Changing Channels

The wages of sin: An appearance on the CBS 'Early Show'

Tawdry? Untalented? Let's get to the point -- will he bring eyeballs to the tube? No sooner did ABC's Good Morning America cancel a Wednesday performance by purported singer but fer-sure nasty boy Adam Lambert than the CBS Early Show snapped him up. Lambert was dumped from Good Morning America after ABC got an earful of viewer complaints about his sleazy performance over the weekend on the network's telecast of the American Music Awards. (He put his hands, and crotch, in places they shouldn't have been, at least on primetime broadcast television.)

But Early Show, the last-place contender among the morning shows, promptly extended its own Wednesday invitation, and Lambert accepted. Just two grandmas watching on behalf of the Parents Television Council to provide affidavits for its FCC complaint will probably double the Early Show's audience.

Shake your Katie, er, booty

Ahhhh, the horrifying power of the Internet in full malicious bloom: Both Gawker and The Huffington Post, among other culprits, have pictures of Katie Couric celebrating her debut as anchor of the CBS Evening News in 2006. Poor Katie -- after a certain number of martinis at CBS parties, Walter Cronkite infamously used to do a striptease he'd memorized from youthfuI evenings he spent in Kansas City burlesque clubs. But nobody was around back then snapping pictures with cell phones.

Lou Dobbs on Fox News? Nah, think higher....MUCH higher...

Lou Dobbs, who left his CNN anchor seat earlier this month amid rumors he was headed to Fox News, says pfffft! to that. He tells Reuters he's thinking of running for a U.S. senate seat -- or maybe the White house. "Right now I feel exhilaration at the wide range of choices before me as to what I do next," Dobbs said. No word on whether he showed his birth certificate.

Oprah Winfrey's long goodbye

I know you Oprah fans love a good cry, but save it for a two-headed kitty or somebody poisoned with mad- cow disease by powerful and sinister Big Meat. The orgy of goodbyes to her syndicated talk show last week was an impressive salute to the power of synthetics -- in this case, Oprah's artificial claim of retirement.

She said she's leaving her syndicated talk show in September, 2011. Somewhat lessheralded was her announcement that her own cable channel, the Oprah Winfrey Network, will go on the air in January 2011. Count on eight months of lugubrious what-will-we-do-without-you goodbye shows, followed by a miraculous deliverance: Well, darlings, you can just follow me right over to my own network!

Did I say eight months? Pardon me for the mental lapse. Make that 24 months. "The countdown to the end of The Oprah Winfrey Show starts now," said Oprah in her announcement last week. "And until that day in 2011 when it ends, I intend to soak up every meaningful, joy-filled moment with you." Whispering in your ear to demand that your cable company add the Oprah Winfrey Network, even though it's going to cost about twice as much as ESPN.

Screen Gems: TV the week of November 22

The Lost JFK Tapes: The Assassination (9 p.m. Monday, National Geographic Channel) -- The name is a little bit of a fraud: The news footage, home movies and radio reports from which this documentary is built have regularly been on display at The Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza, the remarkable museum in the building from which President Kennedy was shot. But even there, they've never been shown like this, pieced together in a riveting minute-by-minute account of that weekend 46 years ago.

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

I was hoping the next sentence would end with 'Simon Cowell'

Ryan Seacrest got a restraining order Tuesday against a stalker. Soon-to-be-ex-fan Chidi Benjamin Uzomah Jr. has been arrested twice in the past three weeks while following Seacrest.

Dear Michelle, wish you were here...

It's not exactly about television, but ...

Dear Michelle:

Sure wish you were here -- China is really cool. Hey, remember how Nixon kept repeating, ``It is truly a great wall''? Well, it really is big. Maybe we were wrong and he wasn't stoned after all -- just having a teachable moment.

Honey, you were soooo right about that that jobs summit thing. Since I announced that I'm inviting ``CEOs and small business owners, economists and financial experts, as well as representatives from labor unions and nonprofit groups'' to the White House next month to talk about creating jobs, everybody's stopped asking me why the unemployment rate is still going up. I haven't even heard any wisecrack questions about whether ACORN will be putting on training seminars for pimps and hookers. Though maybe that's just because Fox News isn't on TV here.

Really, I didn't think it would work. You'd think that after promising that unemployment wouldn't get much past 8 percent if we spent a trillion bucks on a stimulus package, everybody would be little ticked off about the Labor Department report that says it hit 10.2 percent last month and is still climbing.

Instead, everybody's talking about what a genius I am for calling a summit. (For the rest of the postcard, read my column in Tuesday's Miami Herald.)

'The Prisoner': A good argument for capital punishment

The list of Stuff From The 1960s That Doesn't Need To Be Relived just keeps getting longer: Beehive hairdos. Frankie and Annette movies. The Bay of Pigs. Fallout shelters. The Cowsills. And now the latest entry, The Prisoner. Though it would eventually be hugely influential, the original 1968 version went almost unwatched. AMC's new remake is merely unwatchable.

Dismal and disoriented, under-plotted and over-allegorized, the six-hour Prisoner miniseries that debuts on AMC Sunday night (it continues in the same time slot on Monday and Tuesday) is an exercise in full-tilt dramatic tedium that will appall anybody who remembers the original and bewilder anyone who doesn't: What was the big deal about that? Read my full review in Sunday's Miami Herald.

Screen Gems: TV the week of November 15

WWII in HD (9 p.m. Sunday, History Channel) -- Using diaries, letters and recently unearthed film that's been converted to high-definition, this series -- 10 hours over five nights -- follows a dozen Americans (including a Tuskegee airman, an Army nurse and a Japanese-American soldier whose parents were locked up in an internment camp) through World War II.

Search for the Amazon Headshrinkers (9 p.m. Sunday, National Geographic Channel) -- Last week, PBS had a documentary on headshrinkers in Asia! If this trend continues, watch the Disney Channel next week for a documentary on headshrinkers in the Magic Kingdom. Donald? Donald!!

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

Lou Dobbs speaks...on Fox News

Lou Dobbs hasn't talked to a reporter since his startling on-air resignation from CNN Wednesday. But that's about to change: He'll appear Monday night on Bill O'Reilly's Fox News show. Doing his first interview (or so it appears right now; it's possible Dobbs could sit down with somebody else before Monday) with Fox News is bound to bolster speculation that Dobbs is headed for a job at the network or its sister channel, Fox Business, which has swirled since he was reportedly spotted at dinner with Fox boss Roger Ailes last month. But the Fox folks are denying the daylights out of any negotiations with Dobbs.

One likely topic of discussion Monday: This New York Post report that Dobbs was so unhappy with CNN boss Jon Klein that he walked away from $9 million. Dobbswas "incensed" last summer when Klein sent out a memo impliticitly criticizing his show for spending too much time on speculation that President Obama's birth certificate is phony, the Post says.

UPDATE: For whatever it's worth, Fox News says the interview will be done on O'Reilly's set in New York, not via satellite, ESP or smoke signals. In case you were wondering.