Changing Channels

At Univision, new -- bigger -- ambitions

When Nielsen Media Research sent out its weekly television ratings report for the first week in September, TV programmers and marketing directors across America blinked, rubbed their eyes, then blinked again. Could it really be? Spanish-language Univisión finishing first? Not first in the Spanish rankings, not first in Miami or Los Angeles: First in the whole United States, ahead of Fox, CBS, ABC and NBC.

It could be. It was. And, says Univisión Networks President Cesar Conde, it will be again.

"Our goal is to be the No. 1 network in this country regardless of language,'' says Conde, from his office in Doral. ``[If] we continue to perform the way we have -- and you have to have some macroeconomic trends continue -- that is feasible, that Univisión, a Spanish-language network, can be the No. 1 network in this country regardless of language, within the next five years.'' Read the full story that Bridget Carey and I wrote on Univision in Monday's Miami Herald.

Screen Gems: TV the week of October 17

Kimjongilia (8 p.m. Sunday, Documentary Channel) -- An extraordinary documentary about the
government-manufactured cult of personality for weird but murderous North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il, and what happens to people who don't want to join. The title, by the way, is the name of a hybrid red begonia created by North Korean horticulturists to celebrate the big guy's 46th birthday in 1988.

I Am Alive: Surviving The Andes Plane Crash (9 p.m. Wednesday, History Channel) -- How lucky were those Chilean miners to emerge intact from that cave-in site last week? Get a clue from this documentary about the 1972 crash of an airliner in the mountains on the border between Chile and Argentina, after which the survivors had to eat the dead.

Growing the Big One (9 p.m. Saturday, Hallmark Channel)-- Shannen Doherty plays a farmer. And the mind reels with potential punch lines.

Let me program your TiVo! Just click on my best bets for the week at www.tivo.com/guruguide.

A blacked-out sports weekend for Dish TV

This will be a rough weekend for Florida sports fans who watch television over the Dish satellite network. Fox yanked all 19 of its regional sports networks -- including Fox Sports Florida and Sun Sports -- off Dish at the end of September. (FX and the National Geographic Channel were also casualties.) Among the games Dish subscribers can't see this weekend as a result are exhibition hockey matches involving the Tampa Bay Lightning and the Florida Panthers, exhibition basketball games with the Miami Heat and the Orlando Magic, University of Florida women's soccer and volleyball, Florida and Florida State football replays, and several live SEC, Big 12 and Pac-10 games.

If this standoff continues -- and there's every appearance that it will, for weeks and possibly months -- the regular season games of the Panthers and the Heat will be wiped for Dish subscribers. And on October 31, the deal between Dish and Fox's broadcast stations ends, which means Fox-WSVN 7 will disappear.

These hardball negotiations are the industry norm these days; Fox is in a similar dispute with Cablevision, which may lose Fox cable and broadcast channels as early as Saturday morning if there's no breakthrough. Almost the entire NHL season (as well as dozens of Pac-10, Big 12, Mountain West and Ivy League football games) vanished from DirecTV last year in a seven-month fee dispute with the Versus sports channel. My advice: Find a good sports bar. You're going to need it, and not just for the sports.

Cristina: Univision fired me for being old

When my Herald pal Bridget Carey called Cristina Saralegui Wednesday for what she thought would be a routine story on Saralegui's new line of designer products, she got an earful. In August, in a statement filled with kissy-face admiration, Univision had announced Saralegui was retiring from her weekly talk show after two decades. But Saralegui now says a better word be "fired," and that Univision had accused of her breaking one of television's strictest rules: Don't get old. "They want to change the image of the network and get rid of older people and put young people there,'' Saralegui said. "I am too old for what they want to do. And I also think it was because I'm independent and because I call my shots.'' Read the full interview in Thursday's Miami Herald.

'School Pride' goeth before we get ill, hopefully

Any fleeting thought I had that School Pride might be less phony than the average TV reality show vanished literally seconds into the first episode, when one of the hosts, Jacob Soboroff, was identified as a ``political journalist.'' Which, in reality-speak, means he reports on film festivals for the AMC movie channel. Hey, did I mention that I'm an astronaut, a former American League homerun champion and the guy Al Gore stole the Internet from? In reality-speak, anyway.

From there, School Pride tries to sell more whoppers than Burger King. This school-makeover show has all the phony trappings of reality TV: ``Secret'' meetings at which none of the furtive participants seems to notice an NBC camera crew lurking around the room. Squeal-on-cue shots of happy recipients of swag shrieking and dancing around like voracious badgers were trapped in their pants. Hosts breaking down in self-congratulatory tears as they recount their superhuman efforts on behalf of the unwashed masses. Watching it was so tedious that I seriouly wondered why I gave up inventing penicillin and winning NASCAR races to become a TV critic. Read my full revew in Thursday's Miami Herald.

