empowerment for himself and other gay people — and that’s the beauty of it for elected officials, who can talk to an audience that generally might not be interested in pure politics.

Similarly, Alex Geourntas’s The Greek Program, which has been running for five years, mainly features Greeks involved in community or activist work. But pols occasionally get a chance to make their pitch. Last week, Menino appeared to talk about his opposition to a new runway at Logan, and Geourntas and his co-host, Eleni Vidalis, translated the mayor’s comments into Greek — reaching constituents he literally couldn’t have talked to otherwise. It’s also a chance for politicians to be endearing and capitalize on the goodwill viewers feel toward shows aimed at their communities. “Councilor Conley and a lot of other councilors have come on during the holiday show,” says Geourntas. “Some of them, I’d teach them to say ‘Merry Christmas’ in Greek and they’d do it.”

Even if hardly anyone is watching, says former Boston city councilor Tom Keane, these shows are worth doing because it’s fun. “It’s interesting to toss ideas back and forth,” he says. “To have an engaging discussion with someone you’re not running against is rare, and pretty enjoyable.” Former Boston city councilor Larry DiCara, a former local-access host himself, sees another benefit. His program “was good practice for wet-behind-the-ears politicians, including one named Menino,” he says. “It gave them time to become accustomed to TV.”

But the pols who appear on local-access programs hope that such appearances will pay off in themselves. With last year’s presidential election decided by only a few hundred votes, an evening where a candidate can talk directly to even a handful of callers and viewers starts to look pretty good.

Dorie Clark can be reached at dclark[a]phx.com.