The demise of 'Swingtown': Sex DOESN'T sell

The producers of the CBS wife-swapping drama Swingtown were hoping that cable would be a lifeboat for the show, but it turns out to have a sizable leak. The cable net Bravo has purchased the right to rerun the 13 episodes that CBS aired this summer, but says it has no intention of producing any new ones. That means Swingtown, which averaged fewer than five million viewers an episode (and just under 2.1 million in the 18-to-49 age demo advertisers like), is all but officially dead. No way that CBS will absorb the full production costs of a primetime show with that small an audience.

What the Swingtown producers were hoping for was a deal like the one NBC cut for Friday Night Lights, which last season had similar ratings and was on the network's chopping block despite a generally good critical reception. Friday Night Lights survived after satellite provider DirecTV kicked in some money for the first-run rights to the show. You can see the results, if you're a DirecTV subscriber, at 9 p.m. Wednesday when the show's third season starts -- on satellite only. NBC won't air the new episodes until February.

Any fears that the change of venue would alter the texture of Friday Night Lights have proven groundless. Wednesday's debut episode is indistinguishable in tone, substance and style from the show that's been airing on NBC. Of course, the story is moving along. The only missing series regular is Jason Street, the star quarterback who was paralyzed with an injury during the show's very first episode. Tami Taylor, the coach's wife, has been promoted from Dillon High's guidance counselor to principal. And a new quarterback, with a pushy football dad, has transferred in, making some waves on the team. In short, if you liked Friday Night Lights on NBC, you'll like it on DirecTV. In fact, you might like it better: The DirecTV episodes will air without commercials and will include bonus footage that makes the episodes slightly longer. (Wednesday's show, for instance, is about 50 minutes, eight minutes longer than the episodes that run on NBC.)

You can find Friday Night Lights on DirecTV's channel 101. You Swingtown fans can watch and dream about what might have been.

Is it the Internet? Or TV? Or are you just dead?

Once upon a time, new technology meant the steam engine or a rocket that could put a man on the moon. That was great if you were a steamship captain or an astronaut, but no big deal for the rest of us rabble. Modern technology, I'm happier to say, has a thrust that is both more democratic and more relevant: It is essentially aimed at enabling us to fulfill our full potential as lifeless slugs.

The latest great leap forward is a convergence of computer and television technology announced Thursday by Intel and Yahoo that will enable you to check the Internet without taking your eyes off the TV. The software comes in a set-top box and not only allows Internet displays amidst live television shows, but will also enable you to two watch two high-definition programs on the screen simultaneously, allowing the viewer to pause and fast-forward each independently. I mean, think of all the nights you've lain disconsolately on your couch, wondering how much more profoundly impactful The Flavor Of Love reruns would be if you could see Survivor two inches away on the same screen. Those final obstinate brain cells, hiding out in a cave deep in your neocortex like hard-core Japanese guerrillas in the Philippines, will finally be obliterated, allowing you to peacefully decay on your couch.

When that happens, you can take advantage of another television/Internet hybrid, Obit TV. OB TV, as it brands itself, is a new broadband channel that for as little as $400 will prepare a video obituary and then post it on the Internet, where your loved ones can watch it on the same screen as To Catch A Predator if they've got one of those nifty new Intel/Yahoo boxes. Which I'm ordering right now.

The NFL comes to cyberspace

NBC's slate of 17 Sunday-night football games will be available, live and free, on the Internet. The games will be streamed live at both NBCSports.com and NFL.com, where fans can essentially produce their own telecast.

They'll be able to choose among several different camera angles, including "star cam" -- isolating on a single player. They can even watch from two different angles at once using picture-picture technology. They can call up highlights from earlier in the game at any time, as well as a variety of up-to-the-minute statistics. They can even argue with NBC sportscasters via a live blog. Meanwhile, they'll be getting the audio track from the television feed of the game, including John Madden, Al Michaels and sideline reporter Andrea Kremer.

This will be the first time time an NFL game has been on the Internet in America live and free of charge. And it might be the last. NBC announced the cybercast (which it calls Sunday Night Football Extra) Monday as a one-year experiment for the NFL to guage viewer interest. But the more popular it is, the more it competes with a telecast that NBC paid a zillion dollars for. The NFL has undoubtedly has a future on the Internet, but as Janis Joplin used to say, nothin', honey, nothin' it ain't free. At least, not for long.

