The best horror movies of all time, sort of

In honor of Halloween, those guys at Moviefone have picked the top 31 horror movies of all time, probably half of which are airing on cable TV tonight. I promised them I'd pass along their list, even though it unaccountably fails to include The Incredibly Stange Creatures Who Stopped Living And Became Mixed-Up Zombies; or the 1931 version of Frankenstein, a far superior film to Dracula, issued the same year; or The Wolf Man, with Maria Ouspenskaya's weary, grief-stricken eulogy to Lon Chaney Jr.: "The way you walked was thorny, through no fault of your own. But as the rain enters the soil, the river enters the sea, so tears run to a predestined end..." And how could anybody think the silly Donald Sutherland disco version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers was better than the grim old Cold War allegory with Kevin McCarthy? In fact, the Moviefone guys are idiots who should be flogged. But here's their list, anyway.

31. The Ring (2002)

30. Hellraiser (1987)

29. Nosferatu (1922)

28. The Descent (2005)

27. The Omen (1976)

 

26. The Fly (1986)

25. Wicker Man (1973)

24. Carnival of Souls (1962)

23. The Eye (2002)

22. Scream (1996)

21. Friday the 13th (1980)

20. Dracula (1931)

19. Evil Dead 2 (1987)

18. Carrie (1976)

17. Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978)

16. Night of the Living Dead (1968)

15. The Blair Witch Project (1999)

14. Bride of Frankenstein (1935)

13. A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984)

12. Rosemary's Baby (1968)

11. Frailty (2001)

10. 28 Days Later (2002)

9. The Haunting (1963)

8. Dawn of the Dead (1978)

7. The Thing (1951)

6. The Sixth Sense (1999)

5. Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974)

4. The Shining (1980)

3. Psycho (1960)

2. The Exorcist (1973)

1. Halloween (1978)

   

Robert Goulet, RIP

Robert Goulet died Tuesday in a Los Angeles hospital where he was awaiting a lung transplant. Most people, I imagine, will remember him for originating the role of Lancelot in Camelot, or Hurry Home For Christmas or one of his other music gigs. But whenever I think of Goulet, it's in connection with one of my favorite spy shows, Blue Light, which lasted just half a season on ABC back in 1966. In a role that was perhaps inspired by Kurt Vonnegut's Mother Night, Goulet played David March, an American newspaper reporter who had renounced his citizenship and gone to work as a Nazi propagandist -- but secretly he was a double agent, reporting back to an American espionage group known only by its codename, Blue Light.

In an age when Hollywood preferred its spies slick and fanciful a la James Bond, Blue Light was grim and gritty, a dark exploration of the dynamics of betrayal. David March had to fear not only Nazi counterintelligence -- which knew of the Blue Light organization and was ruthlessly hunting down its agents -- but his own countrymen, who all believed him a traitor. The show wasn't about gadgets or girls, but the real mean streets of intelligence. Of course, the biggest lesson in betrayal to me was when ABC canceled Blue Light, the first of a million heartbreaks to come from swinish network programmers.

I believe a few Blue Light episodes have been edited into a movie with the wretched title I Deal In Danger, which is available on DVD. It deserved better. So long, Bob.

UPDATE: Here's an interview Goulet did with the GI newspaper Stars & Stripes while he was shooting Blue Light in Germany in 1966.

JLo gives TV another shot

Undaunted by the glorious mess of South Beach, her last foray into television drama, Jennifer Lopez is coming back to the tube Tuesday night with Como Ama Una Mujer (How A Woman Loves), a five part miniseries that kicks off on Univision at 10 p.m. Lopez, the creator and executive producer, based the series on the lyrics of her Spanish-language album of the same name released earlier this year. Starring Chilean actress Leonor Varela (Voces Inocentes, Blade II, The Tailor of Panama -- that's her in the photo at left) and Mexican actor Raul Mendez (Los Justos, Un Mundo Maravilloso, The Legend of Zorro), it's got a typical telenovela rags-to-riches-but-where's-the-love? plot, and Lopez performs one of the album's songs at the end of each episode. The show is in Spanish, of course, but English captions are available on caption channel 3.

The O'Reilly/Rosie throwdown

In an encounter guaranteed to kill 15 percent of your brain cells in the first 30 seconds, a camera crew from The O'Reilly Factor caught up with Rosie O'Donnell at a weekend book signing, for a discussion of Sept. 11 that airs tonight. You've been warned.

Jim Cramer's catchy new slogan: 'Destroy and mutilate'

CNBC wildman Jim Cramer will be a guest judge on an episode of Donald Trump's resuscitated The Apprentice early next year. It will be interesting to see how Cramer, whose show Mad Money is kind of a one-man bar brawl (he shrieks and throws things and smashes stuff while picking stocks), interacts with Trump. Maybe they'll use baseball bats and tire irons to batter pinatas -- Trump can bring one that looks like Rosie O'Donnell, and Cramer one that looks like Rupert Murdoch, whose new Fox Business Channel is high on Cramer's list of unspeakable evils. “We have a competitor now in Fox and it is really important to destroy and mutilate them,” he told the industry journal Broadcasting & Cable.

Morning people

Call it an editorial disagreement. The main topic of The Morning Show with Mike and Juliet, says Mike Jerrick, is ''people trapped under their furniture.'' His co-host Juliet Huddy sees it differently: ``Let's make no bones about it -- we talk about sex.''

Either one seems kind of a far cry from the two hard-edged shows Jerrick and Huddy hosted together on the Fox News Channel, Fox & Friends and Dayside. But the syndicated Morning Show doesn't pretend it's saving the world.

