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If you get a warm, fuzzy feeling whenever Lou Dobbs starts barking about illegal immigration, you're going to love ABC's new reality series. The network has just ordered 11 episodes of something called Border Security that will follow law enforcement agencies as they try to round up drug smugglers and illegal immigrants along the border. It's produced by Arnold Shapiro, the same guy who does Big Brother. And that's a punchline too cheap even for me.
When you get out the grill this weekend, how about adding a few Survivor and Mole contestants to the charcoal? When Hormel Foods surveyed its customers, asking what irritating pop culture trends they'd like to barbecue to a crisp this summer, a gratifying 48 percent replied "reality shows," while 44 percent mentioned "baby-bump sightings on non-pregnant celebrities." (Better look out, Ashlee Simpson.) The other favorite culprits were mostly predictable -- black nail polish, animals that fit into designer purses, pop-star clothing lines -- but I confess myself perplexed that 32 percent of Americans hate leggings enough to want to douse them in lighter fluid and toss a match. Leggings? Ahead of, like, Paula Abdul?
Tuesday night's announcement that the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (AFTRA) has reached a tentative contract deal with the studios is less significant than it might sound -- and it by no means guarantees that Hollywood actors won't go on strike this summer. The stronger, and much more militant, Screen Actors Guild hasn't agreed to anything yet. And SAG has made it clear from the beginning of contract negotiations that it will go its own way. In fact, SAG often seems to regard AFTRA as the enemy rather than a fraternal union. Just Tuesday SAG sent a letter to its members
attacking AFTRA for holding "confidential sessions'' to bargain with the studios.
The smaller AFTRA represents soap-opera actors, TV weathermen, musicians, reality show hosts, announcers and other performers on the periphery of television production, about 70,000 in all. SAG's 120,000 members include everybody else, including most film and TV actors. (About 44,000 people belong to both unions, which means the number of Hollywood workers exclusively represented by AFTRA is only about 26,000.) They've been squabbling for some time now over jurisdictional issues -- particularly AFTRA's claim that SAG is trying to poach some of its soap-opera actors.
Meanwhile, SAG is also fighting battles internally. Because a SAG membership card is required for even a bit part in most Hollywood productions, thousands of SAG members are really limo drivers, bartenders, or waiters rather than career actors. One faction within SAG wants to exclude these so-called "middle class actors'' from any strike vote. Another faction says protecting the weakest members is exactly what unions are all about. The feud has turned rather bitter during the past couple of months, with petitions and counter-petitions circulating all over Hollywood.
With all that going on, it's easy to lose sight of the actual issues on the table at the negotiations with studios. The big one, just as it was in the writers' strike that shut down TV production for three months at the beginning of the year, is dividing the pot of revenue from DVDs, on-line screenings and other new digital media. Both the writers and directors have already negotiated settlements with the producers on these issues, which you'd think would provide a good model for SAG -- but Hollywood labor negotiations often have more to do with machismo than good sense.
So there's still a good chance of a strike when SAG's contract with the studios expires at the end of June. The fear is great enough that almost no new movies have started shooting during the past several weeks because studios don't want production suspended by a strike. Some TV producers have gone the opposite route, rushing into production ahead of the usual schedule in order to get some shows completed for the fall season. Bottom line: We may have a second consecutive TV season wrecked by a strike. SAG, which suspended negotiations with the studios on May 6, is scheduled to resume them Wednesday. Stay tuned.
How bad was the 2007-2008 season for The CW? Bad enough that it finished behind Spanish-language network Univision. Well, let's make that "got clobbered by Univision." The Spanish net averaged an audience of 3.5 million viewers, a whopping 44 percent more than The CW's 2.5 million. In the 18-to-34 age bracket that The CW supposedly targets, it was even worse: Univision's audience was 64 percent bigger.
In fact, maybe this item is really about Univision's growing strength rather than The CW's weakness. The English-language nets talk about attracting younger viewers, but Univision actually does it: The combined 18-to-34 audience of ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox and The CW) was down by 14 percent this season, while Univision's was up 2 percent. When the industry talks about the Big Five nets these days, Univision ought to be one of the five.
When I talked to Barbara Walters for a story for last Sunday's Herald, she was pretty blunt about why she left 20/20 after a quarter of a century: the eternal, infernal pressure for "the get," the big interview -- particularly the Parises and Britneys and Lindsays of the world. "The fact that it’s mostly celebrities out of rehab that’s interesting to people," Walters told me, ticking off the reasons TV news magazines are headed in a direction she didn't want to go. "The fact that it’s 18 to 49 where our ratings come from, all of that plays a part. And now the Internet, blogs, cable, YouTube, it’s a whole other industry."
If there was a moment that summed it all up, she said, it was the final interview she did for 20/20 in September 2004. Walters trying to get President Bush, then locked in a bare-knuckle race for reelection against John Kerry. ABC told her instead to talk to former schoolteacher Mary Kay Letourneau, just out of prison for having sex with one of her students.
