View Full Version : Hot Off The Press! The Latest Television News and Info
DoubleDAZ
12-11-05, 09:08 PM
I'm not at all surprised by those ranking for "Primetime" viewing. We rarely watch anything but scripted network programming during Primetime. During all other times though, we rarely watch the networks. Why would I watch HGTV during Primetime when I know I can catch any HGTV episode muliple times otherwise but can only catch the network stuff on a given day in a given timeslot? Heck, they don't even show all episodes during rerun season anymore. :)
Gee, I wonder how ESPN can afford $600 million for the #41 ranked show (16 nights a year). That would be enough to produce almost ten 22-episode seasons of the most expensive show on TV (LOST - $2.8 million {est.} per episode)
$1.1 Billion would seem even tougher to justify - but no, they should turn a profit :rolleyes:
Perhaps it is another reason Disney is so admanantly against a la carte.
Let' see, (for ESPN alone) $2.60 a month for 90 million subs = $174 million a month!
Or $2.09 billion per year.
And then there is more: ESPN2, and ESPN News, and ESPN Classic....
Critic’s Notebook
On the set of “Surface”
In this city by the sea, dubbed Hollywood East for its two-decade history in the film industry, "Surface" producers can find countless spots that will pass for coastal California, where much of the series' action takes place.
Well, I would give this a maybe, sort of...It wouldn't fool folks who live near the area portrayed in the show, but probably does for most of the country that hasn't never visited the areas. The scene on the "dock by the restaurant" where everyone was filming the sea monster coming into the "harbor" fed by the Russian River was particularly interesting as none of that area has or looks like what was portrayed in the program. I sort of wish it did though, it looked kind of nice.. :D
A Critical View:
Despite three speakers, “Nightline” lacks voice
How a trio is replacing a Koppel
By Paul Brownfield Los Angeles Times Staff Writer December 12, 2005
They say "Goodnight, America" now at the end of "Nightline." All three of the new anchors say it — Cynthia McFadden, Terry Moran, Martin Bashir — they trade off. They also sometimes say: "Jimmy Kimmel is next."
It is a symbolic if small shift in the post-Ted Koppel broadcast. Koppel, a guardian of the firewall between the news and entertainment divisions at his former network ABC, wouldn't tease to Kimmel, just as he didn't tease to "Politically Incorrect With Bill Maher" in the years that Maher's more compatible series followed "Nightline."
After 25 years, Koppel signed off his last broadcast, Nov. 23, saying to viewers, "You've always been very nice to me, so give this new anchor team at 'Nightline' a fair break. If you don't, the network will just put another comedy in this time slot. And then you'll be sorry."
Is two weeks a fair break? "Nightline," a slicker-looking news package piloted from Times Square in New York, isn't some end-of-the-world devolution from Koppel. But it's just a respectable if slightly overheated newsmagazine now, well produced, with good bookings.
They cover two or three or four stories where Koppel would burrow into one. The result is faster and less substantive, lacking a voice. It opts for movement from hard news into features, the involving story about female soldiers dealing with post-traumatic stress disorder gliding into the sit-down with George Clooney about his film "Syriana," McFadden asking the movie star teasingly: "Is George Clooney trying to save the world?"
It turned out he isn't.
Two weeks ago, accompanying "Nightline's" new debut, the show dispatched Moran to Baghdad to file a week of segments on whether the U.S. should stay in Iraq or pull its troops. But it did this without also delving into the renewed political heat this question has on Capitol Hill. Moran, meanwhile, did a day-in-the-life piece on U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Zalmay Khalilzad, went on a hunt for insurgents with U.S. troops and Iraqi police in Baqubah — a policeman in a lead vehicle was killed by a roadside explosive device — and held a "town-hall" meeting in the U.S.-controlled Green Zone in Baghdad.
It was serviceable — feature stories with raw feeds, at times slightly oversold (a "historic TV gathering," "Nightline" trumpeted the town-hall meeting).
Friday night, McFadden moderated an hour with Ohio mothers of fallen soldiers. But it's hard to imagine this show reading off the names of the war dead in Iraq, as Koppel did last year, prompting the conservative Sinclair Broadcast Group to pull the episode from affiliates.
"Nightline" was his show, its gestures his gestures; now, you sense, it's been returned to the network, as the departures of Jennings-Brokaw-Rather have left nightly news in a place of youth-driven flux, no longer shepherded by history-tested stewards of the public trust.
The reason to watch "Nightline," even if you could go away from it for a day or two — or 20 — was to see an old hand like Koppel fix his gaze on a political topic and root out the subtext, not letting his guest off the hook. No guest is on the new "Nightline" long enough to move much beyond a talking-points memo. "Will troops be in Iraq a year from now?" McFadden asked Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. When he estimated they would be, she asked, "Two years from now? Five years from now?"
He didn't want to guess, and you wondered who these questions were for, the anchor or the audience? Within the last few days, the story mix bounced from reports of CIA-run prisons for terror suspects in Eastern Europe, to the U.S. soldier who kept secret from his wife the valor that earned him a silver star, to the last day of freedom for Victor Conte, who was convicted of giving illegal steroids to top athletes as head of the Bay Area Laboratory Cooperative.
Bashir handled that story; he'd already interviewed Conte previously, on "20/20." Now his segment was dubbed, Geraldo style, "one man's journey from success to the slammer." "I don't think I've ever seen you without your Rolex," Bashir said to Conte as he prepared to drive to prison.
Bashir, it seems, will handle such intimacies with controversial folks. He is, after all, the outsider who famously found a way to earn Michael Jackson's trust in Neverland. But "Nightline" would do well to keep the acronym "WWTD" displayed prominently somewhere: "What would Ted do?"
The loss of Koppel is the loss of a filter, a star, in a time of wider transition following the departures of Peter Jennings, Tom Brokaw and Dan Rather. ABC gave "World News Tonight" to the more telegenic Elizabeth Vargas and Bob Woodruff after it was thought the "Good Morning, America's" Charles Gibson was the front-runner, while rumors are swirling that Katie Couric will take over the "CBS Evening News." None of these are ascendancies, they're casting choices in an industry that finds itself now having to move beyond the shadows of departed giants.
http://www.calendarlive.com/tv/cl-et-nightline12dec12,0,7927631,print.story?coll=cl-tvent
CPanther95
12-11-05, 09:41 PM
I'm not at all surprised by those ranking for "Primetime" viewing. We rarely watch anything but scripted network programming during Primetime. During all other times though, we rarely watch the networks. Why would I watch HGTV during Primetime when I know I can catch any HGTV episode muliple times otherwise but can only catch the network stuff on a given day in a given timeslot? Heck, they don't even show all episodes during rerun season anymore. :)
You can't really look at daytime shows because while they may garner a larger national rating, they likely still are not beating the local affiliate's syndicated programming. Those can't really be measured head-to-head because the timeslots and markets vary.
However, even if you disregard the local affiliate programming and included all cable programs (daytime and primetime) the only changes to the Top 100 list fredfa posted would be from #84 and below - the bottom of the list would like something like this:
80 MONK USA 3.52
81 STACKED FOX 3.46
82 HAPPY ELF NBC 3.45
83 WWE ENTERTAINMENT USA 3.21
84 SPONGEBOB NICK 3.2
85 NFL PRIME TIME L ESPN 3.05
86 FAIRLY ODD PARENTS NICK 3.0
87 KILLER INSTINCT FOX 2.92
88 EVERYBODY HATES CHRIS UPN 2.88
89 REUNION FOX 2.82
90 WWE SMACKDOWN! UPN 2.82
91 REAL WORLD XVI REUNION MTV 2.8
92 SPONGEBOB NICK 3.2
93 SPONGEBOB NICK 3.2
94 FAIRLY ODD PARENTS NICK 3.0
95 SPONGEBOB NICK 3.2
96 FELICITY AM GIRL-WB WB 2.49
97 GIRLFRIENDS UPN 2.45
98 WWE SMACKDOWN! SP- 11/29 UPN 2.36
99 AVATAR: SIEGE OF THE NORT NICK 2.29
100 ALL OF US UPN 2.26
CP:
If you include some non prime-time network programming along with syndicated shows (week of Nov 21, 2005) you get this list.
Since many of the syndicated programs run five days a week, I have also cut back the cable week day shows (like Oprah, Wheel, ET, etc) to just a single slot in this list:
# / Program / Network / Household Rating
1 DESPERATE HOUSEWIVES ABC 15.74
2 MNF: Steelers at Colts ABC 14.81
3 CSI CBS 14.49
4 GREY'S ANATOMY ABC 13.01
5 CSI: MIAMI CBS 12.92
6 LOST ABC 12.30
7 60 MINUTES CBS 11.57
8 SURVIVOR: GUATEMALA CBS 11.45
9 NCIS CBS 11.26
10 LAW AND ORDER:SVU NBC 11.15
11 TWO AND A HALF MEN CBS 10.60
12 WITHOUT A TRACE CBS 10.16
13 E.R. NBC 10.13
14 CSI: NY CBS 10.08
15 CRIMINAL MINDS CBS 9.85
16 BIGGEST LOSER 2 NBC 9.70
17 EXTREME MAKEOVER:HOME EDITION ABC 9.54
18 COLD CASE CBS 9.03
19 HOUSE FOX 9.01
20 OPRAH WINFREY SHOW (AT) 9.0
21 BARBARA WALTERS: 10 FASCINATING PEOPLE '05 ABC 8.96
22 COMMANDER IN CHIEF ABC 8.80
23 LAW AND ORDER NBC 8.74
24 OUT OF PRACTICE CBS 8.59
25 RUDOLPH-RED-NOSE-REINDEER CBS 8.57
26 MEDIUM NBC 8.31
27 WHEEL OF FORTUNE 8.3
28 CROSSING JORDAN NBC 8.26
29 KING OF QUEENS CBS 8.20
30 HOW I MET YOUR MOTHER CBS 7.87
31 LAW AND ORDER:CRIM INTENT NBC 7.83
32 APPRENTICE 4 NBC 7.48
33 LAS VEGAS NBC 7.45
34 NBC Nightly News 7.4
35 PRISON BREAK FOX 7.22
36 JEOPARDY 6.5
37 INVASION ABC 6.39
38 CHRISTMAS-ROCKEFELLER CEN NBC 6.31
39 LAW & ORDER:SVU-SAT-RPT NBC 6.26
40 ABC World News Tonight 6.2
41 SURFACE NBC 6.13
42 EVERBODY LOVES RAYMOND-SYN 6.1
43 GHOST WHISPERER CBS 6.01
44 20/20-FRI ABC 5.95
45 CRIMINAL MINDS TUE SPC CBS 5.74
46 AMER FUNN HOME VIDEOS ABC 5.65
47-t CBS Evening News 5.6
47-t NFL RAIDERS/CHARGERS ESPN 5.60
49 WIFE SWAP ABC 5.57
50-t ENTERTAINMENT TONIGHT 5.5
50-t CSI-SYN 5.5
52 AMER FUNN HM VIDEOS-12/2 ABC 5.48
53 DATELINE SUN-7PM NBC 5.47
54 GEORGE LOPEZ ABC 5.44
55 AMAZING RACE 8 CBS 5.43
56 SEINFELD (AT) 5.4
57 SIMPSONS FOX 5.39
58-t DR. PHIL SHOW 5.3
58-7 SEINFELD-WKND 5.3
60 FREDDIE ABC 5.27
61 POPE JOHN PAUL II, PART 1 CBS 5.20
62 KNOTS LANDING REUNION CBS 5.10
63 ACCORDING TO JIM ABC 5.07
64 RODNEY ABC 5.04
65 WILL & GRACE NBC 5.04
66 ACC CHAMPIONSHIP ABC 5.02
67 JUDGE JUDY 5.0
68 40TH ANNVRSRY OF THE ACMS CBS 4.89
69 JOEY NBC 4.85
70 WEST WING NBC 4.85
71 FRIENDS 4.8
72 ESPN NFL REGULAR SEASON 4.8
73 MEDIUM 12/3 NBC 4.71
74 HAVE NO FEAR:LIFE-POPE J. PAUL ABC 4.62
75-t SANTA CLAUS COMIN' TO TWN ABC 4.60
75-t BONES FOX 4.60
77 PRIMETIME ABC 4.59
78 FAMILY GUY FOX 4.49
79 TRADING SPOUSES FOX 4.38
80 THAT '70S SHOW FOX 4.37
81 PRISON BREAK ENC-MON 8P FOX 4.31
82-t WAR AT HOME FOX 4.26
82-t AMW: AMERICA FIGHTS BACK FOX 4.26
84 APPRENTICE:MARTHA NBC 4.24
85 THAT 70S SHOW-MF-SYN 4.2
86 AMERICAN DAD FOX 4.00
87 EVERYBODY LOVES RAYMOND-WKD-SYN 4.0
88 CROSSING JORDAN 12/3 NBC 3.97
89 THREE WISHES NBC 3.97
90 COPS FOX 3.96
91 O.C. FOX 3.91
92 7TH HEAVEN - WB WB 3.88
93 KING OF THE HILL FOX 3.84
94 INTERROGATION ROOM SP FOX 3.83
95-t WHEEL OF FORTUNE WKND 3.8
95-t INSIDE EDITION 3.8
97-t AMERICA'S NEXT TOP MODEL 5 UPN 3.60
97-t Saturday Night Live NBC 3.6
98 DATELINE FRI 12/2 NBC 3.57
99 MONK USA 3.52
100 STACKED FOX 3.46
In addition, all Sunday CBS and Fox NFL broadcasts, "Good Morning America", the ABC and CBS NCAA football games, (and NBC's Notre Dame coverage) would also be included in the broadcast list.