''It's 100 percent watercooler-ish,'' says Huddy. "We talk about Britney and Lindsay and we also talk about serious news subjects -- not too heavy, but not just the light stuff. Our audience is heavily female, housewives and mothers. But we don't want to insult them doing just cooking segments." Read the entire story in Monday's Miami Herald.

The ugly side of 'Nip/Tuck's Kelly Carlson

Oh, the glamour of Hollywood! Here's what Kelly Carlson had to do to get ready for the new season of Nip/Tuck:

"I lost a little bit of weight, got a little gaunt. They put some sores on my face. Circles under my eyes, dark, dark circles. Oooh, and we rotted my teeth -- they used these bleaching trays, like you would to whiten teeth, except the reverse. They stained my teeth to the color of muddy coffee."

It was, to put it mildly, a new look for Carlson, whose character Kimber has been variously a model, a porn star and a Scientologist missionary in the previous seasons of Nip/Tuck. But as season five gets underway at 10 p.m. Tuesday on the FX cable network, Kimber has become a twitchy, torqued-out meth-head. Read the full story from Sunday's Miami Herald.

Screens: TV the week of October 28

The Undertaking (10 p.m. Tuesday, WPBT-PBS 2) -- Trick or treat? We don't need no stinkin' trick or treat when we've got this episode of Frontline about what really goes on in embalming rooms.

Lost Book of Nostradamus (8 p.m. Sunday, History Channel) -- Scholars say a book recently discovered in a forgotten nook of the National Library in Rome may be the final work of the 16th century seer. Supposedly it contains drawings that foretell World Wars I and II, the assassination attempt on Pope John Paul II and the rise of Islamic fundamentalism. Though, as usual, it's silent on who will
win the World Series, the next kid to get the silver medallion in Kid Nation, or anything else truly useful.

Nip/Tuck (10 p.m. Tuesday, FX) -- Those priapic plastic surgeons are back for a fifth season, not that anyone cares or is going to watch since the show stole away like a thief in the night and moved itself from Miami to Los Angeles, and the entire cast and crew can die screaming like pigs in Hell for all we care. (Except for that cute Kelly Carlson, of course.) Not that we're bitter or anything, you traitorous commie bastards.

Donald Trump marathon (8 p.m. Saturday, Turner Classic Movies) -- No matter how much you love Rosie O'Donnell or hate The Apprentice, it's hard to hold a grudge against a guy who, allowed to program Turner Classic Movies for a night, chooses The African Queen, Gone With the Wind and Citizen Kane.

PBS airdates and times may different outside South Florida.

Abortion: Hard choices and bad choices

Put your bumper stickers away before watching Facing Reality: Choice. This sad, sobering documentary about abortion has no shouting politicians or preachers or activists of any kind, no references to the sacred texts of either the Bible or Roe v. Wade. In fact, maybe it's not even really about abortion at all, but rather, the question of why some women make such poor choices, and others have no choice at all. Read the entire review from Saturday's Miami Herald.

One version of the fall season's winners and losers

The Nielsen ratings for the new fall season shows are still shaking out (though in three cases -- Nashville, Online Nation and Viva Laughlin, the operative words is "out"). But E! Online gossip columnist Kristin polled her readers to see what they'd like to save and what they'd like to sink.

The good news for her readers is that four of their top five -- ABC's Pushing Daisies and Samantha Who?, The CW's Gossip Girl and NBC's Chuck -- have already gotten orders for additional episodes from their networks. The fifth, ABC's Big Shots, is looking a little shaky.

At the other end of the scale, it's a mirror-image story -- four of the least-favored shows (CBS' Viva Laughlin and Kid Nation, ABC's Cavemen and Fox's K-Ville) have either been canceled or are in serious trouble. The fifth, CBS' Cane, has gotten an order for additional episodes. Interesting that three of the five belong to CBS; television's top-rated network had the weakest fall development.

And now, our regular Friday feature for snake-and-model fetishists

It was a television producer's -- and maybe a Freudian psychologist's -- dream: Three half-nekkid models, their bodies draped in slithering snakes, with South Florida's version of the Temple of Mammon, the Seminole Hard Rock Casino near Hollywood, looming in the background as the cameras rolled.

Better yet, the snakes were getting frisky.

One wriggled down a model's back, slipped its head into the bow securing her bikini top and tugged: Call it anthropomorphism, but it sure looked like he was trying to untie it. Meanwhile, a second python coiled itself into a noose around another's neck.

A snake wrangler grabbed the prurient-minded python and placed it back on her shoulders. But since the FCC has no clear rules against the on-camera strangulation of reality-show contestants, the second model was on her own. ''Just let me know when you can't breathe,'' the wrangler helpfully advised her.

Soft-core kink and hard-core lunacy were the rules of the game on a makeshift platform alongside the Hard Rock's pool, where the E! television channel was shooting Last Model Standing, which will air Nov. 24. Read the full story from Friday's Miami Herald.

Fangs for tuning in

  ''Children of the night,'' murmured Bela Lugosi, raising those bushy Hungarian eyebrows, ''what music they make!'' Was he talking about the jingle of a cash register? More than three-quarters of a century after Dracula introduced the genre, vampire movies are as popular as ever -- America's top box-office attraction last week was Thirty Days of Night, about a pack of fanged Alaskans on an all-liquid diet. So the entertaining new Starz documentary Bloodsucking Cinema couldn't come at a better time. Read the full review from Friday's Miami Herald.

