Who let the dogs out?

Here's a review of Fox's new cop drama K-Ville, which is so awful that I've expected it to be the first show canceled this fall. But I could be wrong -- another crummy Fox show that debuted Friday, the pseudoreality Nashville, which drew a paltry 2.7 million viewers and was beaten by such dreary fare as a rerun of America's Funniest Home Videos. Worse yet, it squandered nearly half the audience from its lead-in, Are You Smarter Than A 5th Grader? That's the kind of thing that sends chills through the hearts of network programmers. Another outing like that one and Nashville could be gone by this time next week.

The fall TV preview is here!

It won't be in the Miami Herald until Sunday, but anybody whose life is so empty that they're reading this blog on a Saturday deserves a break. So our fall TV preview is already up and online, and you don't even have to shell out a buck to buy the paper. And anyway, thanks to our techie elves, the online version is a lot cooler anyway -- the reviews of the show have been packaged with videos from the networks in this amazing interactive preview site. (The Cliffs Notes version: The best new shows are Cane and Pushing Daisies. And that photo on the left is of Blake Lively from the delicious teen melodrama Gossip Girl.) There are also stories about broadcast television's new love affair with the geek, the big changes on Law & Order and some other shows, the woman cable TV fears most, and war fever at PBS. Just don't blame me for Cavemen or K-Ville.

Godzilla vs. Megalon, Osama vs. W, and now Stossel vs. Hansen

The entertainment divisions of ABC and NBC have been in an official state of war ever since NBC unceremoniously dumped head programmer Kevin Reilly earlier this summer. Reilly and ABC programming chief Steve McPherson are old college buddies, and McPherson has been scathing in his denunciations of new NBC boss Ben Silverman -- not just for replacing Reilly, but also for hiring Isaiah Washington, fired from ABC's Grey's Anatomy for homosexual slurs against another member of the cast. "When someone stabs your best friend in the back, you don't buy it," McPherson said during the critics' press tour in Los Angeles last month.

Now the war is spreading to new theaters of combat -- the news divisions. ABC's 20/20 is working on a story about the pedophile vigilanteism of the To Catch A Predator segments on NBC's Dateline. An ABC unit is in Texas right now, reporting on a To Catch A Predator segment last year that ended with the suicide of one of the men lured into a sting operation. Coming soon: Meredith Viera and Diane Sawyer pull each other's hair out, eventually followed by McPherson and 20/20's John Stossel in a tag-team Ultimate Fighting match against Silverman and To Catch A Predator's Chris Hansen, with the winners eating the livers of the losers.

Dirty old men need jobs, too

I've just been watching the pilot of Showtime's new comedy Californication, starring David Duchovny as a writer who moves from New York to Los Angeles and goes into a hilariously dissolute downward spiral of sex, drugs, booze and more sex. (The show debuts Monday at 10:30 p.m.; you'll be able to read a review here on Sunday.) And it reminded me of something Duchovny said last month during the TV critics' press tour. A critic, noting that Duchovny's character unwittingly goes to bed with a 16-year-old, asked how it felt "to be playing the first male lead in TV series history who has sex with a minor." Duchovny thought about a moment, then replied: "I gotta update my resume."

Hollywood in one simple lesson

People often ask me what it's like covering television. The answer is, like this...

At a panel for ABC's Grey's Anatomy spinoff Private Practice, a critic asked cast member Tim Daly -- who last season starred in The Nine, a serialized drama quickly yanked by ABC -- if it was deflating to work on a show built around a mystery that's never resolved. "Is it frustrating to do that kind of series and then realize there's never going to be a payoff?" the critic asked.

Daly, looking thoughtful, began to reply. "Well, first of all --" and then suddenly he stopped, eyes staring off into the distance. After a lonnnnnnnnnng pause, he continued: "I'm trying to think of a way to congratulate myself on my Emmy nomination."

Funny, sounds like my boss

Chi McBride, one of the stars of the new ABC comedy Reaper, was asked what it's like working for Executive Producer Barry Sonnenfeld. Explained McBride: "Barry's the kind of guy that would say, 'You know, some people see the glass half empty. Some see it half full. I see half a glass of poison.'"

Sabre-tooth tigers? No, just critics

When it comes to picking the most despised pilot of the upcoming fall broadcast season among critics, it's no contest: everybody hates ABC's Cavemen, which expands those Geico commercials into a half-hour sitcom. (Personally, I think Fox's belligerant cop drama K-Ville is worse, but I'm in the distinct minority.) So when the producers of Cavemen showed up on the press tour, it was a little bit like a parade of baby seals entering a Canadian village: The clubs were swinging from all directions. Here's my story.

Stop the presses! Confirm or deny! Get me rewrite!

You probably think television critics lie around all day eating chocolates and watching TV. Well, yeah, but we're also trained journalism professionals. We get our teeth into the story. We can scream confirm or deny! just as good as Woodward, Bernstein or Carl Kolchak.

Don't believe me? Listen to the coverup we sniffed out and busted Wednesday. ABC programming boss Stephen McPherson had the misfortune to be on the morning panel after a night with no catered dinner (that's what it means when they say a reporter is hungry, right?, and he paid the price. It started with a critic confronting McPherson with a rumor she'd heard that an announcement will be made Thursday at a San Diego comic book convention ("Comic-Con," we call it in our secret hip newshound lingo) about a cast change on Lost. "They do have some announcements," McPherson admitted nervously.

"Well, can you tell us?" the critic demanded. "No," McPherson said, beads of sweat breaking out on his forehead.

"I don't think my editor is going to be very happy," another critic interjected. Threats are never pretty, but sometimes they're the only way.