They would drop the cable shows even farther down the ratings food chain.
Translating US TV Abroad
How do you say 'D'oh!' in Arabic?
”The Simpsons” travels to the Middle East and undergoes a few changes along the way
By Ashraf Khalil and Jailan Zayan Los Angeles Times Staff Writers December 12, 2005
CAIRO -- Bald, chubby underachiever Omar Shamshoon works each day at the local nuclear power plant owned by vulture-like millionaire Mahrooey Bey (Mr. Burned). Every evening, Omar comes home to a family that includes his blue-haired wife, Mona, hyper-smart daughter, Beesa, and troublemaking son, Badr.
Along the way, wacky high jinks invariably ensue, involving the moronic police chief, Maarmish (Crunchy) the television clown and Omar's disturbingly perfect neighbor.
Sound familiar?
This, however, may not: Omar doesn't drink beer. That is not a misprint.
Instead, he spends time with his buddies at a local coffee shop. At home, he pops open frosty cans of Duff brand juice.
"The Simpsons" fans in the Middle East reacted with skepticism when MBC, an Arabic satellite channel, announced it would begin showing culturally modified, Arabic-dubbed versions of the iconic animated show.
The Arabic dialogue laid over existing shows is actually fairly faithful to the original script. Nothing seems censored, but episodes such as those featuring Homer's gay roommate or the visit to the Duff brewery are unlikely to be chosen for translation.
And many of the more American inside jokes are simply glossed over.
Ned Flanders, the devout Christian neighbor, is now merely annoying — with no hint of religion. And needless to say, the relationship between Mr. Burns and his assistant, Smithers — make that Salmawy — has become strictly professional.
One month after the premiere of "Al Shamshoon," voiced by some of Egypt's top actors, many are asking whether this particular cultural divide can ever truly be bridged.
"They managed to make one of the funniest shows ever into something that is terribly unfunny, and one of the smartest shows around into something incredibly dumb," ranted an Egyptian blogger who goes by the name Sandmonkey and who wants the show canceled. "Us Simpson lovers can't take this abomination any longer."
Others take a kinder view. Tarek Atia and Inas Hamam have turned the nightly viewings into a family event, watching raptly with their sons, Omar, 7, and Ali, 4.
"When I first saw it ... I thought, there's no way they're going to pull this off. But now I think it might be funnier in Arabic," said Hamam, marketing manager for American University in Cairo.
Executives at Dubai-based MBC sounded a little bemused by the strong, sometimes outraged, reactions to their venture among hard-core fans. Spokesman Michel Kostandi acknowledged that they had underestimated the depth and passion of the fan base.
"We're fascinated ourselves to see how this works," he said, adding that the show's translators were "determined to keep the exact spirit and heart of 'The Simpsons.' "
Well, not quite: There's that little matter of Homer's favorite pastime.
"What's Homer without beer?" Sandmonkey told The Times, preferring to be identified by his blogger name. "This is a fundamental issue!"
The show was one of the flagships of MBC's Ramadan lineup. During the Islamic holy month, which fell mostly in October this year, television channels compete heavily for the attention of Arab families digesting huge meals after their all-day fast.
MBC spared no expense, promoting "Al Shamshoon" nonstop and recruiting A-list film stars to dub the voices. Egypt's top comedian, Mohamed Heneidy, provides the voice of Omar.
For local fans of the original "Simpsons," it's a wasted effort. The show's real appeal, they say, depends on the multilayered dialogue, the often biting takes on American society and politics.
Without an understanding of that cultural depth, what remains for the audience here is mere slapstick, said Marwan Nasher, managing director of AK Comics Inc., which produces a line of Arab superhero comic books.
"It's just a cartoon now," Nasher said. "I wasn't really impressed. You don't know if they're trying to show American culture or Arab culture. They've kind of lost the message."
Hind Radwan, a cartoon director and editor who oversees dubbings of Disney cartoons into Arabic, echoes this view. "In the U.S., when making cartoons, there is a lot of thought about the children's psychology and what is or isn't culturally appropriate for them. Here we just take those cartoons and translate them; it ends up confusing the child's identity," she said.
Radwan said it was a question of simple economics. In Egypt, cartoon production lacks the prestige it has in other parts of the world and therefore receives little money and attention, so importing cartoons for dubbing is simply easier.
"One minute of dubbing is much cheaper than one minute of production," she said.
Western programming is hardly new to the Middle East. Even before the advent of satellite channels, shows such as [B]"The Six Million Dollar Man," "Falcon Crest" and[B] "MacGyver" were staples of state television.
The explosion of Arab satellite television brought dedicated channels showing subtitled Western movies, cop shows and sitcoms — including the original "Simpsons."
"You'd be surprised by the exposure to the Western media that our audience has," said Kostandi, the MBC spokesman.
Recent attempts to adapt Western programming for a Middle East audience have met with mixed results. "Who Will Win a Million" was a huge hit, but an Arabic version of "Big Brother" was canceled last year after just one week because of protests over male and female contestants sharing a house.
Still, "Al Shamshoon" may yet find its audience.
Playing on the TV screen at the Red Sea resort of Hurghada, "Al Shamshoon" set off belly-laughs from one satisfied viewer: 9-year-old Farida Hassan. Quizzed about her favorite bits, she said shyly, "I don't understand anything, but it's funny."
In Atia and Hamam's home in suburban Cairo, the whole family gathers every evening at 6:30 to watch the show.
For young Omar and Ali, it's a fun, silly cartoon about strange-looking people doing strange things to one another. Omar's favorite character: Badr, because "he's naughty." The parents, meanwhile, enjoy it on a completely different level. Both were born in Egypt, but Atia grew up in suburban Washington and Hamam in London. They dissect the translations, recall the originals and debate what jokes do or do not work in Arabic.
The two are fascinated by the dialogue translations, which are largely verbatim with subtle modifications throughout. Badr likes to shout "rewesh" (cool); Omar, in a flashback to his youth, listens to a classic song by Egyptian singer Ahmed Adawiya.
Atia, a journalist who runs the political and cultural news website cairolive.com notes the significance of the characters speaking the distinctive Egyptian dialect instead of the more stilted formal Arabic normally heard in dubbed children's cartoons. Decades of dominance of Arabic movies and films has made Egyptian slang the lingua franca of the Middle East, and Atia feels its choice is the saving grace of "Al Shamshoon."
"It's the only Arabic colloquial language that's understood by everyone and has that casual, comfortable, potentially cynical feel that's needed for this show," he said.
But some aspects still seem destined to go over the head of anyone without a knowledge of American culture and media. One "Al Shamshoon" episode contained lengthy homages to "Twilight Zone: The Movie" and the legend of the Monkey's Paw. Another centered on baseball, with Mahrooey Bey recruiting major league stars such as Darryl Strawberry and Wade Boggs for the company team.
Atia suspects a hidden pattern in the choices of which episodes to translate — a sort of subliminal America 101 course.
"They've chosen an episode about Thanksgiving, an episode about Halloween and even an episode about the writing of the Declaration of Independence," Atia said. "They seem to have chosen these episodes that really touch on Americana."
To which his wife responded: "I think they've eliminated the ones that feature Homer in a bar, and these are what's left."
But the show isn't a hit with all families. Atia remembers a recent evening with other young Egyptian couples and their kids. The group had to be persuaded to watch it — with the adults saying that cartoons were for kids.
In the end, it bombed, he said: "Even the kids didn't watch it."
http://www.calendarlive.com/tv/cl-et-simpsons12dec12,0,566881,print.story?coll=cl-tv-top-right
Winter Olympics Schedule
The full list of events for the XX Winter Olympics has been finalized.
(So if anyone reading this thread is looking for the final few reasons to convince a spouse that a new HDTV is a good idea this holiday season, here is some possible ammunition.)
NBC has not yet announced its broadcast schedule (but it promises massive, if not all, NBC network coverage in same-day HD ).
Here are the major scheduled events day-by-day:
Friday, Feb. 10
Opening Ceremony
Saturday, Feb. 11
Freestyle skiing
Speed skating
Men's luge
Ski jumping
Pairs figure skating
Sunday, Feb. 12
Men downhill
Speed skating
Short track speed skating
Men's luge final
Ski jumping
Monday, Feb. 13
Men's snowboard halfpipe
Speed skating
Women's luge
Pairs figure skating final
Tuesday, Feb. 14
Women's snowboard halfpipe
Speed skating
Women's luge final
Men's figure skating short program
Wednesday, Feb. 15
Women's downhill
Speed skating
Short track speed skating
Doubles luge final
Thursday, Feb. 16
Men's snowboard X
Speed skating
Men's figure skating final
Women's skeleton
Friday, Feb. 17
Women's snowboard X
Ski jumping
Ice dancing
Men's skeleton
Saturday, Feb. 18
Men's super G
Speed skating
Short track speed skating
Men's bobsled
Ski jumping
Cross country skiing
Sunday, Feb. 19
Women's super G
Speed skating
Men's bobsled
Ice dancing
Cross country skiing
Monday, Feb. 20
Men's grand slalom
Women's hockey Bronze and Gold Medal matches
Women's bobsled
Ski jumping team final
Ice dancing final
Tuesday, Feb. 21
Women's slalom
Speed skating
Women's bobsled
Women's figure skating short program
Nordic combined
Wednesday, Feb. 22
Freestyle aerials
Speed skating
Short track speed skating
Men's hockey quarterfinals
Thursday, Feb. 23
Women's curling final
Women's figure skating final
Friday, Feb. 24
Women's giant slalom
Men's curling final
Speed Skating
Four-man bobsled
Figure skating: exhibition
Men's hockey semifinals
Cross country skiing
Saturday, Feb. 25
Men's slalom
Speed skating
Men's hockey - Bronze Medal match
Four-man bobsled
Sunday, Feb. 26
Men's hockey Gold Medal match
Closing Ceremony
You can get a complete, day-by-day, full-color schedule (suitable for framing!) here:
http://www.torino2006.org/ENG/IDF/calendario_gare.pdf
The 2005-2006 TV Season
Ask Matt
(from the Ask (TV Critic) Matt (Roush) column at TVGuide.com
Question: Do you think there is some gender bias involved in the outright hatred many Lost fans have for Ana Lucia? For my money, she is the first female character to match the emotional baggage and personal flaws that the best of the male characters on that show bring to the table. People adore Locke (who is kind of unbalanced and whose actions led indirectly to the death of Boone), Sawyer (needlessly aggressive at times and a former con artist), and Sayid (has tortured people as recently as a month and a half ago), but Ana Lucia has been vilified almost from the start. I think the fact that her character is deeply flawed and has already made some huge mistakes on the island makes her an interesting character to watch: not a villain, but a compelling and captivating dramatic character. But to hear many fans talk about her, I keep hearing the word "bitch" thrown around, and I have a hard time believing the outrage would be so pointed if there was a badass new guy on the show. Am I totally off base here, or is there some truth to this? — Ryan J.
