TV Critics Summer Press Tour
Hayek Gets Back To Basics

By Ellen Gray Philadelphia Daily News July 18, 2006

Salma Hayek has a cameo in the pilot for the English-language version of a telenovela she's producing for ABC this fall, "Ugly Betty."

Hayek, a fan of the original series, which began in Colombia and became a worldwide sensation, sends up the format in a clip in the show in which she plays a character in a telenovela that's on a TV in one scene.

Noting that she'd begun her career in the Spanish-language soaps in which American networks have only recently become interested, Hayek said the scene, as filmed, had gone on much longer than the clip that made the cut.

"We could release it as a short film," she said.

"It was a lot of fun," she said, sending up her early career and "making fun of myself."

And yes, viewers will probably see more of her on the show, which stars America Ferrera ("Real Women Have Curves") as Betty, a hard-working fashion "don't" struggling to fit in at Vogue-like magazine where everyone else is a fashion "do." (Ana Ortiz, daughter of former Philadelphia City Councilman Angel Ortiz, plays Betty's sister.)

"It was too much fun to miss," Hayek said.

http://www.pnionline.com/dnblog/ellengray/archives/003626.html

TV Critics Summer Press Tour
Lovely Betty

By Mark McGuire Albany Times Union staff writer

America Ferrera is the most exciting young talent in television. She headlines the soulful ABC comedy “Ugly Betty,'’ about a plain — some would say ugly — girl who sets out to conquer the fashion world.

No, Ferrera is not ugly. She just plays a less-than-ravishing beauty on TV.

“It’s sarcastic. We are not really calling her ugly,'’ said executive producer Salma Hayek. (Yes, the actress.) We are making fun of the people'’ who would.

The series is based on a Columbian telenovela that has had massive success in the Latino community worldwide. As Betty, Ferrera brings a sense of dignity rarely seen on television.

“When I’m in character, I never feel more confident and beautifu,'’ Ferrrera said Tuesday.

http://www.bloglines.com/public/TCABlogs

TV Critics Summer Press Tour
Start Dates for 'Desperate,' 'Lost'

By Roger Catlin Hartford Courant TV Critic in his “TV Eye” blog

PASADENA, Calif. – ABC Entertainment President Stephen McPherson says that when it returns Sept. 24, “Desperate Housewives” hopes to recover from a declining second season he said “spent too much time setting up its mystery.”

In a wide-ranging executive session before writers at the TV Critics Association summer press tour Tuesday, McPherson said changes have been made among the producers with Tom Spezialy leaving and creator Marc Cherry remaining to become sole showrunner. McPherson said he has seen early scripts from the season and “the mysteries are stronger from the get go.”

The scripts are “close to the heart of what it is, which tonally was kind of a wicked comedy.”

Whatever its second season lapses, though, McPherson said “something is wrong” when the winner of the best comedy category isn’t even nominated for the Emmys its second season. That was also the case for “Lost,” which won the best drama its first season only to be fail to be nominated for its second.

Of that ongoing mystery, “Lost” will become more streamlined when it returns Oct. 13, McPherson said, with six episodes running consecutively before it is interrupted by the 13-week run of “Day Break” Nov. 15. The remaining 13 “Lost” episodes will resume in February.

McPherson said the departure of J.J. Abrams from ABC’s Touchstone Pictures to a Warner Bros. in a lucrative six year TV deal signed late last week won’t affect his work on ABC this season, when Abrams will work full time on three shows. In addition to “Lost,” they include the new “Six Degrees,” starting Sept. 21 and the returning “What About Brian,” which begins a new season Oct. 9.

“The other choice was to run 22 consecutive episodes straight in the spring,” he said of “Lost,” “but it seemed like it would be too long to be off the air.”

On other topics raised in the morning press conference, McPherson took issue with the assertion made Saturday at the press tour by CBS Entertainment President Nina Tassler that with the move of “Grey’s Anatomy” to Thursdays, the No. 1 drama “CSI” was a now somehow an underdog.

“They are the champion without question,” McPherson said of “CSI.” “We are coming in as a contender and hope to do well.”

He said it was important to move “Grey’s,” which begins its new season Sept. 21, to help bolster other nights of programming after it became a hit on Sunday nights.

McPherson said it was a “tough call” to cancel “Invasion” while keeping “What About Brian,” which hadn’t been doing as well in the ratings.

On other topics, McPherson said if he had to do it over, he would have handled “Commander in Chief” differently. The Presidential drama from Rod Lurie starring Geena Davis started last season as the most popular new show only to be canceled with low ratings by the end. Three different show-runners, long hiatuses and switching time slots were among the reasons.

“We’d definitely do it differently,” McPherson said. “We’d probably bring it on later in the season and let Rod prepare for it longer than he had a chance to do.”

Lurie was dismissed early in the season because of late scripts.

McPherson said he wasn’t thrown by being the first ABC executive in generations to have to program Monday nights in the fall, following the departure of “Monday Night Football” from ABC to ESPN after a 26-year run. “It was always a challenge to program that night when it came to January.”Now, he’ll be able to build Mondays with more year-round ideas, starting with new seasons for “Wife Swap,” starting Sept. 18, and “The Bachelor: Rome” Oct. 2 leading into “What About Brian.”

No celebrity roster has been announced as yet for “Dancing with the Stars,” which begins its first fall season Sept. 12 with its results show following the next night.

http://www.bloglines.com/public/TCABlogs

TV Critics Summer Press Tour
ABC's McPherson: Successful Marketing of Serialized Dramas May Help Draw Viewers

A.J. Frutkin and Marc Berman MediaWeek.com July 18, 2006

With a slew of serialized dramas launching network-wide this fall, reporters at the annual TV critics convention in Pasadena want to know why. Today was ABC entertainment president Stephen McPherson’s chance to answer.

“We tried to develop procedurals, close-ended procedurals. And that’s a tough assignment right now. There are a lot of good ones on,” McPherson said, referring both to the Law & Order and CSI franchises. “We did some in development, and they were not as good as the other choices we had. So it really came down to what is the best material."

