Changing Channels

Why nobody ever bought a Jackson 4 record

 

A&E has a reality series called The Jacksons: A Family Dynasty coming up this weekend. Don't say you weren't warned.

Dwarf-tossers rejoice! John Stossel is back

Sure, John Stossel loves DDT and dwarf-tossing. And OK, he praised price-gouging after Hurricane Katrina and thinks the minimum wage should be cut to about two cents an hour. (If that leaves you short of rent money, don't worry: Stossel is crusading for your right to sell your own kidney.) But none of that means he didn't want to be loved. And now that he's left ABC for the Fox News family, he finally is.

``People are nicer to me here,'' Stossel muses. ``People like me here. I get much a better vibe.''

Stossel -- whose new Fox Business Network show Stossel debuts at 8 p.m. Thursday -- spent 28 years at ABC, rising from a break-of-dawn consumer reporter to co-anchor of the prime-time news magazine 20/20. He got to produce four specials a year with such pugnacious titles as Stupid In America and Are We Scaring Ourselves To Death? He won a wallful of broadcast journalism awards.

But Stossel says he was ``swimming upstream'' against politically hostile currents every inch of the way -- or at least, all the inches he traveled after deciding about two decades ago that Big Government and not Big Business was the biggest threat to American life, limb and liberty.

``I had a nice career there. It was a good gig,'' he says of ABC. ``But I had so many stories I wanted to do that they weren't interested in. I wanted to do much more on health care, all the potential problems with getting government more involved in health care. I wanted to do another show on school choice -- I had done one on schools called Stupid In America that did quite well, and I wanted to do a follow-up. But their attitude was, `You've already been there and done that.' Fox's attitude was, `We like that stuff. Do it for us.' '' Read my full story on Stossel in Wednesday's Miami Herald.

By the way, Stossel says very forthrightly that 10 or 15 years ago, he wouldn't have made the move to cable news. "Almost 20 million people watched The Blame Game," he notes, referring to his 1994 ABC special on victimology. "At the time, cable news had fewer than a million viewers. Now [Bill] O'Reilly in reruns gets four million, and 20/20 is down to five or six million. The gap is withering away."

CBS cancels 'As The World Turns'

The day the Earth stood still has finally arrived. As The World Turns, television's last true soap opera, has been canceled. CBS has announced that the show will wrap up in September after 54 years and something in the ballpark of 14,000 episodes. As The World Turns -- which went on the air April 2, 1956 -- is the last of the daytime dramas that were originally developed in conjunction with detergent manufacturer Procter & Gamble, which led to the term "soap operas." And it's one of a tiny handful of daytime dramas period; only half a dozen will remain when ATWTdisappears. Soap ratings were first decimated when Baby Boomer women joined the workforce in large numbers in the early 1970s, then again when cable TV vastly expanded viewing choices. The genre has been teetering near extinction for so long that when TV writers went on strike in 2007, most soap writers crossed the picket line for fear that their shows would be canceled if they left the air even briefly.

Though CBS has canceled ATWT, its producers are looking for a new outlet -- perhaps a cable network, perhaps the Internet. On a show where miraculous returns from the dead have been common -- its writers even resuscitated one victim who had been reduced to a shrunken head, anything is possible.

Univision opens a studio in Miami

After years of importing heaving bosoms and quivering pecs from Latin America, Spanish-language television giant Univision has found another source: Miami. The company is opening a studio in Miami to start producing its own telenovelas.

Univisión Studios will produce not only the soap operas that are the staple of Spanish-language TV, but reality shows, variety programs, American-style dramas and even short shows tailored for cellphones and the Internet, said network boss César Conde, who announced the move Monday.

``This is a big step forward, not just for Univisión but for the Spanish-language TV industry as a whole,'' Conde said. ``It's big for Spanish-language writers and producers and actors and actresses.''

Univisión's competitors, however, scoffed at the idea that the network is breaking new ground. ``They're acting like they just heard of original content,'' said Don Browne, president of Miami-based rival Telemundo, which has been producing novelas in Miami since 2003. ``They came to the party kind of late.'' Read my full story on Univision's new studio in Tuesday's Miami Herald.

CNN: The night time is the wrong time

CNN boss Jon Klein's fifth anniversary at the network comes up next week. But he's already gotten a glum little present: Last Thursday, for the 100th time during the past year, CNN placed fourth in the prime-time cable-news ratings in the advertiser-friendly age 25-to-54 demographic. OK, technically it was only the 98th time CNN has finished fourth -- on two nights, it was actually fifth, trailing both CNBC and HLN, as they call Headline News these days. If Nick at Night starts airing Walter Cronkite reruns, I shudder to think where CNN might wind up.