"People are not interested in heads of state," Walters said. "It’s not a big coup to get an interview with a president or a politician. We are much more celebrity-oriented. In part it’s because of the 18 to 49 [demographic], attracting younger viewers." Even on the specials that she continues to do four times a year, she has trouble getting ABC's attention for political stories. "The last time I interviewed a head of state was what, a year ago, Hugo Chavez, who people are interested in because he’s like another Fidel
Castro," Walters noted. "And he had done no interviews. But there’s just not the interest in it, in general."
Still, she doesn't necessarily share the conventional wisdom that network news is a dinosaur lumbering toward the tar pits.
"People have been announcing the death of network news now for at least the past five years," she said. "But there still seems to be an audience. There still seems to be an audience for network [news] programming. Somehow or other, they’re still going."
And if she were starting out her career all over again, Walters says, she'd probably still go into TV news.
"The good thing is that there’s so much more opportunity for women now," she said. "In front of the cameras, behind the cameras, even as executive producers. So I’m sure I would be [interested in TV]. But the difference is that if I was on top of the game, I was also ahead of the game. I had no mentors. There was certainly a glass ceiling. There were very few opportunities for women. You had a terrible struggle.
"Today there is much less of a struggle. But there is also much more competition. It’s a wonderful field. And you have to work very hard. You did when I was doing it, and you do today. A lot of travel, a lot of long hours, but it’s a wonderful field. And there are so many women when you turn [TV news] on. You almost can’t listen to a program that doesn’t have a woman on it. That’s great. When I see all the young women who made it and they say you paved the way, that’s my reward. I’m terribly proud if I made even a little difference. Not just in television but maybe for women in general. What a reward."
Carol Lin, the first anchor to go on the air with the news that an airliner had crashed into the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001, has been missing in action for about 18 months now since parting ways with CNN. She resurfaces Tuesday on NPR's noon-hour Day To Day show with a personal report: an account of reconciliation in her sometimes-troubled relationship with her mother, who is battling cancer. It is, unfortunately, a subject on which Lin has some expertise. Her husband, CNN producer Will Robinson, died of the disease in 2003, just six weeks after their daughter Chloe was born.
When you hear the words celebrity and serving in the same sentence, it's usually followed by -- best-case scenario -- "sushi'' or, more likely, "time in jail." But believe it or not, a lot of show-biz folks have spent time in the military. A few to keep in mind on Memorial Day weekend:
** Bea Arthur played TV's first prime-time character to get an abortion back in 1972 on Maude. Thirty years before that, she broke another cultural barrier when she was one of the first women to volunteer for the Marines, where she served as a nurse during World War II...
The Andromeda Strain is full of surprises. Every time you think it's merely bad, boring television, it offers up a moment of such exquisite stupidity that the existential bounds of the universe seem to shimmer and remake themselves before your very eyes. My personal favorite bit was when a biologist, told by a fellow scientist that a disease from outer space is about to obliterate humanity, nods and asks how his kids are taking the divorce.
But The Andromeda Strain has idiotic moments for every taste, or lack of it. Maybe you prefer the researcher who, at a loss to explain how a newborn has survived the disease, shrugs helplessly: "It's not like the baby was knocking back handfuls of acetosalicylic acid." (I dunno, doc; no telling what these crazy kids pick up on YouTube these days.) Or the unfortunate hippie who contracts the space germs when a mouse bites him on the bare butt as he squats behind some scrub brush in the desert. (Thus is the counterculture refuted!) Read my full review in the Miami Herald.
She left The Today Show where everybody loved her for an anchor chair on an evening newscast. After months of hype over her gender and her paycheck, half the country tuned in to watch the first night. But the viewers never came back. The show stayed in a distant third place, right where it was before the network spent all that money on her, and soon the critics began sniping about her delivery, her interviews and -- as if it were some kind of sin against journalism -- her salary. Soon it wasn't a question of whether the plug would be pulled on her show, but when.
Nope, this isn't a story about Katie Couric and her troubles at CBS. It's about Barbara Walters, whose short and unhappy career anchoring ABC's evening newscast three decades ago was eerily, painfully similar. If there's one person in the world who truly understands what Couric is going through, it's Walters. Read my full Miami Herald story.
Recount (9 p.m. Sunday, HBO) -- Just in case you were starting to forget how much fun the 2000 election was -- Hanging chads! Butterfly ballots! Everybody hates Florida! -- HBO has thoughtfully repackaged every painful moment as a movie, with Kevin Spacey, Ed Begley Jr., Laura Dern and just about every other star in Hollywood except Flipper and Gentle Ben, who, on account of being South Floridians, are still under a cloud of suspicion about the whole thing.
Shark Swarm (8 p.m. Sunday, Hallmark Channel) -- Sharks high on toxic waste eat practically everybody in a coastal town. The bad news: Darryl Hannah, Armand Assante and John Schneider survive. The good news: It's not in Florida.
