Changing Channels

Tough choice: TV, or hallucinogenic mushrooms?

This week's Rod Serling Award for Unfathomably Weird Television goes to cable's Fine Living network for its special Forbes Top 10 Places to Live and Work, which airs at 8 p.m. Sept. 24. It identifies these 10 cities as the best places to live in America:

1. Albuquerque
2. Raleigh
3. Houston
4. Boise
5. Knoxville
6. Phoenix
7. Nashville
8. Durham
9. Fayetteville
10. Indianapolis

Phoenix? Where it's 180 degrees 11 months out of the year and everybody wanders among the cactus chanting like so many desert parrots, "But it's a dry heat?" Indianapolis? Where the alluring odor of half-cooked penicillin wafting from the Eli Lilly plant downtown hangs across the city like a poisonous fog? Well, give them points for Albuquerque, anyway, about the only place in America you can get a green-chile burger on every corner.

Too much violins on cable news

When all those Katie Couric stories identified her as "the first woman to solo-anchor an evening weekday newscast on a broadcast network," you knew we were running out of anchor firsts. What's next? First left-handed Lithuanian lycanthrope anchor?  Happily, Fox News has come up with a new milestone, the First Classical Violinist Miss America Anchor. That would be Gretchen Carlson, who was Miss America 1989 before becoming a newscaster. The Stanford-educated Carlson is joining the morning zoo on Fox & Friends, which airs from 7 to 9 a.m.

She'll fill the  chair left empty by E.D. Hill, who's sliding over to the Fox News Live show, which airs from 10 a.m. to noon. Hill's violin skills are said to be negligable, but that could just be a rumor spread by that mean bunch over at CNN.

Did you bet on "Grey's Anatomy"?

If so, remember who gave you the idea -- me! -- because you're now filthy rich. In the greatest ratings battle of the century, or at least of late September, Grey's Anatomy stomped CSI Thursday night. Grey's pulled in 25.1 million viewers to 22 million for CSI. Grey's also had about one and a half times as many of the 18-to-49 year old viewers that advertisers want. The real loser, though, may have been Shark, James Wood's charmingly cynical legal drama that debuted on CBS last night. With 15 million viewers, it lost 44 percent of the lead-in audience handed to it by CSI. That's the sort of thing that makes network execs add an after-dinner crack pipe to their evening at Spago's. And hey, it's only going to get more messy next week when ABC adds its new telenovela Ugly Betty to the mix.

Brain-sucking squids

With all the good giant-cephalopod titles already taken, Sci Fi execs this summer were at their wits' end about what to call their new squid thriller. (You know, back when I was in journalism school, I never dreamed I would someday be writing a piece including the phrase "squid thriller." This is what the First Amendment is really all about.) So they followed Good Corporate Practice 706B, which is, find somebody with more brains than you and trick them into doing your work. In this case, it was the Sci Fi channel's legions of giant-squid fans, who were invited to join a contest to name the movie. The suggestions were spectacular, incluidng Two Guys, A Girl and a Giant Squid, Stop or My Squid Will Shoot, and The Squid Stays in the Picture. Unfortunately, the whole process broke down when the same executives too dumb to come up with a name in the first place got to choose the winner. The result was the scintillating Kraken: Tentacles Of The Deep. It airs Sept. 23 at 9 p.m., but I'm not watching unless Sci Fi guarantees that the guys who picked the name get eaten by the squid.                                                                                                                                                       

                                                                                                                                                     I warned you not to order the calamari!                                                                                                

Should critics be institutionalized?

If you sometimes suspect that critics overthink everything and that not every word of Malcolm in the Middle necessarily throbbed with serious sociological implications, you're probably right. Watching Jericho, the CBS drama about a small town's survival after a nuclear attack on America (it debuts Sept. 20), I admired the way the entire pilot was undergirded by a pastiche of allusions to other post-apocalyptic movies. To start with, Jericho is set in Kansas, a clear reference to The Day After, ABC's 1983 movie that examined life in Topeka, Kansas the morning after a nuclear war. Then Jericho includes a scene in which a young boy learns of his mother's death in the attack from a message she left on an answering machine at the moment of an explosion -- obviously an homage to a similar scene in Testament, a made-for-PBS movie that was instead released in theaters in 1983.