Matt Roush: Ooh, what a great love/hate debate. I was rather taken aback by how much hate mail I got about the character (much of it personally aimed at the actress, Michelle Rodriguez), and I agree that one thing Lost needed (and now has) is another female character besides Kate (another source of constant bickering) — one who can literally take prisoners and yet, for those with open minds, who may eventually be able to earn viewers' sympathy. I find her intriguing, not nearly as off-putting as so many seem to. But Ryan isn't alone.
From Karen B.: "I disagree with Jennifer C.'s comment that the Ana Lucia character is 'written and played so broadly.' Whether or not Michelle Rodriguez deserves to win an award, I've known people who were very much like her. To draw on my introductory psych course (cough), she seems to have a borderline personality disorder, and having known a couple of people who have the same, I'd say it's a fairly realistic depiction. These people tend to see things in black and white, become very angry at people who disagree with them at all, and tend to try to get what they want through rage or charm or whatever it takes, but they are also deeply unhappy people. Sound familiar? Of course, this is Lost, so what we think we know about a character now can often change after a few episodes." Well, that much is true.
From Lauren: "Sure, she had to be tough on a lot of people, but that toughness of hers just may have saved everyone's lives. So why is there so much hate directed towards her?"
From Joyce L.: "I get the feeling that a lot of the viewers are transferring their dislike of Michelle Rodriguez and the characters she's played in her movies to this character. I had no preconceived notions because I had never heard of her until they made such a big deal over her being added to the cast. Anyway, I've tried to give her a chance based on what her group of survivors have gone through since the plane crash. Someone had to step up and take the lead so the group would survive. The backstory on the next episode after "The Other 48 Days" explained her issues but didn't make me feel warm and fuzzy about the character. I think she will shake things up a bit and add something to the mix of characters we know. Not sure I'd want to be around her all the time, though. And whoever wondered why none of our people have hit back yet was right. She needs a dose of chill pills. Now, the character who does intrigue me is Mr. Eko. Can't wait until they tell us more about him. And Desmond, too. They're both really great additions to the cast."
Couldn't agree more about Eko, and it sounds like they've already started working on his backstory as well.
________________________________________
Question: Since Stephanie March is going to be on NBC's Conviction playing her Law & Order: Special Victims Unit character, and since they're using old Trial by Jury sets, do you think Dick Wolf will retitle the spin-off Law & Order: Conviction? Or will he realize that a little distance from "just another Law & Order spin-off" might be necessary? Also, in last week's column, you shied away from talking about Michelle Rodriguez's dreadful character, saying you would rather focus on the good in watching Lost. Uh, isn't it your duty as a TV critic to look at the good and the bad, and "criticize" it? — D.J.
Matt Roush: To continue the Ana Lucia debate: Uh, I thought I made it clear in that column that I didn't have the problems others were having with her, and I still don't. And while it is my job to criticize, I often find I do it best by not rushing to judgments, by not nitpicking every little flaw, especially in a show I love, and certainly by not piling on. I was trying to be honest by confessing to a blind spot where Lost is concerned. Agree with it or not, at least I'm not pretending otherwise.
As for Conviction, Dick Wolf seems very determined, despite the Stephanie March casting, for this show to have a very separate identity from the other Law & Order shows. He doesn't consider this a spin-off, so I doubt we'll see those words in the title. (If those clanging between-scene transitions are missing, that will be the real test.) Because Conviction will feature much more plot-driven material about the characters' personal lives, Wolf has even coined a hideous new term to describe this show: "charactercedural." Let's hope the show is better than that sounds.
________________________________________
Question: I know CBS has won every week of the season. I bet they'll win every week until ABC's Bowl season starts. I bet they'll also win every week, with the exception of the Super Bowl week and the two weeks of the Olympics. Should CBS really celebrate this? Of course! However, once people get tired of the crime dramas, the whole schedule will collapse. I mean, they have nine procedurals on their schedule (excluding Saturday repeats of, you guessed it, more procedurals), so it's bound to happen. I hope that it does. I can't even watch CSI anymore because of how much I now hate procedurals. But to my Question: Do you think that the same thing that happened to ABC with its multiple airings of Millionaire will happen to CBS? If so, when? Because I can't wait! — Luis A.
Matt Roush: I'm not quite as bloodthirsty about the prospect as you seem to be. But to me the most depressing outcome of the season so far has not been the cancellations of promising shows like Threshold and Just Legal (most of the others deserved it), or the woes of Arrested Development and Kitchen Confidential on Fox. What really irks me is the success of Criminal Minds, one of the most generic, uninspired and criminally mundane shows CBS has presented in a long while, with performances that veer from mannered (Mandy Patinkin) to wooden (just about everyone else). This is a show that reinforces the cliché that the CBS viewer will watch just about anything as long as there are dead bodies in it.
The glut of crime dramas has gotten to the point where I'm beginning to get a reputation as a curmudgeon where procedurals are concerned, and that bothers me. I still enjoy the original CSI, Without a Trace and Cold Case, I think Numbers is clever on those rare Fridays when I'm home to watch, Close to Home makes sense to me (though I don't feel the impulse to TiVo it), I'm loving Bones, and so on. But to answer your basic Question: There is a long-standing belief that everything in TV is cyclical, and when the passion cools for procedurals — an event that appears to be nowhere in sight yet — CBS will be in desperate straits unless it sees the end coming early and prepares with at least a few shows that veer from the formula. I'm especially worried about the prospects for CBS' mid-season comedy-drama Love Monkey, mainly because no one dies in it. Yet.
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Question: Hi, Matt. Great column. Some great shows have seen the ax lately, but one of my absolute favorite shows (perhaps, at this point, my overall favorite of the season) is one that doesn't come up all that frequently: NCIS — or, as I mockingly referred to it in the first season, "Navy Criminal Investigation Service." What I love about the show is the characters and the great chemistry the cast seems to have, particularly with the addition of Cote de Pablo this season. In a lineup stuffed with all-too-boring procedurals, this is the only one that can make me laugh. — Brian
Matt Roush: May I also point you towards Fox's Bones, which will soon be moving away from direct competition with NCIS? What sets both of these shows apart is a strong reliance on character-based humor amid the mysteries. NCIS has exploded in popularity this season, and we have acknowledged that with several features (and more to come) in the magazine itself. And since it doesn't appear that the shocking departure of Sasha Alexander (her choice) has had a negative impact on the show's fortunes, I'm happy to give it a plug here.
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Question: What's this talk I hear about an Alias spin-off starring the current bad guys? Do you have any intel. on this? Would Amy Acker be involved? My greatest wish would be a spin-off starring Amy Acker and David Anders, because I don't think you can get any better than Peyton and Sark working closely together to do evil. That would be hot. — Spacegirl
Matt Roush: Spacegirl? Really? Anyway, this possibility of a bad-guy spin-off (also featuring Sloane, naturally) was discussed in the Dec. 12 issue of TV Guide (on stands now), but it's awfully preliminary and, I agree, awfully tempting — though I would be honestly surprised if it gets much beyond the talking stage. ABC is flying high these days, and spinning off a show past its prime seems counterintuitive. But yes, it would be hot. And I would watch.
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Question: After watching this past week's hilarious episode of Fox's Kitchen Confidential, I am officially hooked on the show. At first, it felt raw and unfocused, with mediocre scripts, but the show has been getting better and better and the characters have become more defined and comfortable with their roles. It seems to have a lot of potential, with the interesting setting inside of a top New York restaurant, and with the zany, roguish, flawed characters and the many story possibilities that come with a new batch of patrons every night.
Sexy, edgy 30-minute comedies like this are rare, and most are just retreads of the same old idea. With Fox's announcement of the show's cancellation, is there any chance that the show will be picked up by another network or reupped if the ratings get better and the DVD sells (à la Family Guy)? Even if there isn't, I would like your take on why shows with a great premise, luxurious setting and sexy cast aren't nurtured by the networks. It seems that as Arrested Development's lead-out, Kitchen suffered the same scheduling difficulties and lack of publicity as the earlier show. Can Fox really think that it's given this show a chance, when it took at least a whole season for audiences to catch on to Seinfeld? — Albert S.
Matt Roush: I'm sure Fox doesn't believe it did all it could for Kitchen, but I'm not convinced the network really cares, either. Given the tone of most of Fox's more successful comedies, Kitchen Confidential would probably have trouble fitting in anywhere on the schedule. Kitchen might have had better luck on NBC, which has a track record with more sophisticated comedies, but the chances of anyone coming to this show's rescue are about as slim as my getting a reservation to a restaurant as hot as Jack's.
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Question: What did you think of the Knots Landing reunion? It had very much the same setup as the Dallas one, but I think this one was a lot more successful. Maybe it's because the cast seemed to genuinely like each other. Seeing the clips really made me miss it, and as much as I love Desperate Housewives, it can't compete with Knots. As crazy as the plots could sometimes get, the characters were always believable, and I think that is what put it above the rest. — Chris
Matt Roush: The Knots reunion was indeed better than the Dallas debacle, but then, the show itself was better than Dallas through most of their concurrent runs. Knots was always my favorite of the classic '80s prime-time soaps, and even when I was alone on that critical limb, I was never ashamed to declare myself a fan. It was the most consistent, the most sustained, the best acted and written and (within reason) the most realistic of the evening soaps, yet also deliciously campy when it chose to be. There's little question that Desperate Housewives owes a stylistic debt to Knots, which in its prime was also a model of clever construction and barbed dialogue, albeit not nearly as satirical or broadly comic.
On a similar theme, Adam K. writes: "I've been watching Pasadena in syndication on SoapNet, and I've quickly come to the realization that Desperate Housewives owes everything to this show. The mixture of humor, mystery, and American Beauty pathos is just teeming from this short-lived show. And Dana Delany basically channels all four Desperate Housewives women in one. Would you agree with this assertion?"
Talk about your lost treasures. If Fox had aired the full 13 episodes of Pasadena, Dana Delany would likely have another Emmy on her shelf: She was that great. Kudos to SoapNet for resurrecting this show, which got better and weirder in the episodes after Fox yanked it. That said, Pasadena's quick fade means that it probably had little to do with the genesis of Housewives, but watching it now, it clearly was ahead of its time. If it were being pitched and produced today, chances are it might actually have succeeded.
