AMC revives 'The Prisoner'

One of the most peculiar series in the history of television is getting a long-delayed afterlife. The Prisoner, which aired for 17 episodes as a CBS summer replacement from June through September 1968, is being remade for AMC. The six-part miniseries, starring Jim Caviezel and Ian McKellan, is scheduled to debut in the summer of 2009.

The original Prisoner was a double-edged slice of paranoia that, like many of the best Cold War dramas, could be interpreted as a withering commentary on Soviet-style totalitarianism or a slashing attack on McCathyite conformism in the West. (Think Invasion of the Body Snatchers: Were the pods a metaphor for Communist infiltrators or FBI informers? A pretty good case can be made either way.) It starred Patrick McGoohan -- who also produced and created the show -- as a government intelligence agent who quits his job, only to be kidnapped and imprisoned in a secret camp where there are no names, only number.

The identity and motivation of his captors was always a mystery. Did they work for a hostile government trying to ferret out secrets, or his own, trying to suppress them? And the rest of the prisoners -- were they really docile and brainwashed, as they appeared? Or were they spies, trying to dupe McGoohan? Unknown, and unknowable; that was before the days when series wrapped every little thread in a satisfying series finale. The Prisoner left the air without giving away any of its secrets.

Whether AMC will handle it the same way remains to be seen. The network's announcement of the series calls it a "reinterpretation" that will "reflect 21st Century concerns and anxieties, such as liberty, security, and surveillance" -- but those all sound like concerns of the original series, too. Caviezel (who played Jesus in The Passion of the Christ) will star as Number Six, the McGoohan character; McKellan (nominated for an Oscar as Gandalf in The Lord of the Rings) will play Number Two, an apparent henchman of whoever runs the camp.

PBS asks what caused men to act like Martians

The title of The War of the World, a three-part PBS documentary series, is no sloppy typo but deliberate wordplay on H.G. Welles' 1898 novel The War of the Worlds, which describes a devastating attack by Martians armed with death rays and robotic fighting machines that leaves most of the world's great cities in ruins. To Scottish historian Niall Ferguson, the book was not science fiction but ''a work of astonishing prescience'' that accurately foretold the horrendous world wars of the century that would follow, with a single mistake: ''Those responsible were not Martians -- they were other human beings.'' And, Ferguson wonders, how could a century marked by so much scientific and economic progress have gone so violently wrong -- "What made men act like Martians?''

In The War of the World, written by Ferguson from his book of the same name, he tries to answer his own question. Tracing a century that began with the Russo-Japanese War of 1904 and ended with vicious religious bloodletting in the Balkans that hinted of the horror to come on a September morning early in the next millennium, Ferguson offers up a documentary that is provocative, engaging, maddening and altogether spectacular television. Read my review from Monday's Miami Herald.

Screen Gems: TV the week of June 29

All About Dung (10 p.m. Monday, History Channel) -- Oh, the years I've longed to write this sentence: This show is just a lot of crap. Really: Cow dung. Bat dung. Insect dung. Coffee made from dung. Cellphones powered by dung. History written from dung. I know you think I'm making this up, but, really, this is the straight poop.

The Singing Office (9 p.m. Sunday, TLC) -- Sticking with our dung theme for a moment, this show features the walking musical atrocities Mel B. (Scary Spice of the Spice Girls) and Joey Fatone (the uncute one in 'N Sync) prowling real-estate offices and dentists' waiting rooms for singers as trifling as they were. Or are.

Moment of Luxury (6 p.m. Sunday, WLRN-PBS 17) -- This show on lifestyles of the rich and swinish naturally pays a visit to South Florida. The first of back-to-back episodes checks out Dania Beach, which apparently is some kind of secret hideout of the plutocracy, and then, more plausibly, Palm Beach.

Locked Up Abroad (9 p.m. Monday, National Geographic Channel) -- Back in the '60s, Saturday-morning TV used to be dotted with public service announcements showing college kids being hung by their heels in various Third World hellhole jails after being caught with half a joint. "When you're busted over there, you're in for the hassle of your life," an announcer would sternly intone. Turns out this was one bit of reefer madness that was absolutely true and still is. The debut of the second season of this documentary series focuses on the unlovely life of an American arrested with some hashish in South
Korea.