Classical music returns to the South Florida airwaves -- for now

The good news for South Florida fans of Beethoven, Bach and those guys: The new classical music station WKCP (89.7 FM) is on the air, a week ahead of schedule. The bad news: The abrupt start-up was prompted in hopes of thwarting a lawsuit by fans of the station's old Christian format when its call letters were WMCU. The suit seeks to not only block the format change but even the sale of the radio station that prompted it. My newsroom chum Larry Johnson has the story.

UPDATE: Here's another Larry Johnson story that describes WKCP's programming plans.

Scoop! The next character to die on 'Lost'!!!

Call your bookie right now and place a big bet that Jin-Soo Kwon, the Korean gangster with a heart of gold, will be the next one to die on Lost. My source on this couldn't be better -- it's the Honolulu police blotter, which says Daniel Dae Kim, who plays Jin-Soo, was busted on a DUI charge in the wee hours Thursday. Kim is the fourth cast member of Lost picked up by Hawaiian cops for driving violations, and the first three -- Michelle Rodriguez, Cynthia Watros and Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje -- all had their characters killed off within a season. Even poor Akinnuoye-Agbaje, who later beat the charge; those Lost gods producers are tough.

South Florida's broadcast police blotter

Kind of a rough day to be a Miami broadcaster Tuesday. WPLG-ABC 10 reporter Jeffrey Weinsier got busted for trespassing, carrying a gun on school property and resisting arrest after he stepped on the grass while covering a story at a high school. I'm sure that by tomorrow the cops will have managed to link him to the Kennedy assassination, too. Meanwhile, Joel Feinberg, who owns sports-talk radio station WAXY was arrested in California and charged with beating up his fiance. Glad I stayed off the streets.

What you're listening to on satellite radio

Arbitron, the radio ratings folks, are now measuring satellite radio audiences. Since satellite radio is supported entirely by subscription fees rather than advertising, the numbers are an internal research tool for XM and Sirius rather than than a selling point as they are in commercial radio or TV, so they don't get publicized. But a spy out there in radioland passed along to me a list of the top-rated 25 channels, ranked by the percentage of satellite radio listeners age 12 and older who tune in.

Not surprisingly, the ratings show that listeners being cast off (willingly or unwillingly) by broadcast radio are moving to satellite:

** The top two channels are both dominated by Howard Stern, driven to the unregulated frontier of satellite by the FCC. (Sirius channel 100 is all Stern, all the time; Sirius 101 features Stern, Bubba the Love Sponge and other shock-jock shows.) XM's shock-jock channel 202 is also among the top 10.

** Baby Boomer music, rapidly vanishing from the broadcast airwaves, thrives on satellite. Three of the top 25 channels (XM 5, XM 6 and Sirius 5) play rock'n'roll oldies of the 1950s and '60s. Another, XM 13, features country oldies.

** The Beautiful Music format of gentle Mantovani-style instrumentals, which pioneered FM radio but has long been extinct there, is alive and well on satellite --  XM  78 is among the top 20.

1 SIRIUS 100 HOWARD STERN 100 ----- 7.81%
2 SIRIUS 101 HOWARD STERN 101 ----- 2.48%
3 XM 25 THE BLEND ----- 2.19%
4 XM 26 FLIGHT 26 ----- 2.03%
5 XM 13 WILLIES PLACE ----- 2.01%
6 XM 46 TOP TRACKS ----- 1.85%
7 XM 20 TOP 20 ON 20 ----- 1.76%
8 XM 6 THE 60S ON 6 ----- 1.75%
9 XM 202 THE VIRUS ----- 1.68%
10 SIRIUS 60 NEW COUNTRY ----- 1.65%
11 XM/Sirius 121 FOX NEWS ----- 1.58%
12 XM 71 WATERCOLORS ----- 1.58%
13 XM 23 THE HEART ----- 1.54%
14 XM 16 HIGHWAY16 ----- 1.50%
15 XM 7 THE 70S ON 7 ----- 1.45%
16 XM 78 ESCAPE ----- 1.45%
17 SIRIUS 1 SIRIUS HITS1 ----- 1.43%
18 SIRIUS 20 OCTANE ----- 1.42%
19 XM 8 THE 80S ON 8 ----- 1.25%
20 XM 5 THE 50S ON 5 ----- 1.20%
21 XM/Sirius 140 ESPN RADIO ----- 1.16%
22 SIRIUS 9 THE PULSE ----- 1.16%
23 XM 49 BIG TRACKS ----- 1.10%
24 SIRIUS 8 BIG 80S ----- 0.99%
25 SIRIUS 5 SIRIUS GOLD ----- 0.98%

#$%**! Red Sox! #$+&# Rockies!

Tired of all that wretched, Swiss-like neutrality when it comes to Fox's coverage of baseball? Well, when the World Series starts Wednesday, you can declare war and listen to the partisan coverage of your choice -- if you've got XM Satellite Radio. XM is offering play-by-play from the home radio stations of both the Colorado Rockies (channel 183) and the Boston Red Sox (channel 176). And if you like neutrality but not television, XM also has the ESPN national radio broadcast (channel 189). Final option: the ESPN Deportes game coverage in Spanish (channel 174). By next year, surely we'll have play-by-play in Lithuanian, Tagalog and Urdu.

A scary moment on live TV

You think those contestants don't take Dancing With The Stars seriously? Here's a video of Marie Osmond fainting during Monday night's episode.

Muera Laughlin -- it's gone

CBS' eccentric musical drama Viva Laughlin debuted Thursday with 8.4 million viewers -- a small audience that looks even smaller when you realized that the show lost 40 percent of the audience it inherited from CSI. On Sunday Viva Laughlin moved to its regular time slot on Sunday and pulled even fewer viewers, 6.8 million. What must really have give CBS programmers the cold sweats was that 1.6 million switched channels midway through the show. I'd say Viva Laughlin looks like a good bet for the season's third cancellation, joining Fox's Nashville and The CW's Online Nation in unmarked graves on the studio backlots.

