'The band is on the field!', TV version

With the start of the new fall season barely two weeks away, television's secret war is heating up again:  As they have been for years, Stanford and the University of California are locked in a video death struggle.

Arch-rivals in both sports (surely you remember the Stanford Band's tenacious defense on that infamous 1982 kickoff return) and academics since opening their doors within a few years of each other in the San Francisco Bay Area in the late 19th century, Stanford and Cal are the only two elite universities** on the west coast. And with so many TV shows set in California, executive producers who want to send one of their characters off to college frequently wind up picking between Stanford and Cal.

This may sound hopelessly esoteric if you live outside California, but students and alums from both schools follow it closely. They're thrilled at a flattering mention of their own college, and enraged by insults. 

For instance, a few years back on The Simpsons, the entire family was arrested for something and prissy little teacher's pet Lisa complained that now she'd never be able to go  to an Ivy League school. A clip of the taunt that followed from Bart and Homer -- "You're going to Stanford! You're going to Stanford"' -- turned up endlessly on Cal message boards. But a few years later, a Stanford alum producing a Fox cop show called Killer Instinct topped that. When my Herald review of Killer Instinct included a description of one of its villains -- "a Berkeley professor who uses poisonous Egyptian spiders to paralyze women before he tapes them'' -- I got a call from a horrified Cal publicist wondering if I was making it up.

In recent years, the Stanford-Cal war has been roughly a draw, with each school having its moments in the video sun. Almost all the foxy characters on Fox's teen soap The O.C. had either gone to or dropped out of Cal, but one of the stud ghostbusters on The CW's Supernatural was a Stanford student. Stanford came close to administering a death blow when Veronica Mars producer Rob Thomas seriously contemplated sending his heroine to Stanford and setting the whole show there, but he backed off at the last minute and Veronica went to fictional Hearst College instead. (And, as Stanford people note, look what happened to her.)

This season, though, Stanford seems to have a decisive edge. On The CW's devilish comedy Reaper, a particularly annoying character doesn't get into Stanford; a homicidal villain in the pilot of NBC's time-travel drama Journeyman is pointedly identified as a Cal alumnus, and the producers plan to introduce a heroic Stanford alum later in the season.

But the real story is the defection of producer Josh Schwartz from the Cal ranks. Schwartz, who created the now-canceled The O.C., has a new show this fall called Chuck about a computer-nerd slacker who becomes America's secret weapon when all the government's national-security secrets are accidentally downloaded into his brain. Three characters, including the heroic Chuck, are Stanford grads; nobody went to Cal.

So what does this mean? Is NBC more of a Stanford network than Fox? (Almost all the narcotraffickers on NBC's Kingpin a few seasons back were Stanford grads, but it's hard to figure out whether that was academic flattery, or the reverse.) Or did Stanford pay off Schwartz? Or what? "Well, I'm a USC guy myself," shrugs Schwartz, "so I have absolutely no explanation for any of this."

**One other California school, Cal Tech, can claim elite status, but its graduates are all math-and-physics nerds who are practically impossible turn into TV show characters. This season, however, there's a big exception: The CBS sitcom The Big Bang Theory is about blond hottie Kaley Cuoco being understandably but fruitlessly lusted after by a bunch of Cal Tech geeks whose idea of a hot Friday night is gathering to play Klingon Boggle.

The faces of war

Practically everybody is dismissing Katie Couric's trip to Iraq as a ratings ploy for the chronically unwatched CBS Evening News, and I certainly don't disagree. That said, there are a couple of other points worth making. One is that while it's perfectly absurd to imagine that she's going to dig out any story that the network's regular beat correspondents in Iraq couldn't do (and do much better), a trip to the country could conceivably improve the CBS Evening News by making Couric and her producers more familiar with the situation there.

Several years ago -- this was long before Couric took over the CBS anchor chair and the discussion had nothing to do with her -- I asked NBC's Brian Williams if sending anchors to set up shop at the scene of a big news story really generated anything useful. "Well, it's useful for me," he said. "It gives me a feel for a story that I can't possibly get in the studio in New York." That paid dividends later, he felt, in helping him evaluate and shape stories that would appear on the evening news for months to come. It's a reasonable argument, especially on foreign stories: Newsroom bosses -- and it's as true at newspapers as it is at television networks -- don't always have a good perspective on foreign stories. A visit to the scene can improve it immeasurably.

The flip side of that is that the reporting of journalistic paratroopers who drop in on a story briefly before flitting is sometimes maddeningly superficial. The danger of that is compounded in a situation like the one in Iraq, where security measures impose draconian limitations on a reporter's ability to do the job. In this insightful piece for National Review Online, Internet military columnist Jeff Emanuel argues that too many reporters in Iraq use too much third- or fourth-hand information.