The Andromeda Strain (9 p.m. Monday, A&E) -- In this two-part miniseries (it concludes Tuesday) remake of a 1971 film, outer-space germs attack the Earth, reducing humanity to a few ragged bands of freedom fighters armed with king-size bottles of Lysol. OK, I'm kidding; it's stupid, but not that stupid. Benjamin Bratt, Eric McCormack, Ricky Schroder, Daniel Dae Kim and Christa Miller star. As humans, I mean. The germs are all British guys from Masterpiece Theatre that you never heard of. By the way, miraculously, this one doesn't take place in Florida, either.
East of Havana (10 p.m. Friday, Sundance Channel) -- A documentary about Cuba's tenacious, outlaw hip-hop community, produced by Charlize Theron. Something tells me we're not in The Buena Vista Social Club anymore, Toto.
After one of the most disastrous TV seasons in history, with viewership plummeting and a strike nearly obliterating four months of advertising revenue, the networks are desperately looking for any way they can to pull eyeballs in to the shows they'll debut this fall. That means heavy promotion has already begun, five months before the first new series actually starts. CBS, for instance, has already posted video clips for six new shows, including one that won't debut until January. My guess is that this will backfire, that viewers will grow heartily sick of these shows before they launch, but the networks work on the opposition assumption, that people are sheep who'll do anything they're told by somebody with a marketing degree. Let's see who's right. Here's a clip from a new CBS sitcom called The Gary Project, starring Jay Mohr and Paula Marshall as battling ex-spouses. Watch it; it's kind of amusing. Then watch it again tomorrow, the next day, seven times next week and 43 times in July. After that, let me know what you think.
The May Nielsen sweeps ended this week, and it's party time at WPLG-ABC 10. Not only did the station have South Florida's top-rated 6 p.m. and 11 p.m. newscasts (sending Dwight Lauderdale, who retired Wednesday night after 23 years in the anchor chair, out on top), but seven of the top 10 prime shows air on WPLG. The station's spell over viewers was so total that even mean old Judge Judy on WPLG whupped that sweet Oprah Winfrey on WFOR-CBS 4 in their head-to-head battle at 4 p.m.
I am constantly amazed by the things I learn from daytime TV. For instance, did you know that North Korea or Iran or somebody on that Axis of Evil thing is beaming unwholesome thoughts about Charlie Sheen right into our brains? I discovered this while watching Fox's The Morning Show With Mike And Juliet Thursday. Denise Richards volunteered of her ex-husband that "I don’t really want to think of his penis anymore. I want to move on.” Man, me too.
"For the final time, goodnight," Dwight Lauderdale told viewers at the end of WPLG-ABC 10's newscast Wednesday night -- and with those five little words, ended 35 years in South Florida television. A long goodbye that began in February, when the 56-year-old Lauderdale announced he would retire at the end of the May Nielsen ratings sweeps, was finally over.
The farewell messages that have dotted WPLG's newscasts for the past month reached a crescendo Wednesday, with the final 21 minutes of the 11 p.m. program being devoted to collages of some of his memorable stories as well as so-long-pal messages -- both from colleagues and newsmakers like Gloria Estefan ("You are the only other man in my life for 32 years").
Lauderdale, who came to South Florida in 1973 to report for the station that's now WSVN-Fox 7, moved to WPLG in 1976 and started anchoring the main newscasts in 1985, said he never expect his retirement would trigger such an outpouring. "Frankly, I didn't realize you cared that much," he said as he addressed the cameras for the last time. He closed not with a lofty soliloquy on the future of journalism but thanks to those who helped him over the years, especially his wife Minnie. "Thank you for sacrificing a lot of the time we could have spent together," Lauderdale said. "Thanks for always putting the demands of my career ahead of yours."
Turning to his partners on the set, Lauderdale promised: "Tomorrow night at this time I'm going to be home watching you." Retorted his laughing co-anchor Laurie Jennings: "Oh, sure you will. You'll be out having a nice dinner." Maybe a very liquid one -- as the closing credit rolled, Lauderdale was eying a four-foot-tall gift basket from his colleagues, stacked to the top with bottles of wine and martini fixings.
Old deejays never die, they just go to XM Satellite Radio. To the old tapes of Wolfman Jack and Casey 
Kasem airing on XM, you can now add those of Rick Dees. Archival editions of The Rick Dees Weekly Top 40 start airing on XM's '80s and '90s oldies channels on June 7. The current show is joining the lineup, too, on XM's top-30 Hit List channel. (Which not very coincidentally is located on channel 30, just as the '80s can be found on channel 8 and the '90s on channel 9.)
Unlike Wolfman Jack and Kasem (especially unlike the Wolfman, who is at least purportedly dead), Dees is still behind a microphone every morning at KMVN, a Los Angeles '70s and '80s station known locally as Movin 93.9. And now that Kasem's American Top Forty is gone, The Rick Dees Weekly Top 40 -- which launched in 1983 -- is the oldest chart countdown show around. Who could have imagined there was so much life after Disco Duck?
