Changing Channels

Talk about nine lives!

Felix The Cat is among our oldest cartoon characters, dating back to 1919 and the era of silent films.  And he practically invented television. In 1928, in RCA's very first experimental TV broadcast, an image of a papier-mache Felix doll spinning slowly on a phonograph was beamed out of a Brooklyn lab. (On W2XBS, in case you wanted to check your TiVo.) RCA televised Felix on a daily basis for most of the next decade.

Felix got back into TV in 1953, when some of his old films were licensed to television, among the first programming for children. By 1958, he had his own series -- and next week Classic Media is releasing the 31 episodes (in color!) on DVD for the first time. Happy birthday, pal.

The Nielsen folks say I was wrong -- that was a very good war indeed

The War is a hit not just by PBS standards, but anybody's. The opening episode of Ken Burns' documentary drew 15.5 million viewers -- 18.7 million if you count the audience for the 10:30 p.m. repeat. (In cities like San Francisco, Minneapolis and Seattle, more than 15 percent of the televisions in use were tuned to The War.) The Sopranos, by contrast, drew around 13 million at the show's height. Thanks to my pal Marc Berman at Media Week for ferreting out the numbers.

The FCC bares its fangs

In an ominous and frankly power-mad move, the FCC has proposed fining Comcast for airing a video press release on a sleeping potion without letting viewers know it was financed by the manufacturer. The FCC says CN8, one of Comcast's cable networks, aired a video press release for a product called Nelson's Rescue Sleep on Sept. 21, 2006.

Without defending video press releases or the lazy TV station that air them, I'm puzzled by all the concern: A lot of newspaper print press releases with little or no editing and without identifying them as such. If the federal government needs to stamp out the practice on TV, why not in newspapers?

That's just an asterisk, though, to a much broader problem. Letting the feds make rules about newscasts or their content will be absolutely disastrous for television journalism. The lefty media watchdogs who are pursuing this thing -- it was the Center for Media and Democracy that filed the complaint against Comcast -- are blithering fools if they think it won't rebound against them. If the FCC gets the authority to decide what is valid news and what is not, if it gets the right to rule on every story that appears on a newscast, do you think it will stop at video press releases? What do you think a Republican-dominated FCC would have done to CBS over the Rathergate stories on President Bush's military service?

Worse yet, the FCC is attempting this power grab not against the broadcast networks but cable, a medium it has no authority to regulate. All that hoary twaddle about "public airwaves" doesn't apply to a medium that doesn't use the airwaves. Cable TV has triggered a golden age of television precisely because it is not regulated by the government. The Sopranos and Sex and the City and Dexter and The Shield would never have made it to the air in an FCC-regulated environment. And try to imagine either Keith Olbermann or Bill O'Reilly surviving the Fairness Doctrine. Congress or the courts or both need to slam the door on the FCC's expansionist ambitions, fast.

The mysterious, missing Maya

With the season debut of Saturday Night Live just five days off, Entertainment Weekly's website reports that Maya Rudolph isn't coming back. No reasons given -- yet. Given the stormy history of SNL, rest assured the details will be ugly when they finally emerge.

Rudolph's departure means the show has only two women in the cast: Amy Poehler and Kristin Wiig. I hope Lorne Michaels is out looking for some more; historically, SNL has been a lot funnier when it's had a strong female presence. (Gilda Radner, Jane Curtain, Laraine Newman, Nora Dunn, Jan Hooks, Molly Shannon, Cheri Oteri, Tina Fey...this list could go on forever...)

UPDATE: Well, Entertainment Weekly now reports Rudolph has taken it all back and will show up for work after all.

Hell or Miami? It's a tough choice

Families are full of surprises. Imagine discovering that the Carringtons or Ewings had a set of smarter, deadlier cousins. Or that your dad has horns, a tail and a pitchfork? Ahh, now you're getting the flavor of the new fall shows that debut on television tonight. And it's delicious.

CBS' compellingly soapy Cane is the season's best new drama. Following the adventures of a wealthy, treacherous and beguiling family of Cuban-American sugar barons, it's a South Florida Dallas or Dynasty with mojitos but without the campiness. And The CW's action comedy Reaper, about a young slacker who learns his parents sold his soul to the Devil, is hellaciously funny, pun fully intended. Read the full reviews of Cane and Reaper.

Ratings: Good news and bad news

Apparently America has been longing for a co-host who doesn't know if the world is round or flat. Sherri Shepherd's debut on The View gave the show its highest rating since May and were up 16 percent over the same date a year ago.

On the other hand, Fox's terminally stupid unreality show Nashville edged closer to the grave Friday. The small audience of 2.7 million viewers for its first episode shrank to a minuscule 2.2 million for its second. The next sound you hear will be the plug being pulled.

Mad about 'Mad Men'

Summer on broadcast television is the season of cheapie reality shows and brain-dead burnoffs that were too crummy to make the fall schedule. But executives at basic-cable channels are learning that it's a great time to showcase original dramas that might get lost amid all the hubbub of the broadcasting season.

The summer's three best new shows were all basic-cable originals -- FX's Damages, Lifetime's Army Wives, and AMC's Mad Men. Army Wives has already been renewed for a second season, and now AMC -- basking in the critical acclaim, big audiences and lush demographics (a third of the viewers had annual family incomes over $100,000) generate by Mad Men -- has followed suite: The smart show about advertising men of the 1960s got picked up on Monday.

The OTHER war

Despite its accuracy, there's a deadly irony in David Halberstam's new book when he scathingly observes that what little Americans think they know about the Korean War is mostly derived from the film and TV series M*A*S*H, both nominally set in Korea but actually thinly disguised parables of the Vietnam War. For if The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War proves anything, it's that Halberstam's own vision of history was hopelessly and permanently clouded by Vietnam. It doesn't have anything to do with TV, but you can the rest of my review of Halberstam's book that appeared in Sunday's Miami Herald.

Nerd attack!

Call it Night of the Nerd. Television's got them all tonight -- your Stanford computer nerd, your Cal Tech physicist nerd, and your time-traveling reporter nerd. Unlike the nerds who make you homicidal on computer help lines, though, this bunch is generally rather sweet, mostly funny and always entertaining. Read the rest of the review of Chuck, Journeyman and The Big Bang Theory.

The Good War that wasn't

As the generation that fought it slips quietly away, our collective memory of World War II is fading to a flickering newsreel, blurred by false nostalgia and a yearning for simplicity. At Normandy and Iwo Jima, we suppose, there was none of the moral ambiguity and political rancor of Saigon or Baghdad, none of the command incompetence of Mogadishu. Our men fought hard and well and for a cause that everybody agreed was right. It was the Good War.

But you won't find that war, nor anyone who recalls it, in Ken Burns' magnificent, epic 15 ½-hour PBS documentary The War that kicks off at 8 tonight. The veterans and their loved ones through whom Burns recounts World War II remember it as a time of fear and privation and endless, terrifying death, a war that was no less hateful for all its necessity. Read the rest of the review.