Changing Channels

...and Paul Shafer for vice president

Remember, just three years ago, when everybody ridiculed Arnold Schwarzenegger for announcing his candidacy for governor of California on The Tonight Show? Times change, quickly. John McCain is announcing his candidacy for president Wednesday night on David Letterman's show. “The last time we were on this program --  I’m sure you remember everything very clearly that we say -- but you asked me if I would come back on this show if I was going to announce,” McCain told Letterman at this afternoon's taping.  “I am announcing that I will be a candidate for president of the United States.” No word yet on whether Dave was as impressed as the time Drew Barrymore flashed her boobs at him.

Viva 'Las Vegas'

Flying quietly beneath the radar -- especially since it moved to the video incognita of Friday nights -- NBC's Las Vegas has nonetheless been renewed for a fifth season. Its audience of 9 million viewers is solid, if unspectacular, and it wins its time period in the 18-to-49 age demographic that networks like. And why not? The show's bad-boy (and bad-girl) antics are funny; the plots about casino cheaters and gamblers with weird habits are usually intriguing but not overly complex; and with a cast including Josh Duhamel, Nikki Cox, Molly Sims, James Lesure and Vanessa Marcil, you've got somebody considered hot by every gender and sexual orientation except possibly dead people 67 and over. Plus it's the only show on TV with an Elvis Presley theme song. Man, this thing could go on another 10 seasons.

Other than that, Mr. Ewing, how did you like the car?

Here's a cool -- "cool" being defined as "perfect for people with way too much time on their hands" -- website that analyzes famous TV deaths, everybody from Bobby Ewing on Dallas to Prue the witch (nine times!) on Charmed.

What if they threw an Oscar ceremony and nobody came?

Sunday night's Oscars drew 39.9 million TV viewers. If you want to see the glass half full, that's a small increase of 2.6 percent over last year. If you want to see the glass as splintered shards jammed in Hollywood's jugular, that's the sixth-lowest Oscar telecast of all time, down more than 16 million viewers from the Titanic year of 1998.

The [bleep] Word

Now that bowdlerized versions of HBO's Sex And The City and The Sopranos have successfully drawn audiences in a syndicated afterlife on basic cable, Showtime's even racier lesbian soap The L Word is preparing to turn the scissors on itself. Industry magazine Broadcasting & Cable reports that Showtime has just turned L Word reruns over to corporate cousin CBS Television Distribution, a powerful player in the syndication market, and Alice and Shane and the rest of the ladies could be appearing on basic cable as early as next fall. Other Showtime series, like heroic-serial-killer drama Dexter and terrorist thriller Sleeper Cell, may soon follow.

I'd guess most L Word fans (not that there's exactly an army of them) will be horrified and assume that the editing necessary to get the show on basic cable will ruin it. A couple of years ago, I would have agreed; there's a lot of sex in The L Word and these women -- unlike the weird inhabitants of Lesbian Indy Film World -- do it with their clothes off. It's not easy to see how the show can be successfully trimmed down to a PG product. But I was startled at how successfully Sex And The City made the transition, so there's hope for The L Word.

In fact, L Word creator/producer Ilene Chaiken's biggest problem may not be the sex and nudity, but her tendency to let her characters climb atop soapboxes for hours on end. The L Word is very much a prisoner of the West L.A. political and sexual ghetto in which it takes place, a world where having your latte with real milk instead of soy is suspiciously reactionary. And, for the past couple of seasons, every new heterosexual character over the age of 12 has been portrayed as a clueless lout. (And those are the nice ones.) That may be fine with The L Word's niche audience, but it's not going to win the show many viewers in blue-state America, which does not view itself as a mindless repository of sexual and political fascism.

There's some sign that Chaiken has, perhaps, become aware of the problem; over the past few episodes she's introduced a National Guard captain named Tasha (winningly played by Rose Rollins) who's hot for Alice but bristles with anger at the left-wing sloganeering of her friends. Now, if we could have just one guy on the show who doesn't cheat on his wife or propose a three-way within 15 seconds of meeting a gay woman, The L Word's tether to Planet Earth will have been firmly reestablished.

PS: If you didn't see Sunday's episode, you missed a wonderful canine homage to Brian DePalma's Carrie. Even my cat laughed.