It's not exactly shocking news, but satellite-TV customers are happier with their service than cable customers. The annual American Customer Satisfaction Index, produced by pollsters from the University of Michigan, DirecTV scored 68 points out of a possible 100 from customers, while Dish was close behind at 65 -- the two-top-rated companies in the survey. Cable as a whole scored 64, but that rating benefits from the performance of smaller companies like Cablevision. Most of the larger cable companies got lower scores: Time Warner 59, Comcast and Charter 54. So much for the "consumer protection" that comes from government regulation of cable. Consumers get the best service when companies compete, not when they sit back in comfortable government-created monopolies.
CBS has just announced a new long-term deal with Bob Schieffer. No details were revealed, but CBS News boss Sean McManus did say: "I’m extremely pleased that Bob will continue to play a key role at CBS News for years to come." Yes, indeedy. Good to have a guy like Bob around in case of an emergency, like, say, a sudden vacancy in the CBS Evening News anchor chair.
The feuding between MSNBC's Keith Olbermann and Fox News' Bill O'Reilly has escalated into a clash between GE/NBC and News Corp./Fox News, according to this piece from the Washington Post. The Post reports that executives of the two companies are calling one another to complain about the viciousness of the commentary on one another's networks. O'Reilly, on the air, has accused GE boss Jeffrey Immelt of bearing responsibility for the terrorist deaths of U.S. troops because of the company's business deals with Iran; Olbermann has accused Fox New boss Roger Ailes of a secret role in Rudy Giuliani's presidential campaign.
NBC's squawking that everything was just good clean fun until O'Reilly started calling Immelt an accomplice of terrorists. But I don't think anybody at Fox News was too amused at Olbermann's frequent comparisons of the place to Nazi Germany, or his habit of holding a photo of O'Reilly over his face while giving "Seig heil!" salutes. Each network needs to lash its loose cannon a little more tightly.
Final Approach (8 p.m. Saturday, Hallmark Channel) -- Dean Cain plays a cashiered FBI agent. He's a 
passenger on an airliner. It gets hijacked! Whoooa, didn't see that coming. But wait . . . that flight attendant . . . doesn't she look familiar? Yikes, it's Sunny Mabrey, from Snakes On A Plane! Oh, man, don't open the overhead bin!
Lord of the Ants (8 p.m. Tuesday, WPBT-PBS 2) -- Speaking of crazed anthropomorphism, this episode of the PBS science series Nova is a profile of Harvard biologist E.O. Wilson,
legendary for his fascination by, and affection for, ants. 
(Clearly he didn't watch enough of those big-bug sci-fi flicks in the 1950s.) Wilson is notorious in scientific circles for arguing that all behavior in all animals is governed by biology and that free will is a myth. In this documentary, you can watch him plunge his hand into a bed of fire ants while calmly observing that each sting feels like "the touch of a hot needle," which certainly suggests that free will on occasion may not be such a great concept.
Note: Days and times for PBS shows are for the Miami area, and may differ elsewhere
The upfronts -- the annual ritual when broadcast television networks present their fall lineups to advertisers -- have always been a weeklong festival of Barnumesque bluster lubricated by liquor and advertising dollars. But the party lights were much dimmer at this year's edition, which ended Thursday.
A palpable cloud of anxiety hangs over a broadcast industry that's down five million viewers from last year, has just crawled out of the wreckage of one disastrous strike and now faces the real possibility of another. Even the invincible American Idol is showing wear and tear with its lowest ratings in five years. And now, the networks have ordered only 17 new series -- about half of what they did last year. Read the whole Miami Herald story.
Not needing much new programming after beating the other networks senseless in the Nielsen ratings this season, and not having much to choose from anyway after a writers' strike laid waste to production development, Fox is adding only two shows to its fall schedule, the company's executives said Thursday. And one of them is the most highly anticipated dramas of the fall season: Fringe, a sci-fi thriller from J.J. Abrams, who produces ABC's megahit Lost. Fringe follows two FBI agents and a possibly mad scientist as they investigate an airliner that landed in Boston with nothing but grisly corpses aboard. (Hey, do you think that's what really happened to Oceanic 815?) Read the full Miami Herald story.
It hasn't gone unnoticed around the hallways at Fox that American Idol ratings are continuing to slip, the network's bosses admitted Thursday while unveiling their fall schedule. Last week the show dipped under 22 million viewers, its smallest audience in five years. "I'm satisfied [with the show] creatively, but not necessarily satisfied with the performance," said Fox chairman Peter Liguori during a teleconference with television writers. "Both the network and the producer really want to take a look at the show for next year and see what we can do to inject it with new levels of energy and new unpredictable twists and turns and greater levels of story-telling. I do think the show has somewhat suffered from the post strike malaise of folks watching TV." Unfortunately, he ruled out the most obvious solution: "We love Paula," Ligouri said. "She's coming back."
