CBS, ever-vigilant against an original creeping onto the network, has signed a new two-year deal with the creator of all three of its CSI shows. The deal means that the network's production arm, CBS TV Studios, gets a first looked at anything developed by Anthony Zuiker, including CSI: Keokuk, CSI: Belle Glades and the highly anticipated CSI: Vacant Lot On Calle 8.
Fat people dancing. Fat people passing gas. Stupid, bitchy high school students. Donald Trump gone bad. (Okay, Donald Trump gone worse.) When it comes to picking the summer's worst TV show, we've got an embarrassment of riches.
A couple of months ago, ABC announced it was joining NBC and Fox in the online video service Hulu. This week ABC's programming is finally turning up on the site. Grey's Anatomy became available Monday, and other shows like Desperate Housewives, Ugly Betty, Scrubs and I Survived A Japanese Game Show will start popping up over the next two weeks. The rest of of the ABC corporate stable -- ABC Family, Disney Channel, Soapnet and more -- will follow. Just repeat after me: We don't need no stinkin' digital TV set.
Warehouse 13 (9 p.m. Tuesday, Sci Fi Channel) -- Imagine Scully and Mulder played for laughs and you get the flavor of this charming show about a couple of Secret Service agents who, when their careers crash, find themselves marooned and investigating space-alien artifacts and other weirdness at a remote black-ops base. Eddie McClintock (Felicity) and Joanne Kelly (Vanished) strike sparks as the two agents getting onto one another's nerves and, maybe eventually, into one another's pants.
Angel and the Badman (9 p.m. Sunday, Hallmark Channel) -- This remake of a 1947 movie that starred John Wayne as gunfighter tamed by Gail Russell has Lou Diamond Phillips and Deborah Kara Unger reprising the roles, plus an extra: Wayne's grandson Brendan as one of the gang.
The Conscience of Nhem En (8 p.m. Wednesday, HBO2) -- Thirty years ago, when Cambodia's communist Khmer Rouge regime was slaughtering its subjects by the hundreds of thousands, teenage soldier Nhem En was assigned to photograph victims as they went through a processing center to their deaths. Was he a morally indifferent opportunist, or a secret witness to ensure the story was told? You decide.
The Ascent of Money (10 p.m. Wednesday, WPBT-PBS 2) -- A two-hour condensed version of this excellent eight-hour BBC documentary series aired in January. Now see the whole dazzling thing unfold in four episodes, which trace the origins of the world's financial system -- and argue that the collapse of the past two years was easily foreseeable if government officials had paid any attention to economic history.
Note: Days and times for PBS shows are for the Miami area, and may differ elsewhere.
Here's what the Nielsen folks say were the top shows last week in the cities where it has installed people meters, the set-top boxes that instantly report what's being watch on TV and who's watching it.
** BET Awards Show (BET) – Miami, New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Atlanta, Washington D.C., Houston.
** America’s Got Talent, Tuesday episode (NBC) – Seattle, Denver, Sacramento. ** America’s Got Talent, Wednesday episode (NBC) – Dallas. ** Baseball, ** Baseball, Boston vs. Washington, Tuesday game (New England Sports Network) – Boston. ** Baseball, Detroit vs. Chicago,Wednesday game (Fox Sports Detroit) – Detroit.
** Baseball, St. Louis vs. New York Mets, Tuesday game (Fox Sports Midwest) – St. Louis.
** NCIS (CBS) – Phoenix, Orlando. ** Two And a Half Men (CBS) – Minneapolis. ** 10 p.m. newscast (Fox) -- Tampa. ** Manana para Siempre, Monday and Tuesday episodes (Univision) –
Wide Angle: Crossing Heaven's Border (11 p.m. Wednesday, WPBT-PBS 2) -- I'm not saying PBS has the power or promotional genius to arrange a potential nuclear holocaust as a marketing aid for one of its shows, but with North Korea threatening to fire a missile at Hawaii later this week, the documentary Crossing Heaven's Border couldn't be more timely. It recounts the harrowing, heartbreaking stories of North Korean refugees who escape -- or try to -- across the border into China. It isn't pretty.
Unsung (8 p.m. Sunday, TV One) -- In a weekend of mourning for Michael Jackson, this documentary considers another groundbreaking Motown artist whose left much too soon: Florence Ballard of the Supremes, upon whose life the musical Dreamgirls was loosely based. Ballard had a much better voice than fellow group member Diana Ross, but whose luck was much worse: Alcoholism, obesity and domestic abuse took first her career and then her life.
