Changing Channels

So long, pardner

Word comes from Texas that columnist Molly Ivins has died, presumably of the cancer she's been fighting for a long time. I can't think of any journalist in my lifetime who I've disagreed with as much or enjoyed reading more. Her populist brain and her heart's love for Texas' larger-than-life characters were perpetually at odds, but I think her heart always kept the upper hand. Even when she was eviscerating a guy like Clayton Williams, the oilman who ran for governor a few years back, she couldn't help but cherish his wildcatter honesty. When other reporters were kicking the crud out of Williams for admitting that he lost his virginity as a young teenager to a whore who "serviced" him, Ivins called him up to ask why he'd used a dumb word like "service." Williams, Ivins laughingly reported, replied: "Well, Molly, I thought it was more polite than 'f---in'.'" It was writing stuff like that, by the way, that lost her a job at the New York Times. And that's why I'd gladly trade the New York Times and its whole newsroom of blow-dried twits to have Molly back at a typewriter tomorrow. Anybody who read anything she wrote, ever, is going to miss her something fierce.

Update: Here's an obit from the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. I think Molly would have been delighted to see she got "whomper-jawed" into the paper again.

There she goes...

Even all that pre-pageant depravity about drunkenness and nekkid pictures couldn't pull Miss America off her catwalk to oblivion. Country-music cable channel CMT's telecast of the pageant finals Monday pulled in just 2.39 million viewers. That's a drop of nearly 25 percent from the audience last year, CMT's first Miss America, and a hideous 85 percent from ABC's last pageant broadcast in 2005. This really may be the death knell for American beauty pageants, the driveby victims of reality television: Why should Americans tune in to watch pretty girls in skimpy clothing, when they can watch pretty girls in skimpy clothing sing on American Idol, dance on Dancing With The Stars, or eating the reproductive organs of goats on Fear Factor?

Important note for Rosie O'Donnell, who -- in dissing Miss America a few weeks back as part of her feud with Donald Trump -- insisted it was all a plot by "white men": Nielsen says that in the key demographic bracket, viewers aged 18 to 49, about 75 percent were female. If Miss America is the product of a sinister gender conspiracy, the culprits are more like to look like Nancy Pelosi and Hillary Clinton than Trump.

The High Priestess of TiVo

If you're one of those people who at 9 p.m. on Mondays tunes in to Fox's 24 while watching NBC's Heroes in the picture-in-picture box of your digital TV -- Ha! Didn't think I knew about that, did you? Let me tell you, the Patriot Act has many uses -- you've probably wondered if the characters from one show are bleeding in to the other. Nah, it's just that the marvelously perverse Television Gods are forcing Rena Sofer to compete against herself. She plays Marilyn -- that trashy sister in law who Jack had an affair with way back when -- in 24. And she's also Heidi, the wheelchair-bound housewife on Heroes. You know it's just a matter of time until she turns up over on CBS in the same time slot as one of Charlie's boinkees on Two And A Half Men.

What took them so long?

CBS has just yanked from its schedule Armed & Famous, in which has-been flakes like LaToya Jackson were put in police uniforms -- complete with guns and handcuffs -- in Muncie, Indiana, which is apparently so flush with funds it could spare a few million for lawsuits. Before cheering too loudly, we need some assurances that this doesn't mean they're creating another CSI to fill the slot.

Unasked question of the week

Former astronaut John Young, interviewed over the weekend by CNN's John Zarrella, insisted that outer-space exploration must continue at all costs because "single-planet species don't last." Alas, Zarrella did not ask the obvious follow-up: Which multi-planet species have lasted, Spaceman Young?

Screens: TV the week of Jan. 28

The Day After (3 p.m. Sunday, Sci Fi Channel) -- What with Jericho still on the shelf for another month, anybody in need of a nuclear-holocaust-in-Kansas fix can check out this made-for-TV movie that not only drew an audience of 100 million but also touched off a national policy debate about freezing the production of nuclear weapons when it was originally telecast in 1983. With its scenes of incinerated cities and hideously disfigured radiation-burn victims, The Day After is considerably more sobering than Jericho. Not to mention that Jason Robards wasn't nearly as hot as Skeet Ulrich. By the way, Jericho's producers swear they've never seen The Day After. Watch,
and decide for yourself.

Crossing Jordan (10 p.m. Sunday, NBC) -- This episode starts with an 8-year-old boy being shot 33 times by police, moves on to a full-fledged race riot enveloping Boston, and ends with … well, let's just say there won't be quite so many annoying characters running around the coroner's office bugging that nice Jordan after tonight.

American Experience: The Berlin Airlift (9 p.m. Monday, PBS) -- The first great battle of the Cold War erupted in 1948, when the Soviet Union closed all land routes into Berlin, trying to starve French, British and U.S. forces out of the city and leave the communists in sole control. favor of the remarkable airlift. For the next 11 months -- at a time when the average transport plane's payload was three tons, American and British planes shuttled in 4,000 tons a day, launching a plane every three minutes and stacking them five deep in the air routes into Berlin to make it work. This documentary is a poignant reminder of a time when local kids wrote loving letters to American soldiers addressing them as "Dear Uncle Chocolate," instead of strapping on suicide bombs.

The Power Of Choice: The Life And Ideas Of Milton Friedman (10 p.m. Monday, PBS) -- An often piquant biography of the free-market champion who bitch-slapped the statist John Maynard Keynes in the Ultimate Fighting Championship for the economic hearts and minds of the 20th century.

...but first, a few hundred thousand words from our sponsor...