Because Jack Bauer was bested not by terrorists but striking Hollywood writers, who wiped out the last season of Fox's 24 before it even began, it's been nearly a year since the show has aired. The good news for fans is that they'll get a sneak peek of the new season in November when Fox broadcasts a two-hour prequel that sets the stage for 24's return in January. The network isn't providing a lot of detail, but the prequel is set (and was shot) in South Africa, where Bauer will take on an international crisis. His Counter Terrorism Unit has been abolished, though, so the investigation is being run by a team of FBI agents led by Janeane Garafolo. (Security clearances apparently aren't what they used to be.) "We're excited about the prequel because it explores Jack's complex emotional state of mind," says 24's executive producer Howard Gordon. Also, a lot of stuff gets blown up.
CBS, for the past decade a network built around CSI and its gory crime-drama clones, Wednesday unveiled a fall schedule intended to make its viewers laugh as well as gag. The network added two 
sitcoms, renewed a couple of others that seemed near cancellation just a few days ago, and expanded comedy programming from one night to two.
To make room for the comedies, the network canceled three notable dramas, including Cane (left), its groundbreaking nighttime soap about Cuban exiles in South Florida. Also biting the video dust were the vampire-detective cult favorite Moonlight and Shark, which won James Woods rave reviews for his portrayal of an ethics-schmethics district attorney. Read the entire Miami Herald story here.
When CBS presents its new fall lineup Wednesday, it will be missing the James Woods vehicle Shark. The show's move to Sunday night last fall gave it an uncertain airtime -- whenever CBS' NFL telecasts ran long, which is to say practically every week, Shark could be delayed by as much as 90 minutes -- and just as the Sunday night schedule stabilized at the end of football season, the writers' strike knocked the show off the air. Even more fundamentally, the producers' decision to cut into Woods' screen time in order to build up co-star Jeri Ryan's character revealed Shark for what it was: a typically mediocre CBS police procedural that was being carried by a single remarkable actor. The less viewers saw of him, the less Shark saw of viewers. Now CBS has pulled the plug.
Deja view? That photo up above is the cast of 90210, the linchpin of the new CW schedule unveiled Tuesday at upfronts in New York. The CW, hammered by the abrupt ratings decline triggered in large part by the writers' strike, turned over one huge chunk of its schedule to spoiled brats and abandoned another entirely. Read the whole Herald story.
Now we know -- even blood isn't enough to satisfy Les Moonves and his rapacious CBS henchpersons. For a couple of months now, fans of the vampire-detective drama Moonlight have been donating thousands of pints of their own blood in an effort to convince CBS to keep the show for another season. (They were sending to the Red Cross rather than directly to Moonves, which might have worked better.) On Tuesday, CBS swung the axe anyway, canceling Moonlight on the eve of the network's upfront ceremony in New York. A couple of sitcoms on the ratings bubble, How I Met Your Mother and The New Adventures Of Old Christine, were renewed, which makes you wonder what those fans did for CBS. Donate their eyeballs and kidneys?
Here's an old outtake from Bill O'Reilly's Inside Edition days where he gets a wee bit impatient with the performance of his teleprompter. Of course, if my computer could talk, it might tell some similar stories about me when I'm trying to upload photos to this blog. They would be lies, of course. Bleepin' lies. Bleepin' thing bleeps. But let's get back to O'Reilly here.
The aftershocks of a Hollywood writers' strike that ended three months ago continued rippling through television Tuesday as ABC unveiled a fall schedule with only two new programs -- a game show and a remake of a British series. The only new drama on the ABC schedule is Life On Mars, an American version of a BBC series. It stars Jason O'Mara (The Agency) as a detective who wakes up after a car crash to find himself back in 1973 -- but still working as a cop. Here's the full Herald story.
NBC isn't doing an upfront presentation in New York -- the network unveiled its fall schedule last month 
-- but its executives apparently felt some remorse about wasting an opportunity to induce mass horror and revulsion among advertisers and TV writers. So it chose upfront week to announce a new program that will premiere right after its coverage of the Beijing Olympics: Are You A Mama's Boy?, a reality show in which smothering women will choose wives for their Oedipally crippled sons. This blog can be...oh, let's say glib, but unfortunately this item is entirely true. So is the fact that Are You A Mama's Boy? is being produced by Ryan Seacrest, which should be fair warning to American Idol viewers about what prolonged exposure to Paula Abdul does to the human brain.
Three more shows on the ratings bubble have been renewed. The CW has picked up its satanic comedy-drama Reaper for at least another 13 episodes. CBS is bringing back military drama The Unit. And medical sitcom Scrubs is switching networks in its eighth season -- the is moving from NBC to ABC.
From New York, where ABC is preparing its Tuesday upfront presentation, comes word that prophet-or-madman Eli Stone has been renewed for another season. But chick-cop drama Women's Murder Club and the Peyton Place-ish October Road have bit the dust.