"Hearsay is relied upon far more often than is eyewitness accounting when reporting events in Iraq’s cities and at the battlefront,'' Emanuel writes. "At a time when reporting that is both honest and accurate is more badly needed than ever, reporters are traveling all the way to Iraq and are, in the end, still settling for little more than the hearsay they could have access to at home." (It's important to note that Emanuel is not repeating the old canard that I've heard about war correspondents so many times I want to scream -- that they cover the war from their hotel bars. As he notes, more than 100 journalists have died in Iraq, and it wasn't from poisoned olives in their their martinis.)

I don't agree with everything he says, particularly the extraordinarily high value he places on the reporting of journalists embedded with military units. Embedded reporters play an important role in helping us understand how the war looks from the grunt's-eye-view. But the world of the embedded reporter is necessarily small, limited to what's going on within range of his own eyeballs. It doesn't necessarily reflect the wider reality of the war. Ironically, one of the most widespread criticisms of Vietnam war journalism -- that the U.S. news media made the Viet Cong's 1968 Tet offensive look like an American defeat when it was actually a crushing defeat for Communist forces -- arose precisely from grunt's-eye-view reporting. Reporters covering individual attacks like the Viet Cong assault on the U.S. embassy in Saigon assumed that because their own situation was shaky, so was the entire security of South Vietnam.

The other problem with embedded reporting is that, as Emanuel notes, it's practically impossible for reporters to retain much objectivity when their lives depend on the soldiers they're covering. "When one is being shot at, or seeing children going back to school for the first time in years, or witnessing mutilated bodies being pulled from freshly filled graves," he writes, "ideology, and the ideas one arrived here with, is far less important than is the raw human experience."

There's certainly a place -- a large one, as Ernie Pyle and countless other war correspondents have proven -- for raw human experience in war reporting. But it's not the whole picture, just one piece of a larger jigsaw puzzle. Embedded reporters like Emanuel are giving some pieces. Katie Couric, whatever her larger motive for going to Iraq, may give us some others -- if not next week, maybe somewhere down the road.

Desert storm

What a difference a year of third-place finishes makes. Katie Couric, who once said Iraq was no place for a single mom, was scheduled to fly to Baghdad Wednesday night. After five days on the ground, she'll host the CBS Evening News from Iraq on Sept. 4 and 5, then from Syria on Sept. 6 and 7, a week before the Pentagon releases a status report on the U.S. military "surge'' in Iraq. It's also probably no coincidence that Sept. 5 marks Couric's first anniversary on the air at CBS.

During the long promotional tour last year in the months before she took over the CBS anchor chair, Couric said viewers shouldn't expect to see her doing the news from Iraq. ‘‘I think the situation there is so dangerous, and as a single parent with two children, that's something I won't be doing," she explained.

Her plans have changed -- though if anything, Iraq is more dangerous than ever for journalists, as CBS personnel have every reason to know. One of the network's Iraqi translators was murdered last week, and in June the hotel housing the CBS Baghdad bureau was bombed. And in May 2006, CBS soundman James Brolin and cameraman Paul Douglas were killed in an explosion that also left correspondent Kimberly Dozier gravely injured.

The science of marketing

All the anger at the TV networks over Internet piracy hasn't prevented them from cunningly exploiting cyberspace as a marketing tool. Promotional videos are now popping up all over sites like YouTube. In the hands of lunatics like the gang that produces FX's It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia, this is probably a threat to national security. Here's one of their latest efforts. SHRIEKING THREE-ALARM WARNING: This video is so not family friendly that you can probably be arrested for playing it if there's anybody on your entire block who's not 18. And if your boss walks by while you've got it on at work, he'll have your eyes put out with red-hot pokers.

On the other hand...

...maybe those Europeans have a point.

Pax, europa

Here's a full review of Monday night's extremely entertaining PBS documentary, The Anti-Americans (A Hate/Love Relationship).

Screens: TV the week of August 26

The Anti-Americans (A Hate/Love Relationship) (11 p.m. Monday, WPBT-PBS 2) -- Sometimes irritating but mostly hilarious, this documentary -- airing as part of the occasional PBS series America At A Crossroads -- examines European attitudes toward the United States. Attitudes, for the most part, being a euphemism for snotty bigotry. As one Brit says at a dinner party, after the ritual dismissal of President Bush as a drooling idiot, "Why should an idiot society have intelligent politicians?" How can you do anything but giggle when you consider that the remark comes from a citizen of the country that was transfixed by Benny Hill? And the giggle turns to a guffaw when a Frenchwoman who must have learned her World War II history at the University of The Outer Rings Of Saturn boasts that "we threw out the Germans, we'll throw out the Americans, too." Even Jerry Lewis, mademoiselle?