Shouted a third, brandishing a copy of the First Amendment like a crucifix to a vampire as McPherson cowered back from the podium: "What's the point of having 150 reporters with access to millions of readers sitting here?"

McPherson, whimpering, tried another tack. "Okay, I'll give you the announcement," he said. "I cast Don Imus on Lost." Ha! Like we don't have a million years of collective experience at shrugging off sarcasm from editors. "Are we not important enough for you?" a critic thundered. "Or do you just not want to talk to us?"

The tearful McPherson cracked. "Harold Perrineau is returning to the show," he screamed as a phalanx of ABC publicists threw their bodies into the line of fire, protecting him from the baleful glances we fired his way. It was too late; American journalism had once again afflicted the comfortable and comforted the afflicted. We had our story. Man, if we'd been on Watergate, it would have been over by the first weekend.

PS: Here's a picture of Harold Perrineau, being escorted to his press conference by a crack squadron of TV critics. In case you've forgotten who he is.

PPS: Hey, all you geeks who paid $200 to get into Comic-Con for an exclusive news break on your favorite show, nyah-nyah-nyah.

Be afraid, 'Desperate Housewives' fans, be very afraid

Dana Delany and Nathan Fillion are joining the cast of Desperate Housewives this season, which pretty much dooms it. Delany is a terrific actress -- she won two Emmys for China Beach -- but her last three series (Pasadena, Presidio Med and Kidnapped) have lasted a total of something like 15 episodes, less than a full season. Fillion, meanwhile, has joined two series that promptly died (Two Guys, A Girl And A Pizza Place and Buffy The Vampire Slayer) and starred in two more that didn't make it through a full season (Firefly and Drive). About the only hope for Desperate Housewives is that the ancient Nielsen curses on Delany and Fillion will cancel each other out.

Maybe this is why John Travolta is wearing a dress in 'Hairspray'?

Wondering why female movie stars like Holly Hunter and Glenn Close are suddenly turning up in TV series? Julianna Margulies, who's also returning to TV on Fox's legal drama Canterbury's Law six years after she left E.R., says television is more female-friendly. The meaty roles are increasingly for women, she says, with men relegated to nice but piffly background parts.

"Nothing personal, but it's about time. I am so sick of every script I get for a film, it's the girlfriend of, the wife of," Margulies says. "It's always the shadow... Women aren't seen for their full potential in film the way they are in television. So to be in the company of Holly Hunter and Glenn Close, I get why they're doing their shows. They're not getting offered that in film."

Margulies said she was reluctant to take the role in Canterbury's Law because weekly hour-long dramas are done on a killer schedule. But she eventually concluded that even if TV is a grind, it's the best place for her. "If you're artistic and you want to work and you want to work with good people, for women, television is a great medium," she said. It's the real gift of television -- that it celebrates women."

Toilet journalism

Fox is circulating among critics the pilot episode of Canterbury's Law, a legal drama starring Julianna Margulies that's scheduled to debut sometime after the first of the year. Magulies is a bad-girl defense attorney who breaks all the rules -- and just to make sure the audience understands that, she even pursues a male colleague into the men's room to argue about a case. "Why are TV writers so fascinated with men's bathrooms?" asked a critic. "Virtually every drama, especially courtroom dramas, has a scene with men in the bathroom."

Walon Green, one of the show's executive producers, was johnny-on-the-spot with an answer."The urinal is actually an ideal place to shoot something, because it's not a stall," he explained professorially. "It's not enclosed. It's open. It offers opportunities for different angles and good [camera] coverage, and there's also sound potential." And you probably thought it was just the smutty sense of humor of TV producers.

It's a good thing they don't have the Internet in Greenland

One more of these and this blog will add a new category, Actors Who Thought Their Wives Couldn't Read Or Writer. At a panel on the new Fox show New Amsterdam, about a 400-year-old cop, the discussion veered off into a discussion of the nature of true love -- not because TV critics are acutely philosophical (typical tour question: "Friedrich Nietzsche, wasn't that the guy Monica dated during the first season of Friends?) but because the cop in the show has been placed under an Indian spell that makes him immortal until the day he finds the love of his life.

That seemed simple enough until the producers mentioned that the cop has been in love many times already over the past 400 years. But he hasn't found true love. Well, we wondered, how are we supposed to know when that happens? Will he start walking funny, or what? That set off Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, the Danish actor who plays the copy. "Isn't that the question that all of us ask?" he said. "I mean, I'm married. Sometimes I love my wife to bits. Other times I go, 'This can't be it.'" To the collective gasp in the room, he responded confidently: "She's in Greenland. She's not going to read what you write."

Could this guy choose the next president of the United States?

On CNN Monday night, the Democratic presidential candidates will square off in a debate where the questions come not from the usual assortment of TV talking heads but from videos that regular people (the term being used loosely in some cases) have posted on YouTube. Read all about it.

Two reasons why 'Back To You' is going to be a hit

Most critics, when we heard about Fox's fall sitcom Back To You, were skeptical about its shopworn premise -- a pompous, airhead anchorman raises havoc in a crummy local television news department. We've seen that a few hundred times, if not a few thousand. But the show's going to be a hit, and the top two reasons were on display at a Back To You panel Sunday: the stars, Kelsey Grammer and Patricia Heaton. These two don't have to reinvent the sitcom to get laughs; they are just funny, funny people.

Heaton, for example, was asked why she took the part. "I was doing this play in New York for 600 bucks a week, and they said there's this sitcom," she replied, "and I said, 'Yes, whatever it is!''' (Interjected Executive Producer Steven Levitan, dryly: "That's very flattering, Patty.") Then someone noted to Grammer that many stars of classic sitcoms like Seinfeld and Friends get out of the genre when the shows end, saying they can't possibly top what they've already done. To which Grammer acidly observed: ""I think it might be actually accurate that they've done all they possibly could."