McPherson went on to say that the serialized dramas do present challenges, adding they’re “wonderful in the appointment-nature of them, and they’re difficult in terms of the repeat schedule.”

Several reporters noted that whereas close-ended dramas can draw viewers in at any time during the season, serialized dramas are more difficult to enter mid-way through the season. McPherson said he hopes successful marketing of those shows can change viewer perceptions of the format. The network must convince viewers “they can join the experience along the way,” he said. “And I think we have to do that on a weekly basis, so they understand, this isn’t something that if you don’t come to the party when it starts, you can’t just come in.”

Other journalists pointed out the number of serialized dramas—including ABC’s Invasion—that had been cancelled before they were able to wrap up their story lines. “The difficult thing about serials is that you have these mysteries set up, and there is a loyal fan base, however small sometimes, that is watching. It would be great to be able to close up all of those mysteries when a show isn’t working,” McPherson said. “I hope that viewers will give the next serialized show a shot. But I think it raises the bar for how good serials have to be, because I think people are only going to make an appointment and a commitment to a certain amount [of shows] on the air.”

McPherson did suggest that cancelled shows could get wrapped up on other platforms. “We’ve actually talked about that,” he told reporters. “The question at this point is given the revenue of all those digital streams, how do you produce a 4 million dollar-an-episode show, and is there a way to finish that story, wrap it up, if you will, in a less expensive but still satisfying way for the viewer.”

McPherson also answered CBS entertainment president Nina Tassler’s proclamation last week that with Grey’s Anatomy moving to Thursdays, CSI was now the underdog. “I heard Nina was playing the rope-a-dope,” he joked. “I think it’s kind of funny. CSI and CBS have dominated that night. So they are the champions without question, and we’re coming on with a strong contender, and hope to do some business there.”

Meanwhile, ABC unveiled the premiere dates for its new fall prime-time lineup, beginning with the season-premiere of veteran 20/20 on Friday, Sept. 8 and running through Wednesday, Nov. 15 with new drama Day Break (in place of Lost, which takes a break for 13 weeks).

http://www.mediaweek.com/mw/news/recent_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1002841052

TV Critics Summer Press Tour
USA Tops Cable Ratings for Fourth Week

By Anthony Crupi MediaWeek.com July 18, 2006

For the fourth consecutive week, USA Network remained at the top of the basic cable heap, thanks to Johnny Depp’s turn as a buccaneer modeled on rock icon Keith Richards.

The network averaged 3.55 million total viewers and a 2.9 household rating in prime for the week ending July 16, and scared up the week’s single largest audience with its TV premiere of the 2003 Disney theatrical Pirates of the Caribbean: The Black Pearl, which drew 7.37 million viewers Saturday night (8:00 p.m.-11:00 p.m.). Moreover, USA topped all key demos for the week, including adults 18-34 (0.7 million), 18-49 (1.6 million) and 25-54 (1.7 million).

USA also boasted five of the top 10 most-viewed programs last week, with its ever-reliable Monday night WWE: Raw franchise, a new episode of Monk and the second installment of its latest scripted series, Psych. Episode two of Psych delivered 4.71 million total viewers Friday night at 10:00 p.m., down a bit from the 6.1 million viewers who tuned in for the premiere a week earlier.

Rival TNT pulled in second with 2.46 million total viewers and a 2.0 household rating on the strength of its Stephen King horror/suspense anthology Nightmares and Dreamscapes, which averaged 5 million total viewers during its two-part debut Wednesday night (9:00 p.m.-11:00 p.m.). The first installment, "Battleground," delivered 2.52 million adults 18-49 and 2.88 million adults 25-54, beating out Psych’s one-week record for 2006 in both demos.

TNT also saw a big uptick for its original drama series, The Closer, which delivered 6.4 million viewers Monday night, up from 5.3 million the week before, and landing third among all basic cable shows last week. The Turner net also drew 6.17 million total viewers with its Sunday telecast of the NASCAR Nextel Cup race. In its fifth week, TNT’s EMT drama Saved rebounded from its recent ratings skid, drawing 3.24 million total viewers following its Closer lead-in Monday night, up from 2.78 million total viewers a week earlier.

ESPN took third place on the week, averaging 1.87 million total viewers and notching a 1.5 HH rating, thanks in part to its presentation of the MLB All-Star Game Home Run Derby, which served up 6.79 million viewers Monday from 8:00 p.m. to 11:00 p.m., making it the second-ranked program on basic cable. The sports net also drew 3.62 million viewers the night before with its ESPY Awards.

Fox News Channel finished the week at number four, bolstered by Shepard Smith’s on-the-scene coverage of the crisis in the Middle East, averaging 1.74 million viewers/1.5 HH. Hallmark Channel came in fifth (1.47 million/1.5 HH).

Non-ad-supported Disney Channel was the nominal second-place finisher in prime, averaging 2.52 million total viewers and a 2.2 household rating, thanks to back-to-back showings of the Paul Giamatti/Amanda Bynes theatrical Big Fat Liar Friday night and its original series The Suite Life of Zach and Cody.

http://www.mediaweek.com/mw/news/recent_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1002841026

TV Critics Summer Press Tour
Meet the new "Gilmore Girls" boss

By Alan Sepinwall of the Newark Star-Ledger in the “All TV In Hollywood” blog

I wrote yesterday that new "Gilmore Girls" showrunner David Rosenthal was pretty tight-lipped about his plans to deal with the season-ending mess (Lorelai leaving Luke and sleeping with Christopher) left behind by departed creator Amy Sherman-Palladino and her husband Daniel. But when I caught up to Rosenthal at the CW's party, he was much more open, if not about what he plans to do, then his feelings about the whole twisted saga.
Here's a transcript:

Without spoiling anything major, can you tell me in broad strokes what's going to happen at the start of the season?