Ganja Queen (9 p.m. Monday, HBO) -- Of course, it could have been worse -- he could have been busted carrying marijuana in Bali. In this documentary, a young Australian woman learns the hard way that in Indonesia, trafficking in marijuana is a capital offense.

The War of the World (11 p.m. Monday, WPBT-PBS 2) -- This provocative three-part documentary hosted by historian Niall Ferguson argues that the wars of the 20th century, from Japan's invasion of Russia in 1905 to the Cold War that spluttered out in the early 1990s, were not separate conflicts, merely different facets of a single century-long clash of civilizations. It's a thesis worth considering at a time when the Judeo-Christian West is seemingly locked in a death struggle with a Muslim East.

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

Where to read about kid's shows -- not here, obviously

When I was in college, one of my roommates -- I'm withholding his name to protect the innocent, namely me, since he's now a NASA astronomer who probably has the ability to beam death rays at me from the space shuttle -- used to end all arguments about abortion by proclaiming that it should legal only until the fetus was 12 years old. I'm not quite that tough on kids, but it's fair to say that my idea of good children's literature is Lord Of The Flies. I'd rather have my eyes put out than sit through an episode of SpongeBob SquarePants.

But if you saw the headline on that post I did a couple of days ago about a Lindsay Lohan movie and were disappointed to learn it was about I Know Who Killed Me rather than Freaky Friday, don't despair. There's now a blog for you: Your Family Viewer. It's written by my pal Anne Bannon, whose own daughter has survived to the age of 21 despite numerous provocations. Anne not only is able to sit through kid's shows unaided by Thorazine, but actually likes some of them and usually has a pretty intelligent explanation of why. And when Anne says she's watching out for "sexuality, violence, commercialism," unlike me, it's not to store them on her TiVo.

Of course, now that I've written this nice recommendation, I find she's got the word "boob" in her first post. Geeze. As Roseanne Rosannadanna used to say, never mind.

An epic tale of bad television, plastic toy soldiers and the hidden treasure in your attic

Way back in 1959, when the television airwaves were ruled by Gunsmoke, Have Gun, Will Travel, Wagon Train and countless other horse operas, CBS came up with a Western with a new twist. Don Durant played the titular hero of Johnny Ringo, a gunfighter-turned-lawman, whose claim to fame was that he carried a not a six-shooter revolver but a seven-shooter. So every episode ended with a shootout in which the bad guy would eventually emerge from behind a tree to say, "I got you now, Johnny, I've been counting and you fired all six of your bullets." And Johnny would plug him with that seventh shot and ride off into the sunset.

Even among my fellow 5-year-olds, this formula got old pretty fast, and Johnny Ringo's ratings steadily dwindled. And toymakers who had bought licensing rights from CBS under the assumption that any Western was pure marketing gold were pretty much screwed; all those board games and toy seven-shooters wound up in landfills. The biggest casualty of all was a playset made by the Marx Toy Co., which included a tin Western town populated by plastic cowboys, including Johnny Ringo himself. Only about 300 of the sets were sold. And kids being the ungrateful little wretches they are, I imagine everybody who got one tossed it into the back of the closet and has spent the last five decades cursing his parents as fools for buying such an uncool present.

Well, if you're one of those ungrateful little wretches, look around to see if that Johnny Ringo set is still kicking around your attic. It's now worth about $10,000 (not a bad return on a $6 investment, even allowing for inflation). Even the little Johnny Ringo figure by itself brings a cool $900. Johnny Ringo has become the holy grail for a crusading army of Baby Boomers who have turned into collectors of all those little plastic soldiers and cowboys and spacemen of the 1950s and 1960s. And (think of this not as a mixed metaphor, but an earnest attempt at diversity and even-handedness in religious allusions) their Mecca is the Official Marx Toy Soldier Museum in Moundsville, West Virginia. Read my story about it in Sunday's Miami Herald.

Screen Gems: TV the week of June 22

Hopkins (10 p.m. Thursday, ABC) -- You shouldn't watch this six-part peek inside Baltimore's Johns Hopkins Hospital just because network documentary units are dying out and this might be the last chance you ever get to see one in action. You should watch it because it's fascinating and dramatic stuff: The family of a comatose little girl struggles with the decision to disconnect life support. A young doctor punctures a patient's lung during a routine procedure. And a top brain surgeon recalls how, two decades ago, he climbed over a 20-foot-fence on the border with Mexico to sneak into California in search of a job picking fruit.