Spies, Lies And The Superbomb (8 p.m. Thursday, National Geographic Channel) -- A three-hour documentary about the role of espionage in the Cold War arms race. It tells the stories of spies on
both sides, from the Rosenbergs and Klaus Fuchs helping the Soviets copy the American A-bomb to Oleg Penkovsky helping the United States back down to the Russians during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

World's Funniest Commercials (9 p.m. Thursday, TBS) -- Remember back in the days before TiVo, when television shows were embedded with these little advertisements we called commercials? Did you know they're still making those things? And this collection is almost enough to make you wonder why we hated them so much. For instance, the better-driving ad from Australia with an instructor telling his student to "take one hand off the wheel, look away from the road, while you dig through your bag for the phone. Now veer onto the sidewalk -- '' she hits a mailbox as he exclaims ‘‘Good!'' -- "and over-correct into coming traffic . . ."

NOTE: Days and times for PBS programs are for the Miami area and may differ elsewhere.

Take that, Jeanne Moos

Well, score one for the Anchorwoman team. When a CNN reporter asked Phil Hurley, the general manager of East Texas station KYTX, if its decision to hire a bikini model/wrestling diva to anchor its news didn't have Ed Murrow rolling over in his grave, Hurley drawled back: ""He probably already turned over three or four times watching y'all and Fox cover Paris Hilton."

Anchor away

Katie Couric can breathe a little easier -- to everybody's surprise, America does not want to see female wrestlers in the anchor chair. The Fox reality show Anchorwoman, with WWE wrestling vixen Lauren Jones taking over as anchor at a small East Texas station, has been unceremoniously canceled after a single episode. Despite all the hype for the show -- including several million screechy journalism-is-ruined columns by panicky newspeople -- the premiere episode drew only 2.7 million viewers.

Even in this day of quick network trigger fingers, getting canceled after a single episode is quite an achievement -- it's only happened 10 times before in broadcast network history. My pal Marc Berman at Media Week has thoughtfully compiled a list of these truly brain-dead shows:

ABC

Emily's Reasons Why Not (2006)

Turn-On (1969)

CBS

Co-Ed Fever (1979)

Public Morals (1996)

South of Sunset (1993)

The Will (2005)

You're In the Picture (1961)

Fox

Lawless (1997)

The Rich List (2006)

Who's Your Daddy (2005)

The undisputed champ of this list of video Titanics is Turn-On, a Laugh-In ripoff that so generated so many enraged phone calls from viewers and affiliates that ABC canceled it halfway through the only episode. And You're In The Picture deserves a special mention, too: A game show hosted by Jackie Gleason, it was so appalling that Gleason came on the air the following week and spent a half-hour apologizing for it.

   

Lindsay's fully loaded

The guys who had huge viral video hits earlier this year with Paris In Jail and Harry Potter In The Hood have checked in again with Lindsay's Fully Loaded, which takes aim at the all-time queen of child-stars-gone-bad. The video is set to a country rap a la the Beverly Hillbillies theme song. Sample lyrics: She'll wreck a new car every mile/she's a poster child for Triple A/a fender-bender every day/the Geico's lizard's on her speed-dial...

MyNetworkTV strikes back

My Aug. 20 post titled How far has MyNetworkTV fallen? has mobilized a small army of the network's folks to besiege me with anguished (though unfailingly polite) phone calls. They are particularly unhappy that I characterized their upcoming NFL Network: Total Access show as clip show that's "really just an hour-long prime-time infomercial for a cable channel."

While not denying that Total Access will contain segments from other NFL Network programs, they insist it will include original material and is a preview and analysis of the weekend's pro football games, not a sales pitch for the subscriber-challenged NFL Network. Anybody who loves football, they say, will love the show. Hmmm. I guess we'll see when the show kicks off on Sept. 8 at 9 p.m.

Television transitions, in more ways than one

There's a quiet, little-noticed revolution under way in television. In 2003, when TV did a pair of movies on sympathetic transgendered (or, as they were still widely known then, transsexual) characters, I wrote a story saying it was the first attempt to "break television's seemingly iron link between transsexuals and sleazy criminality." That was no exaggeration. In the months before the story was written, The Shield had a transgender crackhead burglar who gave an elderly woman a heart attack, CSI a transgender serial killer who murdered his own mother and John Doe a transgender psycho locked up in a mental hospital.

Since then, transgendered characters who are neither psycho killers nor AIDS-ridden hookers have popped up with increasing frequency, not only in the two movies I wrote about (HBO's Normal and Showtime's Soldier's Girl) but in regular series including All My Children, Nip/Tuck and The L Word and the Sundance Channel's documentary Transgeneration.

And now it looks we'll have a series in which a transgender character does not merely appear, but stars. FX on Wednesday announced that it has ordered a pilot from Nip/Tuck executive producer Ryan Murphy about a male doctor -- a husband and father -- who realizes he's trapped in the wrong body and starts the long and often painful transition to female. The pilot doesn't have a cast or even a name yet, and there's no guarantee it will be picked up. But FX wouldn't have announced the pilot if its future weren't looking bright. Network president John Landgraf called its script, by Murphy and Nip/Tuck supervising producer Brad Falchuk, "unique, compelling and complex storytelling.”