And finally, when a critic noted on the oddity that two of Hollywood's famously few Republicans, Grammer and Heaton, would wind up on the same show, Grammer cracked: "We couldn't find anybody else that would work with us."

Now just imagine what happens when Heaton and Grammer start working with writers.

   

Which network am I working at today?

The critics' press tour often gets a little weird toward the end. For instance, a couple of years ago, the star of one show got drunk on the next to last night and threw himself naked into the swimming pool, which might not count as weird if it were Charlie Sheen, but this guy was from PBS. So, as we stagger into the final week, I guess shouldn't have been surprised that Sunday morning's questions to Fox programming executives seemed mostly to be about NBC shows like Friday Night Lights.

That's because Fox's new chief programmer, Kevin Reilly, worked at NBC until he was fired a few weeks ago. Well, NBC says he wasn't fired, they just paid him several million dollars to quit showing up at the office. Reilly managed to keep a straight face when a critic asked him about that Sunday. "No one's really ever fired in Hollywood, are they?" he mused. "And no show is ever really canceled...

"You can pick whatever trade euphemism you want. I segued. I thought about it over the holidays. I want to explore other opportunities. I want to spend more time with my family, which I did, for three days."

After helping to build FX from an unknown and virtually unwatched channel of reruns into a basic-cable powerhouse on the strength of shows like The Shield and Nip/Tuck, Reilly jumped to NBC in 2003, just as the network's aging schedule was about to implode. The programs that had kept NBC in the top spot all those years were either departing (Friends and Frasier) or slowing down with advanced cases of creative arthritis (E.R.). And nothing new was in the pipeline. Reilly's arrival wound up coinciding with NBC's tumble from first to fourth in the Nielsen ratings.

Reilly brought plenty of quality replacements to the air, from 30 Rock to Friday Night Lights to Studio 60 On The Sunset Strip, but unfortunately they arrived without viewers. In an oddly timed moved last month after Reilly had just finished putting together NBC's new fall schedule, the network dumped him. Before he could even file for unemployment, Fox (whose entertainment chairman Peter Liguori worked with Reilly at FX) scooped him up. Now he's in the peculiar position of trying to destroy the NBC schedule he created, while boosting a Fox schedule he had nothing do with.

Reilly's deep familiarity with NBC's fall schedule, and the fact that he had literally nothing to do with Fox's, led to an avalanche of questions about the network he used to work for. Reilly patiently answered them all, without either getting too waspish about NBC or making it too obvious how sick of the whole subject he must be. "You're going to make Kevin spend more time on the couch with these kind of questions,'' Liguori joked. "Just picking at that scab, aren't you?"

Only a couple of times did Reilly indirectly suggest that he found NBC a frustrating experience. One came when a critic, asking about the differences in corporate cultures at the two networks, noted that Fox has a quicker trigger finger on new shows that start slowly in the ratings, while NBC was famous for nurturing such late bloomers as Hill Street Blues and Seinfeld into eventual hits.

"There is a history of great shows that started at the bottom that worked to the top" at NBC, Reilly agreed wistfully. "I personally had wished that that history was a little bit more fresh in people's minds and was a little bit more wired into the current environment." A reasonable translation might be, NBC's unaccustomed spot at the bottom of the heap has kept it a perpetual state of panic the past four years.

Another telling moment: Asked what he liked about Fox, Reilly called it "a restless company...an entrepreneurial company...You never rest on your laurels at Fox." Unspoken was the obvious: That was precisely what NBC did before Reilly's arrival, with network boss Jeff Zucker putting an enormous amount of time, effort and creativity into dragging the reluctant cast of Friends back its last couple of seasons, and much less breeding a stable of replacements.

But Reilly stayed away from that kind of talk. He even confessed to a lingering fondness for the shows he helped develop for this fall's NBC lineup. "I love the talent involved in those shows,'' he said. "I would like the best for them." Corrected his pal and boss Ligouri: "I want them all to be bloody failures."

David Chase finally clears up the end of 'The Sopranos'

David Chase stopped by the critics' press tour Saturday night to pick up a couple of awards, and he offered three helpful hints for understanding that ending of The Sopranos. Here they are, in order:

"Here's another clue for you all -- the Walrus was Pauly."

To critic Alan Sepinwall of the Newark Star-Ledger: "You're from New Jersey, right? Would you tell everybody that is is possible -- in fact, very likely -- to be sitting in a restaurant in New Jersey and everything just stops?'

And finally:

"Somebody said it would be a good idea if we said something about the ending. I really wasn't going to go into it. But I'll just say this ... When I was going to Stanford University graduate film school, 23 years old, I went and saw Planet of the Apes with my wife. When the movie was over I said, 'Wow, so they had a Statue of Liberty, too.' So that's what you're up against."

What a relief! No space aliens in the Everglades after all

Remember ABC's drama Invasion a couple of years ago, in which murderous hybrid gill people teemed through the Everglades snatching the bodies of innocent South Floridians (oxymoron alert!) and even took over Homestead? We thought they were space aliens, but that turns out to have been a tragically false smear on the civic reputation of Homestead. Tyler Labine, who played the conspiracy nut Dave Groves, says the truth would have come out if Invasion had been picked up for a second season.

"You would have found out it was not at all an alien invasion, but an evolutionary step," said Labine, who was on the critics' press tour to promote his new CW show Reaper. "It was all based on an evolutionary divide here on Earth -- water people, land people." So human civilization was being threatened not by space alients, but by fish. Well, as Emily Litella used to say, never mind.