And yes, smart guy, I realize that's not Janis Joplin over on the right. It's Faith Hill, who NBC announced Monday will be singing the Sunday Night Football theme and appearing in various time-wasting promos that you can avoid by watching the game on the Internet.

Hey, remember how great 'Living With Fran' used to be? No? How about 'Just Legal'? No? How about....

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.

The Current perspective: another way to watch political coverage

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:

Watch YouTube on your TiVo

It's getting harder and harder to tell TV and the Internet apart. Now TiVo says its newest Series 3 units will allow viewers to log on to their YouTube accounts and watch the videos on their television sets. The service will be available later this year.

Oscars on the Internet

There may not be an Oscar ceremony if the Hollywood writers' strike continues, but the announcement of the nominees -- which is more of a news event than a ceremony, without any scripted patter -- should go on pretty much as normal on Tuesday at 8:30 a.m. Eastern time. And you can watch it live at  oscar.com, which will carry not only streaming video of the announcements but bios, clips and other information on this year's nominees; a red carpet section with photo galleries from past ceremonies; a section on Oscar fashion; and another on Oscar history. 

A new way to watch the Mojo channel

Another cable channel has teamed up with Amazon Unbox, the service that allows you to rent or buy videos and have them sent directly into your TiVo. Among the Mojo shows now available through Amazon Unbox are Chef Daniel Boulud's cooking program After Hours with Daniel; comedian Dave Hill's hipper-than-thou King of Miami; and Wall Street Warriors, an inside look at the lives of financial wizards.Coming Soon: Test Drive, a high-def show on high-performance cars.

Definitive proof that the Internet has become an instrument of pure evil and must be crushed

ABC has just announced -- proudly, for God's sake -- that it will be launching a video podcast offshoot of its new and hopefully soon-to-be-canceled series Caveman on Sept. 18. Because words fail me, I'll just quote from the press release:

Since the dawn of time, cavemen -- and cavewomen -- have been overlooked and their knowledge underestimated. To set the record straight, cavemen spokespersons Joel, Nick and Andy have agreed to answer questions that have been perplexing the "sapes'' for millenniums. And to prove that cavepeople are more than just the group you run into at the local organic grocery store, they've decided to tackle these questions in the form of a video podcast on the internet, entitled Cavetalk -- yes, they are proficient on both Mac and pc!

You can find this on the websites for both ABC and Apple's Apple's iTunes. Where, of course, your name and address will immediately be relayed to Satan.

The science of marketing

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

Lindsay's fully loaded

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

Don't let your boss see this

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

Spy-fi TV

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

'American Dreams': coming soon to a computer terminal near you

It's a ghost that cries faintly but eternally from a lost channel on your TV set: that final episode of American Dreams we never saw. When NBC's drama about a pair of families living the turmoil of the 1960s in Philadelphia was teetering on the cancellation bubble in 2005 in 2005, Executive Producer Jonathan Prince pried some money out of NBC to shoot a just-in-case series finale. It was an expanded version of the episode that ended the season, in which teenage ingenue Meg went roaring off on a motorcycle with her radical boyfriend, headed for Berkeley -- or Moscow-on-the-Bay, as parents knew it in the 1960s. In the revised version, her brother J.J. would three years later go to Berkeley to rescue her from a countercultural life of horror.

American Dreams was indeed canceled, and NBC boss Jeff Zucker duly promised to air the expanded finale late that summer. But other NBC executives balked at the cost of the music -- practically every frame of American Dreams had a hit 1960s record playing in the background, everything from Lesley Gore to the Zombies -- and the episode was shelved.

But Prince says he hasn't given up yet. His newest idea is to run the finale not on television but the Internet, where the music fees would be cheaper. "We had the rug pulled out from under us. We're trying to be available again," he said at the press tour Wednesday, where he was publicizing his newest show Cane, a CBS drama about a wealthy Cuban-American family in Miami. (It's terrific, by the way.) "We're clearing [that is, purchasing the rights to] all the music because there's an online community that keeps asking for it." Prince even joked about trying to get CBS to put American Dreams back on the air. "Nina [Tassler, the network programming chief] picked up Jericho,'' he said wistfully.