Celebrity Family Feud (8 p.m. Tuesday, A&E) -- I know, I know, it's summer and documentaries are a little too heavyweight. Well, there is some entertainment programming, like this prime-time spinoff of the 30-year-old game show. It features Ice T, Joan Rivers and -- arrrrrgh! My eyes! My eyes!

Traces of the Trade (11 p.m. Tuesday, WPBT-PBS 2) -- Those searches through family roots don't always end happily. Filmmaker Katrina Browne discovered her ancestors were heavily involved in the slave trade. This documentary, airing as part of the PBS series P.O.V., describes what she found and how her relatives reacted.

When I Knew (7:30 p.m. Wednesday, HBO) -- Scores of men and women recall the moment they realized they were gay. And after one of them describes his sexual epiphany while watching television, you will never view The Life and Times of Grizzly Adams quite the same way again.

The Sweet Lady with the Nasty Voice (9:30 p.m. Friday, Smithsonian Channel) -- Annette Funicello to the contrary, girls in the '50s could rock. Watch this documentary about Wanda Jackson, known back then as The Female Elvis Presley, and then see if you can figure out why she's not in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

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

Pretty snippy from a country that gave us 'Benny Hill'

British newspapers are reporting that the United Kingdom has banned Martha Stewart, refusing her request for a visit. I realize anybody who accidentally stumbled onto The Apprentice would lust for a terrible revenge, but the Brits seem to be taking things a bit too far.

'Abduction': a disturbing North Korean spy story

You think George Bush is mistaken about North Korea? Make that argument to Sakie Yokota, whose 13- year-old daughter was kidnapped by North Korean spies while walking home from school in Niigata, Japan, 31 years ago and still hasn't returned. Says Yokota, whose ability to discern right from wrong is unencumbered by the sophisticated sensibilities of diplomacy: ``North Korea is an evil place.''  It is almost inconceivable that anyone who watches Abduction: The Megumi Yokota Story, a documentary airing Thursday as part of the PBS series Independent Lens, will disagree. Read the full review in Thursday's Miami Herald.

118.6 channels and nothin' on

As part of the manic Nielsen urge to count everything -- someday, I'm convinced, the company will attach little black boxes to your lawn to count the leaves of grass there -- they've released a new study that shows that average U.S. home gets 118.6 channels. But the average household only tunes in to 16 of those channels, which explains why a lot of folks are interested in so-called a la carte pricing for cable, in which they would only for the specific channels they order.

Another interesting fact hidden away in the study: Black viewers watch way more TV than anybody else. The average black household watches the tube for 45 hours and 22 minutes a week, compared to the overall American average of 31 hour and 55 minutes. Why that's significant: It accounts for the disappearing black sitcom. Sponsors decided they could do without The Bernie Mac Show, Girlfriends, The Hughleys, The Steve Harvey Show, and My Wife And Kids because they get their messages in front of black viewers on other shows.

Screens: TV the week of June 15

Penn & Teller's Bull- - - -! (10 p.m. Thursday, Showtime) -- America's most hilariously debauched investigative report returns for a sixth season, with erstwhile magicians Penn and Teller screaming insults (well, Penn screams; the silent Teller makes faces) and ruthlessly pranking their interview subjects as they trample on conventional wisdom and sometimes even human decency. (I exaggerate not; they actually trashed Mother Teresa one week.) On the season opener, they bash censorious right-wingers, bluenose feminists and (just because it's easy and fun) boy-toy-turned-moral-crusader Donna Rice as they defend Internet porn. In the next couple weeks, the targets include NASA and the environmental movement. Hey, is anybody still reading this who isn't hopelessly offended? Then move on to the next item. . . .

Weeds (10 p.m. Monday, Showtime) -- Nancy Botwin, the cutest soccer mom /narcotrafficker/blackmailer /accessory-to-murder is reforming: She's no longer a soccer mom. As the blacker-than-black comedy Weeds kicks off its fourth season, Mary-Louise Parker's character has fled the suburbs as a full-blown fugitive from justice, and her family -- such as it is -- is hiding out in a little town near the Mexican border. Do not expect Ozzie, Harriet or the Cleavers to pop in to borrow a cup of sugar.