UPDATE: A couple of hours after I posted this, CBS pulled the plug -- Viva Laughlin has been canceled.

Your television may go on strike

The Writers Guild of America, the union for Hollywood screenwriters, has just voted overwhelmingly -- 90 percent in favor -- to authorize a strike anytime after November 1. This strike talk has been bubbling for a while, but most Hollywood people thought it wouldn't hit critical mass until sometime next year, when the contracts for directors and actors also come up for renewal and the three unions could join together in one (they hope) powerful bloc. Now, though, the LA Weekly's well-informed columnist Nikki Finke reports that there's increasing sentiment among the writers for a strike sooner rather than later, and network bosses are hissing "Bring it!'' because they think their fall season has already tanked. The issue at hand: What cut, if any, writers get from the new revenue stream flowing from the digital world: downloads of TV shows and movies to computers, cell phones and that little chip the Department of Homeland Security secretly implanted in your brain last year.

The last strike, in 1988, lasted 22 weeks, cost the industry half a billion dollars (real money even by Hollywood standards) and gave us such unforgettable shows as the remake of Mission Impossible, produced from old scripts. This time we could be looking at a much longer break, with both sides leaving a trail of scorched video in their wake: the flinty network bosses using cheapie, unscripted reality shows to fill the airwaves, while writers hurl themselves over the cliff like a pack of nerdy lemmings. I have seen the future, and it looks like Kid Nation.

As they used to say in Vietnam, sometimes you've got to destroy the village in order to save it.

Before the blog: bashing the mainstream media, 1930s-Berlin-style

Look at that poor fellow over there on the right, rendered senseless by the depradations of the mainstream media. Only catch: He's German, and the year is 1930. Yeah, the first anti-MSM blogger was a photomontage artist named John Heartfield, an ace propagandist with the German Communist Party. Read my review of an exhibition of his work at Miami Beach's Wolfsonian Museum. It includes a gallery of Heartfield's photomontagees and a section on an appallingly interesting display of propaganda targeted on children -- a display available for a virtual tour in case you're part of the Pepsi generation and find brick-and-mortar museums too tedious to contemplate.

Everybody loves Phil Rosenthal

When Everybody Loves Raymond, television's last breakout sitcom, was winding to the end of its nine-year run in 2005, the show's creator and producer Phil Rosenthal was often asked if it marked the end of TV comedy. Absolutely, Rosenthal would always answer. ''Beyond that,'' he'd add, "it's the end of laughing and the end of smiling.'' Read the full Herald story on Rosenthal, who's giving talks in Miami Sunday night and Davie Monday night.

Screens: TV the week of October 21

Bloodsucking Cinema (8 p.m. Friday, Starz)-- The great thing about a documentary on vampire films is that you can call it "sucky'' and editors, no matter how puritanical, can't really cut it out. This one's got
interviews with everybody from vampire auteurs John Landis and John Carpenter to Cheech Marin, who inhaled blood rather than his customary controlled substances in From Dusk Till Dawn. The documentary kicks off a 24-hour marathon of horror flicks including Scream, Blade and the 2004 remake of Dawn of the Dead.

Rock and Soul Night (8 p.m. Sunday, Gospel Music Channel) -- Five hours showcasing the churchy roots of rock and soul music, including concerts by such artists as Calvin Cooke, Mike Farris and the Blind
Boys of Alabama. To top it off there's an airing of the documentary Gotta Serve Somebody: The Gospel Songs of Bob Dylan.

Facing Reality: Choice (9 p.m. Saturday, Fox News) -- This documentary about abortion is a rarity: no politicians or activists of any kind, just three pregnant women facing a choice and its consequences. It turns out to be tougher than you might think from a bumper sticker.

Fox's amazing disappearing TV show trick

It hasn't happened for a couple of seasons, but TV critics used to hold a pool among themselves on which new fall-season Fox show would never see the light of day. Every year, it seemed, the net announced a show that fell through the cracks and never made it air. One season it was The Grubbs, a tawdry sitcom starring Randy Quaid; another season, a perplexing semi-improv comedy with Cheech Marin called The Ortega Family.

Well, Fox may be reverting to form. One of the shows originally announced for this fall, a supernatural drama about a 400-year-old man living under an ancient Indian curse of immortality called New Amsterdam, was already pushed back to midseason. Now Fox has announced it has reduced the number of episodes from 13 to seven. Any bets about how many of them are ever broadcast?

The odd thing about all this is that I've seen the New Amsterdam pilot and it wasn't half bad -- certainly a giant step up from most of the Fox shows that did air this fall, like Nashville, Kitchen Nightmares and K-ville. I hope some medical school is collecting cadavers of old network programmers so that someday we can study their brains and find out what really goes on up there.

Another one bites the dust

Online Nation, The CW's show of Internet video clips, has been canceled after three episodes and ratings so low that Nielsen computers went blind trying to measure them. The network will move reruns of its sitcom Aliens In America in the Sunday 7:30 p.m. time slot.

Quick as the hook was for Online Nation, it's not the first show of the 2007 season to go down. Fox yanked Nashville after two episodes, and while its cancellation has never been officially announced, don't threaten to hold your breath until its return unless you've got your will in order. Fox has also yet to formally cancel its murder-mystery serial Pasadena, which left the air in October 2001. Apparently if you admit defeat over there, Rupert Murdoch chops off one of your toes and feeds it to his dogs.

UPDATE: Fox has finally admitted it: Nashville is officially, totally and eternally dead. The show's seven viewers are reportedly distraught.