"You saw the last episode, so that's going to have far-reaching consequences, not just for Lorelai and for Luke, but for Christopher and everybody... I don't think she just went to Christopher's house -- she wasn't drunk, it wasn't this mad, crazy thing -- she made a decision about where she wanted her life to go, and we're going to explore that. Not to say that Luke isn't in her life and a part of her world, but it still seems like this can't even help create a schism."

You guys spent a lot of this season establishing that Christopher has been growing up.

"I thought so."

And it was always a theme of the show that he would be the perfect guy for Lorelai if he wasn't such a little boy and could mature.

"He did. He grew up last year. He showed a consistent maturity, which is something he's never showed before."

Okay, so logically, it may make sense for her to do this and him to be the right guy. But your fans have invested six years in the other thing, and anyone or anything that gets in the way of that, they are going to hate. How do you deal with that?

"Here's the thing. We've invested six years in this (too). We're the writers, we're fans of the show. We harbor the same feelings, but the question is, just because someone's your soulmate and your ultimate destiny doesn't mean you're going to be with them tomorrow, this week, this month. There's a journey. I'm not sure, if tomorrow everything was perfect with Luke and Lorelai and they were stettled down with no issues or problems, I don't know how interesting dramatically that would be. I feel like Lorelai and Luke will have an opportunity this year to grow a lot and change a lot, and perhaps lead to a situation where they're more ready to be together."

Now, playing devil's advocate, Lorelai getting back with Christopher has been Luke's greatest nightmare since he started dating her.

"You know what they say: you manifest in your life what you most fear."

And knowing the kind of guy that he is, I can't see him easily forgiving her. If or when they get back together, I can't see how they can ever be the same as a couple.

"It's a big question. We spend a lot of time talking about this stuff."

(At this point, Rhina Mimoun, former showrunner on "Everwood" and now one of Rosenthal's lieutenants, chimed in that "Men never forgive. That's why you stink!" After attempting to defend my gender, I continued.)

How passionate were the discussions about all of this last season?

"Amy, you know, kept a lot of it to herself, but as the season went on, we could see that there was something brewing. I don't know. Again, she's been doing the show from day one. We would often discuss ideas, but ultimately Amy would make a decision and we would go with it."

(I bring up David Milch and Aaron Sorkin, two other producers who, like Sherman-Palladino, are known for obsessively writing and rewriting every script of their shows, and who left "NYPD Blue" and "West Wing," respectively, with major threads dangling -- Ricky Schroder's deep secret, President Bartlet stepping down -- that became major problems for their replacements to resolve. After some back and forth about how successfully those scenarios were negotiated, I ask how Rosenthal feels about being left with a similar flaming bag of you-know-what on his doorstep.)

"I just view it as an interesting challenge, dramatically, creatively. It never occurred to me that it was a bad thing. I said, 'Oh, this creates a lot of issues and problems.'"

But did you ever talk with Amy about what she planned to do with this storyline if she hadn't left? Do you know what her plan was?

"No."

(Another writer pipes in that Amy always wrote organically from the characters, so they feel the next steps should be apparent to them. Rosenthal continued.)

"It was never, like (Amy said), 'Oh, we've got to do something big and crazy.' She always worked from character and story, and eventually, problems arise."

But the thing is, there have been entire seasons of this show where almost nothing happened, and the fans were fine with it. I'm sure a lot of them would be perfectly happy if the show was nothing but Lorelai and Rory trading jokes and going shopping. How big a temptation is it to just go that route?

"We're very interested in telling stories. We want every episode to feel like, 'Wow, you've really gone somewhere.' It really feels like you've traveled with these people. We're excited about those stories. It's coming along great. We're very much in synch as a staff. We feel very positive about this season."

Will Luke's daughter still be involved?

"Absolutely."

And Sherilyn Fenn?

"Yes. his relationship with them will continue to grow deeper and more contemplated."

Any chance Luke will respond to what Lorelai did by doing the same thing with April's mom?

"I don't know. But I know that their relationship will grow in significance in his life."

Moving on for a minute, Matt (Czruchy) isn't leaving the show, but Logan's going to be in England. How will that work?

"The first part of the season is (Logan and Rory) trying to deal with a long-distance relationship. Something will come and change that."

It's always struck me that Logan considers going into the family newspaper business as a fate worse than death, and I always wonder why he doesn't realize that all he has to do to escape is to turn down the money.

"I guess so could all of the Murdoch kids."

And it's weird to me that Rory, who knows how much he hates it, has teamed up with (Logan's dad) to put him on this path, like this is the only way he can grow up.

"I think it will make him grow up. He'll do less drinking and partying, and he'll have something to focus on."

But he so clearly, viscerally hates this.

"He's not a big fan of his father. And that's part of his journey this year, exploring what being in the working world means to him."

Okay, so now we come to what's clearly the biggest question going into next season: how much are we going to see of Sebastian Bach?

"He will be appearing occasionally."

Occasionally?

"Occasionally."

Occasionally?

"That's all I can promise."

Oh, alright. You do have, between the regulars and the recurring characters, an enormous cast.

"It's a huge cast, so you can't service everybody every time."

You can go half a season with just one Michel subplot or something.

"It's not for lack of trying. It's just a lot of relationships, a lot of dynamics."

Well, what storylines do you have in mind for the supporting characters?

"Lane and Zach got married, married life is going to bring a lot of challenges and surprises for them. Richard's going to get a job teaching at Yale, an opportunity to fill in kind of thing. Emily's going to do a little tutoring of young debutantes. Paris will spend the summer opening up her own version of the Princeton Review, tutoring students. Everybody's got lots to do."

And Kirk?

"Kirk will be Kirk. I guarantee it."

How were you and the other writers introduced to the idea of April?

"It was something (Amy and Daniel) felt strongly about. They thought it would be a central tenet of the season."

I have to say, I like April as a character, and I don't even mind the whole "Luke has a kid he didn't know about" reveal, but I hate how she was used to drive the wedge in between Luke and Lorelai. By the time Lorelai wound up at Christopher's door, I believed that's where she would go, but I could feel the hand of God painting her into that corner as the season moved along.