A documentary on Cuba that doesn't mention snails

A reader appalled by the recent PBS Nature episode that lionized Fidel Castro as heroic advocate of the 
rights of snails tipped me off to a documentary playing Wednesday night on EWTN, the Catholic church's cable television network. Called Cuba -- Winds of Change, it airs Wednesday at 10 p.m. and again Saturday at 5 a.m. Anglo-American filmmaker Jordan Allott shot much of the documentary inside Cuba, entering on his British passport and pretending to be a tourist. It's an examination of the place of the Catholic church in Cuba today, a decade after Pope John Paul II's visit, as well as the plight of political prisoners and other non-snail inhabitants of the island. I haven't seen it (EWTN never publicizes its programming or sends out screeners), but it sounds worth skipping Law & Order: Los Angeles for.

NBC formally cancels 'Outlaw'

Not that there was much doubt after production was suspended last week, but NBC formally canceled Jimmy Smith's legal drama Outlaw late Monday. The remaining episodes will air on Saturdays, television's equivalent of an an abandoned toxic dump site.

Fox News opens Hispanic-news website

Like bees to flowers, media companies are flocking to the Hispanic market in anticipation that census data is going to show as many as 50 million Latinos in the U.S. population. The latest entry is Fox News Latino, a website that will go live early Tuesday morning.

Not a breaking-news site -- "We won't be refreshing the content every 10 seconds," says manager Francisco Cortes -- Fox News Latino will focus on longer features and analyses of news of particular interest to Hispanics. Among the stories it will cover this week: whether the political controversy over immigration will mobilize Latin voters next month. A campaign announced last week by entertainer Ricky Martin to garner Hispanic support for gay and lesbian rights. A look at the problems of Latino Muslims in the United States.

 "We'll also have a story on how the Spanish-language skills of third- and fourth-generation Latinos decline so severely," says Cortes, 34, whose mother is from Puerto Rico. "That one really hits home for me. My own son will not speak Spanish. If I speak it to him in front of his friends, he acts embarrassed."

Cortes' son, though, won't have any problem reading the website: Though a portion of the site will be in Spanish, Fox News Latino will be mostly written in English. "We're trying to reach the second and third generations of U.S. Latinos," says managing editor Alberto Vourvoulias-Bush, who grew up in Guatemala before getting undergraduate and graduate degrees from Ivy League schools. "We're aiming at Latinos whose first language is English, who inform themselves in English, who are deeply American, but share some of the cultural sensibilities of their parents or grandparents."

It's an audience that Fox News Latino bosses firmly believe is underserved. While the Internet is dotted with news and lifestyle sites aimed at U.S. Hispanics -- Univision, Telemundo, CNN  and AOL are all major players in the market -- they're mostly in Spanish.

"Right now there's no exact competition for us," says Cortes. "No one else is targeting U.S. Latinos in English on-line, and we think it's a huge audience.'

What Fox News Latino isn't: a precursor to a Spanish-language television version of Fox News. Not yet, anyway. "That's nowhere in sight," says Cortes. "Though, trust me, it's in the back of my mind."

Screen Gems: TV the week of October 10

Carlos the Jackal (9 p.m. Monday, Sundance Channel) -- In the 1970s and 1980s, he was the world's most feared terrorist, hopscotching around the world to commit hijackings, bombings and murders with utter impunity. This miniseries, airing on three consecutive nights, stars Edgar Ramierz (Che) as the arrogant, vicious and extremely deadly Carlos.

God in America (9 p.m. Monday, WPBT-PBS 2) -- A three-part documentary airing on consecutive nights, God in America examines the complex interplay between religion and democracy in everything from the American revolution to the Cold War, from abolition to abortion and from the Scopes trial to the Moral Majority.

Monica & David (8 p.m. Thursday, HBO) -- Miami filmmaker Alexandra Codina directed and produced this documentary about a young South Florida couple who share more than a marriage: They both have Down syndrome.

Note: Days and times for PBS shows are for the Miami area, and may differ elsewhere.

Let me program your TiVo! Just click on my best bets for the week at www.tivo.com/guruguide.

Breaking news: New Hallmark Christmas special!

Hallmark has just announced an adaptation of The Zombie Night Before Christmas, Clement C. Moore's little-known sequel to his classic poem that captures the mystery, magic and home-for-the-holidays warmth of a Christmas zombie attack. No confirmation yet that Wilfred Brimley will play Santa, Bruce Dern the brain-eating narrator, or Lindsey Lohan a voracious zombie slut. But talks are continuing.*

*Technically speaking, there's no confirmation that Hallmark plans to make this show at all. But I'd sure watch.