With a song in their hearts, and rocks in their heads...

Years ago, working on one of those dreadful assignments that editors make after they have too much anchovy pizza just before bedtime -- this one was for a Valentine's Day piece -- I called the political satirist P.J. O'Rourke to ask him for the details of his worst first date. No contest, P.J. said, it was the very first date of his life, back in his freshman year of high school. Not only was he too young to drive, which meant his mother had to tag along, but he took the girl of his dreams to West Side Story. ''We didn't know it was a musical,'' he recalled ruefully, "and we were somewhat taken aback to have this tough Puerto Rican street gang that, in crisis situations, started singing and dancing.''

That pretty much sums up my reaction to Viva Laughlin, the peculiar new CBS series that debuts Thursday before moving to its regular time slot on Sunday. I'm not even sure what to call it. CBS says it doesn't have enough singing and dancing to be considered a musical, but it certainly has too much to be a conventional drama. Maybe we could compromise and call it a hallucination. Read the rest of the review from Thursday's Miami Herald.

Liz Claman, NMIA

So Liz Claman wasn't kidnapped by space aliens after all, unless Roger Ailes has some tentacles we don't know about. Claman, who mysteriously vanished from her anchor desk on CNBC's top-rated Morning Call this summer, popped up on the Fox Business Network Thursday afternoon. She'll be coanchoring (with David Asman) the FBN afternoon slot on weekdays from 2 to 5 p.m.

Getting 'Lost' in in cable

If you missed the first episode of Lost way back in back in 2004 and have despaired of ever catching up, here's your chance. The Sci Fi Channel has acquired the cable rights to Lost and will start airing old episodes in the fall of 2008 -- in four-hour blocs, an interesting way to get around the complaint of some viewers that the story moves too slowly. G4, the game-oriented cable channel, will also air Lost reruns on weekends under the title Lost 2.0, which it bills as "interactive." Maybe that means you can beam yourself into an episode and ask Kate why she's hanging around with losers like Jack and Sawyer when she could be with you.

Original episodes of Lost, by the way, return to ABC early next year. Supposedly ABC and the producers are committed to run the show until 2010 and then wrap it up, though in Hollywood, a man's word is his toilet paper and it would not surprise me if someday we see episodes about Sawyer and Kate's grandchildren frantically trying to escape before President Chelsea Clinton unleashes nuclear tests on the island.

There's an HD set in your (near) future

Last week, I wrote that NBC's 756 hours of high-definition coverage of next year's Beijing Olympics might be be the tipping point for HD television, turning it into the standard for American consumers. But HD took another big step just this week, with Direct TV's announcement of dozens of new high-def channels that give it a total of 72 -- with a promise that the number will rise to 100 by the end of the year and as many as 150 by March. Among the newest additions are the Cartoon Network, the Fox Business Network, FX, National Geographic Channel, HD Theater, A&E HD and Smithsonian HD.

Now the pressure will be on cable company's to match Direct TV's offering. And just like that, the principal reason not to buy an HD set -- the lack of programming -- will disappear. NBC's Olympic coverage will be the icing on the cake.

The show Dr. Seuss didn't want you to see

ABC's Samantha Who? debuts Monday night, a pungently funny sitcom about self-discovery, reinvention and the possibility that beauty may be only skin-deep, but bitch goes right down to the bone. Read my full review in Monday's Miami Herald. Originally it was called Sam I Am, but you-know-who's lawyers kicked up a fuss.

Critics, who needs 'em?

Well, the movie studios. They need us so much for blurbs that they inflate some guy in Tucson, Arizona to an "ABC critic" when they stick his words in ads. When it comes to TV, I've usually found that the networks don't much care what you write about their shows as long as you write something. (Though I did once get a memorable email from Chris Fleming, the host of the Biography Channel's silly seance show Dead Famous, after I suggested that the ghost of Jim Morrison's dog could beat him at checkers.) But according to Variety's Brian Lowry, it's a little bit different if you're working in Los Angeles where you run into TV people at parties. By the way, Brian says he reviews shows while dressed only his underwear. Casual Fridays at the Herald haven't quite reached that stage yet.

The Fox Business Network opens for -- well, business

New television channels usually launch with a blizzard of sneak peeks at their programming, but barely 24 hours before the Fox Business Network goes on the air, we don't know much more about it than the name. And even that, says Fox boss Roger Ailes, is too much.

''CNBC's got 90 million homes compared to our 30 million,'' he says of the entrenched rival whose turf he's invading. ``They've got a 17-year head start, they've got GE and Microsoft, they've got Dow Jones, the Wall Street Journal and a two-year warning that we're coming. They know the time and date we're going to hit the beach. We've got to hold a little something back.''

If war metaphors sprinkle Ailes' speech -- he also compares the network's launch to Pickett's Charge at Gettysburg, not exactly a felicitous metaphor -- it's because the decision to go after CNBC head-on is television's most audacious confrontation since Fox News took on CNN a decade ago. The Fox Business Network goes on the air at 5 a.m. Monday. Read the rest of the story from Sunday's Miami Herald.

Screens: TV the week of October 14

Fox Business Network (5 a.m. Monday) -- A new cable channel with 24-hour business news coverage launches this week.

Samantha Who? (9:30 p.m. Monday, ABC) -- Christina Applegate returns to television as Samantha Newly, an accident victim awaking from a coma who discovers that in pre-amnesiac life she was cheating on her boyfriend, a member of AA, and generally a total rhymes-with-witch. It may not sound like it, but this is a comedy -- a tartly funny one, about the getting the chance to hit the "replay'' button on your life.