"Fair enough."

You said in the press conference that you're not planning this as the final season. Do you have any grand plans for the characters that would take you another two, three years?

"Of course. They live in the world, they have a life, they have relationships, I have no doubt we could do more seasons after this one. That's up to the powers that be."

Getting back to the Milch/Sorkin thing, they had distinctive voices, and when they left their shows, the characters began to speak differently. Can you recreate Amy's voice?

"That'll be up for you guys to decide. I write the way I write. I wrote a couple of episodes last season. I don't know, if you put them on and didn't know who had written them, if you could distinguish. But I'm my own person, so it's entirely possible the voice could change a little. but I'm an enormous fan of that style."

I've seen Milch rewrite every word on every page. Was Amy that heavy-handed in the proccess? How much of what you wrote made it to the screen last year?

"Certainly, by the end, the last episode I wrote was pretty much all mine. With any show, there's a learning curve. But I definitely felt that (episode) was my words. And we just showed the cast the first script for the new season. Lauren and Alexis have been doing this for six years, and they're comfortable with what's in it."

What new characters will we have?

"We haven't cast them, but some new friends of Rory's at Yale and new colleagues of Logan in London."

Will Rory be traveling back and forth, or will it be a lot of them on the phone?

"For starters, yeah. Long distance relationship. Not using the Huntzberger jet. She's at Yale, he's in London."

http://www.nj.com/weblogs/tv/index.ssf?/mtlogs/njo_alan/archives/2006_07.html#162506

TV Critics Summer Press Tour
(When is Enough E N O U G H!?)

Rob and Amber Get Real--Again
by Sarah Hall E!Online Jul 18, 2006

Apparently not satisfied with their already overextended 15 minutes of fame, Rob and Amber Mariano are back for more reality.

The hyper-competitive duo--both Survivor alums--first met when they returned to compete on Survivor: All Stars. Sparks flew and Rob popped the question during the memorable finale, on which Amber was also revealed to be the ultimate Survivor.

The betrothed couple then went on to compete on The Amazing Race, on which they finished second. They followed that up by having their April 2005 nuptials broadcast by CBS for the special Rob and Amber Get Married.

After all that, one would think they'd be sick of living their lives on camera. One would be wrong.

The Marianos have now signed with Fox Reality to star in the network's first original docudrama series, The Rob and Amber Project.

The network has ordered 10 half-hour episodes of the show, which will follow the couple to Las Vegas, where Rob will try to become a professional gambler and Amber will try to support him in the venture.

"We've grown up with Rob and Amber," Fox Reality general manager David Lyle told Daily Variety. "We've seen their first kiss on Survivor and watched their wedding. They're likeable and competitive. What Rob's trying to do now, it's probably every guy's dream and every girl's nightmare."

Yes, and should that nightmare prove to be too much for Amber, the couple's next on-camera project just might be Rob and Amber Get Divorced. (Now that we'd watch.)

The Rob and Amber Project is slated to premiere in January.

http://www.eonline.com/News/Items/Pf/0,1527,19528,00.html

TV Critics Summer Press Tour
NBC Signs Spike Lee for Drama Series

By Ben Grossman Broadcasting & Cable 7/18/2006 2

NBC has signed Spike Lee to develop a new drama series for NBC Universal Television Studio.

While details of the project and Lee’s exact role are yet to be announced, NBC Entertainment’s new Senior VP of drama development Katie O’Connell says the deal makes sense for NBC.

"I wanted to be aggressive about bringing in a high-profile filmmaker who fits in so well with NBC's traditional brand of challenging quality dramas," she says.

Lee recently directed the CBS pilot for the new James Woods drama, Shark. His filmmaking career includes hits such as Do The Right Thing and Malcolm X.

http://www.broadcastingcable.com/index.asp?layout=articlePrint&articleID=CA6354354

TV Critics Summer Press Tour
Thursday night fights: 'CSI' vs. 'Grey's'

ABC's decision to move the much-hyped medical drama promises one of the hottest time-slot battles in years
By Chuck Barney Contra Costa Times TV critic Tue, Jul. 18, 2006

PASADENA---The forensic geeks of "CSI" have a message for the oversexed surgical interns of "Grey's Anatomy": If a TV turf war is what you want, bring it.

This fall, one of the hottest time-slot battles in years will be waged at 9 p.m. Thursdays, where ABC has moved its buzz-laden medical drama in to face off against CBS's perennially dominant crime procedural. At stake will be ad dollars and bragging rights on broadcast television's most lucrative night.

And the "CSI" folks, who reign as television's top-ranked scripted show, aren't exactly shaking in their lab coats.

"It's like two really great football teams," says "CSI" executive producer Carol Mendelsohn of the titanic matchup. "You know, the Washington Redskins want to play the Dallas Cowboys. It's exciting."

CBS entertainment chief Nina Tassler, who will be on the sidelines rooting for her team, doesn't sound quite as amped up. "We expect to be dinged a little bit by 'Grey's,'" she told reporters at television's summer press tour. She also referred to "CSI" as the "underdog" in the showdown -- although it's difficult to envision a No. 1 show carrying that label.

Tassler is probably just playing coy, but even so, CBS is taking no chances. For the first time in years, the network organized a "CSI" panel for the press tour and the cast turned out in force, save for William Peterson, who was attending a memorial service for a family member. The press conference kicked off with a highlights reel of memorable "CSI" moments, including last season's surprising revelation that Grissom (Peterson) and Sara (Jorja Fox) are romantically linked (more on that later), and ended with the declaration, "You ain't seen nothing yet."

Apparently, the "CSI" gang is ready for a ratings rumble.

"ABC moving that show opposite us, I think, was the biggest motivator we could have had," said cast member Marg Helgenberger. "We're all excited about it. Hey, we don't want to relinquish the throne that easily."

"We'll definitely have our game faces on," added George Eads.

