Changing Channels

UM football on TV, and it isn't pretty

Does the University of Miami offer a degree in cluelessness? Because most of the former players interviewed in ESPN's documentary The U seem to have majored in it. For two solid hours they brag about their arrogance, their dirty play and even their outright criminality, smiling proudly during every moment.

Former quarterback Steve Walsh seems amused as he recounts bumping into ``some pretty prominent players'' wearing stocking caps, on their way for a night's work of burglarizing autos. His teammate Brett Perriman recalls some Hurricane players dealing drugs, then adds unapologetically: ``We got to eat. If that means we have to do something illegal, so be it.''

Those kind of disclosures seem almost benign when former center Don Bailey Jr. explains the football skills that made his team so great. ``They were nasty,'' he recollects jovially. ``They'd spit. They'd fight. They'd bite. They'd kick.''

The U is a brilliant and horrifying history of the good-old-bad-old-days of the 1980s and early 1990s when UM -- so the joke of the day went -- topped all three football polls: AP, UPI and FBI. It airs Saturday at 8 p.m. on ESPN. On Sunday another UM alum takes center stage when Beth Grosbard's The Christmas Hope aires on the LIfetime Movie Network. Like its predecessors The Christmas Shoes and The Christmas Blessing, The Chrismas Hope is about the holiday magic produced by the croaking of a loved one during the holidays. (Young, penniless but wholesomely pretty mothers seem to produce particularly festive results.) Read my reviews of both The U and The Christmas Hope in Saturday's Miami Herald.

The vast wasteland revisited

Nielsen has just released its list of the top-rated 10 TV shows of 2009:

1.  American Idol (Wednesday)

2.  American Idol (Tuesday)

3.  Dancing With The Stars

4.  NBC Sunday Night Football

5.  Dancing With The Stars (results show)

6.  NCIS: Los Angeles

7.  NCIS 

8.  ESPN NFL Footbal

8.  NBC Sunday NIght Football pre-game

10.The Good Wife

Put them together -- four reality competition shows, three sporting events, two police procedurals and only one scripted drama of any intellectual heft (The Good Wife) -- and you get a pretty depressing roadmap of the future of TV.

In case you were wondering, the top 10 single telecasts of the year were all football games or pre- or post-game shows, with one exception: The Oscars.

Screen Gems: TV the week of December 6

The U (9 p.m. Saturday, ESPN) -- This documentary on University of Miami football in the 1980s contains enough ugly spots -- the pay-for-play allegations, the NCAA violations, the arrogance and hot-doggery of the players -- that the university tried to kill it. But it's also got the on-the-field performances that led to four national championships during the decade.

Alice (9 p.m. Sunday, Syfy) -- A surrealist adaptation of Alice in Wonderland that's more Jefferson Airplane than Lewis Carroll, this two-part miniseries (it concludes in the same slot Monday) has a cast of heavy hitters, including Tim Curry, Harry Dean Stanton and -- as the merciless Queen of Hearts, of course -- Kathy Bates.

Men of a Certain Age (10 p.m. Monday, TNT) -- Ray Romano, Scott Bakula and Andre Braugher go middle-age crazy in this series about college buddies in their 40s wondering if they really should have grown up, or even if they did.

The Christmas Hope (8 p.m. Saturday, Lifetime Movie Network) -- The third -- and, everybody involved swears on pain of lobotomy-by-chainsaw, final -- film of the morbidly sentimental Christmas Shoes series has Madeleine Stowe as a social worker who brings a foster kid home for the holidays. Will the cute, spunky little girl save Stowe's rocky marriage? Maybe, but this is a Christmas Shoes movie, so it's just as likely that somebody will croak. Prettily, of course.

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

If only NBC had six other nights of football

NBC's ratings generally seem to be headed for a spot on the ocean floor right next to the Titanic -- some of its primetime shows were even beaten out by Fox News coverage of the Fort Hood shootings last week -- but there was a rare bright spot Sunday. With a TV-season-high 19.8 million viewers, the Dallas-Philadelphia game on NBC's Sunday Night Football clobbered everything: Desperate Housewives, 60 Minutes, Fox's highly-promoted Family Guy special. And Michael Vick wasn't even playing.

Rush Limbaugh not fit for the NFL, but THESE guys are?

It's not exactly about television, but ...

What I admire about the National Football League is the constant pace of innovation. Instant replay. The zone blitz. The Wildcat offense. And now, at long last, standards for NFL owners.

This last one was invented just last week, when the league pressured a group trying to buy the St. Louis Rams to drop conservative talk-radio host Rush Limbaugh from its ranks for what NFL commissioner Roger Goodell called ``divisive'' and ``negative'' commentary. ``We are all held to a higher standard here,'' Goodell added.

Presumably Goodell was using the phrase higher standard with a certain flexibility, since the NFL counts any number of rapists, cokeheads and serial dog-torturers among its players. But let's be fair: Those are players. There are a very limited number of guys who can thread a ball 50 yards downfield through two defensive backs to a wide receiver, so you don't want to set the behavioral bar too high.

But Goodell has apparently realized that the world is full of half-wit millionaires willing to spend a fortune in order to hang around locker rooms sniffing jocks, so the league can afford to be somewhat choosy. Read my op-ed column in Tuesday's Miami Herald for the new rules governing the behavior of NFL owners.

How much does South Florida hate the new TV season?

A ton. In the Nielsen ratings for the week of Oct. 5, only two of the new shows from broadcast television made the top 30, both from CBS. NCIS: Los Angeles, with 151,000 viewers, came in at No. 12. And The Good Wife, with 121,000 viewers, was No. 25. At the top of the ratings, not surprisingly, was ESPN's coverage of the Dolphins-Jets game, which pulled in 241,000 viewers.

UFL: The Unknown Football League?

Talk about a marriage of the doomed! The United Football League, a new pro football venture, debuted last week on the facing Versus sports network. The result: about 146,000 viewers in the 18-to-49 age demographic. That's about 13 percent lower than the average Versus audience, which is already down at levels nearing Nielsen brain death.

The UFL -- a four-team league that operates in Orlando, Las Vegas, San Francisco and New York -- hitched its wagon to the Versus star at the worst possible moment, just as the tiny cable channel was getting itself kicked off DirecTV's satellite dishes in a rate dispute. That bounced Versus out of 18 million American homes, though the network claims that enhanced availability through the rival Dish Network cut the loss to five million. Bottom line: The Lingerie Football League seems a good bet to outlast both the UFL and Versus.

The Emmys aren't quite dead yet

I wouldn't say the Emmy telecast shows any sign of developing a pulse, but maybe its eyelids fluttered in the midst of its terminal coma Sunday night. Preliminary Nielsen numbers show the CBS broadcast pulled in 13.3 million viewers, a slight uptick from last year's record low of 12.3 million. Still, the Emmys got shellacked by the Cowboys-Giants NFL game on NBC, which had more than 20 million.

Profiles in poor taste, No. 126: ESPN

Hmmm. A slasher movie called Sorority Row sponsoring a Florida State football game. Am I the only one who remembers Ted Bundy?

What we watched last week (Hint: It was oval)

Who says love is the universal language? It's football. The Miami Dolphins' NFL exhibition game with Tampa Bay on August 27, televised by WSVN-Fox 7, broke the Spanish-language stranglehold on the Nielsen chart. The four top-rated programs that week were the game and three pre-game shows (including one to cover a 45-minute lightning delay). After that, though, things reverted to summer form: Of the other 26 top shows, 20 were Spanish-language novelas and variety programs.