'Jericho' nuts, one more time

CBS this week handed out big bags of peanuts to all the critics who attended a panel on Jericho. This was not an act of extraordinary generosity. CBS has 40,000 pounds of peanuts lying around its offices that Jericho sent in during the successful campaign to save their show. That's 20 tons of peanuts. That's 8 million peanuts. They were mostly shipped by a company called Nuts Online, which you may now safely assume is the biggest corporate fan of Jericho in the universe.

Jericho cast members, though they thought the campaign was great, wouldn't have made nuts the designated item of protest. Asked what they would have chosen, Skeet Ulrich promptly replied: "Snakes." Disagreed Lennie James: "Strippers." James, in fact, says he's going to set up an online delivery service called Strippersthatbounce.com to reap windfall profits the next time Jericho is canceled.

Honest, he was just KIDDING, Mrs. Labine

One of the more innovative new shows this fall is Reaper, The CW's comedy about an aimless slacker who discovers on his 21st birthday that his parents sold his soul to the devil before he was born. (Kinda puts the time your dad grounded you for coming home late from the movies into perspective, doesn't it?) During a panel discussion on Reaper Friday, a critic asked each member of the cast to offer a personal definition of Hell. Tyler Labine, who plays the best friend of the damned slacker, pondered the question fruitlessly for several moments before brightening. "I just got married,'' he replied. As the room erupted into laughter, Labine suddenly grasped the folly of comparing his wife to Satan in a room full of people with cameras, tape recorders and laptops. "My wife is going to [bleep]ing kill me," he moaned.

The CW, aka The Bimbos R Us Network

Programming boss Dawn Ostroff -- and please note the spelling of her first name, no Y chromosomes involved here -- announced a couple of new reality shows that will make it to The CW season. One is The Farmer Wants A Wife, in which a bunch of cute but bubble-headed city girls will compete to win the favor of a Midwestern farmer. The other is Crowned: The Mother Of All Pageants, a tawdry, booty-shaking beauty contest for mother-and-daughter teams.

Add those two to the returning slate of CW reality programs: Beauty And The Geek (where the persistent theme is that boys can have big brains and girls can have big boobs), the godawful Pussycat Dolls Present: The Search For The Next Doll and the self-explanatory America's Next Top Model. Then throw in the fact that The CW has just canceled two dramas about intelligent, self-reliant women, Veronica Mars and Gilmore Girls.

If this were Spike or The Troglodyte Channel, maybe none the shows I've just mentioned would matter. But The CW's target audience is women aged 18 to 34, and the network's executives also brag about the number of younger teenage girls its programming pulls in. What, exactly, is The CW telling all those women? That a well-rounded butt is the key to success and happiness for women? That mammaries are destiny?

I'm not one who believes that television programming is supposed to be about social responsibility or providing good role models. The point of TV is entertainment, not social engineering. But the sheer mass of bimbolina programming on The CW, and the absence of any countervailing vision, makes me shudder. If I had a daughter, you can bet that I'd be rooting around in my TiVo user's guide, trying to figure out how to block the channel from my television.

Of course, what do I know? I'm a guy, I lack feminist vision. Ostroff, an actual certified woman, says she's proud of The CW's reality shows. "I think they're aspirational in many ways to what our young audience is looking for," she insists. "It's really all about relationships....I feel proud of taking people from very different walks of life and putting them together in different environments and letting people see how much we really all have in common." Like, reverence for a C cup.

Breaking hoochie news

I am shocked, shocked, to report that Asia Nitollano, the young woman who won the competition on The CW's search-for-the-next Pussycat Doll reality show last spring, didn't join the group. Even though that was the prize for winning. I guess "prize" should have quotes around it in this case.

Nonetheless, The CW is bringing the show back next season, perhaps as The Search For The Next Girl Who Has Too Much Sense To Join The Pussycat Dolls.

Ending the Sunday-night NFL blues

It happens every fall: NFL games on Fox and CBS run long, screwing up the Sunday night's prime-time schedule -- especially for anybody who has TiVo or another DVR service. You think your TiVo is going to pick up Cold Case only to discover that it started 20 minutes late and your recording doesn't include the end of the show.

Well, CBS is doing something about it. This fall, by registering at www.CBS.com, www.CBSNews.com, or www.Sportsline.com, you can sign up for a new service called CBS Eye-lert. It will send you an email or a phone text-message any time one of the network's games runs past 7 p.m. The message will give the specific start time for all the prime-time shows affected by the late game. CBS is also working with TiVo to offer an option that would automatically reprogram your TiVo settings anytime a game runs late, but that's still a ways off.

Now, if CBS could just figure out a way to send text messages alerting us to when the Dolphins will develop a running game...

Emmys!

Here's a story on Thursday's Emmy nominations, which includes a shocking discovery that Neil Patrick Harris made when he Googled himself. Don't try this at home, kids.

'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."

Star wars

Ordinarily CBS police procedurals bore me to madness, but they've been pretty exciting this summer -- though not for anything that happened on the air. First the network had to fire Don Bellisario, the creator of NCIS, after the show's star Mark Harmon delivered a him-or-me ultimatum. Then Mandy Patinkin, the star of Criminal Minds, stopped showing up for work and eventually demanded a release from his contract, which he got.

CBS programming chief Nina Tassler says this stuff is all in a day's work --"Stars complaining about shows and issues, that's new news" -- which I suppose might be true if you work on the seventh circle of Hell cleaning up demon poop. Personally, I'd guess that the odds of either show surviving the season are no better than 50-50. Bellisario was the guiding intelligence of NCIS and one of the few television writers capable of portraying the military sympathetically. (NCIS is about a U.S. Navy police unit.) And over at Criminal Minds, Patinkin's criminal profiler was practically the whole show.

