Changing Channels

Screen Gems: television the week of July 5

Warehouse 13 (9 p.m. Tuesday, Sci Fi Channel) -- Imagine Scully and Mulder played for laughs and you get the flavor of this charming show about a couple of Secret Service agents who, when their careers crash, find themselves marooned and investigating space-alien artifacts and other weirdness at a remote black-ops base. Eddie McClintock (Felicity) and Joanne Kelly (Vanished) strike sparks as the two agents getting onto one another's nerves and, maybe eventually, into one another's pants.

Angel and the Badman (9 p.m. Sunday, Hallmark Channel) -- This remake of a 1947 movie that starred John Wayne as gunfighter tamed by Gail Russell has Lou Diamond Phillips and Deborah Kara Unger reprising the roles, plus an extra: Wayne's grandson Brendan as one of the gang.

The Conscience of Nhem En (8 p.m. Wednesday, HBO2) -- Thirty years ago, when Cambodia's communist Khmer Rouge regime was slaughtering its subjects by the hundreds of thousands, teenage soldier Nhem En was assigned to photograph victims as they went through a processing center to their deaths. Was he a morally indifferent opportunist, or a secret witness to ensure the story was told? You decide.

The Ascent of Money (10 p.m. Wednesday, WPBT-PBS 2) -- A two-hour condensed version of this excellent eight-hour BBC documentary series aired in January. Now see the whole dazzling thing unfold in four episodes, which trace the origins of the world's financial system -- and argue that the collapse of the past two years was easily foreseeable if government officials had paid any attention to economic history.

Note: Days and times for PBS shows are for the Miami area, and may differ elsewhere.

Let me program your TiVo! Just click on my best bets for the week at www.tivo.com/guruguide.

What we (and everybody else) watched last week

Here's what the Nielsen folks say were the top shows last week in the cities where it has installed people meters, the set-top boxes that instantly report what's being watch on TV and who's watching it.

** BET Awards Show  (BET) – Miami, New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Atlanta, Washington D.C., Houston.

** America’s Got Talent, Tuesday episode (NBC) – Seattle, Denver, Sacramento.

** America’s Got Talent, Wednesday episode (NBC) – Dallas.

** Baseball,  San Francisco vs. Oakland, Monday game (NBC) – San Francisco.

** Baseball, Boston vs. Washington, Tuesday game (New England Sports Network) – Boston.

** Baseball, Detroit vs. Chicago,Wednesday game (Fox Sports Detroit) – Detroit.

** Baseball, St. Louis vs. New York Mets, Tuesday game (Fox Sports Midwest) – St. Louis.

** NCIS (CBS) – Phoenix, Orlando.

** Two And a Half Men (CBS) – Minneapolis.

** 10 p.m. newscast (Fox) -- Tampa.

** Jon & Kate Plus 8 (TLC) – Cleveland.

** Manana para Siempre, Monday and Tuesday episodes (Univision) –  Los Angeles

More on the NPR torture debate

More on the is-waterboarding-torture? debate at NPR: It seems NPR ombudsdman Alicia Shepard, who has been defending the network's refusal to label waterboarding as torture, refused to appear on a radio show with Salon's Glenn Greenwald, who disagrees. An NPR spokesman said Shepard declined because "she didn't want to get into a shouting match." Refusing to do radio interviews is an odd thing for a radio executive to do, seems to me, and Blogasm's Simon Owens -- who has the entire story -- seems to agree.

...and how to fix it

I'm thinking if CNN became the Jeanne Moos News Network, Rupert Murdoch would be toast inside of a week.

CNN's ratings implosion...

The Age of Obama, as everybody predicted, has been a disaster for one cable-news network...but not the one that was expected. The snowball rolling down the Nielsen hill is not Fox News -- which seems to be headed for a record year in ratings -- but CNN.

When the quarterly ratings were released this week, CNN finished behind MSNBC in weekday prime viewing hours for the first time ever. MSNBC's average audience between 8 and 11 p.m. was 946,000, CNN's 939,000. The more you slice and dicethe numbers, they look even worse: CNN often finishes behind sister network HLN in weekday primetime among viewers aged 25 to 54, the top news demographic.