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Question: Since its premiere, Invasion has been developed in a very slow way. However, I love the show's family concept, the acting is consistent in each episode, and the story is mesmerizing (even with a slow pace). I am very worried about Invasion's chances for a second season, since it hasn't been able to capture Lost's audience, and ABC is so hot right now that it may not need Invasion around after this first year. Commander in Chief is another possible casualty beyond its first season, because House is winning the competition so far this year. ABC has so much buzz and so many good shows that I don't know if they would rather trust Invasion and Chief, or just look for bigger hits (Grey's Anatomy and Desperate Housewives). I know it's a little early to start next year's predictions, but Invasion is not winning new viewers and Chief is losing important numbers. You were right when you predicted Invasion's full-season order, so now I am looking for some perspective on two of my favorite shows. Thanks for a great column each week. — Glenda
Matt Roush: You're welcome, and thanks for the question. It is probably too early to start worrying about renewals — both of these shows still have the second half of a full season to produce. But after a gut-check, I would be surprised if ABC doesn't renew Commander in Chief as a prestige property, unless the numbers completely collapse on American Idol on Tuesdays. As strong as ABC is these days, it can't win every ratings battle, and being a solid No. 2 or even No. 3 — counterprogramming to a different audience and demographic than those that watch House — may be enough to keep it around a while. Invasion I'm less sure about. Yes, it loses a lot of Lost's audience — almost anything would — but given ABC's track record in that time period, ABC is doing better than I ever would have expected with this quietly but increasingly unnerving series. As is often the case, much depends on the quality of ABC's development for next season. If ABC believes it has come up with a better show to pair with Lost, then Invasion could be in real trouble (or, possibly worse, shipped off to Thursday next season). If not, maybe ABC will accept Invasion for what it is. I'm hoping for a good result, but am not especially confident just yet.
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Question: I've recently discovered that I have psychic powers of prediction. Here is my prediction for March 2005: Prison Break will return on Fox. The ratings will be abysmal. Longtime viewers will get to see the end of Season 1 (thankfully) but the show will not continue. I've seen it happen before. Remember how Farscape's ratings dropped after Sci Fi pulled it off of the air for seven straight months without reruns (four episodes from the end of Season 3)? Nine-tenths of TV viewers — and it seems like ten-tenths of Nielsen families — are creatures of habit. How many people still care after a hiatus that long? The answer: only the die-hards — the ones who suffer again and again when networks pull this dren. What's your opinion on my psychic forecast? — David G.
Matt Roush: Sorry to burst your crystal ball, but I think Prison Break will do just fine when it returns. Yes, it's a long break, but not as long as initially rumored, and Fox will go all out promoting the one-two punch of a Prison Break-24 action night starting in March. Given where the story was left hanging, it won't take much to get the shows' fan bases caught up in the action. There will be a huge desire to see how the escape plan plays out, and pairing these episodes with 24 is genius. But then, I could be wrong. Maybe 24 will be a letdown this year, and that could depress the numbers for Prison Break upon its return. Not that I truly believe that for an instant. (As for how Prison Break fares in a second season — and I believe there will be one — is anyone's guess.)
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Question: I just wanted to write you a brief thank-you note. I've come to respect your opinions about television during the last few years, and I've seen you rave about the reimagined Battlestar Galactica series, as well as Veronica Mars. So within the last two months, I picked up the DVD sets containing the first seasons of each show, completely blind, and solely based on the positive buzz both these shows have attracted. I was blown away by how amazing these shows are. It really takes the sting out of losing Alias in the spring. It just goes to prove that when one door closes, another one opens. Incidentally, that might be something helpful to pass along to your readers: Don't be afraid to try new television shows. Always strive to sample what might interest you. If you'd told me a year ago that I'd be watching and loving Veronica Mars and the new Battlestar Galactica this Christmas, I'd have scoffed. Don't you agree that it pays off to constantly try to sample new shows? — Michael C.
Matt Roush: I'd be fired if I said I didn't. I'm ending the column on this optimistic note because, no matter how frustrating it gets to have favorite shows canceled or jerked around, there's always the chance that another great show is right around the corner, and every so often (My Name Is Earl, Lost, The X-Files, Northern Exposure, to name a few), good things happen to those risk-taking shows that deserve it.
http://tvguide.com/tv/roush/askmatt/
The fight over a la carte gets serious
”Family Friendly” Plan Sets Cable Rift
FCC Heat Spawns Talk Of New Tier of Channels; Weighing a Financial Hit
By JOE FLINT, PETER GRANT and AMY SCHATZ Staff Reporters of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL December 12, 2005
A split has developed within the entertainment industry as several major cable operators signaled their willingness to give in to regulatory pressure by providing a so-called family-friendly package of programming, despite resistance from many cable programmers.
The nation's two largest cable operators, Comcast Corp. and Time Warner Inc., indicated they are considering creating a "tier" of cable channels that would exclude channels airing risqué programs. Two smaller operators, Cox Communications Inc. and Insight Communications Co., hinted they are ready to do the same.
The cable operators' statements come after weeks of pressure from Federal Communications Commission Chairman Kevin Martin, who wants to find a way for consumers to avoid seeing television programming they find objectionable. The FCC only last month ratcheted up pressure on the cable industry by reversing its position on the pricing of pre-packaged bundles, suggesting instead that consumers may be better off buying channels individually or in themed tiers.
In showing willingness to play ball with Mr. Martin, the cable operators are breaking ranks with the major entertainment companies that own most of the country's cable and broadcast channels. The entertainment companies are concerned about the impact of a family-friendly tier on their revenue and who would determine what qualifies as a family-friendly channel. They also worry about what would happen to channels that don't meet that qualification.
The escalating tensions likely will have broad repercussions in an industry where relations between cable operators and cable channels are never easy.
Operators and entertainment companies frequently bicker over terms for carriage of TV channels: in some extreme cases, disputes lead to TV channels being taken off the air for a few days.
Entertainment companies have several concerns about a family-friendly tier. For starters, there are worries about how such a tier would hurt channels they own that are decidedly not family friendly.
Even if a few million consumers decided to drop their current cable service and sign on for only family-friendly channels, that could have big financial ramifications. Walt Disney Co.'s ESPN, for example, costs cable operators about $2.50 per-subscriber per-month. If ESPN wasn't a part of a family-friendly tier and lost three or four million of its 90 million subscribers, that could translate into tens of millions of dollars it would have to replace. An ESPN spokeswoman declined to comment.
Other cable networks would likely face similar scenarios. Cable operators could see their monthly bills drop by $10 for people who subscribe to only a family-friendly tier, added one senior executive at a major cable operator.
Another big issue is just who would decide what makes one channel family friendly and another not family friendly, said executives at several major cable programming services. Further complicating this is that there likely wouldn't be a one-size-fits-all family-friendly tier. Each cable operator would create its own package and have to negotiate with programmers, an executive at a large cable operator said.
Spokeswomen for Viacom declined to comment while a Fox Cable official didn't respond to requests for comment.
Comcast Executive Vice President David Cohen said the company is considering a family tier in response to consumer demand.
In recent months cable operators and the entertainment companies tried to agree on a set of voluntary decency standards to appease Mr. Martin's concerns, but talks broke down. Some of the largest cable companies were ready to adopt voluntary decency standards, people familiar with the matter say, but because of opposition from several large entertainment companies, including Viacom Inc. and News Corp.'s Fox, a consensus couldn't be reached.
The final attempt to reach an accord came late last month during a conference call involving many of the country's leading programmers that was organized by Kyle McSlarrow, chief executive of industry lobbying group the National Cable and Telecommunications Association. Mr. McSlarrow has been told to come back to Capitol Hill today to provide Senate Commerce Committee Chairman Ted Stevens (R., Alaska) and other senators with a progress report of the industry's attempts to find a solution to indecency concerns.
Channel owners worry that decency standards would require them to tone down programming on cable channels. The companies also are opposed because of their experience dealing with decency standards in broadcast television, specifically with what they see as unclear regulations on what is or isn't indecent programming.
The industry talks centered on decency standards that would be similar to those already required of broadcast television stations, people involved in the talks said. Entertainment executives don't relish the idea of having to apply those same rules to cable.
What entertainment companies can do to stop cable operators creating a new tier of programming isn't clear. One possibility, industry executives said, is that network owners could contend tiers were in violation of their contracts with cable operators. In the future, large entertainment companies that own numerous networks will likely fight fiercely to get them on family tiers, using their most popular channels as leverage.
Mr. Martin put pressure on cable operators by making it clear that the family-tier issue could influence the FCC's consideration of Time Warner and Comcast's agreement to buy the assets of Adelphia Communications Corp. Last week the FCC asked Time Warner and Comcast for extensive follow-up information which some observers interpreted as a sign that the commission was considering a number of conditions to approving the deal.
An FCC official with knowledge of the staff's review, however, said the information request was routine and it's too early to speculate on what conditions, if any, the commission might require.
'Martha' settles in for second season
The Hollywood Reporter
LOS ANGELES -- It looks like daytime is a good thing for "Martha."
NBC Universal Domestic Television Distribution is set to announce Monday (December 12) that it has sold the Martha Stewart-hosted daytime show in more than 90 percent of the country for its upcoming second season.
http://channels.netscape.com/news/story.jsp?id=2005121201060002211543&dt=20051212010600&w=RTR&coview=
Sports On TV
TV poker about to reach new heights
By Michael Hiestand USA Today
In retrospect, it seems inevitable that the popularity of TV poker would lead to the erection of a Pokerdome for a new poker series in which cards will carry computer chips and the marquee event offers the winner $60 million — a payday billed as the biggest ever in sports.
Sounds like satire. But Fox Sports Net will announce Monday the creation of the Mansionpoker.net Pokerdome Series, a sort of case study in wretched excess that also seems like a promising TV property.
Take the so-called Pokerdome, which Fox will build in Las Vegas and use only for the series. It will be in a mall or hotel — not a casino — for the same reason TV poker only associates with online poker sites that don't charge and don't offer actual gambling: TV networks like to show they have scruples.
Players will be encased in one-way, mirrored glass with microphones everywhere so fans seated around the dome can hear and see everything, without being seen or heard. George Greenberg, executive vice president of FSN, made up of Fox's 20 owned or affiliated regional sports channels, says the dome "will be a Cone of Silence, as Maxwell Smart would say."
Cards will carry computer chips, so fans know what cards are discarded. And the series, starting in May, will include new "speed poker," giving players 15 seconds to act or lose immediately. That, says Greenberg, will be "poker with a shot clock."
Greenberg says sponsor Mansion, a Gibraltar-based online gambling company, also will get a big "brand awareness" show July 12 at an Australian casino, where six players put up $10 million apiece — winner take all. Greenberg says he has three entrants, whom he declined to name, and the event might be on the Fox broadcast network.
Big dance: ABC's second season of Dancing with the Stars, where celebrities waltz and fox trot with pro dancers on live TV as home viewers vote to eliminate couples, begins Jan. 5 with a lineup including George Hamilton, Tia Carrere, Jerry Rice, Tatum O'Neal, teen rap star Romeo — and ESPN's Kenny Mayne.
Your first reaction has to be that Mayne is on some sort of quest, a real-life Flashdance in which he dares to dream that his pulsing gyrations can somehow free him from a life of talking about sports on TV.
But no. He says he's worried about just making it past the first round, where he'll do the cha-cha in a costume "sort of like the puffy shirt in the Seinfeld episode" — a look that sounds hard to pull off unless you have, say, Hamilton's tan.