Frontline: Cheney's Law (10 p.m. Tuesday, WPBT-PBS 2) -- Michael Kirk, who's been following the Bush administration's war policies and their collision with domestic civil liberties for Frontline since 9/11 (this is his 10th documentary), takes a look at Vice President Dick Cheney's attempt to get control of the Justice Department office that sets legal guidelines for the White House's power to detain, interrogate, torture, wiretap and spy in the war on terror.

Viva Laughlin (10 p.m. Thursday, CBS) -- In this bizarre murder mystery ripped off from the BBC -- will  they never forget about that damn tea? -- Nevada casino owners and their henchmen murder, rape, loot and generally run amok while occasionally breaking into song. Yes, it really is as weird as it sounds.

Miami: Reflections on the River (10 p.m. Thursday, WPBT-PBS 2) -- Seven short videos by University of Miami film students are bound together in a half-hour documentary on the history, life and culture of the river. Nobody breaks into song.

The Next Great American Band (8 p.m. Friday, Fox) -- No Simon, no Paula, no Randy, but probably multiple Sanjayas -- it's an American Idol for bands, with a whole new loopy and/or vicious cast of judges, led by an Australian brute named Ian "Dicko'' Dickson. If nothing else, it's a valuable reminder that the Brits (them again!) emptied the populations of their prisons into Australia.

Freaks (9:15 p.m. Friday, Turner Classic Movies) -- Not often seen on television, this 1932 Tod Browning film tells the story of circus sideshow freaks who band together against a beautiful but cruel trapeze artist. No special effects or prosthetics here; Browning searched the back tents of carnivals across America to find his cast. Banned in Britain and severely censored in America during its original release, Freaks is airing as part of a four-movie Browning minimarathon that includes Mark of the Vampire (1935), The Devil Doll (1936), London After Midnight (1927), The Unknown (1927) and Simon Cowell's Home Movies. (Made that one up.) (But I gave you the willies, didn't I?)

Versus, the new king of college football

Can those guys at the Versus channel pick games or what? Last week they showed one of the greatest upsets in the history of college football when No. 1 USC lost to Stanford 24-23, and this weekend they had another colossal upset when No. 2 Cal -- which maybe even technically was No. 1 for a couple of hours after LSU lost earlier in the evening -- imploded against unheralded Oregon State, 31-28. Both games were decided in the final few seconds.

It's no big deal for ESPN/ABC or CBS/CSTV to get games like this; they air dozens a week. Versus only shows five or six a year. Clearly the channel's programmers have the luck of the -- well, you can't say Irish, not the way Notre Dame is playing this season. But something.

Honest, the last Elvira item this week

Oh, how I've longed for a contestant on American Idol to confess to the cameras: ''They thought I peed on the floor when I screamed, but I didn't. Well, I might have, I don't know.'' Never gonna happen, but no matter -- now we've got The Search For the Next Elvira. Read the rest of the review from Saturday's Miami Herald.

Wonder women

During the Emmys, Sally Field said that if women ruled the world, there would be no war. I don't know about that, but judging from Women's Murder Club, we could expect that toothless old Patriot Act to get some real bite.

When Lt. Lindsay Boxer, for instance, is asked the grounds on which she's requesting a search warrant, she answers forthrightly: ''I don't like the cheating bastard.'' To which prosecutor Jill Bernhardt replies: ``I love you like an annoyingly pushy, emotionally stunted sister, but I need probable cause.''

That exchange tells you pretty much everything you need to know about Women's Murder Club: that it's funny and smart, with affably quirky characters who aren't cut from cardboard. As long as you don't mind the occasional severed limb or corpse crashing through a car roof, it's an utterly engaging hour of television.

Read the rest of my review here.

From Big Apple to Big Orange

New York was nice, Shireen Sandoval thought, but she sure missed that mean little show of hers back in South Florida. "Deco Drive -- it's full of sardonic humor, making fun of themselves, a little bit sick," she says. "I like that."

So, 13 months after deserting us for the Big Apple -- and, perhaps not coincidentally, just before the winter weather returns -- Sandoval is returning to her old job as a reporter and fill-in anchor on WSVN-Fox 7's gossipy entertainment show. Her first night back on Deco Drive, which airs weeknights at 7:30, will be Nov. 1.

"I really like New York," says Sandoval, who spent the year freelancing for Extra, ESPN and WNBC's movie gabfest Reel Talk. "It's completely different than anything I've ever been around, growing up in the West. I like the hustle and bustle. I like the ‘You talking to me?'

"You've got to learn to learn to be more aggressive, in a good way, in New York. But I miss Miami more than I like New York. Miami felt like home. And I will so not miss December in New York."

So she's coming back, looking for a cheap place in Aventura -- man, has she been away from South Florida. (‘‘That's what everybody tells me. I'll probably end up sleeping on a cot at the station.") But she'll bring back at least one souvenir of New York: Husband Ken Slotnick, a talent agent who will commute between offices of the William Morris agency. Hmmm. Shireen Sandoval Slotnick? "Yeah, don't try to say it when you're drunk," she warns.

Let a thousand HD sets bloom

When you buy your first high-def television set, be sure to say thank you to the Chinese taxpayers who made it possible. China is spending an insane $40 billion on the summer Olympics in Beijing next summer, much of it to build new stadiums wired top-to-bottom with fiber-optic cable. The main beneficiary of that will be American TV viewers, who will get 756 hours of high-definition coverage of the Olympics -- nearly double the amount from the last summer Olympics in Greece. NBC Sports executive producer David Neal, speaking at an industry conference in New York Wednesday, predicted all that high-def coverage will be the tipping point for HD sets in America: "It will be a signature moment for the adoption of high-definition as a mainstream delivery medium for consumers," he said,  predicting that more than half of all U.S. households will have high-def sets by the end of 2008.

