The rumors are true: Sarah Palin -- the real one, not Tina Fey -- will appear on Saturday Night Live this weekend. McCain campaign officials confirmed that Palin is doing the show, though they wouldn't say exactly what she's going to do. But the host is Josh Brolin, who plays George Bush in the new Oliver Stone movie W., so the possibilities are nearly endless.
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Eight (minutes) is not enough: Why a critic has to watch the whole show
In one of life's little coincidences, not long after I finished watching an advance screener of The CW's horrendous, why-is-there-life-on-Earth-bad Stylista, I came across this piece by film critic Roger Ebert 
talking about writing a review of a movie that he walked out on after eight minutes. I haven't seen Tru Loved, the picture that sent Ebert into meltdown, but I can sympathize. Eight minutes is about twice as much as I had seen of Stylista before I knew that I didn't just hate it but wished slow, agonizing deaths on everybody involved. Believe me, I wanted to turn it off. I didn't, because...Well, I don't know, exactly.
It's not like there was any chance I was going to change my mind. A reality show about 11 stupid, untalented people with vile personalities who think that individual worth is calculated by the labels on the clothes they wear? The conception was trash, the execution was trash, the cast was trash, and the people who put it on the air are trash. No television alchemist was going to somehow turn the show around between its fourth minute and its 42nd.
Some TV critics would have turned it off. I've spoken with colleagues who've confessed to me that they occasionally write a review of a show they gave up on before it ends. Even more common, now that we get advanced screeners on DVDs, is fast-forwarding through, cutting the time and effort you invest in pure garbage while guarding against any big surprises toward the end. I don't do that, either, though I've certainly been tempted -- for instance, while watching the pilot of NBC's Knight Rider last month, a show that made so little sense that I seriously wondered if I had a malfunctioning DVD. A few years ago, CBS had a show called Robbery Homicide -- created by Michael Mann, the Miami Vice guy, no less! -- that really, seriously gave me a crippling headache.
But I watched those all the way through, too. Part of it is some kind of personal quirk -- for better or for worse, I almost never quit reading a book or watching a movie before the end, even though it's got nothing to do with my job and I'm not going to write anything about them. The last movie I walked out of was Fritz the Cat, a smutty cartoon, in 1972 -- and that was because my girlfriend at the time insisted.
More broadly, though, I think quitting a novel, a movie or a TV show is an intellectually lazy slippery-slope. Being a critic means you're going to take the bad with the good. Most of the time that's not going to be a good deal for the critic, because the bad is really bad and there's a lot more of it. Whether they're misguided idiots who think they've something to say when they don't or just cynical fast-buck artists trying to make a quick score before being found out, the world is full of creative shams whose "art" is barely one step removed from the scrawls on a bathroom wall.
But however painful, it's part of the job, just as football players have to play even when it's raining and the Macy's Santa has to sit there while kids pee in his lap. If you're going to criticize somebody's work, you've got to sit through it first. Nothing drives me crazier than hearing from people complaining about one of my stories based on nothing more than the headline or the first paragraph. Why should I expect a novelist or a director to feel differently?
Footnote: The Herald's film critic, Rene Rodriguez, always stays to the end of a movie, though I'm pretty sure it's because he can't find his way out a theater in the dark.
'Robinson Crusoe' is a (detached) eyeful
Let us introduce Crusoe with a series of good news/bad news jokes, one of the intellectual staples of 
the audience of 11-year-old boys for which it is intended. Good news: A ship has arrived to the desert island on which Robinson Crusoe is marooned. Bad news: It's full of pirates. Good news: One of the pirates is a chick who compares favorably to the coconuts Crusoe has been dating. Bad news: The last guy to hit on her got his eye ripped out. ''That sounds grim,'' broods the chastened Crusoe. ''For him, yeah,'' one of the pirates replies. ``It was very entertaining for the rest of us.''
Equal parts sly and stupid, rousing and ridiculous, NBC's action-adventure Crusoe -- the last of the fall TV season's scripted shows to debut -- gets underway Friday with a special two-hour episode. Read my full review from Friday's Miami Herald.
Joe the Plumber: Nielsen success, but no Sarah Palin
Wednesday night's final presidential debate pulled in 56.5 million viewers -- down a bit from the 63.2 million who watched the second debate, but still more than the first round's 52.4 million. It's also worth noting that this was the first debate to face significant competition: Fox didn't carry it, picking up the decisive baseball playoff game between the Los Angeles Dodgers and the Philadelphia Phillies, which no doubt cut heavily into the Southern California ratings.
However heroic the exploits of Joe the Plumber, the mythic Ohio man whose theories on taxation suddenly obsessed both John McCain and Barack Obama, he still couldn't match Sarah Palin as a TV draw. Her debate with Joe Biden, with 69.9 million viewers, remains the 2008 Nielsen champ.