"I'm a terrible dancer," said Mayne, calling from an appearance Sunday at a Disney store in Manchester, N.H., where he says nobody recognized him. "In terms of 'let's go dancing,' I haven't done it since my last wedding, and I might not have done it then."
He says "it wasn't just the humiliation" that caused him to "wrestle with whether to do it." But, then, it is "found money," and it doesn't hurt to score points with ABC's entertainment division, which might remember Mayne the next time it casts a sitcom about, say, an extraterrestrial stuck in the suburbs.
Mayne has beaten long odds before. Before joining ESPN in 1994, Mayne assembled garbage cans and sold prepaid legal insurance — after he'd quit an on-air job at a Seattle TV station over creative differences. And in a society obsessed with winning, Mayne knows his toe-pointing will be about much more than scoring points: "I'll be honored just to represent my nation."
Angry: On CBS on Sunday, New Orleans Saints quarterback Aaron Brooks said the team, displaced by Hurricane Katrina, was treated unfairly and "a lot of it has been swept under the rug."
He blames NFL commissioner Paul Tagliabue for not visiting the team right after the storm, and says he told Tagliabue to "get the hell off the football field" at the team's so-called home opener in New York. Said CBS' Boomer Esiason about Brooks: "He's making $6.6 million. I am sympathetic to the fact they are uncomfortable. But what about those other people who are displaced?"
Spice rack: Ugueth Urbina, who has pitched 11 big-league seasons, is a free agent. But in real life he's jailed on charges of attempted murder in his native Venezuela. In a taped interview with ESPN on Sunday, Urbina said "people" accuse him of the crime "so that they can get money." Said Chicago White Sox manager Ozzie Guillen, a Venezuelan: "I swear to God, I'd rather be dead than be in jail in Venezuela." ...
The Texas men's basketball team wore black jerseys, at sponsor Nike's request, in their loss to Duke on CBS on Saturday. "I don't think that's in the best interests of college basketball," said CBS' Billy Packer. "But that's where we are. Like Willie Sutton said, you rob banks because that's where the money is."
http://www.usatoday.com/sports/columnist/hiestand-tv/2005-12-11-hiestand-poker_x.htm
“Night Stalker” Just Won’t Die
By Jim Benson Broadcasting & Cable
After ABC pulled the plug last month on Night Stalker, the update of the 1970s series about a ghoul-hunting reporter, it looked like danger-seeking journalist Carl Kolchak had met his demise—done in by six low-rated episodes.
But NBC Universal’s Sci Fi Channel is expected to announce it has acquired all nine episodes produced and will air them at 7 p.m. Fridays next summer. Press reps for Sci Fi and Stalker producer Touchstone Television declined to comment last week.
Touchstone is believed to have fetched only $15,000-$50,000 per episode, and competitors think Stalker may fall on the lower end of that scale, since there were so few episodes produced and Sci Fi was its only logical cable home.
Only one of the three unaired episodes has so far appeared on iPods as part of an overall programming agreement announced in October between Disney and Apple’s iTunes. The two remaining unaired episodes are slated to be available for downloads later.
The Sci Fi sale does raise a conundrum for Touchstone: whether it will have to pay broadcast or much lower cable residuals.
Critic’s Notebook
TV critic is holiday flick collector
By Ellen Gray Philadelphia Daily News Posted on Mon, Dec. 12, 2005
I love Christmas like a child, but as a TV critic I've been known to get a little Scroogelike this time of year, with so many shows in reruns and bad made-for-TV movies piling up like yellow snow.
Once I've guilted my younger son - now a strapping eighth-grader - into watching "A Charlie Brown Christmas" with me, I'm pretty much done for the season, professional obligations aside.
My friend (Newsday TV Columnist) Diane Werts, on the other hand, often has three or four recorders going at once in December, just so she won't miss a single one of the holiday episodes the networks start serving up the minute the Thanksgiving dishes are cleared.
She's been at it for years and estimates she's collected about 800 episodes.
"I just like them," she said last week. "I didn't even realize I had this obsession until I started taping them and the stack got so big."
The line between obsession and expertise can be a fine one, but thanks to Werts' new book, "Christmas on Television" (Praeger, $39.95), the Newsday TV columnist has made it safely over to the expert side, with a detail-rich exploration of television's long love affair with Christmas that brought back more good memories than I'd have thought some old TV shows held for me.
With commentary on everything from "The Sopranos' " Christmas episode - remember the Big Mouth Billy Bass Meadow gave Tony? - to "South Park," she's also kept faith with the Ghost of Christmas Present.
She even explains how Frank Capra's 1946 film "It's A Wonderful Life" went from box-office flop to beloved classic through the magic of a lapsed copyright that for about 20 years, starting in the mid-'70s, had "every TV station that could get its mitts on a copy" playing the Jimmy Stewart movie all the time.
Now that it's legally locked up again, NBC, she said, shows it only twice a year. (It ran this past Saturday and will air again on Christmas Eve.)
"I'd like to say it's made it a little bit special, but what made it special was that it was on all the time," Werts said. "This binge viewing has actually become a big thing, with DVDs" and cable-network marathons.
Marathons on Turner-owned stations also helped make a hit of the quirky 1983 film "A Christmas Story" - this year's 24-hour marathon on TBS starts at 8 p.m. Christmas Eve - even though when it was released, according to Werts' book, "audiences unsure what to make of this little mutt stayed away in droves."
Not even the "Christmas on Television" expert can explain, though, why most of the made-for-TV holiday movies are such dogs.
"The movies tend to be real syrup," she said. Modeled after "A Christmas Carol," "they tend to be just the greedy developer or the greedy businessman" who wants to do something bad and who's made to see the error of his ways while finding the "true" spirit of Christmas.
" 'A Christmas Carol' is really a lot harder-edged than most people think, and the hard edge is usually what's missing" in these movies, she added. "The CBS movies are the worst. God bless them for doing TV movies at all... but they do three or four Christmas movies a year and they're almost all bad."
Still, they keep making them, and showing them earlier every year.
"They've kind of gone nuts since the advent of cable," she said. And she should know, having not yet closed the book on her passion for holiday TV.
"I've got three recorders going again," she said Thursday. "And it's more than two weeks till Christmas."
http://www.philly.com/mld/philly/entertainment/television//13387234.htm?template=contentModules/printstory.jsp
Sports On TV
NHL Endures Remote Outpost
Hockey is trying to get comfortable with its place on cable TV's OLN,
where being a big fish still means dealing with weak ratings
By Helene Elliott Los AngelesTimes Staff Writer December 12, 2005
The NHL, returning from a season lost to a lockout, needed a cable TV outlet that would give it star billing instead of the bit-player status it had received at ESPN.
OLN, known as a hunting-and-fishing haven during the lulls between Lance Armstrong's Tour de France triumphs, wanted to change its image from a quaint and quirky sportsman's paradise to a home for testosterone-fueled competitive sports.
And so was born an unlikely partnership between the NHL, desperate to grab a chunk of a fragmented TV audience, and OLN, known as the Outdoor Life Network when it was known at all beyond its narrowly focused, heavily male audience. So far, their alliance has had some on-air missteps and is producing feeble ratings, but neither side is measuring success by conventional standards.
Their convergence, sealed in August with a deal that's worth $135 million over two years and could last three or six years depending on a variety of options, occurred at a pivotal time in their history.
Plagued by weak TV ratings and an unappealing, defense-oriented game, the NHL had been forced to accept a profit-sharing deal for over-the-air telecasts on NBC. When ESPN declined to pick up a $60-million option for this season but suggested it might consider a profit-sharing model — and then declined to match OLN's offer — the NHL took its puck home.
League executives said they felt insulted by ESPN, which had used hockey to establish its legitimacy. They wanted ESPN's cachet but wouldn't grovel for it. Their cable package "was probably undervalued before that, and we were not prepared for further undervaluing of the product," said Bill Daly, NHL deputy commissioner.
Enter OLN, owned by cable giant Comcast, which owns a two-thirds stake of the Philadelphia Flyers. Under Gavin Harvey, a UCLA business school graduate who had a marketing background and became OLN's president in March 2004, the network had moved away from its outdoorsy roots by adding the Dakar Rally, Iditarod, America's Cup yacht race, Boston marathon and reruns of CBS' "Survivor" series.
"Our mission at that point was to start to expand the middle," Harvey said. "To get people to watch as destination, people who don't know the difference between carbon fiber and titanium as a benefit to your bike or couldn't argue entomology for fly-fishing.
"We need more men, for more minutes, more often. And they don't have to be hikers or bikers or campers or hunters. They just have to be guys. Who are the guys watching the NFC championship? Because it's a big event? I want those guys watching our programming."
The NHL gets in on the beginning of a dream, much as it did on ESPN. OLN, which plans another name change next year to reflect its wider aim, gets to piggyback on the NHL's history and mainstream status while still giving its core fans mano-a-mano battles. Instead of man vs. beast, as in its Professional Bull Riders events, or man against the sea, it's shooter against goalie.
"The evolution of OLN was a big part of what we talked about," Daly said. "The most important part was they were prepared to make us a priority, which I think they've done."
Harvey declined to say whether OLN will use the NHL as a foothold to pursue TV rights of other sports leagues, but that's not farfetched.
"We have never said that we want to take on ESPN because ESPN is a great channel. It's an institution," he said. "It's simply that we've been trying to make this channel better. Our distributors have asked for it, our advertisers have asked for it. Viewers are responding to it."
Perhaps so. But not in huge numbers. And the NHL is discovering that being a big fish in a small pond has its drawbacks.
OLN reaches 63 million homes; ESPN goes to 90 million and ESPN2 to 89 million. In addition, OLN was dropped by Cablevision for several weeks at the start of the hockey season, eliminating about 3 million homes, and OLN remains off EchoStar's Dish network because of a dispute over EchoStar's placement of OLN on a higher-priced channel package. OLN pulled its NHL telecasts because that channel isn't seen by 40% of the system's viewers, the minimum set by OLN for providing games.
OLN is delighted with its internal viewer measurements. Compared to a year ago in the same time periods, it has more than doubled impressions among its target groups of men 18 to 34, men 18 to 49 and men 25 to 54. Overall numbers, though, are small. Its first NHL telecast drew a 0.4 rating and 353,439 households and didn't return to that level until Nov. 16. Through the same period of the 2003-04 season, ESPN averaged a 0.5 rating and 476,384 households, and ESPN2 averaged a 0.2 rating and 196,000 homes.
However, ESPN2's telecasts were not exclusive, meaning they were not seen in the markets of the teams involved. OLN telecasts are seen in the local markets, which account for nearly 80% of OLN's national audience. Without the local markets, OLN's ratings would be microscopic. Through last week, they were averaging a rating of 0.24, slightly down from a 0.3 last month.
"We're getting numbers that are very comparable to ESPN last year. We anticipate the numbers will get better as we build a relationship with them and as viewers know where to look for the NHL," Daly said. "Next year they will have exclusive windows where they will have the only game. With proper lead time, we can build a schedule around our broadcast partners.
"The timing was not ideal. We signed the agreement six weeks before the season was to start and signed with a network that had never done a major sports league. It continues to be a work in progress and we're pleased with the progress Comcast and OLN are making."
Marc Fein, OLN's senior vice president for programming and production, called hockey the network's "crown jewel," adding, "On the distribution side it helps elevate OLN into a must-have network," although he said that "in a couple of months, in straight-up profit and loss terms, you can't assess" the deal's impact.