   

And you thought 'Kid Nation' was the last word in reality TV

The hottest TV show in Colombia, Nothing But The Truth, has just been canceled -- not for low ratings, but because one of the contestants won $25,000 by admitting she hired a hitman to kill her husband. That narrowly beat out other contestants who, while wired to a lie detector, confessed to drug smuggling, gay prostitution and various other acts of good clean family fun.

Good news, though -- Colombia's loss is our gain. The Associated Press reports that Fox still has plans to air an American version of the show called Moment Of The Truth. I guess they needed something to fill in for that O.J. Simpson How I Did It special they reluctantly canceled.

Not so fast, dino-breath

For days, ABC has been running ads taunting TV critics for the high ratings for last week's debut episode of Cavemen. Guess what? The audience for Tuesday's second episode was down 31 percent. It dropped to fourth place in its time slot, below even its ABC follow-up, Carpoolers. Seems several million people tuned in last week to see if the show was as awful as the critics said and decided: It is.

A bigger person would stop this item right now....but not me, I dare to be small. Hey ABC: Nyah-nyah-nyah, we told you so!

The TiVo Top 10

Among the zillion-and-one television statistics generated by the Nielsen folks is a list of the top that people watched not live but on TiVo or some other digital recording device (within the first seven days after broadcast). It differs significantly from the regular Nielsen ratings top 10, and it's hard to know exactly why. Is there some particular reason that cartoons like The Simpsons and Family Guy should do so well in TiVo households? And Kid Nation -- are kids secretly setting the recorder to watch the show when their parents aren't looking? I'm not sure, and I don't know if anyone else is, either. Anyway, here's the list for the week of Sept. 17:

1. Survivor: China (CBS, season premiere): 2.12 million

2. Family Guy (Fox, season premiere): 1.84 million

3. Prison Break (Fox, season premiere): 1.55 million

4. Back To You (Fox, premiere): 1.46 million

5. Come Rain/Come Shine (ABC): 1.26 million

6. Big Brother - Tuesday episode (CBS, season finale): 1.25 million

7. The Simpsons (Fox, season premiere): 1.09 million

8. Kid Nation (CBS, premiere): 1.01 million

9. K-Ville (Fox, premiere): 993,000

10. Shark (CBS, season premiere); 982,000

   

The 411 on 'Gossip Girl' is good

Its ratings have been mediocre, or even a little less than that. Nonetheless, The CW has just picked up teen drama Gossip Girl for a full season, meaning it will be with us at least until May.

Today's smile**

On CBS' The Early Show Tuesday morning, Harry Smith asked former president Jimmy Carter: "Is there a best way to find peace with Iran? Is it diplomatic, or is it military?" Replied Carter, with a straight face: "It's definitely diplomatic. Even after the shah was deposed, I quickly restored diplomatic relations with Iran." And how did that work for you, President Carter?

**That is, unless you're one of the 52 hostages seized at the U.S. embassy in Iran in 1979 and held for 14 months, or a family member of one of the eight servicemen killed in an abortive rescue attempt midway through the crisis.

Coming soon to The CW's Sunday-night lineup: America's funniest test patterns

Networks cancel shows all the time, but The CW may be the first forced to cancel an entire night. Sunday's debut of the dippy family drama Life is Wild drew just 1.64 million viewers, which is perfectly awful compared to anything else on network television....except The CW's other Sunday night shows. CW Now, its even lighter-weight version of Entertainment Tonight. had a mere 852,000 viewers; Online Nation, its pointless review of Internet videos, an almost immeasurably low 762,000.

Saturday's biggest college football victory: the Versus channel over good sense

The promotion people at the Versus cable channel must have spent last week cursing whatever idiots saddled them with the telecast of Saturday's football game between Southern Cal and Stanford. USC was the undefeated No. 1 team in the country in the coaches' poll, and Stanford was getting blown out by 33 points a game against major-confrence opponents. (And that was before the Stanford quarterback was bench with convulsions from the hideous beats he was taking from enemy linemen.) USC was favored by 41 points, and most sportswriters didn't think that was nearly enough. Versus, struggling to put lipstick on this dog of a game, sent out a press release last week quoting its football analyst Kelly Stouffer that "USC is marching to another title shot and Stanford is looking for hope in the little victories." That's about one step above saying you should watch because the commercials will be colorful.

So what happens? Stanford pulls off one of the most monumental upsets in the history of college football, winning 24-23 on a touchdown pass in the final seconds. Versus gets its logo all over every sports channel in America on the game highlights showing endlessly Sunday. Its game-selection committe will not be dragged and shot after all. And what seemed like an even more idiotic programming decision than picking the game in the first place -- rerunning it on Monday at 4 p.m. Eastern time -- now looks like unadulterated genius. I'm trying to figure out whether Versus has some of the finest minds in the television business, or if Satan is renting a double-wide for all the souls he's collecting around the network offices Monday morning.

By the way, if you're from South Florida, that happy fellow up at the top of this item might look familiar. He's Tim Simms, class of 2003 at Belle Glade's Glades Central. Sims is one of two Belle Glades guys -- the other is Nick Sanchez, a 2003 graduate Glades Day School -- who play cornerback for Stanford. They both made several key plays against USC. And I wouldn't be surprised if Versus publicists set some new record for creative spinmastering later this week with a press release about how on Monday afternoon, their channel was the top-rated network in the entire Greater Belle Glade Metropolitan Area.