We don't have to get carried away with political correctness here; television does not need a transgender character on every show. The problem has not been that transsexuals are underrepresented -- America has no more than a handful -- but that they've been represented in such a uniformly awful manner. That's starting to change, and if the Unititled Ryan Murphy Project makes it to the screen, the change will officially be huge.

Don't let your boss see this

If you've got a few minutes to waste at work this afternoon -- and you must, or you wouldn't be reading this -- the folks at Me.dium and Tiki Bar TV are offering just the ticket. Me.dium is a free browser add-on that lets you surf the Internet with friends; Tiki Bar TV is a popular video podcast. They've partnered to show the premiere of the newest Tiki Bar TV through Me.dium, so you can watch while chatting with other fans as well as Dr. Tiki, the star of the show. It all kicks off at 3 p.m. Eastern time; to join in, download the software, then head over to tikibartv.com to watch.

Nothing Mickey Mouse about these numbers

All that hype for High School Musical 2, it turns out, wasn't hype at all. The Disney Channel's movie drew 17.2 million viewers Friday, breaking the previous record for basic-cable audiences by more than 1 million. And a lot of those folks stuck around for the rest of the night. An episode of Hannah Montana following HSM2 had nearly 11 million viewers, and the Miley Cyrus episode after that still had 8 million pairs of eyes glued to the tube. So guess which network won the basic-cable ratings sweepstakes for the week?

UPDATE: If you missed HSM2, you get another shot on Thursday, when the Disney Channel plays it again at 8 p.m.

How far has MyNetworkTV fallen?

Still trying to emerge from the rubble of its failed attempt to entice Americans to watch an all-telenovela network, MyNetworkTV for the past several months has been a ragtag collection of reality shows and trash sports. Now it's going to air a program that's essentially a collection of previews and teases of a wildly under-subscribed cable network. On Sept. 8, MyNetworkTV debuts something called NFL Network: Total Access, an hour-long collection of clips from the NFL Network, the football league's channel that's faced stiff resistance from cable operators. It's really just an hour-long prime-time informercial for a cable channel.

MyNetworkTV was born to fill the desperate need for programming by all the broadcast stations left in the lurch when UPN and The WB merged last year. But it's hard for me to imagine they're going to stick with this kind of thing for long.

And how soon before we see Bill O'Reilly on Fox's NFL games?

Keith Olberman's MSNBC show Countdown will get a shot at the big time Sunday night when it runs on NBC prior to the NFL exhibition game between Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. Olbermann's now part of the studio team that handles pre-game and halftime shows. We'll see if this goes better than the last attempt to mix snarky political commentary with pro football, which ended in ABC/ESPN's abrupt dismissal of Rush Limbaugh.

Wholly holy

Here's a piece from Tuesday's Miami Herald about Christiane Amanpour and the three-part documentary series God's Warriors that starts airing tonight.

Don't worry, PBS will kick in some money

The insensitive louts who run Japan's government have cut the subsidy for Naked Sign Language News, a five-minute newscast in which an anchor strips while delivering the news in sign language.

HBO renewals

HBO has picked up Entourage for another season, which is no surprise, and Flight Of The Conchords, which is. Flight Of The Conchords averages less than a million viewers, but it also costs about 12 cents an episode to produce. Those New Zealanders work cheap.

Screens: TV the week of August 19

God's Warriors (9 p.m. Tuesday, CNN) -- This three-part documentary hosted by Christiane Amanpour (it continues Wednesday and Thursday) is not, as you might guess from the title, a story about suicide bombers -- at least, not entirely. Rather, it's an examination of religious fundamentalists around the world who believe society has grown too secular and are struggling to put God into the cultural and political driver's seat. They run the gamut from Muslim jihadists to Jewish settlers on the West Bank to America's religious right. And whether they're using car bombs or ballot boxes, they're determined to be heard. As an American evangelical tells a rally, "Whoever speaks up most gets to shape the culture."

Anchorwoman (8 p.m. Wednesday, Fox) -- In this reality series, a TV station in Tyler, Texas, imports a swimsuit model/wrestling vixen to jazz up its evening newscast. Hey, why didn't CNN think of that? God's Warriors would be a lot more informative if that talky Christiane Amanpour was replaced by one of the Pussycat Dolls.

Only for people who REALLY hate Che Guevara

Author and congenital-doubter-of-the-divine-origins-of-Fidel-Castro Humberto Fontova will talk about his book Exposing the Real Che Guevara: And the Useful Idiots Who Idolize Him at 6:30 a.m. Sunday on CSPAN2. And in my opinion National Review ought to be lobbying for the creation of some kind of Congressional Medal of Anticommunist Honor for anybody willing to get up at that hour to watch.