"Grey's Anatomy" comes into the matchup with youth and momentum on its side. It is entering its third season and has been building its ratings ever since a highly watched special episode on Super Bowl Sunday. Meanwhile, "CSI" is entering its seventh season, but it has owned the time slot for years and is coming off one of its strongest creative seasons.

The face-off presents an interesting contrast in styles. "Grey's" is a steamy serial soap that emphasizes its characters and has a large female fan base. "CSI" is a procedural that skews toward males and generally tries to avoid the sudsy stuff, despite that juicy little Grissom-and-Sara cliffhanger at the end of last season.

The surprising scene stunned the show's fans, who have been split between excitement and outrage.

"I run into some people who think it's great," says Fox. "But I've also had some bitter fans say, 'What are you doing with him? You should be with Greg (Eric Szmanda)!'"

As for the actress herself, Fox says she's "thrilled" with the story line and jokes that she's prepping for some sex scenes if they come her way. "Billy and I have been working out all summer," she proclaims.

But don't expect "CSI" to get too out of character and get all steamy, a la "Grey's Anatomy."

"We'll deal with the relationship when it's organic to an episode or a scene," says Mendelsohn. "It's not going to be an overt kind of thing. We're not doing a soap opera."

http://www.contracostatimes.com/mld/cctimes/entertainment/columnists/chuck_barney/15063438.htm?template=contentModules/printstory.jsp

Updating a story from earlier this month:

The Business of TV
U.S. Digital Television is bankrupt

TV service files with court but continues service

By Brice Wallace Deseret Morning News July 18, 2006

DRAPER — U.S. Digital Television's plans to revolutionize delivery of low-cost, wireless, cable-like TV service may be derailed.

USDTV filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy July 6 in Delaware.

Although Chapter 7 bankruptcy usually involves liquidation, published reports indicate that USDTV is still providing service in its four existing markets and that at least two parties are interested in securing its assets and continuing the service.

The company has been providing service to about 16,000 subscribers in Salt Lake City, Dallas, Albuquerque and Las Vegas.

USDTV, formed in June 2003, leases portions of the digital spectrum from local television stations. Customers with a set-top box and antenna receive about 30 channels of "off-the-air" wireless digital TV service for $19.95 monthly as a low-cost alternative to cable or satellite TV.

The company was founded by Steve Lindsley, who is USDTV's chief executive officer and former president of KSL Television. In November, Lindsley said he believed the Salt Lake market had 75,000 to 100,000 households that would have some interest in USDTV and that research indicated 15 million to 16 million households in the country would subscribe if it were available in their markets.

The company reportedly had about 5,000 subscribers in Utah.

The effort was backed by $25.75 million from several partners, including Fox Television Stations Inc., Hearst-Argyle Television Inc., McGraw-Hill Broadcasting, LIN TV Corp., Morgan Murphy Stations and Telcom DTV LLC.

Morning News attempts to contact Lindsley through the company for several days were unsuccessful. A telephone message to his bankruptcy law firm, Landis Rath & Cobb LLP of Wilmington, Del., was not returned Monday.

USDTV's Web site said the company is "unable to accept your phone calls or e-mail requests for service at this time." Calls to the customer service phone number prompted a recording and suggestion to call a toll-free number, but calls to that number received a busy signal.

Bankruptcy court documents indicate the company had estimated assets of between $1 million and $10 million and estimated debts of $10 million to $50 million. It lists the company's locations as 12552 S. 125 West, Draper, with a network operations center at 935 W. Bullion St., Murray. It also lists a mailing address in Riverton and offices in Los Angeles and Ft. Lauderdale, Fla.

The documents indicate U.S. Digital Television LLC is 28.28 percent owned by USDTV. Among entities each holding a 12.35 percent ownership are Hearst-Argyle (HATV Investments Inc. and Hearst Broadcasting each have 6.17 percent), LIN Television Corp., McGraw-Hill Ventures Inc., News-USDTV Holdings Inc. and Telcom DTV LC.

A federal bankruptcy court trustee, Alfred Thomas Giuliano of Marlton, N.J., has control of the company. Broadcasting & Cable quoted his attorney, John Carroll, as saying Giuliano is close to securing financing to keep the company's system going in hopes that it can be sold to an investor group. It said one investor group was already negotiating to take over the company's assets and assume some of its debts, while Giuliano later was contacted by a second group.

TVTechnology.com quoted Carroll as saying that an agreement with one of the negotiating parties could be reached before an Aug. 3 creditors meeting in Delaware.

In comments published by Broadcasting & Cable, Lindsley said USDTV was "well on our way to proving our business model" but added that broadcast stations weren't willing to make the financial commitment it would take to expand the system and market it properly.

"We had a very positive sign of consumer demand of this product in a very short period of time," Lindsley said in a TVTechnology.com story.

The bankruptcy filing includes a list of nearly 500 creditors, many from Utah. Creditors include television stations KUEN (KULC), KUPX, Acme Technologies of Utah LLC (KUWB) and KJZZ-TV (LHM Comm Corp.); cable channels Fox News Network LLC, Home & Garden Television and ESPN Inc.; phone service providers AT&T, BellSouth, Sprint, T-Mobile, Qwest and Nextel Communications; FedEx; Wal-Mart; UPS; and Hartford Insurance. Among others with Utah connections are Utah Soccer, doing business as Real Salt Lake; Newspaper Agency Corp. and R.C. Willey Home Furnishings.

http://www.desnews.com/dn/view/0,1249,640195539,00.html

TV Critics Summer Press Tour
Pretty on the Inside Betty

By Christopher Lisotta at Broadcasting & Cable’s “Critical Eye” blog Tuesday, July 18th, 2006

Although the Tuesday afternoon “Ugly Betty” press tour session started on an off note with the video team accidentally throwing up a clip from ABC News, the producers and cast of the Friday night drama “Ugly Betty” were not easily thrown off.

The title character “Betty,” a plain secretary working at a glamorous magazine, “is not a victim,” said executive producer Salma Hayek.