Tassler wasn't willing to really shed any light on either case, though she did admit that the CBS press release attributing Patinkin's flight to "creative differences" was, shall we say, a whopping lie. "'Creative differences' is a euphemism for 'personal issues,'" she said, winking. (When a critic asked what the wink meant, she replied, "I think you get it." Actually, we didn't, but things moved on anyway.) What those personal issues were Tassler declined to say, even when somebody pointed -- even when somebody pointed out that this is the second time Patinkin has walked out of his contract with a successful CBS drama -- he flaked out on Chicago Hope after a single season in 1995, though he returned a few years later. "I can only hope in the very near future that Mandy himself will be able to answer those very questions," she said.

Over at NCIS, Harmon's ultimatum that resulted in the firing of Bellisario has been so widely reported that Tassler didn't bother to deny it, though she claimed she couldn't remember Harmon's specific complaints. (Most frequently cited in the Hollywood trades: Bellisario's supposed tardiness in delivering scripts and general inability to keep the production moving on time.) She would only say that "the conflict was resolved in the best interest of the show," an indirect way of saying that she thought Harmon was more integral to the success of NCIS than Bellisario.

That may sound harsh (and she may have made the wrong choice), but Tassler said that a network boss is not a State Department diplomat. "You talk as much as you can, and then you have an objective and a goal: to keep your show running," she said. "If there are changes, there are changes. But your main   objective is to keep the show running."

Hey, 'Jericho' nuts!

You guys have actually succeeded in making CBS programming boss Nina Tassler afraid to visit the doctor. Here's the story.

Critics know much less than you (or they) think

Last summer on the critics' press tour, I got a valuable lesson in critical overthink. During a press conference on the CBS show Jericho, I discovered a whole web of literary allusions I thought I had to detected in the show's pilot -- to other movies about the aftermath of a nuclear holocaust as well as an infamous commercial from the 1964 presidential campaign that implied Barry Goldwater was a Strangelovian madman --  turned out not to exist. The show's producers and writers had never seen or heard any of the stuff to which I thought they were alluding.

It happened again at NBC's session on its remake of Bionic Woman, a sci-fi drama about a woman who acquires superpowers after her crushed limbs and organs are replaced following a catastrophic auto accident. In the show's pilot, bionic woman Jaime Sommers is caretaker to a younger sister who's deaf. It seemed clear that the sister's character was meant to act as a counterpoint to the reconstructed Jaime, a continuing illustration of nature's failures of the flesh versus the advantages of technology.

Turns out that was just so much monkey business. The pilot is about to be reshot with a new sister who can hear perfectly well. The deafness wasn't there for symbolic or thematic reasons, just a convoluted way to bring chimpanzees and a love interest into the show. Really -- chimpanzees.

  "Jaime was originally working in a lab," explained Jason Smilovic, one of the executive producers. "She was going to be assigned to these chimpanzees. The chimpanzees were going to [a character named Dr. Anthros], who was using them for experimentation. He would come down to get the chimpanzees and they sort of fell in love during that time." (I'm guessing he meant Jaime and Dr. Anthros, not Jaime and the chimps, but perhaps I've overthought that, too.) And we were looking for an organic way for her to be talking to the chimpanzees in sign language.

"Of course, the chimpanzees disappeared. The lab disappeared. The sign language [disappeared] The deaf sister stayed, but now she's disappeared as well."

After a conversation, I wonder what would have happened if William Shakespeare had conducted press conferences for critics. "Incestuous longings? In Hamlet? Are you mad, sir? It's just a play about swordfights -- and no, dammit, that's not Freudian code..."

PS: The guy with the beard is Jason Smilovic. The other picture is Michelle Ryan, the young British actress who plays Jaime. Or maybe it's one of the chimpanzees. I don't really understand the show very well.

Some of my best friends are Republicans

The same Democratic presidential candidates who refused to participate in a debate sponsored by Fox News have agreed to do one on MSNBC on Aug. 7, to be moderated by Keith Olbermann. Asked at a Tuesday breakfast appearance on the TV critics' press tour if that means that Democrats prefer his show to Bill O'Reilly's, Olbermann demurred: "I don't think this is an endorsement of any kind." He might have been more convincing had MSNBC producers not just five minutes before screened a clip from Olbermann's show in which he demanded the resignations of George Bush and Dick Cheney.

Olbermann did get off one funny line about his archenemy O'Reilly. Asked how he feels these days about the Fox News host, Olbermann replied: "It's as, to some degree, a virus feels about the host."

Donald and Rosie: the show

Donald Trump's hardball business reality show The Apprentice, once a bona fide hit but recently a Nielsen loser, will return next season with a twist that NBC thinks will revive it: celebrity contestants. "We looked overseas and saw how phenomenally well the British version of The Apprentice did with the celebrity version," says one of NBC's programming bosses, Ben Silverman, "and what could be more fun than Donald sharing his business acumen with celebrities on our air?" Well, grinding a cigarette out on your arm comes to mind. Instead of looking into what British audiences liked, it might have been smarter for NBC to consider what Americans like. ABC killed the most popular game show of the past 40 years, Who Wants To Be A Millionaire, with precisely that that tactic, using celebrity contestants playing for charity, which saps all the tension out of the contest. Unlike 24-year-old MBA whose career is actually at stake, Ben Affleck doesn't really care if Trump fires him?

Silverman, however, did mention one potential celebrity contestant who would no doubt pull in big audiences: Trump's archenemy Rosie O'Donnell. "Donald personally told me to extend an invite to her," says Silverman. "So if she would like to be on it, that would be fun." Especially if you locked the two of them inside a small room with machetes.