Psychic Kids: Children Of The Paranormal (10 p.m. Monday, A&E) -- "I see dead people!'' Shut up and do your homework.

OMG! Sextuplets! (10 p.m. Wednesday, WE) -- This new documentary series follows an Arizona couple as they try to conceive and then overdo it a bit. Kind of unrealistic, though: six babies, and not a single psychic or narcotrafficker in the bunch?

Abduction: The Megumi Yokota Story (10 p.m. Thursday, WPBT-PBS 2) -- In 1977, a 13-year-old girl disappeared on her way home from school in Niigata, Japan. It took her parents 20 years to find out what happened: She had been kidnapped, along with a dozen other Japanese, by North Korean spies. Watching this documentary, airing as part of the PBS Independent Lens series, you may find President Bush's label of North Korea as part of an "axis of evil'' to be less fanciful than you thought.

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

'Swingtown' ratings: sex sells -- once, anyway

You evil, defiant viewers disregarded my advice in droves and tuned in to CBS' wife-swapping drama Swingtown Thursday night in big numbers -- bigger, anyway, than those for NBC's superior horror anthology Fear Itself. Swingtown pulled in an audience of 8.6 million, compared to just 5.2 million for Fear Itself. (The night's real winner was the NBA championship game on ABC, which averaged 10.5 million viewers during the 10 p.m. hour when Swingtown and Fear Itself debuted.) My guess is a lot of the eyeballs drawn to Swingtown were there in search of the explicit sex the show seemed to promise and failed utterly to deliver. It will be very interesting to see how many of them return next week.

'Fear Itself' may have vampires, but 'Swingtown' really sucks

Never let it be said that network television ducks the hard questions. Like, what's scarier? Being hung upside down in a barn while an insatiable vampire gorges himself at your throat? Or having group sex while loaded on 'ludes and Gary Wright records? They'll both make you shudder, but the difference is that NBC's new horror anthology series Fear Itself is supposed to be frightening. The grimness of CBS' Swingtown, a chronicle of 1970s wife-swapping culture, is entirely accidental, a byproduct of its relentless fixation on the decadent and the deviant. Read my full review in Wednesday's Miami Herald.

Screen Gems: TV the week of June 1

In Plain Sight (10 p.m. Sunday, USA) -- Watching this new crime drama about the federal witness protection program, you can pretty much toss a coin about who you want to root for: the lousy murderous scum trying to hide out under new identities, or the lousy murderous scum trying to kill them for squealing. Well, there is that nice Mary McCormack (from The West Wing) playing a U.S. marshal. OK, problem solved.

Stonehenge Decoded (9 p.m. Sunday, National Geographic Channel) -- So that's how they did it in the days before The 700 Club and PTL! This documentary argues that Stonehenge was part of a giant Stone Age religious complex that attracted pilgrims from all over the known world.

Swingtown (10 p.m. Thursday, CBS) -- A nice young couple moves to the 'burbs and discovers everybody wants to give them coke and 'ludes and have sex with them. And, no, this new series isn't set in Florida. Molly Parker and Jack Davenport star, if that verb can be used in connection with a show that's practically guaranteed to make you stab yourself in the eyes with red-hot needles.

Lou Dobbs: the reality show

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.

Thursday: Toss another 'Survivor' on the barbie, mate

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?

Remembering some unlikely vets on Memorial Day

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...

See the rest of the list from Monday's Miami Herald.

And you think Christmas shopping starts too early: Welcome to the fall TV season, in May

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.

A big sweeps victory for WPLG

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.

Who says Denise Richards doesn't have a thought in her head?

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.

Grave days at the network upfronts

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.

Why Mayor Daley and Boss Tweed would have been 'American Idol' fans

Those Nielsen folks, who apparently have a lot of times on their hands, have just finished studying American Idol fans who vote via text messages. They averaged 38 votes apiece during the month of April. No wonder it bugs Pakistan and Venezuela when we lecture them about clean elections.

The final upfront: a muscular Fox adds just two new shows

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.

Fox: getting itchy about 'American Idol'

              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."

The return of '24'

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: corpses, comics but no 'Cane'

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.

'Shark' extinction

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.

Brat power at The CW

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.

A stake through the heart for 'Moonlight'

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?