If you're an American Dreams fan who's spent the last two years cursing NBC -- I realize those two statements are redundant -- you might enjoy the exact text of the question that Prince was asked.

QUESTION: Now that you're safely beyond the long reach of [NBC boss] Jeff Zucker, I wondered if you could tell us which treacherous, venal, mendacious NBC executive is keeping us from seeing the last episode of American Dreams?

"I'm not sure if there were any venal executives involved," Prince replied. "Small-minded, maybe."

Wipe that blood off your tiara

Prom Queen, the webisode mini-murder-mystery that was the hit of the Internet this spring (15 million viewers!) has generated a sequel. Prom Queen: Summer Heat will kick off in August, with some of the characters getting into trouble during a vacation in Mexico. The sequel will be shorter than the original -- 15 two-minute episodes over three weeks, instead of 80 over three months. “The fans are craving more," says Michael Eisner, whose Vuguru studio produces Prom Queen, "and the great thing about the Internet is the ability to meet their demand almost immediately." Well, most people think the great thing about the Internet is porn, followed closely by this blog, but you know what he meant.

Jack and Chloe strike back

The feds have charged a Chicago man for uploading episodes of 24 onto the Internet. If only they'd do something about the people who put Wife/Swap on the air.

Important warning about a potentially lethal website

This blog is nothing if not diverse, and herewith a scrap for our many and dear masochist readers: Tonight, after either Heckle or Jeckle, er, Blake or Jordin, emerges victorious on American Idol, AOL will put up a link where you can hear the winner's single. Yes, yes, iTunes will have it for sale, but even masochists have their limits.

Coming soon to Disney Jihadist Kids!

This sounds like something from Saturday Night Live, but unfortunately it's all too true: A Hamas-operated television station in the Middle East is broadcasting a new children's show hosted by a Mickey Mouse lookalike that preaches anti-Israel warfare to kids. Literally no subject is too far afield for the mouse, whose name is Farfur, to work into an anti-Semitic rant. In a little skit that's supposed to teach kids that cheating is wrong, Farfur -- caught looking at another student's paper -- explains that he couldn't study "because the Jews destroyed my home and I left my books and notes under the rubble." When he flunks, the repentant Farfur says he's learned his lesson: "I'm calling on all children to read more and more to prepare for exams because the Jews don't want us to learn." Farfur then said after being told he had failed the test. Check out some other examples of the playful wit and wisdom of Farfur. 

Why John McCain shouldn't be president

He doesn't know beans about rock'n'roll. Here's a video of him answering a foreign-policy question at a campaign rally in South Carolina by singing "bomb-bomb-bomb, bomb-bomb-bomb, bomb Iran...." What's shocking is that he says it's an old Beach Boys song. My feeling is that America cannot afford a president who is obviously entirely ignorant of Vince Vance & The Valiants, who wrote and recorded Bomb Iran in 1980 during that unpleasantness over the hostages. Or maybe McCain was just dissing George Bush? Vince and the boys are from Texas, I think.

Six degrees of dead

ABC will run the final five unaired episodes of the canceled Six Degrees on its website ABC.com starting April 27, so you 12 people who were watching it, stop complaining.

Psst! Wanna sneak peak of 'The Tudors'?

If you want to get an advance look at the the murdering and conspiring and boinking and wife- decapitating that went on in the court of Henry VIII -- we're talking about the 16th-century British king here, not the guy in the Herman's Hermits record -- here's a link to a website where Showtime has posted the first two episodes of its series The Tudors in a slightly less lascivious version than the ones that will start airing April 1. But if you get hooked and mortgage your home to buy a lifetime subscription to Showtime, send your complaints to Les Moonves and not me.