Harvey said OLN is "impatient for growth" but happy with results so far. "We're starting to see OLN is less and less the story and the NHL and the game is the story," he said. "It's a new network, and again, everybody was, 'What's it doing on that network?' They didn't quite get the connection. Hockey fans found it right away.
"I think you'll get the bigger growth as more and more people are attracted to the game and the heavy lifting the league and players have done by getting the game back on the ice. That's what we're sort of starting to see, and when the games are really good, the fans are coming. And again we're only in the first couple of months. It's just back. It's a question of people finding us, getting reconnected with their teams, getting reconnected with some of their favorite players who have moved to other teams, and a question of our distribution."
Viewers who found OLN's first few telecasts often had trouble hearing the fuzzy audio feeds. The set for the intermission shows, with ESPN recruit Bill Clement as host, looked like something assembled in a garage by a bunch of kids on a rainy day. "I couldn't figure out if I was going to go bald or gray first," Fein said of the audio woes. "It was upsetting. We felt terrible."
Harvey acknowledged that "there were definitely things we're not proud of that were going on" and attributed the technical problems to a rush to get on the air. He said the set will be improved and telecasts will be enhanced with player profiles and other efforts to "demystify" the sport and its athletes. OLN aired its first doubleheader last Monday and ventured west of the Central time zone for the first time; it plans several more doubleheaders and additional games involving West Coast teams.
"One of the issues in televising hockey is that there's so much in-arena excitement that doesn't always translate to television. Of all the majors, it's toughest to translate the speed and athleticism," Fein said.
"Fox, NBC and ESPN are all very good networks with a lot of talented people. Our hope and intention is that we can grow it to that higher level over time."
Harvey said he's sure that day will come.
"I think now we are in the good part," he said. "We definitely turned the corner."
http://www.calendarlive.com/tv/cl-sp-oln12dec12,0,4215922,print.story?coll=cl-tv-features
Xesdeeni
12-12-05, 10:33 AM
“Reunion” ends at a cliffhanger
...
Who killed Samantha?
...
"Reunion" fans may never know.
...
Shame on someone. But who exactly is to blame?You know, hindsight is 20:20, but am I the only one who saw this as a very real possibility before the season ever started? I said at the time that surely FOX had committed to the entire season. Surely they wouldn't create a mystery and then not solve it.
"Shame on who?" Shame on FOX.
Don't get me wrong, we watched two episodes and dumped the show. We didn't like it.
But the point is that FOX has now told us in no uncertain terms that they are willing to hook us and then screw us. Tru Calling was left hanging. But this one takes the cake.
I will remember this the next time FOX introduces anything remotely resembling a serial show...and I won't watch. I may even drop a line to FOX letting them know why I'm not even watching the pilot. And I may copy their advertisers.
Xesdeeni
CPanther95
12-12-05, 10:39 AM
Shame on FOX - however, this exact scenario was brought up to the creators when the show was picked up and they said they would accelerate the plot should this happen. If this is a case of the Reunion folks pouting - shame on them as well.
Sunday’s prime-time ratings – and Media Week Analyst Marc Berman’s analysis of what they mean -- have been posted at the top of Ratings News the second post in this thread.
TV Ratings Finale bounce for sagging 'Survivor'
By Diego Vasquez MediaLifeMagazine.com staff writer Dec 12, 2005, 11:28
The latest season of “Survivor” was the lowest-rated in the show’s 10-season history, but the franchise hasn’t lost its juice entirely.
Last night’s two-hour finale of “Survivor: Guatemala,” won by Danni Boatwright, averaged a 7.6 overnight rating among viewers 18-49, up 3 percent versus the 7.4 last fall’s “Survivor” finale earned.
It was also flat versus the 7.6 “Survivor” earned this spring for its two-hour finale, but even that marked a turnabout after a season of decline.
Last night’s finale bettered last December’s season-ender even though the overall season had shown a significant decline in ratings. Through mid-November, “Survivor” was averaging a 6.3 final rating among viewers 18-49, according to Nielsen Media Research, down 15 percent versus the show’s 7.4 rating through the same period a year earlier.
Presumably many former viewers who didn’t watch the regular season did come back for the finale.
Part of last night’s success came because ABC didn’t air an original episode of “Desperate Housewives” head-to-head with the “Survivor” finale as it had the previous two seasons. It instead aired a special two-hour edition of “Extreme Makeover; Home Edition.”
The one-hour “Survivor” reunion show that followed the finale was about on par with the last two. It averaged a 6.8 overnight rating among 18-49s, even with last December’s reunion show and down slightly from the 6.9 the spring season’s reunion show averaged in May.
Last night’s finale was also up in total viewers versus May, at about 21.7 million total viewers to 20 million last spring.
“Survivor” helped CBS to a rare Sunday night first-place finish among 18-49s, averaging a 7.1 rating and a 17 share. Usual winner ABC fell to second at 5.2/12, followed by Fox at 4.0/10, NBC at 2.4/6 and the WB at 0.9/2.
http://medialifemagazine.com/artman/publish/printer_1793.asp
Telco David Takes on Goliaths
California-Based Pioneer in Video Delivery Achieves 20% Penetration
By Daisy Whitney TVWeek.com
The day before Thanksgiving, a small California telephone company conducted a trial of high-definition television services, running a feed of Discovery HD Theater on two 50-inch-plus Panasonic HDTV sets side by side. One set received the channel's signal from a satellite provider and the other received it via the phone company's own Internet protocol infrastructure.
The result?
The little guy won.
The IPTV version of Discovery HD Theater delivered by Sacramento-area telephone company SureWest actually looked better than the satellite one. The picture was crisper, brighter and clearer around the edges, as judged by this reporter. The telco's engineers were pleased. After all, the delivery of video services has become a cutthroat business, with new competitors cropping up daily, threats rising from every corner of the wired world and all of the players looking to grab a slice, or even a sliver, of the potentially lucrative market for delivering entertainment services to ravenous consumers. Providers will take any edge they can get, including a slightly better HD signal.
As a smaller telco, SureWest, which has offered video for three years in the fast-growing Sacramento area and plans to add about 17 HD channels in the next few weeks, doesn't command the attention that behemoths with swagger and might, such as AT&T, BellSouth and Verizon, do in the telco TV world.
But SureWest, in its own way, is a major player.
"SureWest is by far the leader in deploying [IPTV in the U.S.]," said Jeff Heynen, an analyst for broadband and IPTV at Infonetics Research.
SureWest got started early, has been progressive with technology and has been able to capitalize on somewhat of a "feel-good" opportunity because it's the local telephone company rather than a massive regional Bell operating company, Mr. Heynen said.
By year-end, SureWest will have poured about $200 million into its fiber-optic broadband system.
And it's starting to pay off. SureWest offers 260 channels of video to nearly 85,000 customers via its fiber infrastructure and has almost 20 percent video penetration.
Those hearty numbers are indicative of the potential for smaller phone companies to battle incumbent cable and satellite operators. That 20 percent penetration is particularly powerful given some analyst estimates of take rates for all telcos. Brahm Eiley, an analyst with Convergence Consulting in Toronto, predicts that by the end of 2009 phone companies as a whole will have taken only 5 percent of the pay TV market. Cable companies, meanwhile, will capture 20 percent of the residential phone market, he said.
That makes SureWest a bit of an anomaly. But it has achieved a relatively high penetration rate for a variety of reasons, said Fred Arcuri, SureWest senior VP and chief operating officer. There's strong population growth in the region and the bundle of services is attractive, he said. Most customers opt for at least two to three services from SureWest, and the company also offers cellular, giving it a quadruple play. Customers receive a discount when they sign up for more than one service.
SureWest offers voice, video and data for about $110 a month, Mr. Arcuri said, about 15 percent less than local competitors AT&T (formerly SBC) and Comcast.
That lower price is a good selling point because the vast majority of consumers care most about the price of services rather than bells and whistles, Mr. Eiley said. "[Telcos] have to be highly competitive on prices," he said. "The truth of the matter [is that] for most consumers, what [they get] for the price is really the key to get into the market."
So SureWest is going for the pocketbook, but at the same time it is preparing for the future, when the bells and whistles will likely become more important to consumers.
Mr. Arcuri knows full well that his company can't compete right now on many advanced services. SureWest doesn't have access to CBS's 99-cent on-demand prime-time shows, which competitor Comcast will offer. Nor does it have the depth of VOD content that Comcast has with its 3,800 programs comprising 2,200 hours. SureWest's VOD library is sparse in comparison-about 400 hours, mostly consisting of movies.
If telcos do want to compete for the higher-end consumer, they still have a ways to go, said Paul Rule, president of VOD research firm Marquest Research. "A bare-bones VOD offering can hardly be expected to peel away upper-end cable subs," he said. According to a recent Marquest study, 79 percent of higher-end customers-those with digital cable and broadband-said they believe the cable company would do the best job of offering a bundled triple play of services, while only 11 percent thought the phone company would do best. The other choices were spread among Internet service providers (7 percent), satellite operators (2 percent) and the electric company (1 percent).
Mr. Arcuri acknowledged that SureWest isn't ready to play the high-end game yet. But the telco is shoring up its advanced services with HD this year and plans to offer an integrated DVR in the first quarter of 2006. Furthermore, he contends that SureWest's advantage lies in the triple play because Comcast has yet to offer IP voice service in the area.
Comcast believes it has other advantages. It offers a dual-tuner hi-def DVR, 14 HD channels, broadband, more than 250 basic and premium channels, more than 50 channels of commercial-free music, and multicultural programming, said Erica Smith, spokeswoman for Comcast in Sacramento.
SureWest has a hefty international lineup too, with 38 international channels and 24 pay-per-view international channels, as well as local Hispanic-oriented programming.
SureWest started out as Roseville Telephone in 1914, operating as a small rural telephone company until the mid-1990s when it migrated into additional services such as data.
The company entered the video market in 2002, when it purchased assets from bankrupt overbuilder WinFirst. WinFirst was among a crop of overbuilders that entered the scene earlier this decade with ambitious plans to build fresh cable plants from the ground up. But the company bit off more than it could chew and went belly-up.
SureWest landed a foothold in video with WinFirst's 20,000 "marketable" video homes. About 4,500 of those already were video customers. In three years, SureWest basically quadrupled those numbers, rising to 85,000 marketable homes and nearly 16,000 video customers.
Mr. Arcuri thinks SureWest's success is due to several factors.
First, it already had the infrastructure in place in the way of trucks, technicians, a call center and billing support.
It's also operating in the sweet spot. Sacramento is one of the fastest-growing areas in the country, as San Francisco and Bay Area residents escape escalating home costs and move north, where property still approaches affordability. According to U.S. Census Bureau population estimates released in June, two Sacramento-area cities were ranked among the 10 fastest-growing cities: Elk Grove was second and Roseville 10th.
That influx of people means the market opportunity increases and the cost to pass homes decreases. As new homes are built it's easier for a service provider to lay fiber in the "open trenches" instead of digging up the ground around existing homes.
Also, as customers move into new homes they are in a shopping and buying mode for services.
A recent study by home builder Lennar Communications Ventures found that half of all new home buyers upgrade and switch communications providers. They are also heavy users. About 69 percent of new home buyers are broadband users, compared with 38 percent of the general public. In addition, 38 percent of new home buyers own HD sets, compared with 13 percent nationwide. "These people's minds are open. These customers are really in play," said David Kaiserman, president of Lennar Communications Ventures in Miami.
Mr. Arcuri said SureWest has partnered with local builders to market its services.
Like many smaller telcos, SureWest has chosen to rely on a combination of equipment from various technology providers. While many large telcos have said they will use Microsoft's end-to-end solution, Microsoft isn't targeting small phone companies.