UPDATE: NBC made a number of other announcements on the press tour Monday, including the return of Norman Lear to television and a new show featuring Uri Geller. Remember him? Didn't think so. Read this to be reminded.

None dare call it bias

During the week of Nov. 4, all of NBC Universal's TV properties -- including NBC, Bravo, the Sci Fi Channel, the Sundance Channel and a host of others -- will participate in "Green Is Universal" Week, with programming devoted to promoting environmentalism as a political and social issue. The "Green is Universal" press release pointedly includes NBC News and CNBC on the list of company divisions that are participating, not that there's any systematic ideological bias in network news, no sir.

'Criminal Minds' loses Mandy Patinkin

Criminal Minds star Mandy Patinkin has ditched the show.Patinkin, who played troubled FBI psychological profiler Jason Gideon, didn't show up for work when Criminal Minds resumed production for next season earlier this month, and on Monday, CBS granted his request to release him from his contract.

Patinkin's talk about leaving the show had been widely believed to be a bluff to pry some more money out of CBS, which a couple of years back faced a similar brief strike by a couple of members of the CSI cast. But the terse CBS announcement that he's gone said his departure "was not in any way connected to contract renegotiations or salary issues." (On the other hand, NBC executives Monday also said that their ex-head-programmer Kevin Reilly wasn't fired, either, even though the network gave him about a zillion dollars in severance pay, so Hollywood's conception of the truth about money matters may be somewhat different than the one in the real world.) CBS said the character's disappearance will be explained within the show, but say explain how. Maybe they'll bring over David Caruso from CSI: Miami to investigate.

Some days being a serial killer is just no fun

It's shaping up to be a tough season for Showtime's serial-killer-next-door Dexter. When the show returns on Sept. 30, Dexter -- a police technician by day, a serial killer by night -- will discover he's no longer operating under the radar. The discovery of a few dozen corpses that he's stashed at the bottom of Biscayne Bay will bring an FBI task force headed by new cast member David Carradine to town intent on discovering the identity of the killer. Meanwhile, his police colleagues are starting to grow suspicious of him and his girlfriend's mother thinks he's peculiar, and not in a good way. Worst of all, he's not going to get to come to Miami to shoot the series anymore. Read my full story in Monday's Herald.

Decapitations? Okay. Sex with sheep? Okay. Cigarettes? Are you NUTS?

Just about anything goes these days on television when it comes to sex or violence, but there's one act that's almost totally taboo: for a character to light a cigarette. A cop can fry a suspect's face on a stove, a friendly serial killer can chop his victims into bite-size pieces, and sexual acts that would have made the authors of the Kama Sutra tremble with fear are routine -- but woe to the producer who tolerates a cigarette on his set.

The near total self-censorship on this issue is underscored by a couple of dramas airing during the next few weeks that defy the ban. One of the principal characters in The Company, TNT's Cold War miniseries that debuts next month, is James Angleton, the legendary CIA counterintelligence chief who went through several packs a day. And in Mad Men, AMC's series about the cutthroat world of advertising in the early 1960s, almost every character is seen smoking.

Producers and directors from both shows acted like defendants in Stalinist show trials when they appeared on the critics' press tour over the weekend, confessing their crimes, pleading history as their defense. Though, they shamefacedly admitted, smoking looks pretty cool on camera.

"I always try to avoid having people smoke because, as we all know, it's not a good thing," said Mikael Salomon, who directed The Company, reciting his lines by rote before breaking down and confessing: We all regret that smoking has gone away because, as a former cameraman, you love atmosphere. You love the way it catches the light...When the opportunity was there to do it for a reason, [when] it was legitimized by the character who we know smoked, it was great to do be able to do it, finally."

Matthew Weiner, the executive producer of Mad Men, said it  would have been impossible to portray the world of Madison Avenue advertising without showing cigarettes -- it was a world where everyone smoked, mostly for pleasure but also in a show of solidarity with their clients, who included all the big tobacco companies.

"It's part of the time travel," Weiner said. "It was ridiculous to try and tell the story without it. It's a self-destructive, horribly addictive habit that these people suffered from. And when I was trying to find these advertising guys who were there and talk to them about it, it was difficult,because they're dead."

Weiner admits that cigarette smoke winding around somebody's head looks great on camera. "It's very romantic at that last moment when they're in bed and they share a cigarette and that guy looks out the window and has thoughtful thoughts," he said. But Mad Men will also include scenes offering another side of the reality of smoking: "People are taking [old butts] out of the bathtub and stubbing stuff out in food and there's piles of it and trash cans are on fire."

For all that, Weiner said, many of his actors begged to be allowed to smoke when they were on-camera. "Actors love to have this as part of the scene and who wouldn't?" he said. "It's the same reason people smoke. It's just sort of something to do."

Michael Keaton, who plays Angleton in The Company and is rarely seen in the show without a cigarette in his hand, said it was less fun than it looks like. "It's miserable," he declared. "And I was a smoker and a chewer, you know. I chewed Skoal and Red Man for about 15 years." Keaton saw the necessity for his cigarettes -- "The guy smokes. You know what I mean? That's just the deal" -- but he was happy when the production was over. "I don't really look forward to doing that again," he shuddered.

She who must not be mentioned

BET this fall will debut a new animated sketch-comedy called BUFU, in which anchors and reporters at a mythical and really crummy TV station needle celebrities and popular culture. Written by comedian Orlando Jones and Everybody Loves Chris executive producer Ali Leroi goes after everybody from Tyra Banks (who rents out advertising space on her giant forehead) to Barack Obama (whose campaign is sabotaged when his hand puppet Bam, a kind of alter ego, starts spewing sleazy remarks) to Bryant Gumbel ("Is he street enough?"). One celebrity who goes unscathed is Oprah Winfrey because, admits Leroi, "we are afraid of Oprah."