Star Jones has been there a week, and already they're speaking in tongues

I have never met a marketer who didn't need to be clubbed like a baby seal, but the bunch at Time Warner really deserve a special place in Hell. They sent out a huge press release today saying they're changing the name of Court TV -- to what, they didn't mention -- in order to target "a highly coveted psychographic known as 'Real Engagers.' "

I'm not sure what a "psychographic" is, or a "Real Engager," either. But judging from the new programming the press release announced for Not Court TV Anymore, I'm guessing it may be marketingspeak for "irretrievable cretins." For instance, one of the new series, called Bounty Girls, is a reality show about "an elite team of female bounty hunters who use their brains and beauty to track down the most elusive criminals." Meanwhile, much of Court TV’s trial coverage is being banished to the Internet to make room for Star Jones and Nancy Grace. I'm thinking that if the Dish Network had known what was coming, it wouldn't have been so concerned about striking a deal to get Court TV back on its satellites last month.

Other than that, Mr. Ewing, how did you like the car?

Here's a cool -- "cool" being defined as "perfect for people with way too much time on their hands" -- website that analyzes famous TV deaths, everybody from Bobby Ewing on Dallas to Prue the witch (nine times!) on Charmed.

Zombie jamboree

Since it's been, like, an entire month since a new horror/sci fi site opened on the web, the folks at Fangoria magazine's FangoriaTV.com have decided to open up their joint for free, at least for a month. The free trial period starts March 2 with a free streaming of George Romero's original Night of the Living Dead, then a week later offers up William Castle's 1958 classic House on Haunted Hill -- without, regrettably, Castle's Emergovision gimmick, in which a skeleton came flying out of the roof of the theater's ceiling at a tense moment. Later in the month there's 1960's Horror Hotel with Christopher Lee, the silent 1922 version of Nosferatu, and the misunderstood axe-murdered flick Dementia 13, one of Francis Ford Coppola's first films. The idea here is to get you to subscribe -- that is, pay money -- for FangoriaTV.com, but what can they do if you just watch the freebies and go about your business? Well, besides sending a pack of Romero's zombie to scoop out your intestines and eat them, I mean.

Alas, poor YouTube, we knew you well

YouTube has complied with subpoenas and turned over to News Corp. the names of a couple of users who uploaded complete episodes of 24 and The Simpsons to the YouTube website. "We intend to use the information provided to pursue all available legal remedies against those who infringed our copyrights," a News Corp. official said, not adding that those include Rupert Murdoch going to their homes, slitting their throats and drinking their blood, even though that's pretty much what everyone assumes is next. What with Viacom and NBC Universal -- which along with News Corp. own practically every other TV network known to man that is not managed by a rodent wearing white gloves -- also talking tough about copyright violations on YouTube, I'd say a lot of the fun is about to go out of that website.

Trio! It's back!

Ever since Boots And Saddles was canceled in 1958 after a single season, leaving forever unknown the fate of Capt. Shank Adams and the bedraggled troops at his frontier fort and plunging my 4-year-old life into existential crisis, I've known that quality TV shows don't always find an audience. But I was still amazed by the failure in 2006 of the Trio cable channel -- not just a quality show but an entire network dying of viewer distinterest. Disinterring died-too-young TV shows in series like Brilliant But Canceled and died-too-late ones in documentaries like The Flops, running shows on subjects like sick humor (What would Princess Di be doing if she were alive today? Scratching at the lid of the coffin) and the N-word that nobody else would touch, Trio was the smartest, hippest, funniest thing around.

Well, it's back, sort of. NBC Universal this week unveil a new website, getTRIO.com, that slices and dices popular culture in a daily report on Stuff to buy (books, CDs, DVDs), Stuff to do (concerts, events), and Stuff to see (architecture, art, exhibits, websites). It will screen old Trio documentaries like Parking Lot and Facetime With Kurt Andersen, and it has quick links to a pair of other Trio-inspired websites: BrilliantButCanceled.com (where you can watch shows like Kolchak: The Nightstalker and American Gothic) and OutZoneTV.com, home of the swords-sandals-and-barechested-young-dudes Roar, Shaun Cassidy's short-lived and hopelessly homoerotic series about Irish rebels fighting Roman oppression in the 5th Century. Those were the days.

Can't we all just get along?