So smaller operators opt for a best-of-breed approach, which affords flexibility in architecture and pricing, said Bill DeMuth, chief technology officer for SureWest. That also means if a piece or part doesn't work it can easily be jettisoned or replaced.
That makes all the difference for a small company, because it provides leverage the company otherwise would not have.
SureWest's headend, housed inside an air-conditioned room in its headquarters, is a testament to that open philosophy, peppered with racks of equipment bearing the names of vendors such as Kasenna, Minerva, Irdeto, Big Band and Cisco.
"It is a completely open architecture," Mr. DeMuth said. "We can mix and match various pieces of a network based on our needs and what we feel is most cost-effective."
Nor does SureWest want to use the same equipment as its competitors. The set-top boxes it uses from Amino look nothing like the clunky boxes most cable customers have in their homes. The Amino boxes are the size of a thick sandwich.
SureWest has become something of a model for other telcos. Mr. DeMuth said more than 100 telephone companies internationally, including Korean Telephone and Verizon, have visited the lab in Roseville.
The lab is not glamorous. It consists mostly of plywood walls with dozens of mundane-looking pieces of equipment and boxes from various vendors. Soon that lab will be testing MPEG4 equipment. SureWest wants to start transitioning next year to MPEG4 compression, considered the next-generation TV format because it allows a service provider to deliver more channels using less bandwidth.
More bandwidth also means SureWest will be able to offer more of those increasingly important bells and whistles.
http://www.tvweek.com/news.cms?newsId=9024
This story contains details and comments on “The Survivor” finals.
If you still haven’t seen it and don’t want to know, skip by it.
I didn’t post it last evening because I suspected some of you might have TiVo’d “Survivor”.
The grace period can only last so long! :)
Critic’s Notebook
Way to give away a million bucks, Rafe!
By Maureen Ryan [B]Chicago Tribune December 11, 2005
For Stephenie LaGrossa, making it to the final round in her second "Survivor" go-round wasn’t enough.
LaGrossa, who also competed on the previous edition of the long-running CBS reality show, made a lot of enemies on her way to the final two on "Survivor: Guatemala," which broadcast its live finale Sunday.
The final competitors on "Survivor: Guatemala" were two women, LaGrossa, who was on "Survivor: Palau," and Danni Boatwright. Those on the jury, many of who had been voted out by LaGrossa and her followers, awarded the million-dollar "Survivor" prize to Boatwright.
"Your strategy was just to backstab," said Judd Sergeant as the two women defended their game-playing strategies to the members of the "Survivor" jury. Boatwright, on the other hand, was well-liked and flew under the radar for much of the game.
She was helped in her quest to win the ultimate prize by Rafe Judkins, who ended up in the final three with LaGrossa and Boatwright. Judkins and Boatwright had had a pact to go to the final two together, but Judkins released her from that promise late in the game. It was a costly decision, as Boatwright ended up taking the less liked LaGrossa to the final two.
Some other "Survivor: Guatemala" highlights:
• Rafe, what were you thinking? You released Danni from her promise to take you to the final two, then later said that you thought she was "the one person who would take me to the final two and [she] didn’t." Uh, that’s because you let her out of her promise to take you to the final two! Don’t whine about her decision if you were the one that allowed it! Sheesh.
• The final four survivors’ decision to eat the chicken that was used in a Mayan ritual at the end of the game was understandable but still a little ooky; as soon as they’d finished chowing down, the heavens opened up and the competitors were pelted with a massive thunderstorm. Then again, the one person who didn’t eat the chicken, Rafe, also made the dumbest decision in the game. Go figure.
• Stephenie was pretty dopey for helping to vote Lydia out. Why on Earth did Steph say she wasn’t sure whether the final challenge would be "mental" or "physical"? Jeez, it’s always a physical endurance thing, everyone knows that! And Steph obviously knew that Lydia wasn't a great physical competitor. Honestly, Steph. Give me a break.
• It was truly lovely to see Gary Hogeboom say that he would judge Danni and Steph based on how honest they were. How about admitting that you’re not really just a landscaper, but also a former pro football player? Nobody’s entirely honest on "Survivor," can we all just accept that and move on?
• Same thing goes for Judd, man. Don’t get all hacked off about Stephenie and her lying, man, when you lied too, man, about where the immunity idol was, man.
• By the way, I tried to count how many times Judd said "man" in his final anti-Steph tirade, but I kept losing count. I just couldn’t do it. Man.
http://tempo.typepad.com/entertainment_tv/
Isn't it incredible what just a little exposure can do in a couple of weeks?
Virtually no one in the national media had covered the a la carte question at all until FCC Chairman Martin mentioned it in late November.
Then coverage turned into a flood.
In the past cable had always dismissively shrugged when asked about tiering family channels.
But, now, in just a few days, it has caved in.
And this won't be the end.
It seems to me that the simple question of "why should we pay for channels we don't watch?" has quite a bit of resonance in the media, if not yet on Capitol Hill.
Cable Ops Offer Family Tiers, Says McSlarrow
By John Eggerton & John M. Higgins Broadcasting & Cable
It was a case of tiers to head off fears.
National Cable & Telecommunications Association President Kyle McSlarrow Monday outlined preliminary plans for a number of cable operators voluntarily to start selling "family tiers." The move is an attempt to head off government-mandated tiering or a la carte cable lineups.
In a Senate Commerce Committee indecency hearing Monday, McSlarrow said that operators representing over half the nation's subs are ready to offer some family-friendly tiers. They are: Comcast, Time Warner Cable, Advance-Newhouse, Brennan, Insight, and Midcontinent.
He said there would be announcements from one or two of those in the next couple of weeks, and that more operators were considering similar moves. He also said first quarter 2006 is a target for launching some of these tiers, though he said there were still technical issues to be worked out.
Committee Chairman Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) said the sooner the better because Congress is under pressure from family groups to move legislation that would mandate tiering.
McSlarrow said the individual operators would define family-friendly differently, saying there would be anti-trust issues involved in coming to group decisions on those.
He said he could not say exactly what the tiers would look like, but that it would be a case of the mandatory basic service--broadcasters and public access channels--then a choice of the traditional 70 or 80 channels of expanded basic or a digital family tier, though he did not know what form that would take, or how it would be priced.
McSlarrow said he hoped that government-mandated tiers would now be off the table because he said the government would "get it wrong."
He also cautioned that the decisions by the individual operators "were not easy decisions, nor is this an easy place," he said, "because marketplace negotiations have produced the greatest single engine for diversity or compelling content in the world. That should not be lightly trod upon."
It's not clear what networks might be included in the tiers, particularly whether the most popular ones -- Nickelodeon and Disney Channel -- will be sold in small tiers that could dramatically limit their reach.
At the same hearing, former Motion Picture Association of America President Jack Valenti said he had held three meetings with industry in the past two weeks (since an earlier indecency forum), and that the conclusion was to simplify the TV ratings and give parents more information about them.
Valenti said what government mustn't do is step and try to tell people what to see and hear.
Commerce plans to hold another hearing Jan. 19 and Stevens said he hoped McSlarrow could by then be able to hold a demonstration of how the family-friendly tier would work.
Stevens thanked McSlarrow for taking what he called a "leadership position" on the issue, and Valenti for coming out of retirement to head up the ratings effort.
Minority Groups Oppose A La Carte
By John Eggerton Broadcasting & Cable
Led by the National Congress of Black Women (NCBW), 16 organizations representing minority interests have written the leadership of the House and Senate Commerce Committees opposing any attempt at a la carte cable legislation.
The issue of encouraging, or forcing, cable programmers and operators to unbundle cable channels has been roiled up by the indecency issue and brought to a boil by FCC Chairman Kevin Martin's advocacy for more cable choice, including a family-friendly tier of service. One cable company, Cablevision, has already weighed in in support of such a tier.
"According to overwhelming evidence on the public record," wrote the groups "such 'pay-per-channel' regulations would likely result in price hikes for consumers while decimating minority and other new cable programmers who are now able to air programming focused on African-American and Hispanic audiences."
Among other things, they cite an FCC study that concluded that "new cable television programmers depend on their inclusion on the so-called 'expanded basic' programming tier for their very survival."
Martin has recently said that study was one-sided and erroneous. "The staff is now finalizing a report that concludes that the earlier report relied on problematic assumptions and presented incorrect and incomplete analysis," he told the Senate Commerce Committee at an indecency forum two weeks ago.
"[A] la carte pricing regulations could have devastating effects on Hispanic and African-American programmers," the groups concluded. "Were such regulations in place previously, networks such as BET, TV One, Sí-TV and others could not have survived."
The Senate Commerce Committee is holding a follow-up indecency forum Monday, Dec. 12. Former Motion Picture Association of America President Jack Valenti and National Cable Telecommunications Association President Kyle McSlarrow are the two witnesses, with a simplified TV-ratings system expected to be a topic of conversation, though a la carte and famly-friendly tiers will likely come up as well.
Among the groups signing on to the letter were the National Council of La Raza, the Minority Media & Telecommunications Council, and the Cleveland chapter of the NAACP.
Critic’s Notebook
''Survivor: Anticlimax''
By Rich Heldenfels Akron Beacon Journal
There was a Christmas music concert at my church tonight, so I didn't get home until about 9, just in time to see Lydia voted out. (Thank goodness for football overruns.) The only remaining suspense involved the last immunity challenge and whom Stephenie might take with her to the final if she won immunity. But if either Rafe or Danni won, taking Stephenie seemed a no-brainer; she had enough enemies on the jury to put her at a huge disadvantage against anyone else, and it's been that way for several weeks.
So all of Danni's agonizing after she won immunity seemed pointless, and Rafe's ''I release you from your PROMISE'' gambit was transparent. The smart move was to take Stephenie. So Danni did, and it paid off for her. The jury deliberations made clear there were at least four votes against Steph that were unmoving, and only sure vote for her (Rafe's). So it was just a question of how big a blowout it could be.
Not that I let myself rest entirely. I kept waiting for one of those stunning twists where everyone goes, shoot, Stephenie played ''Survivor'' exactly the way you're supposed to play it, so why not vote for her? I think she probably did a lot to kill those votes by telling all the jurors she had outwitted them; you're supposed to let them figure that out on their own.
Also, when the solution to ''Survivor'' seems obvious to me, I start to rethink, because I am so bad at picking winners.
The fact that even I knew Danni could beat Steph -- and had sensed awhile back that Steph probably couldn't beat anyone left but Judd -- tells me that this was, finally, a disappointing series of ''Survivor.''
The ending should feel more dramatic. There should be greater doubt in the air. And Stephenie never should have come back to the show; any good will she built up on her first go-round was wiped out by her machinations and ruthlessness this time. It wasn't just the jury she ticked off. It was a lot of us viewers.
http://blogs.ohio.com/beacon_tv/
Critic’s Notebook: Best of 2005
Culture Awards :TV
By John Leonard New York Magazine
Six Feet Under croaked, Doogie Howser was reborn (he’s the new Chandler!), and Jon Stewart kept doing what he does best, except now with an 11:30 sidekick. But this year the biggest news in TV was less about what people were watching than where they were watching it—namely, everywhere, including right beside you on the subway.
Best Drama
‘Cold Case’
Every week on this CBS drama, a brand-new ghost story haunts Philadelphia homicide detective Kathryn Morris and her police squad that actually practices teamwork. The music is superbly cued to the moment, from Bessie Smith to The Rocky Horror Picture Show. And at the end of each hour, an avenged ghost waves good-bye.