One critic asked if the title, which starts with such a harsh word, might offend viewers.

Hayek isn’t worried, since she sees the title as “sarcastic” and also subjective.

Society seems to view ugly as “anybody who is not super skinny and super tall,” she said but as for models, “maybe I think that they are ugly and need to eat a little and look healthy.”

America Ferrera, who plays “Betty,” said she wishes she was as strong as the character she plays.

“She forgives people for not understanding who she is,” Ferrera said. “She doesn’t resent them.”

Moving into entertainment made Ferrera feel like a Betty, she said.

“I didn’t know I was fat until I started acting,” Ferrera quipped.

Another critic asked about the character’s prominent braces, which Ferrera said is actually a “wonderful contraption” (Ferrera has a lovely smile in real life).

“It comes out whenever I want to take a trip to craft service,” she said.

“Which on this show we encourage,” Hayek interjected. “Go to the craft table, go to the craft table!”

http://blogs.tvweek.com/?cat=5

The New TV Season
'Studio 60': Golden Child and Whipping Boy

Reaction is already crackling on the Web as bits of NBC’s coming ‘Studio 60’ series get leaked. It’s enough to fray even Aaron Sorkin’s nerves.
By Maria Elena Fernandez Los Angeles Times Staff Writer July 19, 2006

Reaction is already crackling on the Web as bits of NBC's coming 'Studio 60' series get leaked. It's enough to fray even Aaron Sorkin's nerves. In Hollywood, there used to be a period of time called the "bubble," which described the quiet months between the making of a television pilot and the launching of it as a new series.

That bubble has burst. And no one is feeling the ramifications more than Aaron Sorkin and his new series, "Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip."

Set designers are still at work building a massive theater inside a sound stage for his drama about a troubled sketch comedy series set in an old vaudeville house. Production on the show begins today. And yet, two months before NBC premieres it, vocal segments of its not-yet-existent audience are divided: Chatter on the Web has declared alternately that "Studio 60" is the fourth-place network's savior and that Sorkin's return to TV is dead on arrival. To Internet bloggers, it is both "the biggest hit of next season" and "an underwhelming disappointment."

For Sorkin, 45, who has been away from television since he left "The West Wing" in 2002, the experience has served as an education in the new, bumpy world of promoting a show.

"It's unusual for backlash to begin before the show starts," said Sorkin, sitting in his office with his longtime producing and directing partner, Thomas Schlamme. "But I'm hoping now that the timing will work out that there will be a backlash against the backlash by the time we open."

"Studio 60" is not alone in such scrutiny. TV is being filtered, analyzed and debated on the Internet like never before, resulting in savvier viewers who feel fully invested in even the smallest of programming decisions. Already there are dedicated fan sites for another upcoming NBC drama, "Heroes," created by viewers who are hailing it as "the next 'Lost.' " In an attempt to keep up, networks and studios are developing new levels of fan interaction using a variety of digital platforms.

"The Internet has created something that didn't exist five or 10 years ago, a direct dialogue with the creators or actors of a show," said "Lost" co-creator Damon Lindelof. "For fans, they feel they have this access and they are empowered. When we do our podcasts, and we explain what we're doing, they disagree with us and they tell us, 'Well, it's my show too.' "

It would seem to be a network's dream to have people identify so closely with a show, to hear them debating the finer points of a pilot episode around the water cooler. But in the case of "Studio 60," the premature analysis is making an already struggling network's job even harder.

Someone leaked early drafts of the script for the show's pilot to the Web before a single scene had been shot. Casting announcements were disseminated on the Web faster than you can say "Get me Matthew Perry." Things spun further out of the network's control when NBC decided to parade the cast to advertisers at a development session in March, then showed a six-minute trailer to advertisers and reporters at the television preview conferences in May. Those clips hit the blogosphere in nanoseconds, as did a rough cut of the pilot. Reviews popped up immediately.

Even in the age of the Internet, the focus on "Studio 60" seems unusually sharp, undoubtedly because of the involvement of Sorkin, its award-winning creator. "Studio 60" would be just one of dozens of television series launching in the fall if it weren't for the writer whose past is as colorful as the words he puts on paper. A playwright and screenwriter ("A Few Good Men" and "The American President"), Sorkin, a recovering cocaine addict, has stayed away from television since he left "The West Wing" under a cloud of NBC complaints that he was delaying production by routinely turning in scripts late. So intense interest from the media, especially from television critics, was to be expected.

Still, he could not have envisioned that the script he wrote almost entirely in a London hotel while he was performing in a revival of "A Few Good Men" last summer would generate this kind of fury from so many pajama-clad bloggers months before viewers get to even see his new show, which stars Perry, Bradley Whitford, Amanda Peet and Steven Weber.

"I try not to look at it," Sorkin said, and then half-joked: "It scares me."

But, like it or not, this modern court of public opinion isn't going anywhere. As NBC President of Entertainment Kevin Reilly warns, "We've only just begun on that front."

The early feedback was a virtual love fest. One 35-year-old blogger at craigbe.com declared he was "fully prepared for an embolism to hit" after reading a draft of the script. "It's like 'Entourage' meets 'Larry Sanders' meets 'The West Wing' all wrapped up in 'Sports Night.' Good God, this is going to be amazing," he wrote.

Then came the clip presentation for advertisers and a self-deprecating skit that Sorkin wrote for the actors designed to mock their own heady buzz, and the rumbling began.

The characters seemed as smart and as fast-talking as Sorkin usually draws his players, and Schlamme's 360-degree camerawork, with its famous "walking-and-talking" sequences, were on hand too. But advertisers and reporters didn't know what to make of the trailers: The clips were clunky, not catchy. There was Perry falling out of a chair, a stuffy-seeming rage against reality television and insider-y executive power talks. Was it a comedy or a drama?

Bloggers jumped into the fray: "Every second of 'Studio 60' sounds like Sorkin and looks like Schlamme and thus it's all familiar and reassuring and intelligent and nowhere near as smart-seeming as it was back when 'The West Wing' premiered," wrote Dan Fienberg of Los Angeles on his blog, fienprint.blogspot.com.