"Why are you afraid of Oprah?" wondered a critic.

"Say nothing," hissed Jones to Leroi.

Not to flog a dead gangster, but...

It's official: 100 percent of premium-cable executives agree that the blackout that ended The Sopranos was a sucky idea. Here's Showtime bosses Robert Greenblatt and Matthew C. Blank replied when a critic asked them how they felt about the ending:

GREENBLATT: My immediate reaction was --

BLANK: Cable's out.

Hey, senator, put THIS foot in your mouth

Hey, remember how CNN's Anderson Cooper lost it and started screaming at Louisiana's Sen. Mary Landrieu while covering Hurricane Katrina a couple of years ago? Next time it could be even worse -- during a visit to the critics' tour today, Cooper revealed he's taken up kickboxing.

'Masters Of Horror': premature burial

Halloween just won't be the same without Showtime's Masters Of Horror, the anthology series that gave veteran horror writers and directors like John Landis license to do the scariest, grisliest thing they could think of for 60 minutes. The show is gone, a casualty not of ratings but a series of mergers and corporate takeovers that erased all the foreign co-production deals that bankrolled it. Dennis Kucinich even as we speak is preparing a speech exposing how globalization has destroyed our domestic zombie film industry.

Showtime loses its marbles

Showtime, already home to series about a lovable narcotrafficker (Weeds) and a lovable serial killer (Dexter) has decided to push its luck even further with a show about a lovable mentally ill mom with multiple personalities. Production will start this fall on The United States of Tara, a sitcom about a Three Faces Of Eve-like mom whose personality shifts from moment to moment to "an aggressive male biker, or a promiscuous teenage girl, or a cake-baking Martha Stewart-like homemaker.  And more personalities may emerge from her as the series unfolds,'' adds Showtime programming boss Robert Greenblatt, who if this thing goes wrong may find that his next personality is that of a former big-shot network executive living under a bridge eating government cheese.

The truth is STILL out there

Good news for X-Files geeks: another movie is coming up. David Duchovny, appearing at the TV critics' press tour Saturday to promote his new Showtime comedy series Californication (which, by the way, is every bit as dirty as the title implies), said he's supposed to get the script for the new flick next week. His longtime co-star Gillian Anderson is signed for the flick, and writers Chris Carter and Frank Spotnitz are both involved with the production. No word on whether Cigarette Smoking Man is on board.

Mailbag: When flashcubes were high-tech

My story about the perils of live TV back in the early days prompted a reader to write:

When I was just starting out in the advertising business at J. Walter Thompson in New York as the lowliest of lowly paid writers, one of my jobs was to get up every morning at 5 a.m. and go down to the Today show studios at 30 Rock.  Eastman Kodak, the account I worked on, was a sponsor of the show and back then many of the commercials were done live by the hosts.  So I had to make sure that the latest scripts were transferred to cue cards and coordinate with the producers about who was doing what each morning.

Kodak was introducing its latest innovation: the flash cube. 

Joe Garagiola, the baseball player turned sports commentator, was doing that morning's spot.  The action was for him to deliver his lines about how easy it was just to pop on a flash cube, point and shoot the picture.  The trick was that, because the set's main camera was very light-sensitive, he had to point the Instamatic camera away when he demonstrated the flash. 

Of course, live, he popped on the flash cube showing how easy it was, and shot the flash right at the camera.   

For the remaining 25 minutes of the show every main shot of the set had a big, purple, pulsating blob in the middle of the picture.  All the flash cube commercials after that had to be written without any actual demonstration of the flash. 

This was 1972.

Bob Bishopric

Miami

Thanks for sharing that, Bob, and for giving me a chance to utilize once again one of the hardest-won skills of my childhood, the ability to spell Garagiola. That's him on the right in the photo, trading jokes with former Dodger manager Tommy Lasorda at a game last month.

Mailbag: Where's 'Deadwood'?

The readers write:

If you have any opportunity to inquire about the Deadwood mini-movies promised for this
summer, we would appreciate it.  I'm sure you have heard how everyone is anticipating more of Deadwood -- in any form.

Toni Newton-Townsend

Jacksonville Beach, FL

When HBO canceled Deadwood last year, it promised the story would continue in two movies. Since then, however, HBO has undergone some management changes, Deadwood producer David Milch has gotten wrapped up in the network's surf noir series John From Cincinnati and the movies have pretty much vanished from public discussion -- until Thursday, when TV critics pressed HBO executives on the subject during a Q&A session in Los Angeles. And I'm afraid it doesn't sound good, Toni.

"It is complicated," said Michael Lombardo, HBO's chief programmer. "We don't have have holds on the actors anymore. David is busy doing John...It's doable. It will just be daunting." HBO Co-President Richard Plepler didn't even sound convinced that Milch wants to do the movies. He said even if all the Deadwood actors can be rounded up (many of them have contracts for other films or TV series) there's a question of "whether or not David is fully committed and motivated to getting the script written."

"I spoke to him the other day," added Plepler. "He's obviously exhausted in concluding this project with John. And I think he wants a little time to think about it."

The chances for the movies may hinge in large part on whether HBO decides to pick up John From Cincinnati for a second season. A month ago, that would have been unadulterated good news for Deadwood fans; the mystical and mysterious John was tanking in the ratings despite its heavy promotion during the final weeks of The Sopranos. But Plepler said the show has rallied, with 4.3 million viewers watching the latest episode. "The show is really finding an audience," Plepler said.