It's upfront week in New York, where the broadcast networks are unveiling their new fall lineups to advertisers. Formal presentations don't begin until Tuesday, when The CW and ABC do their thing. (CBS follows on Wednesday and Fox Thursday; NBC, skipping the upfronts this year, presented its fall lineup a few weeks ago.) But word is starting to leak out about some of the cancellations and renewals. Good news for fans of ABC's Boston Legal, Fox's Til Death and The CW's The Game: They've all reportedly been picked up for another season. Bad news for fans of Kelsey Grammer and Patricia Heaton in Fox's Back To You: It's gone.
Expect a media and marketing blitz this week as the 10th anniversary of Frank Sinatra's May 14, 1998 death approaches. There will be a new postage stamp, new DVDs and CDs, and a film festival on Turner Classic Movies. In Sunday's Herald, there's an interview I did with Nancy Sinatra about her dad, Vietnam, and yucky father-daughter romantic ballads.
Sex: The Revolution! (10 p.m. Monday, VH1) -- From the Kinsey Report to Bill Clinton's stupid cigar tricks, this four-part documentary tracks the upheaval in American sexual mores during the second half the 20th century and its impact on culture and politics.
Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives (10 p.m. Monday, Food Network) -- Believe it or not, there's more than $45 seared tuna on South Beach. Host Guy Fieri, who each week seeks out just plain food on this 
series, pays a visit to the 11th Street Diner, South Beach's most determinedly unglamorous eatery, and likes what he finds.
Secret Diary of a Call Girl (10:30 p.m. Monday, Showtime) -- First we had soccer-mom-as-dope-dealer (Weeds), then math-teacher-as-meth-maker (Breaking Bad). And now it's legal-secretary-as-high-priced-hooker, with British actress Billie Piper as the demure Hannah by day and depraved Belle by night in this new sitcom. If Secret Diary of a Call Girl draws viewers, expect a kindergarten-teacher-turned-dominatrix in time for the fall season.
Nostalgia takes some peculiar forms. In Germany, for instance, there's something called ostaglie, a conjunction of the German words for east and nostalgia. Its devotees get together to drink watered-down beer, flash their old East German ID cards, and reminisce about the glories of the Trabant, the smoking, lurching little dogsled of a vehicle that passed for a car in the communist half of Germany. It wouldn't surprise me to hear that they even sing weepy ballads about the grand old days when you could get shot trying to flee over the Berlin Wall.
Nostalgia for The WB isn't quite that bizarre, but it's close. Are fans of the little-watched and less-mourned network that lasted from 1995 to 2006 really going to huddle around computers to watch their favorite episodes of classic WB shows? For that matter, what is a classic WB show? Parent 'Hood? Sister, Sister? Kirk? Savannah? (Excuse me for a moment while I pop a Xanax; I'm feeling considerable anxiety over the fact that I can even remember this stuff.)
Well, the Warner Brothers Television Group apparently thinks so. It's just announced that The WB, which went out of business in 2006 when it was merged with the equally unlamented UPN, is being reconstituted as an Internet-only channel airing, new short-form webisode series as well as, yes, "classic" WB shows.
Tucked away in the fine print is the fact that The WB will also show series produced by Warner Brothers' studio, including Friends. I wonder how that news will be taken by TV stations (and even cable networks like TBS) that are paying millions of dollars for the rights to syndicated reruns of shows like Friends.
There is something about Jon Stewart and The Daily Show that just makes brains turn to mush. A 
couple of years ago, the Television Critics Association even gave Stewart an award for "outstanding achievement in news," which if nothing else should confirm the deep conviction of many of the folks who email me regularly that TV critics rank only slightly above single-celled organisms on the evolutionary ladder.
The latest example of IQ drainage over Stewart comes from the Pew Research Center, which says its surveys show that "16 percent of Americans said they regularly watched The Daily Show or the Comedy Central spin-off, The Colbert Report." Either the Pew folks misplaced some decimal points, or they distributed their questionnaire only to sociopathic liars. If 16 percent of Americans watched The Daily Show, that would give it an audience of 48 million viewers and make it the biggest television hit since the days of three-channel television. Here on Planet Earth, the Nielsen folks reported in January that The Daily Show audience averages around 1.5 million viewers, and The Colbert Report about 1.3 million -- that is, even poor forgotten Katie Couric trounces them by a margin of around 4 to 1.
Anybody at Pew with a faint trace of common sense should have questioned those polling numbers. The reason no one did, I imagine, is that everybody around the Pew offices does watch Stewart. This idea that he's delivering the real news has real traction among the chattering classes, who fancy that Stewart is some kind of heroic lone gunslinger standing up against the corporate leviathans who control network newscasts. (Pay no attention to the Viacom/CBS suits behind that Daily Show curtain!) A number of Pew's I absolutely do believe is the one showing that much of Stewart's audience also watches news on PBS and listens to it on NPR.
In reality, of course, The Daily Show is not a newscast at all, neither in structure nor substance. It's a (very funny) show of left-wing political satire -- the Pew Center's content study showed Republican are three times more likely to be the butt of jokes than Democrats -- put together not by reporters and editors and producers out in the field but by gag-writers sitting in a studio. Stories that do not lend themselves to scathing attacks on the Bush administration, like the Virginia Tech shootings, are barely mentioned at all.