And finally there's an enigmatic scene in the first episode of Jericho in which a little
girl wearing a blouse covered with flowered appliques counts backward while playing hide-and-seek. It seems a deliberate evocation of the "Daisy'' advertisement -- one of the first and still the most infamous example of negative political ads. The ad, which Democratic President Lyndon Johnson used to paint Republican challenger Barry Goldwater as a nuclear gunslinger, included a little girl counting as she picked petals off a flower, followed by a nuclear explosion.

Guess what? When I talked to Jericho's creator Stephen Chboskey, he told me he's never seen a single one of the things I thought he was alluding to. In fact, he'd never even heard of Testament or the Daisy ad. "I deliberately didn't watch anything else about nuclear attacks because I didn't want to be influenced," he said. Guess this means I'll have to rethink my whole Friends-as-postmodernist-restatement-of-Oedipal-complex thesis.

Mailbag: Dead guys

From time to time, I'll answer reader mail here. At least until the first email asking, "Can God make a rock bigger than He can move?"

Dear Glenn,

Both Grey's Anatomy and Weeds had the same male actor who always dies. He played Denny in GA ,the love interest of the pretty blonde intern and he died in bed of a heart attack. In Weeds he was the father who died causing his wife to sell pot to support the family.

I love this actor with his big eyes and loving face. He is never named. I think he is very good and I wish the writers would let him live. Do you know his name? Also I thought Huff was so fabulous and I wish it was not canceled.  I don't think Showtime does a good marketing job. So many people never heard of Huff. If that show was on HBO it would have made it. Your thoughts please.

Thanks, Kathryn

Indeed I do know the identity of that dead-guy specialist. His name is Jeffrey Dean Morgan. He is practically the best dead-guy actor who has ever lived, so good that the producers of Supernatural, where he has a recurring role as the elusive dad of Sam and Dean Winchester, may be kiling him off too. He was in a big cliffhander car-crash at the end of last season, and I don't know if he survived. Hmm. Maybe all his various dead-guy characters will get guest slots on Ghost Whisperer.

I, too, loved Huff. But watching somebody's mid-life crisis week after week may not have been appealing to a lot of viewers. I can't blame Showtime, which marketed the heck out Huff -- not to mention The Brotherhood, the excellent Irish Mafia series that just ended a three-month run with nary a viewer in sight. We could be headed for real disaster here -- Les Moonves, the CBS boss who recently wound up in control of Showtime as well in a corporate shuffle, has been grumbling that Showtime's programming is aimed at TV critics rather than viewers. That could mean Showtime will shortly become the all-CSI-all-the-time-network.

Let me help you wreck your life

Hey, why should guys like Jeff Zucker and Les Moonves have all the fun? Now you too can put staggering sums of money at risk, gambling on the whimsy of American television viewers. And unlike Zucker and Moonves, you can't just stick shareholders with the loss as you shrug your shoulders and walk away. That should make it really exciting.

The on-line gambling site PinnacleSports.com is now taking bets on TV's equivalent of the heavyweight championship: which series -- reigning but grizzled champ CSI or fresh-faced young challenger (not to mention hard-bodied) Grey's Anatomy -- will be the top-rated rated show at 9 p.m. on Thursday night.

CSI, averaging around 20 million viewers, has owned the time period for CBS for years. But Grey's Anatomy was so strong on Sundays last season -- averaging 19.9 million for the season, with numbers even gaudier toward the end of the year after piggybacking on the Super Bowl --  that ABC decided to throw it into the ring on Thursdays.