UPDATE: This item originally said, incorrectly, that CNN 100 times finished in fourth place for the entire day. Actually, the fourth-place finish was for prime-time hours. During many daytime slots, CNN finishes second to Fox News in the 25-to-54 demo. (It's MSNBC that's the weak sister of cable news during daylight, frequently lagging in fifth place -- sometimes with as few as 55,000 viewers in the 25-to-54 demo.) CNN executives argue that the daytime hours are a pure news competition, but that they're an apple among oranges after sundown when Fox News and MSNBC turn mostly to opinion and analysis shows. "CNN is the only cable news channel that continues to provide non-partisan programming representing all points of view in weekday prime," a network spokeswoman said.

Screen Gems: TV the week of December 6

The U (9 p.m. Saturday, ESPN) -- This documentary on University of Miami football in the 1980s contains enough ugly spots -- the pay-for-play allegations, the NCAA violations, the arrogance and hot-doggery of the players -- that the university tried to kill it. But it's also got the on-the-field performances that led to four national championships during the decade.

Alice (9 p.m. Sunday, Syfy) -- A surrealist adaptation of Alice in Wonderland that's more Jefferson Airplane than Lewis Carroll, this two-part miniseries (it concludes in the same slot Monday) has a cast of heavy hitters, including Tim Curry, Harry Dean Stanton and -- as the merciless Queen of Hearts, of course -- Kathy Bates.

Men of a Certain Age (10 p.m. Monday, TNT) -- Ray Romano, Scott Bakula and Andre Braugher go middle-age crazy in this series about college buddies in their 40s wondering if they really should have grown up, or even if they did.

The Christmas Hope (8 p.m. Saturday, Lifetime Movie Network) -- The third -- and, everybody involved swears on pain of lobotomy-by-chainsaw, final -- film of the morbidly sentimental Christmas Shoes series has Madeleine Stowe as a social worker who brings a foster kid home for the holidays. Will the cute, spunky little girl save Stowe's rocky marriage? Maybe, but this is a Christmas Shoes movie, so it's just as likely that somebody will croak. Prettily, of course.

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

Brokaw uninjured in three-car crackup

Retired NBC anchor Tom Brokaw and his wife were involved in a three-car accident Friday that left the driver of another vehicle dead. In a statement issued to news media Friday even, Brokaw said the collision took place on New York's Bruckner Expressway around 1 p.m. An SUV, trying to avoid a loose piece of cable on the freeway, hit a mail truck and knocked it into the path of Brokaw's car. Neither Brokaw, his wife nor the driver of the mail truck were injured, the statement said, but the driver of the SUV was thrown from her vehicle and killed.

Up yours, Charlie Brown! You too, Frosty!

So, if you're CBS, and your 45th showing of Rudolph The Red Nosed Reindeer brings in 10.6 million viewers and clobbers everything within Nielsen sight, what do you do? That's right: Schedule the46th showing right away! After Rudolph led CBS to a ratings win Wednesday night, the network scheduled it again for Saturday, December 12, at 8 p.m. The way Saturday ratings are flat-lining these days, if Rudolph can drawfive million or so, it might have its 50th screening before the end of 2009.

Comcast buys NBC, but what will the feds say?

Comcast and GE on Thursday finally sealed the deal they've been talking about for months, with Comcast obtaining NBC Universal for $13.75 billion. That leaves America's largest cable company in control of NBC, Telemundo, USA, Bravo, Syfy, the Weather Channel and about two dozen other cable channels.

The deal still has to clear several regulatory hurdles, and so-called consumer advocates -- who always seem to be fighting the last war -- will no doubt fight a scorched-earth campaign to keep it from happening. If Comcast owns all these cable networks, the reasoning will go, it can charge more to cable subscribers while jerking rival companies around.

That argument completely misses the point of Comcast's pursuit of NBC, which is that cable is a dying industry. There are a zillion ways for networks to get their programming to you these days that don't involve cable, including cellphones, satellites and -- most ominously for the cable companies -- broadband. Broadband is eventually going to threaten not only cable but broadcast television stations themselves. Why should NBC (or any other network) pay its balky and often troublesome affiliates to be middlemen when it can pipe the programming directly to you?

Comcast wants to get into the content business because it sees the end of the cable business looming on the horizon. It will be interesting -- and, no doubt, depressing -- to see if the government will get in the way of a far-sighted company's prudent attempt to deal with technological upheavals in its industry.

Who says blonds are dumb?

On Extra Wednesday night, Jenny McCarthy revealed an arcane secret known only to a handful of ancient Mayan priests and Hugh Hefner: "Being good in bed" is good for a relationship. Coming soon, her research on whether having lots of money helps you avoid poverty.