2 ‘House’
(Fox) Never mind the tedious business between ex-lovers Hugh Laurie and Sela Ward—this medical show is more about death than love. What makes it so riveting is the acting (especially Laurie), the writing (high-speed, even highbrow, with compound sentences when required), and the odd cases themselves (guaranteed to flummox everybody, including Dr. House, until the last ten minutes).
3 ‘Bones’
(Fox) I really, really like the screwball romance between forensic anthropologist Emily Deschanel and FBI homicide detective David Boreanaz—a romance made even better because neither of them is doing anything about it.
Best Comedy
‘The Daily Show’
It’s so daily you can sometimes see it five times every 24 hours on Comedy Central, with the occasional family-friendly bleep, but otherwise as intelligent, insouciant, and insolent as Jon Stewart insists on being. Nobody does incredulity better than Stewart, and he’s not bad at contempt, either.
2 ‘Weeds’
(Showtime) Getting to spend half an hour with Mary-Louise Parker every Monday night is, like the Paris of Henri IV, worth a Mass, much less this year-end vote of thanks.
3 ‘Las Vegas’
(NBC) Notice that these women working in James Caan’s casino, wearing as little as possible over their various moving parts, are nonetheless the ones with brains. This is bikini television with a smart mouth.
Best Actor
Michael Kitchen
From understatement and minimal gesture, hesitation and the slamming of a door, Kitchen—as a British detective-superintendent on Foyle’s War, under the PBS Mystery! umbrella—has for three astonishing seasons conveyed anguish, contempt, despair, and something unremitting but always tethered to a moral compass.
2 William Petersen
The CSI: Las Vegas bugman, is the gravity holding these forensic graces together, a kind of martyr to the scientific method.
3 Hugh Laurie
His line readings on House feature an accent here of Shakespeare, a seasoning there of Beckett, plus a rant of mouthy Mamet. He is our very own Philoctetes; his genius and his wound depend on each other.
Best Actress
S. Epatha Merkerson
She probably deserves it for her noble service on Law & Order, but she blew the windows off the boarding house on Lackawanna Blues on HBO. As earth mother “Nanny” Crosby, Merkerson—with her fierce loyalty, raucous humor, and supple cunning—tended to a houseful of refugees who sought sanctuary and found healing.
2 Mary-Louise Parker
As if there were ever anybody else. Well, there was, from Glenn Close in The Shield to Kristen Bell in Veronica Mars to Emily Deschanel in Bones, but I am nothing if not loyal, which I hope stops short of stalking.
3 Kyra Sedgwick
Who, on TNT’s The Closer, proved to be the best interrogator this side of Helen Mirren on Prime Suspect.
Best Nonfiction
‘Destination America’
David Grubin’s richly textured four-hour PBS documentary on immigration takes in, among many others, migrant workers from south of the border; modern dancers from Taiwan; and women who flee second-class citizenship or servitude in Guatemala, the Middle East, and even Italy. This is the sort of television that puts faces on stats, but it’s also almost elegiac: These are the doors we are bolting behind us.
2 ‘Death in Gaza’
(HBO) Award-winning documentarian James Miller and reporter Saira Shah began with the stories of three Palestinian children growing up in godforsaken Gaza, but before they got to interview a similar selection of Israeli children, Miller was shot to death by an Israeli tank. This is not the story anyone wanted to bring home, but doesn’t it bring home a story, anyway?
3 ‘Bearing Witness’
(A&E) Documentarian Barbara Kopple followed five female foreign correspondents—all of whom eventually converged on Baghdad—and who, between them, won dozens of awards and lost many relationships, several husbands, and one eye.
Best Debut
The Trampoline Bear from 'Pardon the Interruption’
That bear: We kept seeing it over and over again on Pardon the Interruption, the ESPN sports yak show. The bear escaped from either a circus or a zoo, I can’t remember which. It climbed a tree in some backyard, and they set up a trampoline under the tree, shot the bear with sedative darts, and the bear flopped down and hit the trampoline and then went up, up, and away again, but this time when the bear came down, it missed the trampoline, and the Earth shook, and Tony Kornheiser couldn’t stop laughing and Mike Wilbon pretended not to, but they must have shown the same footage a thousand times, until finally I videotaped it myself. And I am heartily ashamed.
2 Tyler James Williams
Williams is terrific in Everybody Hates Chris, not only playing Chris Rock but playing him at age 13 in a Bed-Stuy junior high.
3 Bob Schieffer
Sitting in for Dan Rather on the CBS Evening News, Schieffer looked like the only person in prime time old enough to tell us what’s wrong with the world tonight.
The Short List
Best One-Liners
Jeremy Piven as Ari Gold in Entourage (HBO), whose best lines are highly quotable, if highly unprintable. His jokes aren’t funny on paper anyway, yet Piven’s turned Gold into TV’s foulest zinger machine.
Best Impromptu One-Liner
America’s Next Top Model (UPN) contestant (and New Yorker) Kim Stolz, who, after making out with one of the other female contestants on the show’s premiere, announced, “One down, eleven to go.”
Best Couple (Comedy)
Marshall (Jason Segel) and Lily (Alyson Hannigan), on How I Met Your Mother (CBS). Cool enough to be worth hanging out with, irritating enough to be believable.
Best Couple (Melodrama)
Dr. Derek Shepherd (Patrick Dempsey) and Meredith Grey (Ellen Pompeo), on Grey’s Anatomy (ABC), which has evolved into an addictive, high-end cross between General Hospital and ER. Okay, so they didn’t end up a couple—Shepherd decided to stick it out with his straying wife—but they should have. There’s always next season.
Best Villain
The reptilian T-Bag on Prison Break (Fox), a slippery southern pedophile who slithers around like a cross between Hannibal Lecter and Truman Capote.
Best Incredibly Complicated Plot That Hasn’t Unraveled—Yet
Prison Break’s plot details are ludicrous: The lead has the entire prison’s blueprint tattooed over his torso (hidden in a gothic pattern only he and schizophrenics can discern), and he’s so resourceful with discarded toothpaste tubes he’s like some sort of cellblock MacGyver. But against the odds, the show’s remained internally consistent—and ridiculously addictive.
Best Drawn-Out Tease
The numbers 4, 8, 15, 16, 23, 42—which will mean nothing to you, unless you’ve been watching Lost (ABC), in which case this mysterious string of figures has been driving you mad for months.
Best ‘Lost’ Rip-Off
Invasion (ABC), a creepy mash-up of hurricanes and aliens, and the real standout in this season’s crop of spooky one-word-title dramas (Threshold, Surface, Supernatural).
Best Show You Probably Never Watched
Starved (F/X), a show set among an eating-disorders support group. In a year of HBO-inflected, high-concept premises (suburban marijuana dealers!), this cringe-inducing setup yielded a surprisingly sharp—and funny—comedy.
Best Programming Decision
NBC is going to move My Name Is Earl and The Office to Thursday night—while putting the dismal Joey and the foundering The Apprentice in deep freeze—in an effort to recapture the network’s must-see-TV mojo.
Best Stunt Casting
Wink-wink celebrity cameos have gotten out of hand, but drafting Scott “Chachi” Baio to replace Henry “Fonzie” Winkler as the family lawyer on Arrested Development (Fox) was absolute genius.
Best Humiliation
The four-person firing on The Apprentice (NBC). Not that they all got fired but that the quartet then had to squeeze into one cab to the airport. That’s cold.
Best On-Air Evolution
The rapidly improving The Colbert Report (Comedy Central), in which Stephen Colbert is getting comfortable enough in his blowhard persona to occasionally, and hilariously, shrug it off.
Best Encore
In a year notable for great comebacks both inevitable (Neil Patrick Harris, after a few great film cameos, on How I Met Your Mother) and shocking (90210-er Brian Austin Green on Freddie), one actor returned as the same character we fell in love with way back when: Chris Noth as Detective Mike Logan, back on the beat on Law & Order (NBC).
Best Rapprochement
Oprah finally, finally, finally agrees to appear on The Late Show with David Letterman (CBS).
Best Use of Pinteresque Pauses in Television
The Office (NBC), which is starting to get the hang of the painful, prolonged silences that made the BBC original so achingly great.
Best Elegant Ending
The flash-forwards in the finale of Six Feet Under (HBO), in which we got to see how all the characters eventually expire. A perfect endnote to a vital, if at times maddening, show.
http://newyorkmetro.com/nymetro/arts/cultureawards/15287/
Indeed, he's quite good, and we're lucky to have him in Northeast Ohio...
You are not kidding.
I must read 50 TV critics on a regular basis, and Rich Heldenfels of the Akron Beacon Journal is at the very top of any list I'd make.
He is likes TV and is interested in how it works (many critics seem to look down their noses at prime-time programming) and very, very timely. His weblog frequently has stories way ahead of the more well-known writers.
He is truly a gem.
McSlarrow Says Family Tiers in Works at Six Cable Operators
By Doug Halonen TVWeek.com
In an effort to appease critics of cable's programming, six of the nation's major multiple system operators-including Comcast and Time Warner Cable-hope to roll out family-friendly programming tiers for their digital subscribers early next year.
That was the word from Kyle McSlarrow, president and CEO of the National Cable & Telecommunications Association, during a public meeting with Senate Commerce Committee leaders on Monday. Mr. McSlarrow said the six cable MSO's-the others being Bresnan Communications, Advance/Newhouse Communications, Midcontinent Communciations, and Insight Communications-together serve more than half of the nation's cable TV subscribers, and that other cable MSOs are considering following suit.
Mr. McSlarrow said he was not privy to pricing plans. But under the general concept, cable customers would still have to subscribe to cable's basic tier, and then have a choice whether to subscribe to the system's enhanced basic tier or the new family-friendly one. Mr. McSlarrow also made clear that the industry is hoping that its offering of a family tier, along with ongoing industry efforts to improve awareness of TV ratings and technology enabling parents to control what their children see, will enable the industry to avoid federal regulation.
"I really hope we can take mandates off the table," Mr. McSlarrow said.
Jack Valenti, the former chief of the Motion Picture Association of America, said during the session that industry leaders have been meeting to consider ways to better educate the public about the v-chip and other technology that parents can use to control the programming that comes into their homes.
Sen. Ted Stevens, R-Alaska, chairman of the committee, said that if the industry adopts a "meaningful" ratings system, he will hold off pending legislation to beef up indecency regulation while the public evaluates the voluntary efforts.
"As far as I'm concerned, none [of the pending bills to beef up indecency regulation] have enough support for us to move as long as this process is moving on," Sen. Stevens said.
Mr. Valenti said surveys have shown that while many consumers object to some TV programming, the vast majority-from 70 percent to 80 percent-don't want the government to decide what they can see and hear. "You cannot allow a few loud voices outside the Congress to try to entice the government to go where the people plainly do not want this government to go," Mr. Valenti said.
In a follow-up session with reporters, Mr. Valenti said concerns about programming were being stirred up by the Parents Television Council's L. Brent Bozell and "a few loud voices"-people, according to Mr. Valenti, "who really don't want anything on television except Bible stories."
http://www.tvweek.com/news.cms?newsId=9026
“Daily Show” suicide
An employee of the Comedy Central program "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart" has committed suicide, leading the network to suspend production of Monday night's episode of the program, a spokesman confirmed.
--The Hollywood Reporter
Am I the only one who is just a little concerned about our government listening to a guy like Jack Valenti...? The movie industry poster boy for government intervention with regards to copyright rules and protections..? Jack, just go back home and stay retired, please.
OTOH, Stevens is pretty much a Neanderthal when it comes to things digital anyways..dinosaurs travel in groups I guess...
Somehow I missed this Rick Kushman column Friday. It isn’t really dated and he makes some important points.