ABC's fall lineup: only two new shows

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 officially destroys the last shred of human dignity

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.

New life for 'Reaper' and 'The Unit', and a new network for 'Scrubs'

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.

Hello, 'Eli Stone'...and goodbye, 'October Road' and 'Women's Murder Club'

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.

NOT 'Back To You'

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.

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.

Screen Gems: TV the week of May 4

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.

'Jericho': The show that will not die

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.

Good news, I guess: A judge rules you can't copyright big boobs, promiscuity or stupidity

It is surely a sign of the apocalypse that people would be hiring lawyers to fight over who thought up South Beach, the last drama to have premiered on the late and unlamented UPN network. Here's what I wrote when the show started its run in 2006:

Maybe the best way to explain UPN's new drama South Beach is to tell you that when Vanessa
Williams warns a young model that "South Beach will eat you alive, " I fully expected the next scene to be a horde of zombie parking attendants chewing the entrails of half-naked girls in the lobby of the Delano. Cannibalism is about the only thing missing from this delirious new trashfest of hard bodies and soft brains.

Like a misanthropic video postcard to the world, South Beach shimmers with civic depravity and dysfunction. Boobs. Cocaine ("the real South Beach diet"). Santeria. Boobs. Rollerblades. Cuban gangsters. Oily pecs. Exhibitionist bimbos. Dolce & Gabbana suits (fitted by mincing and very hands-on tailors). Crazed old people squawking about erectile dysfunction. Really, what more could you want to know about South Florida? Wait, did I mention the boobs?

Not that South Beach makes us look bad -- heavens, no. It presents South Florida as a profoundly democratic land of opportunity, where a dumb kid from Brooklyn can show up and a single day later have a job spritzing the butts of poolside models. And a day after that, he's a Mafia capo, because, hey, South Beach is not just about the sex. Though I should mention the boobs.

In short, it was hardly the sort of thing anybody wanted to take credit for. UPN was so mortified by what it had done that it went out of business a couple of weeks after South Beach went on the air. And you'd think that Jennifer Lopez would admit that her butt swallowed a Volkswagen before she'd confess that she was executive producer of the thing.

But you'd be wrong. A writer named Jack Bunick has been wrangling with Lopez and CBS (which owned UPN) in federal court in New York for two years, claiming they swiped the idea from him. On Wednesday, a judge ruled against him, saying that Chernobyl-sized boobs and gluttonous consumption of cocaine are to South Beach what sand is to the Sahara -- purely generic. Now, if we could just get to the bottom of who was responsible for Kid Nation...

Ratings worries at 'American Idol'

American Idol is, for the first time, showing a little bit of Nielsen wear-and-tear. Though the show is still the biggest thing on TV, averaging about 29 million viewers per show, that figure is down 7 percent from last season. And the slippage gains significance when you consider that Idol this season has mostly aired against reruns and tepid reality shows thrown together to fill airtime emptied by the Hollywood writers' strike.

Executives at Fox, where the entire schedule is built around Idol, have taken note. The trade journal Broadcasting & Cable reported Monday that the network is circulating a marketing survey to viewers asking about potential changes to the show, including tinkering with the audition episodes, expanding -- or contracting -- the role of Ryan Seacrest, and of course just how much of Idol's bilious and/or airheaded judges anybody wants to see. For instance, viewers are asked how strongly they agree with the statement, "I watch American Idol mostly to hear what Paula has to say." More sensible might have been, "I watch American Idol mostly to see if Paula will pass out face-down in her 'Coke' cup." Or, "I want American Idol mostly to guess which contestant(s) Paul has slept with."

More evidence that reality TV is damaging our brains

The nice folks at TV.com just polled their users to ask on which reality show they would most like to be a contestant. Some of the answers were not surprising -- 39 percent chose a round-the-world trip on The Amazing Race. Some were hopeful -- only 15 percent picked American Idol, which seems to indicate the potential for future William Hungs is diminishing. But an alarming 14 percent said they wanted to be locked up on a desert island with a bunch of sociopathic morons -- that is, Survivor. And 13 percent said Beauty and the Geek, which strongly suggests that 13 percent of TV.com's users are geeks

What was it P.T. Barnum used to say?