It's hard to know how much of that is spin -- Plepler also claimed HBO is happy with the ratings for its phlegmatic sitcom Flight Of The Conchords, which had less than a million viewers last week -- but a renewal for John From Cincinnati seems at least possible, if not exactly likely. If the show is picked up, the HBO bosses said, Milch will have to go right back to work writing new episodes, and the chances for the Deadwood movies shrink considerably.

That, by the way, led to one of the most interesting asides during the HBO presentation. A critic, noting that The Sopranos sometimes went a year and a half between seasons, wondered why a renewed John From Cincinnati couldn't be put on hold until at least one of the Deadwood movies is done. Lombardo said, quite firmly, that the long gaps between seasons of HBO series are a thing of the past.

"Waiting a year and a half between shows, I think we've discovered, is probably not ideal for the viewer," he said. "I think viewers have expressed that to us." That's exactly 190 degrees the opposite of what HBO executives used to tell us when we asked why it was taking so damn long to produce another season of The Sopranos. Back then, they claimed, all the complaints about long hiatuses were from TV critics, not viewers, who didn't care. On Thursday, HBO finally admitted the truth: They were willing to put up with just about anything in order to get another season of The Sopranos from perennially reluctant producer David Chase, but those days are done.

Anyway, bottom line on the Deadwood: not so good. When we asked for odds on whether the movies will ever be made, Lombardo dodged: "I'm not a betting guy." Plepler guessed about 50-50, but his voice seemed pained. You want to see Seth Bullock and Al Swearengen again, my suggestion is to buy the DVD.

Tales of Marilyn and Tony

Here's a story on why FX's Nip/Tuck changed its setting from Miami to Los Angeles. (The answer has something to do with having sex with Marilyn Monroe impersonators while chained to a wall. Which, I have to admit, is not a common practice in Miami.) And here's one on the reaction of HBO executives when they first saw the final episode of The Sopranos. Sadly, it has nothing at all to do with sex, being chained to walls, or Marilyn Monroe impersonators, which is pretty much the sort of thing you only get to write once in a lifetime.

Interview THIS

During the critics' tour, press conferences after the first couple of days tend to resemble some kind of sinister late-night documentary on Animal Planet, with critics taking on the roles of wolves who drag stragglers down and strip them of their flesh. But once in a while, the roles are reversed. Larry David, the curmudgeonly star of HBO's Curb Your Enthusiasm, is a kind of one-man wolfpack himself, and a rabid one at that. Here are a few representative exchanges from a press conference he held Thursday.

QUESTION: Was there some question that you weren't going to come back after last season?

DAVID: Every season that I do is my last  season. That's the only way I can get through the season.   If I thought that I had to come back and do it again, I would never do it in the first place.

QUESTION: How many groups do you hear from each season who've been offended?

DAVID: Nobody seems to be offended except for the people who just hate me in general.

QUESTION: One last question. Do you think you've  made --

DAVID: Why do you get two? [Bleep] this guy. There's a lot of people here. Shut up. That's enough from you.

***

QUESTION: Why are you so willing to portray yourself --   

DAVID: Careful, careful.

QUESTION: -- you are portraying yourself --

DAVID: Careful.

QUESTION: -- as such a shmuck?

DAVID: I'm portraying you, shmucko....I'm Jesus Christ. I'm Jesus Christ. I'm sacrificing myself for the betterment of humanity.

***

QUESTION: Larry, can I ask, how do you think you've grown as actor?

DAVID: Not at all.

***

QUESTION: I wonder if things happen to you in life now when you're looking for ideas for your scripts where you're angry at what's happening to you but you're glad because you're going to get your revenge by acting them out?

DAVID: Yeah, if something happens, if I'm angry or something, I'll go, "I'm going to use that." Yeah, so it works like that. Does that answer your stupid question?

QUESTION: How does your Jewish identity inform your comedy?

DAVID: Oh, Jesus.

'Army Wives' re-ups

Some decisions are so easy and obvious that even a TV executive can make them correctly. Army Wives, which is not only the best series in the history of the Lifetime cable network but the most-watched, has been renewed for a second season. Lifetime programming boss Susanne Daniels announced at the critics' press tour Thursday that she's ordered 18 new episode of Army Wives. With 3.6 million viewers a week, Army Wives is a hit by any cable-TV measure, and at Lifetime, it's an unprecedented smash.

When live was lively

Here's my story from Thursday's Herald about a press tour panel of television pioneers -- Betty White, Tony Orlando, Tim Conway, Ed McMahon and Dick Cavett -- talking about the perils of live TV in the old days. Warning: Don't read it if you're one of those people who thinks Jackie Gleason walked on water, or at least scotch.

A slight difference of opinion

I've been reading David Halberstam's last book, The Coldest Winter, an account of the Korean War that's scheduled for publication in September. Halberstam characterizes the Korean War as a campaign where nothing ever seemed to go right for the U.S. military -- as opposed to World War II when, he writes, nothing ever seemed to go wrong.

So I was curious when filmmaker Ken Burns, who has just finished six years of research on World War II the PBS documentary The War that debuts in a couple of months, appeared on the TV critics' tour Wednesday. Did he agree with Halberstam that nothing went wrong during World War II? Replied Burns: "Our fifth episode is called FUBAR." In military jargon, that stands for Fouled Up Beyond All Recognition, excepted "fouled" is spelled with a C and a K.

I give up -- which one is Samantha?

Masterpiece Theatre next season will air productions of all six of Jane Austen's novels, so she's pretty hot for an author who's been dead for nearly 200 years. And that's not the half of it, says PBS producer Rebecca Eaton, who notes that Austen's MySpace page lists 3,000 friends. "What she wrote, it was like Sex and the City in the 18th century," Eaton says. "Well, a little bit like extensive hand-holding in the country, but it's the same idea."