Reilly spent a lot of time at the NBC party after the trailer presentation — and in the weeks following — pleading with ad buyers and the media to wait until they saw the entire pilot. But, he said, "I'd rather see some dialogue, even if it's not all positive, rather than no dialogue."

For his part, Sorkin is learning what a few in the industry already know about Internet fans: They may bark loudly, but there's not that many of them. Yet.

Craig Beilinson, a father of two, is the Sorkin fan who predicted he would be struck with an embolism. "The Internet is causing public opinion to spread faster than ever, but it's not clear that it's having an impact on the viewing habits of the general population yet," he said. "Look at what happened to 'Arrested Development.' No amount of rabid blogging about how it was the greatest comedy on TV could get more people to watch it."

Reilly appreciates the closer relationship with the audience that the Internet affords, figuring it can only help programmers and marketers target them more efficiently. But in the case of "Studio 60," viewers may have gotten a bit too close for comfort, he said.

"One of the dangers of the Internet is any sort of work getting out prematurely or any sort of early judgment before anything is ready to be hatched," Reilly said. "When you have perfectionists like Aaron and Tommy, they want you to see their finished product."

Sorkin seems to be a quick study: "We can't let this affect us because if it does it will only affect it badly. So you have to believe in what you start out doing, believe in what you've got and keep going forward."

The characters of Matthew Albie (Perry) and Danny Tripp (Whitford) are best friends and partners, much like Sorkin and Schlamme, who, in addition to "The West Wing," previously collaborated on "Sports Night." Matthew is the offbeat genius writer and Danny is the brilliant director-producer, but it's Danny's — not Matthew's — misstep that finds them running a 20-year-old sketch show that is lagging in the ratings.

"The idea of what happens in the pilot is based on the idea of what would happen if once, just once, it was Tommy who screwed up instead of me. Where would that land us?" said Sorkin, who is divorced and shares custody of his 5-year-old daughter, and who no longer talks publicly about his addiction recovery.

In truth, Reilly wasn't dying to launch a series about show business when others set in the industry were failing or succeeding only marginally, but the Sorkin-Schlamme pedigree tempted him. When he read the script, Reilly said, he thought "Studio 60" would be a talent magnet that could help him revive NBC, which with its falling profits continues to be a drag on parent company General Electric. And so, the bidding began. NBC and CBS were neck and neck, both offering big bucks and promising huge promotional launches.

The producers chose NBC because "it felt a little like home, and we felt it's still the place you'd expect to find a show like this," Sorkin said. The show's budget is big: NBC is reportedly spending between $2 million and $3 million on each episode.

And it did indeed lure in the talent, spurring Perry to return to television, Whitford to stay in it and Peet to give it a try. In interviews, most of the cast said they have deliberately avoided reading early reviews of the show because, as Whitford put it, "show business is like dating a schizophrenic: I love you, I ignore you, you're fantastic, you're terrible. I don't need that. I just want to wear makeup and be funny."

But Weber, who plays the chairman of the show's fictional network, NBS, said he has absorbed almost every syllable.

"It's the equivalent of a baby being born and ... everyone is shouting at it, 'Come on, grow already!' " Weber said. "The element of time is the most important thing: time to gather an audience or time to repel an audience, time for people to draw conclusions."

While the pilot clearly takes aim at television's current lowbrow factor, Sorkin promises he is not raging against the medium that pays his bills. The characters of Matt, Danny and Jordan are all driven by the legacy they have inherited, the "medium of Sid Caesar and Jackie Gleason, Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite, and it's ours now, and it matters what we do with it," Sorkin said.

The same could be said for Sorkin and Schlamme, who as they begin toiling on their third series together, are surely mindful of the fact that none of those luminaries had to contend with the Internet.

http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/la-et-studio19jul19,1,968423.story?coll=la-headlines-entnews

TV Critics Summer Press Tour
ABC chief blasts lack of Emmy nods for popular shows

McPherson finds like lack of nominations for "Lost and other popular shows "remarkable."
By Greg Braxton Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

Memo from ABC Entertainment President Stephen McPherson to the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences: You blew it.

When he appeared in front of reporters Tuesday at the Television Critics Assn.'s press tour, McPherson blasted the academy for the absence of major nominations for the network's "Desperate Housewives" and "Lost," both top winners in last year's ceremony.

"To have that kind of oversight is just remarkable," bristled McPherson, saying he felt that new nomination rules and the creation of blue-ribbon committees that were intended to help open up the categories to oft-overlooked shows in fact ended up hurting those ABC series. (Last year, "Lost" won outstanding drama, while Felicity Huffman of "Desperate Housewives" scored outstanding lead actress in a comedy. Three of "Desperate Housewives'." four lead actresses were nominated last year.)

Noting those wins and nominations, McPherson said their omission this year was troubling: "There's a problem." He said he also felt there were a lot of "odd positives and negatives" with the nominations, and he advised the academy to reexamine the rules "and see that the changes weren't all good."

McPherson also took exception to a question from a journalist who said that "Desperate Housewives" had suffered a "creative collapse" following its barn-burning first season. "I completely disagree that there was a creative collapse," he said. "I think that's overstating it."

However, the executive noted that the show's creator, Marc Cherry, was back running the show full time, taking over from Tom Spezialy, who had taken the series in a more soapy direction over the last season. McPherson said that all the new scripts "were going through Marc's typewriter. I think it's going to be great." He added that Cherry was engrossed in crafting story arcs for the next season, and promised that the show would return to a more wickedly humorous sensibility.

Though the network has several solid hits, such as "Lost" and "Grey's Anatomy," it is launching 10 new series this fall, which some critics said was unwieldy.

"It is an aggressive schedule," McPherson said. "We're rebuilding, and we've got a lot of work to do . . . . It's not the best scenario."