Attack of the Elvira clones

It's hard to say what they bode for the world, or even which is more startling, but here are two astounding facts: Elvira, the vampy, campy horror hostess with the enormous, um, following, envisions an America ruled by an army of her clones, one in every shopping mall and car wash. And when she held tryouts, 2,000 women (and men!) applied for the job. "It was insane!'' she recounts of the tryout -- (or "open casket call," as she put it) last summer. "We started at 11 a.m. and we ended at about 2 in the morning the next day, interviewing just a few of them." Read my full story on Elvira from Sunday's Miami Herald.

Africa screams

In Hollywood, they say never to work with animals or children. (I think that's also a saying in the porn industry, but we'll take that up some other time.) And Life is Wild makes a great case for never watching animals or children, either. Read the full review of Life is Wild from Sunday's Miami Herald.

More on Charlie Baxter and M.T. Graves

Here's a link to Sunday's Miami Herald obituary on the spokesghoul to a generation of South Florida kids.

Screens: TV the week of October 7

Women's Murder Club (9 p.m. Friday, ABC) -- Charlie's Angels minus Charlie and the jiggle factor. Four women -- a cop, a prosecutor, a medical examiner and a reporter -- team up to fight San Francisco's profligate population of homicidal maniacs and their significant others, not always in that order. Angie Harmon (Law & Order), Paula Newsome (Heroes), Aubrey Dollar (Guiding Light) and Canadian actress Laura Harris (24) star in this surprisingly agreeable -- provided, that is, you don't mind the occasional slashed throat or severed limb -- series based on James Patterson's novels.

William Castle marathon (8 p.m. Friday, Turner Classic Movies) -- William Castle produced and directed a bunch of cheapjack but surprisingly scary horror B-movies in the 1950s and 1960s, and with Halloween approaching, TCM is airing four of them in a single burst: Homicidal (1961), Strait-Jacket (1964), 13 Ghosts (1960) and The Tingler (1959). Unfortunately, watching them on TV, you don't get to experience the schlocky promotional gimmicks he used in theaters: The cardboard axes that came with your ticket to Homicidal, the special colored-cellophane glasses necessary to see the spooks in 13 Ghosts, or the joy buzzers wired to the seats in Tingler that zapped your butt whenever the monster was about to strike. Best of all was the voiceover near the end of Homicidal announcing that patrons too scared to stay had 45 seconds to go to the lobby to get a full refund. The catch: They had to stand in the Coward's Corner, a yellow cardboard booth, as the rest of the audience filed past while a taped voice screamed "Watch the chicken!'' Ahhh, the Golden Age of Cinema.

America's Psychic Challenge (10 p.m. Friday, Lifetime) -- Sixteen purported psychics compete for a prize in this (pardon the expression) reality series, though if any of them were genuine, they surely would have advised Lifetime not to send me a press release about this show because they'd have foreseen me calling it unmitigated idiocy and an affront to human intelligence.

The Search For The Next Elvira (midnight Saturday, Fox Reality Channel) -- Don't worry, guys. America's favorite DD horror-movie hostess isn't going anywhere -- she's just got so many gigs she needs an apprentice Elvira to help fulfill them all. In this three-week reality show (it ends on Halloween, naturally), 13 contestants vie for the honor. Elvira says they'll have to fulfill challenges, just like on Survivor. Blood-sucking? Coffin-building? Divining the future in the intestines of a baby goat? Tune in and see.

Dan Rather meets the Dalai Lama, and...

Nope, it's not the start of a joke. The next edition of HDNet's Dan Rather Reports features a rare in-depth interview of the exiled Tibetan leader. The show airs October 9 at 8 p.m., but to tide you over until then, here's a little preview clip.

The renewal of 'Tell Me You Love Me' and other mysteries

From the Department of Perplexing Programming Decisions comes a bulletin that HBO has renewed its short-on-thought-but-long-on-sex series Tell Me You Love Me. Though less than a million viewers tuned in for the debut, HBO claims that when you add in all the 3 a.m. airings across its various channels (HBO 2, HBO Signature, HBO Mars, etc.), the show is drawing 3.1 million sets of eyeballs per episode. Maybe. More like, I think, is that HBO's tank is empty. Its new series over the past couple of years have ranged from the weird (John From Cincinnati) to the stupid (Lucky Louie) to the downright inexplicable (Flight Of The Conchords). Even the shows with broader appeal (Rome in 2005, Big Love in 2006) are solid performers rather than the watercooler-buzz material of The Sopranos or Sex And The City. The slogan "It's not TV, it's HBO" is taking on a whole new meaning.

Meanwhile, Showtime is rolling out exquisitely crafted shows like Dexter, The Brotherhood, Weeds and Californication. At some point, the viewers are going to start finding them.

M.T. Graves, RIP

In one of life's little ironies, I was working on a story about Elvira, the Los Angeles horror-movie hostess who turned into a national phenomenon, when I got word that Miami's own creature-features guy Charlie Baxter had died in Tennessee. Back in the 1960s, Baxter played the lovable ghoul M.T. Graves, host of the Dungeon horror-flick matinee on WCKT (now WSVN-Fox 7). HIs sidekick was a vampire named Count Down, played by WCKT's Charlie Folds. Fold and Baxter reversed roles on WCKT's Miami Herald Sunday Funnies kiddie show, with Fields hosting as Toby the Robot while Baxter was the sidekick. Those days when local TV stations had movies and kiddie shows seem part of another world now -- one that, every time we lose a Charlie Baxter, seems more distant.

UPDATE: Here's a cool website dedicated to Charlie Baxter and M.T. Graves.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Here's the Miami Herald's full obituary on Charlie Baxter and M.T. Graves.