Ordinarily, I'd simply pass this all off as a ephemeral fad, the media equivalent of Hula-Hoops and Pet Rocks. But when the Pew Center report was crossing my desk today, I happened to be watching CNN, where correspondent Cal Perry and his crew were pinned down by gunfire in Beirut while trying to cover a battle between Hezbollah and the Lebanese army. Perry and his team eventually came away unscathed -- but they were lucky to do so. Journalism has never been more dangerous than it is right now: Nearly 200 employees of news organizations have died in Iraq alone during the past five years. The biggest risk Jon Stewart faces, on the other hand, is getting some bad sushi from the craft services table. To compare him to reporters getting shot at overseas is an unspeakable insult. Cut it out.
Loyal NCIS viewers probably didn't think so, but when Katie Couric broke into the show at 8:09 p.m. Tuesday to announce that CBS was projecting a Hillary Clinton victory in the Indiana primary, she was actually introducing them to a much more compelling drama than the one they were watching. CBS was the only network to call the tingly-tight Indiana race -- in which Clinton and Barack Obama were never separated by much more than 50,000 votes -- on Tuesday night.
Everybody else held off...and by midnight, with Clinton's lead shrinking to 17,000 as Obama's stronghold precincts in Gary finally began reporting in, it looked like Couric might have to break out the Tabasco sauce in preparation for eating her words. “I have some sympathy for the people on the decision desk over at CBS News tonight, who probably have made the right call, but they’ve made it early and I wonder as the results tighten, if there’s some tightening in the blood veins of some of those people over there who I certainly identify with,” jibed Fox News' Brit Hume.
In the wee hours of Wednesday morning, Clinton's lead at last edged back out to about 22,000, and other networks began making their own projections for her: MSNBC and Fox News at 1:09 a.m., CNN three minutes later. CBS says nobody there was sweating over the network's early call. “When we made the projection, we remained confident Senator Clinton would carry Indiana based on the information we had gathered about vote projections and the demographic composition of the vote that was yet to be counted,” declares Kathy Frankovic, who directs CBS surveys and sits on the network's decision desk. It's a thin line between recklessness and prescience when it comes to making election projections, but Tuesday night, CBS stayed on the right side by 23,000 votes.
A couple of weeks ago I wrote a story about how cable TV has become the go-to place for political coverage during the 2008 presidential campaign. My piece concentrated on the cable news networks, but the paradigm shift extends to other cable channels -- and their web counterparts as well. Niche networks are exploring what the campaign means for their audience, in a way their audience can relate to.
There's no better example than Current TV, an interactive cable net that concentrates on under-35 viewers. It's had a team of half a dozen or so young "collective journalists'' out on the campaign trail since the New Hampshire primary, looking at the race through twentysomething-eyes.
"Our focus is on issues important to young adults," says Andrew Fitzgerald, manager of the unit. "Our audience demographic is a major portion of the electorate that's underserved by traditional media outlets."
He's not talking about idiotic MTV-style reports on boxers or briefs, but covering the real issues from a different perspective.
"Our audience certainly shares the concerns of other age groups, it just has a different take on them," 
says Fitzgerald, 27. "Our demo is the age group that has the highest percentage fighting in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. That makes it uniquely personal to them. They have a unique perspective on health care, too, because so many of them are recent college graduates who don't have full time jobs, so they don't have access to health insurance."
Current tailors its coverage to that audience perspective.
"For instance, we've paid a lot of attention on the retiring of the Baby Boomer generation will affect this younger generation behind it -- financially, socially, every other way," Fitzgerald notes. "We had a package of stories asking our contributors to show us, in 60 seconds, the debt they've already accrued, the generational debt. This generation is steeped in credit-card debt and student-loan debt. How will that affect the landscape in an election year?"
When Hillary Clinton unveiled her proposal on universal health care, most political reporters concentrated on the cost. Fitzgerald's staff instead looked at how that cost would be borne -- by younger, healthier workers forced to buy insurance to subsidize their older counterparts.
"Her plan would coerce people into buying health insurance," points out Fitzgerald. ‘‘Many young adults don't feel like they need health insurance. That wasn't a point made in many news reports."
The work of Current's reporters is supplemented by the audience itself, which also provides much of the network's content on other subjects as well. Many stories (or pods, as the channel refers to them) are collaborations between members of the audience and Current reporters -- hence the word collective.
"Collective journalism is our citizen journalism effort," says Fitzgerald. "The way that citizen journalism has been treated in recent years on news channels is to focus on the gotcha video, the off-guard moment caught by somebody on their cellphone. That's what CNN's iReport is, videos from people who happen to be at the scene of breaking news before a news camera crew gets there.
"Collective journalism is more of a network-journalism model. We work with contributors around the world to tell stories as a group. Reporters from, say, The Miami Herald are journalists, who work on a story from start to finish and have the skills necessary to do so. We're not asking that of all our contributors. Some are talented freelance journalists, but some are college students getting a degree in engineering who happen to have access to part of a story that they share with our audience."