Vito recants

If you bought one of Joseph R. Gannascoli's "To Die For" pool cues, it'll probably be worth a fortune someday as a collector's item: The company has just taken them out of production.

All your princess are belong to us

Lifetime, which has an Aug. 26 movie called The Murder Of Princess Diana and, evidently, more promotional money than it knows what to do with, just completed a poll that shows 43 percent of its viewers believe Diana's death was no accident. The other 57 percent think she was abducted by aliens, which possibly accounts for Lifetime's upcoming project Diana, Queen Of Outer Space, with Zsa Zsa Gabor in the title role.

Music to kill dinosaurs by

With ABC's Cavemen looming ominously over the horizon -- life as we know it will probably end with the debut on Oct. 2 -- the only thing to do is wallow in bitter nostalgia for the past, when network sitcoms about cavemen were really funny and had really cool theme songs. Okay, the funny part is the Jack Daniel's talking, but the theme song to the 1966 CBS caveman epic It's About Time (in which two astronauts broke the time barrier and found themselves living among Neanderthals, by which for once I do not mean network executives) was the best ever. Listen and tell me you don't agree. Hey, maybe Cavemen will adopt another totally cool song, Hotlegs' 1970 Neanderthal Man, as its theme.

UPDATE: Okay, I can't imagine how I forgot this one.

Who would have guessed? Sex and drugs build ratings

Monday was a big night for Showtime. The debut episode of dope comedy Weeds was up 43 percent from last season's premiere and was the show's most watched episode ever. And the debut of Californication, in which David Duchovny had sex approximately every five and a half minutes, was the biggest premiere of a Showtime comedy since 2001. In fact, my theory is that Duchovny is going to boink at least one member of every Nielsen family in America during Californication as part of a new Showtime ratings strategy, which it desperately needs. Regardless of how good Monday night's performance was in terms of percentages and historical comparisons, the raw numbers -- 824,000 for Weeds, 550,000 for Californication -- are abysmally low. HBO's Flight Of The Conchords averaged better than either of those shows, with just under a million viewers, and is floating on the cancellation bubble, which gives you an idea of how the two networks' audiences compare. 

Duchovny poses with an apple that he did not have sex with in the opening episode of Californication.

Godzilla vs. Megalon, Osama vs. W, and now Stossel vs. Hansen

The entertainment divisions of ABC and NBC have been in an official state of war ever since NBC unceremoniously dumped head programmer Kevin Reilly earlier this summer. Reilly and ABC programming chief Steve McPherson are old college buddies, and McPherson has been scathing in his denunciations of new NBC boss Ben Silverman -- not just for replacing Reilly, but also for hiring Isaiah Washington, fired from ABC's Grey's Anatomy for homosexual slurs against another member of the cast. "When someone stabs your best friend in the back, you don't buy it," McPherson said during the critics' press tour in Los Angeles last month.

Now the war is spreading to new theaters of combat -- the news divisions. ABC's 20/20 is working on a story about the pedophile vigilanteism of the To Catch A Predator segments on NBC's Dateline. An ABC unit is in Texas right now, reporting on a To Catch A Predator segment last year that ended with the suicide of one of the men lured into a sting operation. Coming soon: Meredith Viera and Diane Sawyer pull each other's hair out, eventually followed by McPherson and 20/20's John Stossel in a tag-team Ultimate Fighting match against Silverman and To Catch A Predator's Chris Hansen, with the winners eating the livers of the losers.

I'm calling it: brain in left-corner pocket

Remember Vito, Tony Soprano's gay capo who came to an end unfortunate even by the standards of The Sopranos? (It involved a pool cue, in case the Memorably Gruesome Deaths portion of your brain is still fully occupied with the sound that SUV made rolling over Phil Leotardo's skull.) The actor who played Vito, Joseph R. Gannascoli, markets a bunch of products -- cigars, sauces, olive oil -- under the brand "To Die For." And in a truly regrettable decision, he last year added a pool cue to the brand. The Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, as my pal Steve Rothaus reports, is not amused.

'½ Hour News Hour' gets 30 minutes shorter

Looks like ½ Hour News Hour, the Fox News experiment in satire, isn't going to be with us much longer. The network announced Tuesday that the show will wrap after its Sept. 16 episode, though there's some vague talk about "retooling" that might bring it back later. I'm guessing that means "subtracting salaries from" -- the show's ratings are decent by cable standards, but it's pretty expensive compared to the marginal costs of filling up that half-hour with news from reporters who are already in place.

Raising 'Cane'

When you see that lyin', cheatin', murderin' Duque family running amok through the sugar business this fall on the new CBS drama Cane, rest easy: It's not our friendly neighbors the Fanjuls. The Palm Beach family that controls about 400,000 acres of canefields in Florida and the Dominican Republic had gotten a bit cranky when CBS announced in May that Cane would join the network's prime-time lineup this fall, and lawyers all over South Florida were locked and loaded.