It's hard to know which is more amazing: that two TV networks would simultaneously decide that what viewers really want is a celebrity circus show, or that one of them would back down. Both NBC and ABC had glommed onto the idea after Celebrity Circus, in which B-list Latin stars trained with a real circus, scored big ratings in Argentina and Portugal. NBC bought the rights to a U.S. version, while ABC acquired a planned remake of Circus of the Stars, a hit as an annual special on CBS during the 1980s. Both shows seemed headed to the air this fall.

Ordinarily when two networks come up with the same idea, they fight to death over it -- and the stupider the show, the fiercer the combat. For example, in 2002, when ABC and Fox were both developing game shows in which contestants answered questions while being literally tortured, they filed lawsuits against one another and ran tapings into the wee hours of the morning in a desperate race to get on the air first. Result: ABC's The Chair ran nine episodes, Fox's The Chamber three. (It's possibly no coincidence that the torture-chamber concept had also been a hit overseas, on the BBC.)

This time around, though, one of the networks blinked: ABC has just pulled the plug on Circus of the Stars. Supposedly there just weren't enough big stars to go around for two circus shows. Sadly, I guess that means there will be no bidding war for Erik Estrada, Pia Zadora and Jan-Michael Vincent.

A summer of wife-swapping at CBS

Swingtown, a CBS drama about a suburban wife-swapping club, is finally making it to the air. The series was originally set to air this spring, was one of the first casualties of the Hollywood writers' strike. But now CBS says Swingtown -- created by Six Feet Under producer Alan Poul -- will debut June 5 as part of the network's summer schedule. It's one of two new dramas CBS is adding during the summer. The other, Flashpoint, is a Canadian cop show.

The rest of the summer slate is the usual mix of reality and game shows, including Million Dollar Password with Regis Philbin, a new martial-arts version of Saturday Night Fights, a game where contestants are challenged to come up with product jingles, and The Greatest American Dog -- which is about canines, not television production.

'Secret Talents Of The Stars' canceled

CBS has canceled Secret Talents Of The Stars, a bizarre parallel-universe version of Amateur Hour in which you saw stuff like Star Trek's Lt. Sulu singing country ballads, after just a single episode. Even in these days of People Meters and Nielsen overnights, that's a mighty quick hook. Only 10 broadcast network series have been shut down after just one showing: You’re in the Picture (CBS, 1961), Turn-On (ABC, 1969), Co-Ed Fever (ABC, 1979), South of Sunset (CBS, 1993), Public Morals (CBS, 1996), Lawless (Fox, 1997), Dot Comedy (ABC, 2000), The Will (CBS, 2005) and Emily’s Reasons Why Not (ABC, 2006). Though CBS, with five of the 10, is the quickest network to sniff blood, ABC still gets the award for itchiest trigger finger. Turn-On, a ripoff of NBC's top-rated Laugh-In, was actually canceled after half an episode because so many managers at affiliate stations were phoning network headquarters to scream threats. Now you know why Tim Conway, the guest host of that first and only episode, was reduced to making those Dorf on Golf videotapes.

Fangs for nothing, 'Moonlight' fans

These campaigns to save TV shows from cancellation are getting out of hand. All those peanuts sent to CBS on behalf of Jericho were one thing, but now fans of the network's vampire drama Moonlight, worried that it's on the chopping block, are sending blood -- 3,000 pints so far. This would be a far more interesting item if they were mailing it directly to CBS programming honcho Nina Tassler, but the recipient is instead the Red Cross. So far. Moonlight, by the way, returns with four new episodes starting April 25.

How to watch 'Friday Night Lights' four months early

NBC wants to use its telecast of the 2009 Super Bowl as a platform to launch the new season of Saturday Night Lights, so the show's third season won't start until sometime next February. But you can watch it four months earlier if you subscribe to Direct TV's satellite service. New episodes of Friday Night Lights -- the same ones NBC will show in 2009 -- will begin airing on Direct TV's channel 101 on Oct. 1.

A couple of months ago, when it looked like a second season of marginal ratings had doomed Friday Night Lights, Hollywood was abuzz with gossip that it would move to Direct TV, which is hoping to lure customers away from satellite rival Dish Network with original programming. Apparently that was too expensive a proposition for Direct TV, and instead an agreement was hammered out to split production costs with NBC. "We're beyond thrilled that we have structured an innovative deal that allows us to continue to produce and air this beloved series,'' said NBC programming boss Ben Silverman in announcing the return of Friday Night Lights.