Maybe the Super Bowl just makes corporations want to slug each other. Not only are Time Warner and Echostar slugging it out over that whole Dish Network/Court TV messiness, but now Viacom and Google are going at it. Viacom, which owns CBS, MTV, Nickelodeon, Comedy Central, VH1 and practically everything else including possibly your house, today demanded that Google's YouTube pull all the Viacom clips posted there. How many is that? Well, in its demand letter, Viacom counted them in the only numbers that corporations really understand, dollars -- 1.2 billion of them, to be specific. Google responded by sending every household in North America a satellite photo of Julie Chen sunbathing topless outside Les Moonves' house. Well, not yet, but I'll bet they do it by Monday.

The L world

For a program with no more than a couple hundred thousand viewers, Showtime's lesbian drama The L Word sometimes seems about to take over the world. Latest move: an invasion of Second Life, the insanely popular online game in which you create an avatar -- that is, a little virtual you -- to run around and screw up its virtual life even worse than you've screwed up your real one. In The L Word section of Second Life, your avatar can go to dance clubs, hang out at a virtual version of The Planet, and presumably even cheat on that poor (but let's face it, boring) Tina, just like they do in the show. Here's a site where you can download everything you need to get started except maybe Shane's haircut.

You can never have enough giant gila monsters

Internet television is quickly becoming a paradise for sci-fi and horror fans, if a place inhabited almost exclusively by giant squid and death rays. The newest is the Sci Fi Channel's Sci Fi Drive-In, a subdivision of SciFi.com. When the site launches on Jan. 21, you'll be able to watch about 100 old films, shorts and animations there, among them such auteur masterpieces as The Giant Gila Monster, 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea, the Flash Gordon movie serial, and the original theatrical trailers for Attack Of The 50 Foot Woman and Twenty Million Miles To Earth. With all that, who needs Masterpiece Theatre?

The ultimate reality show

Here's something for all the idiots who write me all the time quoting that Bruce Springsteen song about 57 channels and nothin' on. You want television with novelty and variety, something more than sitcoms and cop dramas? Well, here's your chance to watch Saddam Hussein's hanging on live TV without actually moving to Baghdad, where it's expected to be televised. Just sign up for a subscription at  JumpTV.com, an Internet site that carries live TV programming from 230 different stations in 65 countries. It's got the rights to all six Iraqi channels, plus Al Jazeera and Al Jazeera English, and subscriptions start as low as $9.95. Me, I'll just stick with my shallow, meaningless Friends reruns.

That was the year that was

Those nice folks at TiVo have compiled a list of what Americans think were the 10 most memorable moments on television in 2006. No Jacksonian nipples, but it's pretty interesting:

1. Katie Couric says goodbye on The Today Show. Oddly, nobody seems to think anything she's done on the CBS Evening News is memorable.

2. Mel Gibson says he's a mean drunk, but not an anti-Semite, during an ABC interview with Diane Sawyer.

3. Oprah  consigns lying author James Frey to the ninth circle of Hell.

4. Sara and Grissom hook up on CSI. 

5. Faith Hill nearly blows beets when Carrie Underwood beats her at the CMA awards.

6. Kirstie Alley's bikini reveal on Oprah.

7. The Will & Grace series finale, in which their kids begin dating.

8. Kate and Sawyer hook up on Lost. You TV viewers sure like to watch people hook up.

9. Rosie O'Donnell's debut on The View. Don't get your fingers too close to the screen; she might be hungry.

10. Connie Chung's bizarre farewell serenade to her husband Maury Povich on the final episode of her MSNBC show.

Rebooted, not stirred

Yeah, yeah, James Bond is back. But much cooler, so are Napoleon Solo, Ilya Kuryakin and even April Dancer. The folks at the broadband-television site in2tv have added something called Secret Agent TV, which makes available more than 50 hours of vintage spy shows.

At the top of the list is The Man From UNCLE, which starred Robert Vaughn (Hu$tle) and David McCallum (NCIS) as Solo and Kuryakin, a pair of super-agents for a world peace-keeping organization. Like the Bond movies, The Man From UNCLE was sort of a deracinated Cold War thriller, with an international crime syndicate called THRUSH supplying all the bad guys rather than the KGB. And like Bond, Solo and Kuryakin were suave and urbane. No coincidences in all this; Ian Fleming, who wrote the Bond books, was a consultant on the show. Later it spawned a spinoff, The Girl From UNCLE, with Stephanie Powers (Hart to Hart) as agent April Dancer. The UNCLE shows kicked off a craze for television spies -- I Spy, Mission Impossible, The Wild Wild West, Branded, Operation Blue Light -- that never quite died out, as the clamorous viewers of Alias will be happy to tell you.