Screens: TV the week of Feb. 25

The Black Donnellys (10 p.m. Monday, NBC) -- With Tony Soprano down to his last horse's head, those opportunistic Irish see a chance to become the most fashionable ethnic criminals on TV. Last year we had Showtime's Boston Irish mafia drama The Brotherhood. Now NBC has opened a new front in New York with The Black Donnellys, a drama from Academy Award winners Paul Haggis and Bobby Moresco about four Irish-American brothers in Hell's Kitchen who shoot and steal and eat prodigious quantities of bangers 'n mash. It's only a matter of time until Fox debuts When Leprechauns Attack.

Robin Hood (9 p.m. Saturday, BBC America) -- You'd think the tax rates they pay would have soured Brits on the whole steal-from-the-rich idea, but they've mounted yet another production with Robin, Maid Marian, Little John and all the usual suspects -- this one a series lasting 12 weeks or until the Sheriff of Nottingham calls in an airstrike, whichever comes first.

The Robber Bride (8 p.m. Saturday, Oxygen) -- Mary-Louise Parker stars as the rhymes-with-witch Zenia Arden in this adaptation of Margaret Atwood's novel. When the movie opens, Zenia has disappeared and the cops are trying to figure out who had a motive to kill her. Answer: practically everybody. Sounds like a case for Judge Seidlin.

Geezergraphics

Turns out there is a show that apparently values older viewers, and it may surprise you: American Idol. The list of celebrity guest coaches for the rest of the season, announced Thursday night, includes some serious ghosts of pop charts past, including Lulu, who hasn't had a hit record in 25 years, and Peter Noone, the lead vocalist of Herman's Hermits, who hasn't had one in 40 years.

It's great to see Fox ignoring television's Iron Law of Demographics, which states that history began in 1994. And it may produce some interesting television, too. Some of the guest coaches, like Tony Bennett, Diana Ross and Barry Gibb, even if their heyday was long ago (in Bennett's case, long-long-long ago) have recorded albums recently and will probably be familiar to the twenty-something American Idol contestants. But how many of them have ever heard Lulu's To Sir With Love or Noone's signature Hermits hit, Mrs. Brown You've Got A Lovely Daughter? I anticipate some confused looks when they walk out (or perhaps roll out in wheelchairs) in a few weeks.

"Six Degrees" returns

Six Degrees, which vanished from ABC's schedule last fall, will return on March 23. But ABC hasn't ordered any new episodes, so unless there's some unexpected prairie fire of support as the remaining episodes are burned off, color it gone. Meanwhile, the network's floundering Men In Trees is taking a break while ABC shows off a drama, October Road, starring Bryan Greenberg as an author who had a bestseller with a Peyton Place-like novel about his hometown -- and comes back a decade later, his career sinking, to discover his old friends still hold a grudge. If this sounds familiar, it's precisely the premise of Glory Days, a WB series starring Eddie Cahill as the novelist that croaked after a few episodes. Now that The WB has been dead six months, mourning is over and the grave-robbing can begin.

You ARE smarter than a game-show contestant

Ha! Jeff Jones passed on the $500,000 question to which we all knew the answer on Thursday's edition of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire. He still gets to keep $250,000, which he says he'll spend on a search for the Loch Ness monster. I'm more of an Amelia Earhart guy myself, but whatever.

So you want to feel smarter than a game-show contestant?

If you're watching the syndicated version of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire that still lurks among the talk shows and soaps of daytime television, you know that nice young Jeff Jones from Texas is winning like crazy. On Wednesday's show, he got all the way up to $250,000, which is approximately 43 years' worth of Miami Herald salary, not that I'm jealous or anything, even though I'm a highly trained professional who performs life-or-death TV critic tasks like clicking the remote 24/7, while he's a guy whose main previous work seems to have been attending keggers at Abilene Christian University, which has apparently undergone some interesting theological revisions since the old days.

Anyway, my crack network of game-show spies tells me that the question Jeff will face for $500,000 when Thursday's show gets under way is this: In the 1982 movie Diner, what is the name of the diner where the main characters hang out?  A) Windsor Hills Diner, B) Rosemont Diner, C) Fells Point Diner, D) Allendale Diner.

The correct answer is C, Fells Point Diner. So now you sit back with a smug smile as you watch Jeff -- who, by the way, is all out of the lifeline gimmicks that allow him to seek help from geniuses like us -- squirm around, groping for an answer while beads of sweat pop out on his forehead and his whole life passes through his eyes as he contemplates blowing the $250,000 he's already made on the show and being forced to live in a cardboard box in the West Texas desert the rest of his life. Is television grand or what? If you're watching in South Florida, the fun gets started at 11 a.m. on WSVN-Fox 7.