So pretend you're a rapacious network swine for a minute -- which show do you think will win? And are you willing to put your money where your mouth is? PinnacleSports has made CSI an overwhelming 4/11 favorite -- that is, you bet $11 to win $4. Grey’s Anatomy is a 5/2 underdog (bet $2 to win $5). Don't worry; if you lose, there's always government cheese out there.

Meanwhile, in the first big ratings contest of the fall season, CSI's tropical cousin CSI: Miami beat out NBC's most ballyhooed new show, Studio 60 On The Sunset Strip Monday. The maggots and corpses racked up 17.2 million viewers to Chandler and Josh's 13.4 million. The margin was closer in the 18-49 age group that the networks care about, which is good news for Studio 60. Question is, how many of them will come back next week? TV shows about TV have generally not been ratings successes. But what do you care? After you blow all your money betting on Thursday nights, you won't be able to afford cable. Hell, you won't be able to afford electricity.I've probably just decimated my own reading audience. Oh well, easy come, easy go.

Corso's Anatomy

I was watching the USC-Nebraska game Saturday night when Lee Corso, ESPN's resident imbecile -- OK, one of ESPN's resident imbeciles -- announced his intention to interview Traveler the horse, USC's mascot. I waited breathlessly to see if Corso would find the right end of the horse -- and, if he went to the wrong end, if he would smile in recognition of the same image he sees in the mirror each morning. Alas, those uncooperative USC officials led the horse away before Corso could do the interview.

The takeover of ABC Sports by corporate cousin ESPN is the worst news for sports journalism since the birth of Dick Vitale. ESPN's credo is Attitude, Not Information. By the time I finish watching a game on ESPN (and now ABC), I actually know less about football or basketball than when I started. But of course, I'm always up to date on the educational status of Vitale's granddaughters or whatever cute nicknames Chris Berman has come up with in lieu of actually learning anything about the teams he's covering. Bring back Keith Jackson!

The new fall TV season

Technically, the fall season started sometime back in August when Fox beat everybody to the punch by debuting a bunch of shows that no one remembers and have probably already been canceled. But the real wave of new shows begins Monday. Today's Miami Herald has the fall preview issue of our TV Week magazine, with perceptive and witty reviews of all the shows written by, well, me.

For those of you too cheap to buy one who were attacked by wolverines when you tried to get the paper out of the front yard, here's a site where you can read it all for free, at least until the McClatchy Web Police figure out a way to track you down at home and beat the money out of you. Highlight reel: The best new drama is NBC's behind-the-scenes-at-Saurday-Night-Live drama, Studio 60 On The Sunset Strip. Close second: Daybreak, ABC's sinister and paranoid version of Groundhog Day. Best new comedy: The Class, a poignant and funny look at a group of third graders whose didn't all live happily ever after. Runners-up: NBC's 30 Rock, another behind-the-scenes-at-SNL show (when NBC gets a good idea, they stick with it), but played strictly for laughs, and ABC's The Knights Of Prosperity, about a bunch of losers who decide to improve their lives by robbing Mick Jagger. Too bad they didn't stick with the original title, Let's Rob Mick Jagger, but it turns out the guy who recorded Under My Thumb and Sympathy for the Devil is a sensitive soul. Who knew?

Who says reality TV is trash?

Now the dream of every child in America -- for his mom to be flashing a little T&A to not just everybody at his school, but everybody in town, everybody he knows, everybody he'll ever know -- is within reach, thanks to reality TV. A new show titled Hottest Mom In America is starting auditions next week. Naturally Miami, renowned for its good taste and innate dignity, is first on the list, on Sept. 23. But don't worry; trashy moms in Chicago, Atlanta, New York and Los Angeles will get their fair shots later on.

Not, I hasten to add, that this blog doesn't want trashy-mom readers. Heavens, no -- Trashy Moms Aged 18 to 49 is now a leading newspaper demographic. And just to prove how much we value your patronage, here's a link where you can find all the details on Trashy Mom Tryouts. Have a good time, and try not to get arrested outside camera range.