Silverman called the deal "a win-win for NBC, Universal Media Studios and Direct TV, not to mention the many passionate fans who adore Friday Night Lights." No doubt about the fans; whatever happens later, they at least get a third season of original episodes. As for everybody else, we'll see. How many new subscribers will this really bring to Direct TV? And how many viewers will still be left by the time Friday Nights Lights begins airing on NBC, especially with bootleg copies recorded from Direct TV zipping all around the Internet?

Another 'Saturday Night Live' spinoff -- and one from 'The Office,' too

Forget Must-See TV -- NBC seems to be rebranding its comedy bloc Thursday Night Live. The fall lineup unveiled by the network Wednesday (NBC has bagged its upfront, the traditional May meeting with advertisers where new programming is previewed) includes not only SNL alum Tina Fey's 30 Rock but a half-hour version SNL's Weekend Update mock newscast that Fey used to write and star in. Both shows will air on Thursday night

The return of 30 Rock, a sitcom set backstage at an SNL-type program, was by no means a sure thing: The show is much-praised and little-watched. But NBC doesn't exactly seem awash in original ideas right now. Its new lineup is heavy on spinoffs, remakes, spare footage of its existing shows, and most anything else the NBC pages could find while rummaging through the dumpsters behind the building.

Consider:

*an untitled spinoff from The Office, itself a remake of a British show.

*a remake of the 1980s supercar drama Knight Rider.

*an American version of Kath & Kim, an Australian sitcom about the suburbs.

*Most Outrageous Moments, a collection of bloopers from other NBC shows, which in the case of stuff like Knight Rider may be almost indistinguishable from what made it to air.

*Crusoe, based on the Daniel Defoe novel that was a bestseller -- in 1719.

*Merlin, a fantasy series set in Camelot, which was a bestseller about 500 years earlier than that.

*The Philanthropist, a drama about a renegade billionaire who gives money away to people in a jam, which sounds suspiciously like an inflation-adjusted version of the 1955 CBS series The Millionaire, in which an eccentric and perpetually off-screen rich guy named John Beresford Tipton sent million-dollar checks to the unsuspecting.

There were also a handful of slightly less familiar new entries in the NBC lineup, including My Own Worst Enemy, a spy drama starring Christian Slater; Kings, starring Ian McShane, set in a city under siege; The Listener, about a telepathic medic; and a couple of reality shows, Shark Taggers and America's Toughest Jobs.

Returning to the NBC lineup: Heroes, Friday Night Lights, Chuck, My Name Is Earl, Lipstick Jungle, American Gladiators, Life, several hundred versions of Law & Order and -- one last time -- ER. Among the canceled are Bionic Woman, Las Vegas and Journeyman.

TV odds 'n ends -- mostly odds

Watching Fox's Unhitched Sunday night, I knew I was in for a very special episode when the show was preceded by title card: "No rats were harmed in the filming of this episode. In fact, several were invited to the wrap party." Sure enough, in the first scene, a rat gets microwaved. For nine minutes.

In a possibly related matter, ABC announced Monday that its summer lineup will include a program called I Survived A Japanese Game Show.

NBC renews 'Friday Night Lights'

Friday Night Lights star Kyle Chandler says NBC has picked up the show for a third season and production will resume in June. No word on which characters are being decapitated and/or resusciated.

Fox scientists discover a cure for decapitation

Remember how Bobby Ewing returned from the dead after 12 months and kissed off the show's entire 1986-87 season with the blithe assurance that it was all a dream: "None of that happened." Well, looks like something like that is happening again over at Fox, where Sarah Wayne Callies is returning to the cast of Prison Break after a year off triggered by a vicious contract dispute. Only the anally retentive and disputatious are likely to protest that her character, Dr. Sara Tancredi, got killed last year. Killed, in fact, doesn't begin to cover it -- her head got chopped off! Put in a box! Mailed to her boyfriend's brother! No matter, she's back. Maybe this means Ted Williams will play for the Red Sox again after all.