While MSNBC and CNN scrap for second place, Fox News is steamrollering them both. Whether you measure in primetime or round-the-clock, it's got more viewers than MSNBC and CNN combined. And for the first time in history, the top 10 shows in cable news all belong to Fox News. Though I don't think there's any truth to the rumor that Keith Olbermann is distributing those big foam fingers you see at football games, emblazoned: "We're No. 11!"

WTVJ axes Kelly Craig

After 19 years anchoring at WTVJ-NBC 6, Kelly Craig is out of a job. Also hitting the video bricks: sportscaster Andrea Brody and tech reporter Joe Carter, all victims of the lagging economy. My pal Joan Fleischman has the details.

If Air America knew what it was doing...

...it would quit screwing around using Nicole Sandler to pinch-hit at every hour of the day, and hire her for a regular show. Until then, however, you've got to put some effort into finding her fill-in gigs. For the time being, she's Nic at night, doing an 11 p.m. to 1 a.m. shift. If you've got a computer -- don't try to deny it, you're reading this, aren't you? -- you can listen even in commie-free-radio zones like South Florida.

That Honduras coup is more complicated than it looks

It's not exactly television, but...

The greatest tourist attraction in Central America has always been politics. Diplomats stop by every few years, take a couple of snapshots of what's going on at the presidential palace, and then profoundly declare their opinions, devoid of context or history. This week's favorite diplotourism destination is Honduras, where the army Sunday arrested President Manuel Zelaya and booted him across the border to Costa Rica. In the Polaroid analysis, it's pretty clear what happened: ''A return to barbarism in our hemisphere,'' as Argentina's president Cristina Fernández put it.

But here's a question for all these new-found defenders of Honduran democracy: Where were you last week? Perhaps if some of these warnings about sticking to the constitution had been addressed to President Zelaya, the Honduran army would still be in the barracks where it belongs. Read my full op-ed column in Tuesday's Miami Herald.

Is waterboarding torture? NPR argues with itself

Bob Garfield, co-host of NPR's On The Media, had an unusual guest last week: NPR ombudsman Alicia Shepard. Garfield wanted to know why NPR doesn't refer to waterboarding as "torture." Said Garfield: "The U.N.’s High Commissioner for Human Rights says that waterboarding is torture. The International Committee of the Red Cross have called what the U.S. did 'torture.' Waterboarding is unambiguously in violation of the International Convention on Torture, which has been ratified by 140-some countries." Shepard argued back that news organizations shouldn't let themselves be dragged into a legal debate: "Torture is illegal, so I think the media gets caught up in trying to figure out how to use this. And so, the one point I hope I made strongly was just stop characterizing things, just describe what they are." Read the whole very interesting exchange here. There's even an audio link for the pre- or post-literate.

HBO's 'Hung' -- a hard man is good to find

Wherever there's a fight, so hungry people can eat, I'll be there. Wherever there's a cop beatin' up a guy, I'll be there. I'll be in the way guys yell when they're mad. I'll be in the way kids laugh when they're hungry and they know supper's ready, and when the people are eatin' the stuff they raise and livin' in the houses they build -- I'll be there, too. And whenever a poor guy is gettin' $50 to pleasure a bored rich lady with his prodigious lovestick, Ma, I'll be there, too.

 -- Tom Joad, The Grapes of Wrath

Well, I can't find that last sentence in John Steinbeck's novel, but perhaps the HBO guys were working from the Larry Flynt translation when they conceived (heh-heh, pun definitely intended) Hung, the Official Sitcom of the New Depression.

The ruined Oklahoma farms have been replaced with code-violating split-levels in the Detroit suburbs; the
steely-eyed bankers with bullying homeowners associations; Tom Joad's Marianite sister with a poetess-turned-pimp; and Joad's dawning socialist conscience with a male prostitute's growing (all puns intended until further notice) priapic pride. But otherwise, Hung is definitely a poor-and-dirty-minded man's Grapes of Wrath. Read my full review in Sunday's Miami Herald.