But after an exchange of testy letters, the Fanjuls say everything is OK. "CBS has given us assurances that it will be clear from watching early and subsequent episodes that Cane is not about the Fanjuls, and that the fictional Duque family will not reflect the Fanjul family members or its businesses," says Joseph P. Klock, general counsel for the Fanjul-controlled Flo-Sun, Inc. CBS, for its part, had said all along that Cane, a kind of mojito-flavored version of Dallas, was pure fiction. You can see for yourself when the show debuts Sept. 25.

Elvis 'n' me

It was 1977, and we could go see Elvis for 15 bucks -- or $12.50 if we wanted to cheap it out.

John from Cincinnati, meet the Grim Reaper from Nielsen

HBO has canceled its fascinating but inscrutable surf-noir drama John From Cincinnati. The show, about a scruffy but well-intentioned collection of beach bums whose damaged lives revive after they're joined by a mysterious visitor, ended its run Sunday, no more decipherable at the end than it was at the beginning. The characters -- Vietnam burnouts, remorseful gangsters, wiped-out surfers, ex-porn stars -- were all well-drawn and funny. But the show lacked any clear narrative thrust, and its mysteries (like the idiot-savant visitor John: devil or angel or CIA agent or what?) were never clarified even slightly. Clearly David Milch, the producer, was trying to reassure us that life is full of second chances, but beyond that, John From Cincinnati's cosmology  was as maddeningly opaque in the final episode that aired Sunday as it was in the first, three months ago. The show's Nielsen ratings, hopelessly meager despite a giant HBO promotional campaign during the final weeks of The Sopranos, reflected the audience's confusion and ultimate disillusion.

The good news, if you're a fan of Milch's much-lamented revisionist Western series Deadwood, is that John's cancellation means he'll have time to work on the two Deadwood movies HBO promised us last year.

Return of the hanging chads

For stand-up comedians and investigative reporters, Florida's performance in the 2000 election is the gift that just keeps on giving. Latest among the latter to weigh in is Dan Rather, whose HDNet show Tuesday offers yet another theory about what went wrong: crummy paper in the punchcard ballots, which led to all those hanging you-know-whats.

"We talked to people at the company that made the ballots -- some workers, some management," Rather says. "They say they were making quality punch cards for a long while and proud of it. But starting around 1999, the cards were made from what they felt was inferior paper. They raised concerns about it, but the company's management had them under pressure to get the ballots out."  As the expression hanging chad turned into a national punch line, the workers told Rather they were ordered to destroy evidence of the poor paper.

The material about the ballots is part of a larger Dan Rather Reports investigation of voting machines. Most of the show -- which will run 10 to 20 minutes longer than its normal hour -- focuses on the so-called paperless voting machines that many jurisdictions installed after the 2000 election problems. Workers at the plants where they were made say the manufacture was shoddy, quality control
nonexistent. The fun gets underway at 8 p.m. Though, if you can't wait, here's a neat little preview clip.

Screens: TV the week of August 12

Elvis! All The Time! Everywhere! -- With the 30th anniversary of Elvis Presley's death coming up Thursday, we're in for a week-long spasm of total Elmania. Get started at 8 p.m. Sunday with TV Guide Network's special The Life, The Legend, The King, which focuses on Elvis' television appearances -- including that infamous 1956 Ed Sullivan Show where he was present only from the waist up. By Thursday, you should be ready for Turner Classic Movies' 24-hour Elathon, with 13 movies that either star or are about Presley. It kicks off at 6 a.m. with the 1967 film Stay Away, Joe, in which Elvis plays a Navajo Indian and sings a love song to a bull. (Sadly, the marathon doesn't include 1965's Girl Happy, which features Elvis's most tender song of inter-species romance, Do The Clam.) It all wraps up at 3:30 a.m. with That's Entertainment! III, which features a ton of clips from Elvis movies. Then you can go back to sleep until 2012 when we do Elvis Death Anniversary XXXV.

Weeds (10 p.m. Monday, Showtime) -- America's cutest narcotrafficker, soccer mom Nancy Botwin, is back for a third season. Now let's see if she can charm all those drug gangsters who were pointing their guns at her when the finale of season two faded out last year.

Californication (10:30 p.m. Monday, Showtime) -- He's chasing skirts instead of UFOs, but David Duchovny is back on television in this bleakly funny new comedy about a writer going to seed in Los Angeles. Once America's most promising novelist, Hank Moody's talent has dissolved in a blur of easy dope and sleazy sex and he's reduced to writing a blog even crummier than this one. But don't get down about it; Hank certainly hasn't. "I'm disgusted with my life and myself," he observes, "but I'm not unhappy about that." Words to live by.