Current got off to a slow start, distribution-wise, when it was launched by Al Gore and others three years ago. But it's now available in more than 50 million homes via cable and both big satellite-TV systems. Or you can check out some of the political stories on its website -- or even just watch an episode of its satirical series The Democratic Messiah, in which Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama ask God rather than the voters to choose a nominee, right here:
People complain to me all the time about the dumbing down of television news -- the obsession with celebrity and the allegedly unprecedented empty-headedness of a young generation of anchors and reporters who got their jobs not by tramping around live battlefields in Europe like Walter Cronkite, but by mastering the art of hair gel.
Well, maybe. But the television news business -- and let's make that just the news business, period -- has never been short on either small brains or outsize appetite for celebrity news. In Barbara Walters' 
new autobiography Audition, she recounts a moment right out of a Ron Burgundy movie -- except it took place back in 1953, during television's alleged Golden Era. Walters had just broken into the business at WNBT, the NBC affiliate in New York that a few years later would change its call letters to WNBC. One of her first assignments was to "produce" a talk show for gossip columnist Igor Cassini, who wrote for the New York Journal-American under the name Cholly Knickerbocker.
Her duties as producer mostly consisted of writing out Cassini's introduction and questions on cue cards. "I assume, fool that I was, that Igor Cassini would know his own name," Walters writers. "So I simply wrote his initials on the cue card for the introduction." Thus it was that several hundred thousand New Yorkers got to watch Cassini ponderously intone: "Good evening. I am I.C."
George H.W. Bush (9 p.m. Monday, WPBT-PBS 2) -- This two-part episode of the documentary series American Experience argues that the presidency of the first George Bush -- which ended in recession and a humiliating defeat by Bill Clinton -- has been seriously underrated, especially in foreign policy: Bush successfully steered a tricky course through the chaotic breakup of the Soviet Union, the reunification of Germany and the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. Some of the comments on the latter are particularly piquant. 'Some people said, `Why didn't you guys take care of Saddam when you had a chance? Why didn't you go to Baghdad?' '' notes Bush's advisor James Baker. ``Nobody asks me that question anymore.''
An American Crime (9 p.m. Saturday, Showtime) -- Now that Juno and Smart People have alerted the world to the fact that Ellen Page is the wittiest, smartest actress in Hollywood, everybody's scrambling to see her previous movies, which had the approximate popular reception of a warm family comedy about Osama bin Laden. This one, written and directed by indie auteur Tommy O'Haver, is based on a real-life 1965 crime in Indiana and stars Page as a teenager tortured and murdered by a family caretaker. Not exactly Juno territory, but then neither was Hard Candy, in which Page played a pubescent girl stalking a pedophile.
Note: Days and times for PBS shows are for the Miami area, and may differ elsewhere.
Hey, what's radio-programmer jargon for "oops''? South Florida oldies station WMXJ fired its morning man Bruce Kelly late last month, saying his ratings were flat. But in the Arbitron ratings released Friday, covering January through March, Kelly's show zoomed from 10th place to fifth in Majic-102's target audience, listeners aged 25 to 64.
The top five stations in the Arbitron ratings: Spanish contemporary WAMR-FM (Radio Amor), Spanish oldies WMCQ-FM (Clasica 92.3), urban contemporary WEDR-FM (99 Jamz), Spanish talk WAQI-AM (Radio Mambi) and urban adult contemporary WQHT-FM (Hot 105).
If you think you were seeing a lot of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama on Fox News even before their appearances on The O'Reilly Factor and Fox News Sunday during the past week, you're right: Clinton has given 13 interviews to the network, Obama 10, in an effort to reach the increasingly important white working-class wing of the Democratic Party. Seems the party's lefty fringe isn't very happy about it.
Jericho, canceled by CBS for a second time a few weeks ago, is yet again showing signs of life. CBS 
Paramount Network Television, which owns the show, is talking to Comcast about a partnership deal in which the show would air first on Comcast, later on CBS. (NBC last month saved another cult favorite with marginal ratings, Friday Night Lights, by striking a similar deal with Direct TV.)
And of course Jericho's few but fierce fans -- who revived the show from a 2007 cancellation by shipping 20 tons of nuts to CBS -- are at it again. Not only are they once again sending out nuts (this time to Nielsen, to protest what they say are flaws in its rating system, and to TV critics, because they cynically but not entirely unrealistically think we're amenable to graft), but they're raising money for full page ads in trade papers like Variety and Hollywood Reporter.
Their canniest move of all may have been buying DVDs of the show and shipping them to U.S. troops in Afghanistan and Iraq. CBS programming chief Nina Tassler is a tough cookie, but I think a couple of angry divisions of Marines camped outside her office might scare her more even than her legendary flesh-eating boss Les Moonves.
You can join the fun at jericho4sale.com. That's the Jericho nuts, I mean. To join the Marines, try here.
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