Glenn Beck joins Fox News
Glenn Beck, whose conservative news-talk show has been one of the key building blocks of the 
revitalized nighttime programming bloc on CNN Headline News, is jumping ship. Beck on Thursday signed a multi-year deal with Fox News and will move over to the competitor next spring. Beck, whose show airs daily at 7 p.m. Eastern time with a repeat at 9 p.m., will take over the 5 p.m. slot at Fox News as well as doing a weekend show.
Beck and Nancy Grace's vigilante crime-talk show that follows it have been a major boon to CNN Headline News nighttime ratings, which were dropping to almost unmeasurable levels before the two show personality-driven programs replaced the channel's regular 15-minute news roundups. Beck's ratings have grown about 200 percent since his show launched in 2006. He's also got a radio talk show syndicated by the Premiere network that's the third-most-listened-to program among adults aged 25 to 54.
A PBS show explores war, killing and conscience
Soldiers of Conscience is about wars, those that men fight against one another and those they fight 
against their deepest human impulses. The latter are on display in the earliest moments of the show, in footage of U.S. infantry recruits learning to fight with bayonets.
''What's the spirit of the bayonet?'' their drill instructor screams. ''Kill, kill, kill without mercy!'' they chant back. ''There are two types of bayonet fighters -- the quick and the dead!'' the sergeant shouts. ''Which are you?'' The recruits, in unison: ``The quick, drill sergeant, the quick!''
It's a scene of reptilian cold-bloodedness from which even the most Spartan soul is likely to flinch . . . and yet the truth of the drill instructor's Orwellian shouts is inescapable: A soldier who pauses for moral reflection during a bayonet fight will go home in a body bag.
This thoughtful and disquieting film, airing as part of the PBS documentary series P.O.V., explores the fundamental contradiction between the killing required by war and the remorse required by humanity. It profiles eight soldiers who served in Iraq -- half of them men who regarded killing the enemy as their duty, half of them men who came to see it as a crime and turned into conscientious objectors. Read my full review in Thursday's Miami Herald.
Could D.L. Hughley kick Nancy Grace's butt?
Maybe we'll find out soon. D.L. Hughley is joining the network's extended family with a show called D.L Hughley Breaks The News that debuts on CNN Oct. 25. The show, airing at 10 p.m. on Saturdays, will feature Hughley not just cracking jokes but interviewing newsmakers and chatting with reporters, all in front of a live audience. Any similarities to Jon Stewart and The Daily Show are entirely uncoincidental. You might even be reminded of other shows: One producer, Mitch Semel, was the head of Comedy Central when it launched the original version of Bill Maher's Politically Incorrect. Another, Dave Becky, worked on The Dennis Miller Show. What, nobody from That Was The Week That Was?
Current TV: the funniest way to watch the debate
Just imagine if, when the TV cameras pulled back to show the audience during last week's presidential debate, Charles Gibson had breathlessly exclaimed: ''Uncomfortable chairs brought to you by Ikea!'' Or if, as the candidates ripped into federal mortgage agencies for causing the banking crisis, a reproving Katie Couric had decreed: ``Fannie and Freddie are totally not invited to my next pizza party!''
It may not be exactly the kind of political analysis you're used to. But if the first batch of presidential debates bored, terrified or annoyed you, consider a different way to watch Wednesday night's final square-off between John McCain and Barack Obama: Current TV, a cable channel that's mostly programmed by its own viewers, is running the debate with wisecracks and witticisms culled instantaneously from Internet chatter.
In perhaps the most radical attempt yet to merge television with the Internet, Current's Hack the Debate scrolls comments from the social-networking site Twitter.com across the screen, about one every five or six seconds, as the candidates debate. The comments -- known as ''tweets'' -- range from utterly hilarious to surprisingly insightful to unfathomably stupid. Read my full story from Wednesday's Miami Herald.
Casper the Friendly Senior Citizen, er, Ghost, now on DVD
Yeah, Reaper and Fringe and True Blood are all lots of good gory fun. But it wouldn't seem like Halloween without Casper, the Friendly Ghost, who's been accidentally terrifying people he's trying to embrace for almost 70 years now. Luckily the folks at Classic Media, which owns all kinds of old cartoons, have issued two new DVD collections: Trick or Treat and Casper and Wendy the Good Witch Scare Up Some Fun. I've always like Casper, whose nerdy nonconformity to his ectoplasmic community inevitably strikes a chord with kids. Wendy, his blond girlfriend who popped up in 1954, is a different matter. What a little brown-noser! There isn't a kid alive who, given the ability to turn people into writhing toads, wouldn't use it on parents, teachers, older brothers and editors. The red hoodie is cute, though.