NASCAR In Primetime (9 p.m. Wednesday, ABC) -- This five-part series goes behind the scenes of stock-car racing to show drivers having deviant sex with carburetors and other shocking stuff. OK,
probably not. I'm hallucinating a little bit because, like, WHERE THE HELL IS FOOTBALL?

Three yards and a cloud of pixels

More evidence that, within a couple of years, high-definition TV will be the standard: The new college sports channel Big Ten Network, which goes live Aug. 30, will air 85 percent of its schedule or more in HD. Imagine how cool it would have been to see Woody Hayes slap that Clemson linebacker in HD.

Barnabas Collins wanted too much money, not to mention a fridge full of A-negative

Harvey Keitel, whose career started out on television 40 years ago -- surely you remember him as "customer at the Blue Whale" in Dark Shadows -- is coming back to tube, replacing Mandy Patinkin on Criminal Minds.

UPDATE: Turns out this was a premature report. It's Joe Mantegna, not Keitel, who's replacing Patinkin. Mantegna was never in Dark Shadows, not even the remakes, but CBS wants him anyway. Go figure.

I got my job through the New York Times

With the Fidel-is-dying rumors flying again, I thought it might be a good time to link a review I wrote for Reason magazine of Anthony DePalma's The Man Who Invented Fidel: Cuba, Castro And Herbert L. Matthews Of The New York Times. Matthews was the Times reporter whose interview of the guerrilla leader in 1957 created the Castro mythology that haunts the American news media to this day. The controversy over Matthews that raged during the late 1950s and early 1960s is now largely forgotten everywhere outside the Cuban exile community -- which is too bad, because Katie Couric, Barbara Walters and a lot of other journalists would profit from studying it.

Miami spies

USA's spy drama Burn Notice, the only scripted TV show actually shot in Miami, has just been renewed f or another season. We'll see if they can dodge the storms two years in a row. TNT's cops-and-angels drama Saving Grace has been renewed, too. Now that's a show that should shoot in Miami -- with a guardian angel on the set each day, who'd worry about hurricanes?

That photo, by the way, is Biscayne Boulevard doubling for a Nigerian slum in the pilot of Burn Notice. Talk about separated at birth...

Dirty old men need jobs, too

I've just been watching the pilot of Showtime's new comedy Californication, starring David Duchovny as a writer who moves from New York to Los Angeles and goes into a hilariously dissolute downward spiral of sex, drugs, booze and more sex. (The show debuts Monday at 10:30 p.m.; you'll be able to read a review here on Sunday.) And it reminded me of something Duchovny said last month during the TV critics' press tour. A critic, noting that Duchovny's character unwittingly goes to bed with a 16-year-old, asked how it felt "to be playing the first male lead in TV series history who has sex with a minor." Duchovny thought about a moment, then replied: "I gotta update my resume."

South Florida politics: Profiles in Hypocrisy, part 9,027

Just two months ago, Broward County Commissioner Stacy Ritter blocked renewal of the county government's hurricane emergency-broadcasting partnership with WIOD radio on the grounds that the station runs Rush Limbaugh's show. Most Broward residents, Ritter reasoned, would rather die than tune into a station that airs a conservative show. "We don't have to do business with them," Ritter sniffed. (Eventually her objections were overridden by an accidental spasm of common sense from the rest of the commission.)

That was then, this is now. On Tuesday, Fort Lauderdale station WFTL announced that Ritter will join its lineup with a talk show on Saturdays at 10:30 a.m. Among Ritter's on-air colleagues at WFTL will be the famously tolerant Dr. Laura Schlesinger (who brands halter-topped teenagers at malls "sluts" and women who have adulterous affairs "whores"), Republican party hitwoman Laura Ingraham (who once urged GOP voters to tie up Democratic party voter hotlines with crank calls), the truly demented Michael Savage (who recently speculated that Democrats somehow caused the seizure of Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts) and Fox News host Bill O'Reilly, who surely needs no introduction. Apparently Ritter's standards about who she personally does business with are a little more flexible than the ones she applies to the county.

To be fair, it's possible she's had a sincere change of heart. After all, during the controversy following her veto of WIOD, Limbaugh called her "a babe." The allure of being a right-wing sex symbol can turn even the most progressive girl's head.

Old anchors never die, they just turn mutant

If you live in South Florida, something might have struck you as strangely familiar in Sunday night's episode of HBO's John From Cincinnati. That blond reporter interviewing Mitch Yost after his grandson disappeared -- yeah, Terry Anzur, former anchor at WTVJ in Miami and WPEC in West Palm Beach. These days she runs a media consulting business in Southern California and has created a cottage industry of playing reporters in movies and TV shows. What? You didn't see X-Men: The Mutant Watch? Well, quit wasting time reading this useless item and get on the horn to Netflix right now.