Hung (10 p.m. Sunday, HBO) -- In this melancholy new sitcom, Thomas Janes plays an economically battered high school coach who realizes he's got one asset that's recession-proof. Full coming review later Sunday.
Shouting Fire: Stories from the Edge of Free Speech (9 p.m. Monday, HBO) -- This documentary on the erosion of U.S. free speech covers everything from a University of Colorado professor fired for saying the 9/11 attacks were America's own fault to a San Diego high school kid suspended for wearing a T-shirt emblazoned "Homosexuality is Shameful." Guaranteed to raise practically everybody's blood pressure.
Dance Your Ass Off (10 p.m. Monday, Oxygen) -- Fat people. Dancing. Really. I don't know what else to say.
Note: Days and times for PBS shows are for the Miami area, and may differ elsewhere.
Let Miami Herald TV critic Glenn Garvin program your TiVo! Just click on his best bets for the week at www.ew tivo.com/guruguide.
In 1972, a 13-year-old Michael Jackson appeared on The Dating Game, pitching questions to three sixth-grade "bachelorettes." The most important one: "If I bring my pet snake Rosie the Crusher along on our first date, what would you bring along and why?"
''I'm asking if you know fantasy from reality,'' the starship commander demands of one of his officers, and in Virtuality the question is anything but rhetorical. This sci-fi TV movie that Fox hopes to spin off into a series is like an existential Cuisinart, slicing and dicing the real, the virtual and the imaginary into something that's intellectually fascinating if not quite dramatically satisfying.
A sort of cross between 2001: A Space Odyssey and The Matrix, Virtuality is set aboard the Phaeton, a spaceship setting off on a 10-year intergalactic voyage in search of a new planet to replace an ecologically doomed Earth. As a form of recreation, as well as a psychological escape from the close quarters in which they live, the 12 crew members (including three married couples) have been equipped with a cutting-edge virtual-reality program that allows them to simulate anything from fighting a Civil War battle to surfing big waves off Hawaii.
But the virtual world proves destructively seductive. One wife cybercheats on her husband with another crew member; another, whose dreams of children were dashed when she signed on for the long voyage, obsessively indulges her fantasy of pregnancy. An officer uses the program to resurrect his dead family and is quickly embroiled in bitter domestic drama with his ungratefully risen son. Read my full review in Friday's Miami Herald.
It's easy enough to dismiss Farrah Fawcett, who died of cancer Thursday at age 62, as a gaudy but useless ornament of 1970s -- all teeth and hair; like old disco records stacked in the attic, a faintly embarassing relic of an era when appearance was everything and substance, nothing. Certainly feminists will shudder at the memory of Charlie's Angels, the television show that made Fawcett famous: three female detectives who took all their orders from a disembodied male voice and were notable mainly for their lack of foundation garments.
But in their own jiggly, half-baked way, the Angels were feminist. They were television's first frankly sexual female characters, women who could be hunters as well as prey. Before Jill, Sabrina and Kelly came along, female sexuality could be acknowledged only in non-human characters: the robot played by Julie Newmar in My Living Doll, Barbara Eden's don't-show-your-navel genie in I Dream Of Jeannie. The idea that women might have erotic impulses beyond those commanded by male masters was, whether feminists want to acknowledge it or not, a form of liberation.
It's also worth noting that Farrah was a much better actress than she ever got to show in Charlie's Angels. Her career always seemed to be tangled in contract disputes and poor choices, but when she hooked up with a good role -- the murderously vengeful rape victim in the 1986 film Extremities is my favorite -- she made the most of it. Still, what she'll probably be most remembered for is that poster. She seemed philosophical about it. "The reason that the all-American boy prefers beauty to brains," she once said, "is that he can see better than he can think." So long, darlin'.
There's a good reason why competently run television networks want to look at a pilot episode before they buy a series. Regrettably, you can see it for yourself Wednesday night if you watch NBC's ineffably stupid The Philanthropist. NBC's programming boss Ben Silverman reportedly purchased it sight unseen at dinner one night, and the only thing I can figure is the oysters had gone bad.
Pointless, charmless and bound to be viewerless after the first half-hour or so, The Philanthropist recalls such epochal television bombs as Manimal (a scientist who could turn into a crime-fighting dolphin) or It's About Time (astronauts break the time barrier and frolick happily with cavemen) in its conceptual imbecility: ''The heroic adventures of a billionaire playboy-turned-vigilante/philanthropist.'' Honest; that's right out of the NBC press release. Read my full review of this abysmal tripe in Wednesday's Miami Herald.