Secret Agent TV also makes available some of the lesser-remembered UNCLE imitators, including Hunter (1977), with James Franciscus and a pre-Dynasty Linda Evans as U.S. counterintelligence agents who sometimes fought actual communists; Spies (1987), with George Hamilton as a cynical masterspy whose career is on a downward spiral; and one of my favorites, Under Cover (1991).

Under Cover was the first post-Cold War spy thriller, with much of the action taking place in Third World countries governed by rogue regimes. (One of its first episodes, in which U.S. agents tried to foil an Iraqi plot to use biochemical weapons against Israel, had to be yanked at the last minute when the first Gulf War broke out.) It also dealt with the everyday life of spies; Anthony John Denison and Linda Purl played a husband-and-wife team who had to struggle with such domestic crises as their teenage kids figuring out what they did for a living. The show, produced by the same people behind the Vietnam war drama China Beach, was smart and gritty. But ABC buried it on Saturday nights, and it was postponed several times by breaking news from the Gulf War. It died ingloriously after five weeks and possibly nobody in America except me ever saw it. And now all you Internet geeks aficionados.

Go ahead, hurt my feelings

Infidel swine not satisfied that everything worth knowing about television can be found on this very blog might want to check out Yahoo's new television site. There's gossip, videos, summaries of upcoming episodes, and naked pictures of Jennifer Aniston. (As you may have guessed, there is at least one blatant lie in that last sentence. Yahoo would never stoop to gossip.) Go ahead, look at it. Don't let the door hit your butt on the way out, ingrates.

(Sniffle.) OK, loyal readers, where were we? Hey -- anybody still here?

The Internet that dripped blood

We pause briefly for a senior moment: When I was a kid growing up in New Mexico, horror movies were practically never on television. In the tiny three-channel universe of those days, about the only time they were ever on TV was during Science Fiction Theater, a weekly creature-feature flick that aired Sunday evening, unfortunately opposite The Wonderful World Of Disney, which my parents insisted my imbecilic younger sisters watch in the vain hope that they would grow up to be at least as smart as Disney's talking kittens and dancing pigs.

These days, you practically need superpowers to avoid seeing horror flicks, especially around Halloween. Anybody whose bloodlust hasn't been sated by AMC's 230-hour MonsterFest, which concludes Tuesday, is in serious need of Thorazine. Or one of the new multimedia horror platforms that have set up shop this week.

One of them, In2TV’s Halloween Channel (www.aol.com/in2tv) is strictly seasonal and will go out of business Wednesday. Until then, though, you've got 30 hours of scary stuff running from a Flintstones Halloween episode (Fred and Barney do battle with Rockula and Frankenstone) to the original 1952 version of House of Wax with Vincent Price (3D glasses not included). The Halloween Channel also has a bunch of classic Hammer horror films, including Christoper Lee in The Horror of Dracula (1958) and The Mummy (1959) and Peter Cushing in Frankenstein Must be Destroyed! (1969).

FEARnet, on the other hand, is a permanent fixture for people who feel no room in the house looks completely decorated unless it includes some kind of screen full of severed intestines. The video-on-demand side is available through Comcast Digital Cable (in South Florida, on channel 1). It's got 70 hours of programming a month, including a bunch of pretty cool freebies like Carrie, Bram Stoker's Dracula and Flatliners. (Ten hours a month in Spanish, too.)

When all your TV sets burn out from zombie overload, move over to to www.FEARnet.com. It goes on-line sometime late tonight with nine free movies in streaming video (including See No Evil, the classic 1971 suspense flick in which a blind Mia Farrow gradually discovers that everyone in her house has been murdered) and 50 others that can be downloaded for a fee. It even claims to have "horror ring tones" -- I'm not totally clear on what those might be, but I suspect I'll soon be hearing the dulcet tones of a hooker being disemboweled by a chainsaw echoing from cell phones in every corner of Aventura Mall. Short of downloading Freddy Krueger himself -- which I'm sure we'll be able to do by this time next year -- I don't see what more you could possibly want.