Changing Channels

Laughing last, or at least, laughing at 10 p.m. Sunday

Nobody, including most of the network's own bosses, had much confidence in The ½ Hour News Hour, Fox News' new Daily Show-like comic newscast that debuted Sunday. Supposedly the show's liberal-bashing humor had failed to impress anybody in test screenings.

Well, chalk another defeat up for the marketing and research whiz kids. The ratings were actually pretty good. With 1.4 million viewers, The ½ Hour News Hour actually increased the very healthy audience of 1.2 million it inherited from its lead-in, Hannity's America. That's a 69 percent increase over the time slot's audience so far this year, and a whopping 91 percent over the same date in 2006.

The first show will be rerun this Sunday at 10 p.m., with a new episode airing March 4. So far, Fox News has only ordered two episodes -- compared to simply airing an extra 30 minutes of news in the slot, The ½ Hour News Hour is pretty expensive -- but the Nielsen numbers are giving the network something to chew on. Stay tuned.

And then there was light

Oprah Winfrey is appearing on The Ellen DeGeneres Show for the first time Thursday, and it's  easy to see why no producer previously dared to unite these two giant intellects in the same room; they generate a cyclonic wave of synapses that destroys everything in its path and threatens to remap the universe. Tim Russert and George Will will plunge red-hot needles into their eyes, for instance, when they hear this incisive exchange that renders all previous models of political commentary ancient and obsolete:

Ellen: Hillary and Barack ... That’s very interesting, right?
Oprah: Very interesting.
Ellen: Very interesting.  Anyone that you’re feeling right now?
Oprah: (nodding yes) Um hum.
Ellen: Yeah, you want to say or no?
Oprah: I’m feeling Barack.
Ellen: You’re feeling Barack
Oprah: I’m feeling Barack.
Oprah: I know it’s tough -- the thing about it is, it doesn’t make the other candidate any less.  I’m just feeling Barack.
Ellen: ....I’m really torn because I love him. I really love him.
Oprah: I don’t just love him.  I respect him.

I dare not repeat more for fear my brain will boil over and run out my ears from hypercognition. Watch if you dare.

How come my name's not on there?

What do Geraldo Rivera, Charlie Sheen, Rosie O'Donnell, Ellen DeGeneres, Wolf Blitzer, Dr. Phil, Danny DeVito, Larry King, Martha Stewart, Carson Daly, Dick Vitale and Satan have in common, besides being powerful figures in the broadcast industry? Well, they've all been seeded in Paternity Madness, CelebrityHack.com's "Anna Nicole Baby Daddy Bracket."

Zombie jamboree

Since it's been, like, an entire month since a new horror/sci fi site opened on the web, the folks at Fangoria magazine's FangoriaTV.com have decided to open up their joint for free, at least for a month. The free trial period starts March 2 with a free streaming of George Romero's original Night of the Living Dead, then a week later offers up William Castle's 1958 classic House on Haunted Hill -- without, regrettably, Castle's Emergovision gimmick, in which a skeleton came flying out of the roof of the theater's ceiling at a tense moment. Later in the month there's 1960's Horror Hotel with Christopher Lee, the silent 1922 version of Nosferatu, and the misunderstood axe-murdered flick Dementia 13, one of Francis Ford Coppola's first films. The idea here is to get you to subscribe -- that is, pay money -- for FangoriaTV.com, but what can they do if you just watch the freebies and go about your business? Well, besides sending a pack of Romero's zombie to scoop out your intestines and eat them, I mean.

Screens: TV the week of Feb. 18

A Distant Shore: African Americans of D-Day (7 p.m. Saturday, History Channel) -- Think of A Distant Shore as the chapter missing from The Longest Day or Saving Private Ryan. Not every soldier who braved the Nazi artillery on Omaha Beach looked like John Wayne or Tom Hanks. This is the story of the black troops who fought for a country in which they were barely citizens, then suffered racial taunts and were denied medals for their trouble. Their lack of rancor is astonishing, and humbling.

Jericho (8 p.m. Wednesday, CBS) -- Nope, it wasn't all a dream. American is still a blasted nuclear ruin when Jericho returns after a three-month hiatus, though at last we're going to learn a little bit about who launched the attacks in this flashback episode.

Decoding Disaster (10 p.m. Wednesday, Discovery Times) -- If nuclear war in Kansas isn't disastrous enough for you, try this new documentary series that's nothing but stories of fires, crashes, explosions, avalanches, mine cave-ins and all the other stuff that makes life interesting. Tonight's episode deals with train derailments and collisions. Next week: Paula Abdul.