Breaking fat-person news

Because its many rabid fans simply couldn't wait 24 more more hours, ABC has moved up the debut date of the scintillating new reality show Fat March, in which 12 fat people march from Boston to Washington D.C. It now starts Monday (that is, tonight, assuming of course you're reading this today and not tomorrow or sometime next week or even in 2012, when this item will still be kicking around in some dusty Google cache, to be read by future generations of slackers who are even more desperate to avoid work than you are) at 9 p.m. Do not all stampede toward your TV sets at once. Especially if you're reading this in 2012.

Screens: TV the week of August 5

The Company (8 p.m. Sunday, TNT) -- This epic six-hour miniseries (it airs three consecutive Sundays) views the Cold War through the eyes of its spies. Mixing fictional characters with real spooks -- notably the ruthless CIA molehunter James Angleton, played as cold and hard as a diamond by Michael Keaton -- it follows the four-decade face-off between the CIA and the KGB from Berlin to Budapest, from Saigon to Havana. It's a gripping requiem for the Cold War and the men who fought it, the Saving Private Ryan of a struggle that took place not on beaches between uniformed armies but in bordertown back alleys and jungle clearings, where standoffs often counted as victories and the greatest triumph was snatching compromise from the jaws of defeat. Suspenseful, riveting and not to be missed. (Here's a full review.)

Flash Gordon (9 p.m. Friday, Sci Fi Channel) -- We don't need no stinking R2D2. Not when we've got this new series featuring old faves Flash, spacegirl-next-door Dale Arden and the brainy Dr. Zarkov defending Earth against Ming the Merciless, who makes Darth Vader look like a slightly delinquent Boy Scout or maybe in the worst case theory Jerry Springer.

Fat March (9 p.m. Monday, ABC) -- Hey, what could be better than a reality series about fat people marching to Washington, D.C.? OK, practically anything, but give me a break -- it's August.

Bounty Girls (9 p.m. Thursday, Court TV) -- Instead of fat people, it's got four hot chicks dressed like hookers. And instead of marching to Washington, D.C., they run around Miami beating the crap out of bad guys. Otherwise, this new reality series is practically indistinguishable from Fat March. Like I said, it's August.

Spy-fi TV

The Company, TNT's six-hour miniseries about the intricate and deadly chess match between the CIA and the KGB during the Cold War, debuts Sunday at 8 p.m. You'll be able to read a full review here on Sunday. (Hint: It's excellent.)  Meanwhile, warm up over at TNT's website, where you can see video and other features of various spy toys, many of them featured in The Company. That poison umbrella in particular looks like it might come in handy in dealing with editors. I mean, terrorists.

Reports of the sitcom's death may be slightly premature

Here's a list of most-watched syndicated TV shows last week, courtesy of (or, to use technical journalism terms, ripped off from) my pal Marc Berman, who loves to curl up in bed each night with a thrilling Nielsen report:

1. Wheel of Fortune

2. Jeopardy

3. Oprah

4. Judge Judy

5. (tie) Entertainment Tonight and CSI: Miami

7. (tie) Seinfeld, Dr. Phil, Friends, Wheel of Fortune/weekend and Seinfeld/weekend.

Note the presence in the top 11 of Friends, which hasn't shot a new episode since 2004, and Seinfeld (twice!), which hasn't shot one since 1998. Next time you hear someone saying sitcoms don't work on television anymore, mentally insert the word bad at the beginning of the phrase. TV still has plenty of viewers hungry enough for funny sitcoms to watch shows they've already seen 10 or 12 times.

Big Whoop

Confirming the least-kept secret of the summer, ABC announced today that Whoopi Goldberg is joining The View, taking over for either Star Jones or Rosie O'Donnell, take your choice of an annoying star of days gone by. One difference: Whoopi has the title of "moderator," though now that the long death match between Elisabeth Hasselbeck and O'Donnell is over, it's not clear who she's got to jump between. Guess we'll find out on Sept. 4, her first day at work.

Not quite so mad about 'Men'

Much as I liked the show, I was a little surprised when the heroic admen of the '60s drama Mad Men pulled in 1.6 million viewers -- a giant audience for a cable channel like AMC -- for its debut a couple of weeks ago. Could it be the secret dream of American television viewers has long been to watch guys smoke, get loaded during business meetings and check out their secretaries' butts? Apparently not. The audience was down to just over a million viewers for the second episode, which is still a very respectable number for AMC. And like* I said, I'm a big fan of Mad Men, which has fascinating characters to go with the all the frat-boy antics and is also a fascinating window into a forgotten era of American history. But still.

*One of the cool things about writing a blog is that none of my bosses read it. If they did, you can be sure that a pack of copy editors, yapping like preposition-phobic hyenas, would have wrestled that like to the ground and changed it to as. But here, in my forgotten little corner of the Internet, I can say anything I want. Like [censored] or [censored] or even [CENSORED]. Coming soon, my 137-part series on the secret sex lives of McClatchy executives.