Fox cancels 'The Return Of Jezebel James'

The Return Of Jezebel James, Fox's singularly unfunny sitcom, has been canceled after just three episodes. Things aren't looking so hot for the network's much-better legal drama Canterbury's Law, either. Poor ratings in its original Monday time slot have banished Canterbury's Law to Friday nights, the Siberia of American television. The show is getting one last chance: With the cancellation of Jezebel James, its new lead-in will be reruns of Bones, which should bring in viewers who are not only more numerous but more compatible with Canterbury.

'Prison Break' renewed

A lot of viewers grumbled about moving the local to Panama, the ratings were mediocre (and just barely that) and only 12 episodes made it to air because of the writers' strike. But Fox has nonetheless renewed its drama Prison Break for a fourth season.

'Jericho': Canceled again

Jericho has bitten the dust for a second and no doubt final time. When CBS killed the show (about life in a small Kansas town after a nuclear war) after last spring's cliff-hanging season finale, enraged fans bombarded network programming boss Nina Tassler with tons of peanuts. (A play off a line in the show.) Tassler relented, and the show returned last month for a seven-episode mini-season. But against the weak competition left in network television's own version of a post-apocalyptic landscape, a prime-time schedule populated mostly by reality shows and reruns, Jericho couldn't pull in the viewers. Tassler, in a press release issued Friday afternoon, said the March 25 episode will be the show's last -- and made it clear last spring's nuttiness won't be repeated. "Without question, there are passionate viewers watching this program," she observed. "We simply wish there were more."

Ivan Dixon, RIP

Ivan Dixon, who died over the weekend at age 76 of complications from kidney failure, is best known to American television audiences as Sgt. James Kinchloe, the only non-weird member of the group of  American POWs in the World War II sitcom Hogan's Heroes that aired on CBS from 1965 to 1971. He also had a memorable role as the leader of a band of anti-communist guerrillas in the 1987 ABC miniseries Amerika, set in a United States conquered by the Soviet Union. And viewers who obsessively study the fine print of the credits know that he later worked behind the camera, directing countless episodes of shows like Magnum, P.I. and The Rockford Files. (The photo to the right -- with actress Diana Sands -- is from a 1967 guest role on The Fugitive.)

But I'll always remember him for a CBS Playhouse production called The Final War Of Olly Winter. Airing in early 1967, it was almost certainly the first television drama to deal with the Vietnam War, and among the first to intelligently grapple with America's growing racial divide. Winter gave a stunning performance as Sgt. Olly Winter, a career GI left alone in the jungle after a Viet Cong ambush wipes out his unit. As he tries to make his way back to safety, he's joined by a young Vietnamese girl of uncertain intentions who speaks no English. Winter nonetheless carries on a conversation with her as they creep toward American lines, musing about his life, his family, the wars he's fought in and his future -- if, as Winter is painfully aware, he has one.

The Final War Of Olly Winter was a work of extraordinary ambition and courage in both political and dramatic terms. A TV show in which only one character spoke English -- for 90 minutes! -- was unheard of, and so was a TV show that voiced doubt (however mild it would probably seem in retrospect) about an ongoing American war. Watching it was my first clue that television might mean something more than a few laughs or an hour of flying lead. Dixon's performance (nominated for an Emmy) was so remarkably affecting that, four decades later, it was the first thing I thought of when I heard of his death.

Sadly, there was some kind of screwup over the rights to the screenplay, and The Final War Of Olly Winter has never been seen again since it was broadcast on Jan. 29, 1967. The only surviving copy I've ever heard of is in an archive of Vietnam War films at Wellesley College. I don't know if the legal complications can ever be untangled at this late date, but some enterprising DVD company ought to give it a shot. It was too powerful a work to be lost forever.

Beverly Hills, 90210, part 2

The CW, which hasn't had a lot of luck introducing original dramas, is pondering a well-known retread. The network has a rather late-breaking spinoff of Beverly Hills, 90210 -- which left the air eight years ago -- in development. Veronica Mars creator Rob Thomas is reportedly writing the new show.

Vincent Price, Casey Kasem and Peter Cottontail

Looking for an old-fashioned TV Easter? Well, Charlton Heston will part the Red Sea as usual in The Ten Commandments on ABC on March 22. But this year there's another option: Classic Media has just released a DVD of the 1971 TV special Here Comes Peter Cottontail, which used to be another ABC Easter perennial. Produced by the same animators who did Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer, it's also got the voices of Vincent Price, Danny Kaye and Casey Kasem.