When it comes to watching football and basketball, Fox Sports is superior to ESPN in nearly every single way. But it's a big, big "nearly." The single exception is what happens when games run past their scheduled times. When that happens, Fox Sports is egregiously disdainful of its viewers, leisurely joining the next game in progress after cramming in huge numbers of ads and silly promos.

Saturday's college basketball schedule on Fox Sports offered some particularly painful examples. The afternoon began with a terrific women's game between two top 20 teams,Texas A&M and Oklahoma. It ended in a nailbiting 54-52 upset win for Texas A&M, a game that went down to the final shot and in which both coaches called several timeouts in the final two minutes of play. Result: It went past the tipoff time for the next scheduled game, a matchup between Arizona State and Stanford, a pair of top 10 women's teams.

Nothing Fox Sports could do about that -- except make it worse. First the network stayed with the Texas A&M-Oklahoma game even after it ended, showing pointless pictures of the cheerleaders while the announcers blathered the usual postgame cliches about who wanted it more. When that finally ended, Fox Sports crammed in four commercials before joining the ASU-Stanford game, 13 minutes into the telecast.

Amazingly, ASU-Stanford was even more excruciatingly tight, going into overtime before Stanford took over for a 73-65 victory. Once again the action spilled past the scheduled time slot, so viewers tuning in for the next game -- the Oregon State and Washington men -- had to wait...and wait...and wait.... while Fox Sports ran an astonishing 11 commercials. (In a truly maddening example of how cancerous the pseudoscience of marketing has become, one of the ads was for the Oregon State-Washington game itself -- Fox Sports apparently thought viewers would prefer watching a promo to the actual game.) It was 16 minutes into the telecast before the network decided it had tortured its own viewers long enough and joined the game.

No television network really gives much of a rat's derriere about viewers' opinions, and cable nets are even more insulated than the broadcasters -- their constituency is the cable companies, not the viewers. (And you know exactly how much your cable company cares what you think.) So Fox Sports' cavalier attitude is unlikely to change unless the college conferences whose games are being jacked around say something. If I were the Pac-10 commissioner, I'd be jumping up and down about what happened Saturday.

New pilots and old grievances

More news on the pilot front: NBC wants a pilot of The Mastersons of Manhattan, a comic soap opera about two sisters from a New York social-register family. And ABC has ordered a pilot for Sam I Am, a sitcom about a woman who wakes up from a coma with amnesia and has to figure out who she is. Which reminds me (heh, heh) of an old Western that was waaay ahead of its time in jerking its viewers around.

A Man Called Shenandoah starred Robert Horton as a cowboy left for dead after a gunfight. When he wakes up, he's forgotten his name, his face, everything but a single word: Shenandoah. Horton spent the whole 1965-66 season riding from one frontier town to another, picking up tantalizing clues to his own identity. But when ABC canceled the show without warning at the end of the season, the viewers were left hanging -- and, as you can see, I'm still brooding about it four decades later. Once we get that lost American Dreams series finale on the air, I'm going after ABC on a finale for A Man Called Shenandoah.

The L world

For a program with no more than a couple hundred thousand viewers, Showtime's lesbian drama The L Word sometimes seems about to take over the world. Latest move: an invasion of Second Life, the insanely popular online game in which you create an avatar -- that is, a little virtual you -- to run around and screw up its virtual life even worse than you've screwed up your real one. In The L Word section of Second Life, your avatar can go to dance clubs, hang out at a virtual version of The Planet, and presumably even cheat on that poor (but let's face it, boring) Tina, just like they do in the show. Here's a site where you can download everything you need to get started except maybe Shane's haircut.

Why "Smith" had to die

Few things about television anger viewers more than the quick hook that prevails in broadcast TV these days: the seemingly instant and arbitrary way new shows are canceled, often within three or four weeks of their debut. The poster child for the victims of this practice is Smith, a fascinating cops-and-robbers drama starring Ray Liotta and Virginia Madsen that CBS unceremoniously dumped after three episodes this fall. Is it really fair -- not to mention smart -- to spend several million dollars developing a show, luring big-name movie stars to it, and then give it only 126 minutes of screen time to find its audience?

Well, CBS executives say these decisions are less arbitrary and more carefully considered than they look. Kelly Kahl, the network's No. 2 programming boss, says there was unfortunately a lot of data to indicate that the Smith Fan Club would soon be able to hold its meetings in a phone booth.

"We look for patterns," says Kahl. "We want our shows to succeed. We are looking for little kernels of good news every week, especially with a new show...[Smith] had a good lead-in, had a good chance to work its time period, came in with pretty good premiere numbers. But it dropped 15 percent in week two and then another 15 percent in week three. And at week three, we saw its lead-ins, NCIS and The Unit, both go up about 15 percent.

"At that point, you wonder what the future is for the show -- where is the growth going to come from? One of the toughest things we find for shows is that if you get people there [with a good lead-in] and they leave, getting them back is almost impossible."

Canceling a show, Kahl says, "is one of the toughest things we do. Every cancellation is, in some sense, an admission of failure -- we picked a show built around a bad idea or miscast it or put it in the wrong time slot. We never do it casually. We want our shows to succeed. Every week we're telling producers, give us a reason to believe, give us a reason to bring it back one more week. Even a little improvement in a single demographic can sometimes be that reason. But sometimes it's just not going to happen."

Kahl's explanation was the most succinct and sensible I've ever heard from a network executive of the modern practice of hurling shows overboard almost as quickly as they air. But I'd still like to hear from somebody at ABC about Emily's Reasons Why Not, a sitcom dumped last season after a single episode of 22 minutes. I can only guess that large numbers of Nielsen families committed suicide after watching it.