Be sure to send O'Reilly his cut, Keith

MSNBC has signed a new deal with Keith Olbermann, reportedly for something close to four times his previous $1 million a year salary. Supposedly he's worth it because he upped MSNBC's audience 85 percent in his time slot. A couple of thoughts on that: First, any increase at all at MSNBC shows up as a whopping percentage because the network starts from such a low point. Olbermann's audience is still just 715,000 viewers, a fraction of his archenemy Bill O'Reilly's. Second, what happens if the Democrats capture the White House next year? Olbermann's show has exactly two drawing card, the way he eviscerates George W. Bush and Bill O'Reilly. Will his audience continue to grow if there's no Republican to kick around? Unlikely though it may seem, at MSNBC they must be praying for John McCain.

Tiger Radio roars!

If you grew up in South Florida during the 1960s, you surely listened to Tiger Radio, the bossest Top 40 radio station around. Here's a story from today's Miami Herald about how XM satellite radio is recreating the WQAM sound tonight from 4 p.m. to 9 p.m. Eastern time. (Even if you don't have XM, you can still listen on the Internet with one of XM's free three-day trial subscriptions, which have the added bonus that you cancel after three days and go around cackling for weeks about how you ripped off a corporate megabeast. At least until XM purchases and eats the members of your immediate family. Even after that, you can console yourself with the WQAM memorabilia at this cool website.

Alas, poor YouTube, we knew you well

YouTube has complied with subpoenas and turned over to News Corp. the names of a couple of users who uploaded complete episodes of 24 and The Simpsons to the YouTube website. "We intend to use the information provided to pursue all available legal remedies against those who infringed our copyrights," a News Corp. official said, not adding that those include Rupert Murdoch going to their homes, slitting their throats and drinking their blood, even though that's pretty much what everyone assumes is next. What with Viacom and NBC Universal -- which along with News Corp. own practically every other TV network known to man that is not managed by a rodent wearing white gloves -- also talking tough about copyright violations on YouTube, I'd say a lot of the fun is about to go out of that website.

Trio! It's back!

Ever since Boots And Saddles was canceled in 1958 after a single season, leaving forever unknown the fate of Capt. Shank Adams and the bedraggled troops at his frontier fort and plunging my 4-year-old life into existential crisis, I've known that quality TV shows don't always find an audience. But I was still amazed by the failure in 2006 of the Trio cable channel -- not just a quality show but an entire network dying of viewer distinterest. Disinterring died-too-young TV shows in series like Brilliant But Canceled and died-too-late ones in documentaries like The Flops, running shows on subjects like sick humor (What would Princess Di be doing if she were alive today? Scratching at the lid of the coffin) and the N-word that nobody else would touch, Trio was the smartest, hippest, funniest thing around.

Well, it's back, sort of. NBC Universal this week unveil a new website, getTRIO.com, that slices and dices popular culture in a daily report on Stuff to buy (books, CDs, DVDs), Stuff to do (concerts, events), and Stuff to see (architecture, art, exhibits, websites). It will screen old Trio documentaries like Parking Lot and Facetime With Kurt Andersen, and it has quick links to a pair of other Trio-inspired websites: BrilliantButCanceled.com (where you can watch shows like Kolchak: The Nightstalker and American Gothic) and OutZoneTV.com, home of the swords-sandals-and-barechested-young-dudes Roar, Shaun Cassidy's short-lived and hopelessly homoerotic series about Irish rebels fighting Roman oppression in the 5th Century. Those were the days.

I love you, despite your faint odor of tuna

XM satellite radio listeners chose Unchained Melody by the Righteous Brothers as their favorite Valentine's Day love song, just edging out At Last by Etta James. These are a couple of great examples of an afterlife fueled by movies and TV. Unchained Melody was a pretty big hit when the Righteous Brothers released it in 1965 -- it made it to No. 4 on the Billboard charts -- but over the years, it slipped out of the public consciousness. Oldies stations didn't play it, and when I interviewed the Righteous Brothers' Bobby Hatfield in the mid-'80s, he said they kept in their act mainly because it was his favorite solo. Then, in 1990, Demi Moore danced with the ghost of Patrick Swayze to the record in Ghost, and bang, Unchained Melody was all over the place again, even hitting the Billboard charts again twice that year. Now oldies-radio listeners routinely vote it the greatest record of all time.

The tale of At Last is even more peculiar. The record didn't even make the Top 40 when it was released in 1961 and was virtually unknown until it was used in a Jaguar television commercial in the early 1990s. Now it's Etta James' signature song, the one that brings the crowd to its feet at her concerts. A couple of years ago it resurfaced on TV again in ads for Purina cat food. If only XM radio performed better in the Felines 24-45 demo, At Last probably would have finished first.