One key move is splitting up the "Lost" season. To appease viewers who had complained about the numerous repeats during last season, he said, six episodes would air in October; the series would then go on hiatus for 13 weeks until the spring, when it would return with new episodes. He said the strategy was also determined by the show's production schedule.

McPherson chuckled when told of CBS' Entertainment President Nina Tassler's claim that the top-rated "CSI: Crime Scene Investigation" would be a Thursday night underdog against the new competition moving into that time slot: ABC's "Grey's Anatomy." He called the statement "a rope-a-dope. They are the champions of that night."

Later, McPherson added: "To me, if you've got a network that's dominating the night and we're coming in and trying to do business on that night, yes, we are trying to come in and do better than we've done. And they've been winning the night."

http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/tv/la-et-abc18jul18,1,2303292,print.story?coll=la-entnews-tv

TV Critics Summer Press Tour
ABC ready for Thursday night fight

By Andrew Wallenstein The Hollywood Reporter July 19, 2006

PASADENA -- ABC is ready to make an impact on Thursday.

That was the word from Stephen McPherson, president of ABC Entertainment, at the network's kickoff session Tuesday at the Television Critics Assn.'s summer press tour at the Ritz-Carlton Huntington Hotel.

With the hit drama "Grey's Anatomy" getting lead-in support from the new comedies "Big Day" and "Notes From the Underbelly," ABC is looking to get traction on a night that has bedeviled them in recent seasons.


"We definitely think 'Grey's' is a self-starter," McPherson said. "We really believe in these comedies. It's the first time we're really going to go full bore against Thursday nights."

McPherson also got a chuckle out of comments made by his counterpart at CBS, Nina Tassler, that he believes was aimed at managing expectations of how well "CSI" will perform with "Anatomy" in its 9 p.m. time slot, referring to comment she made during CBS' press tour session Saturday that "CSI" was the "underdog" in the looming showdown (HR 7/17).

"I heard Nina was playing the rope-a-dope," McPherson said. "It's kind of funny. 'CSI' and CBS have dominated that night, so I think they are the champions without question. We are coming on with a strong contender and hope to do some business there."

McPherson also expressed some concern for the departure of J.J. Abrams, executive producer of multiple ABC series including "Lost," from Touchstone Television. Last Friday, Abrams struck a new deal for TV production with Warner Bros. Television, as well as a separate film deal with Paramount Pictures.

"It's a shame to lose him from the studio because obviously we have a special connection with (having him) in-house," McPherson said.

But in the short term, Abrams is still working closely with ABC and "Lost," which he will work closer on than last season, when he was off directing "Mission: Impossible III." Abrams is expected to direct select episodes of "Lost" and be in the writing room as well, McPherson said.

Next season, Abrams will be committed to developing for Warner Bros., though sources indicate he has already expressed to Touchstone his dedication to contributing to his current series in the future, which also include dramas "What About Brian" and "Six Degrees."

McPherson also noted that ABC does plenty of business with Warner Bros. Television and could see the network's relationship with Abrams under different auspices. "Peter and I have already talked," McPherson said of Warner Bros. Television president Peter Roth. "We intend to keep in business with him."

McPherson also issued a vote of confidence for "Desperate Housewives," which critics carped suffered from a creative malaise in its second season. The network likes what it sees from early scripts and descriptions of seasonlong story lines coming from creator and executive producer Marc Cherry, who has the reins to himself now that Tom Spezialy has left the show.

"It's all going through Mark's typewriter, which I think is a great thing," said McPherson, who also noted "Housewives" will return to the "wicked" comedic tone it displayed early in its run.

McPherson didn't mince words on the subject of the recent Emmy Awards nominations, which delivered more than a few omissions for both "Housewives" and "Lost," which were big winners at last year's Emmys. He blamed the new nomination process.

"I hope the academy will look at it and realize that maybe the changes aren't all good and that they need to go back to the old system," he said.

McPherson also aired some regrets over the failure of "Commander in Chief," adding that if he could do it over again he would have launched later in the season to avoid overwhelming executive producer Rod Lurie, who was removed from the series because of production delays.

"I think if we had gotten way out ahead, we would have had a much better chance of being able to deliver a show week to week," McPherson said.

In addition, McPherson addressed the ongoing challenge of incorporating digital-media strategies into the network business. He expressed an openness to using alternative platforms to extending or ending a series that can't hack it on the TV network. He offered no specifics but mentioned that "Lost" likely will create supplementary content, though not broadband episodes, to sate viewer appetites when "Lost" takes a midseason break.

McPherson also mentioned that ABC could take a second look at Patricia Heaton, the "Everybody Loves Raymond" actress who had a pilot the network declined to pick up. ABC is in discussions with producers of the pilot about redeveloping the project, which McPherson said "didn't come together."

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/thr/television/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1002841483

If I were a cableco or satco, I would buy gobs of ad time during these two shows and hawk my DVRs big time. :)

That would be a great use of advertising dollars, Dave

TV Critics Summer Press Tour
Death March With Cocktails

The Laugh Track Man
By Tim Goodman San Francisco Chronicle in his TV blog “The Bastard Machine” Tuesday, July 18, 2006

Everybody hates the laugh track.

At least anectdotally they do. (The truth is, a large portion of the viewing audience doesn't so much rely on laugh tracks as a crutch - telling them when to laugh - as they need it out of habit, like Linus needs his blanket, because they haven't quite been conditioned to live without it. For example, not everything meant to be funny is funny. It's OK not to laugh.)

ABC has a new serial comedy called "Big Day" which doesn't have a laugh track (doesn't need it - take that as you will). But during this most recent development season, a supposedly record amount of "single camera" comedies were shot as pilots (single camera comedies are like "Scrubs" - they have no laugh track). Not all of those shows were picked up, of course, but there has been much discussion here about whether laugh tracks are a curse. This came up during a session for "The Class" on CBS, which had what appeared to be a very enthusiastic laugh track.

Turns out - not. (This is the same problem on HBO's "Lucky Louie," which tapes in front of a live audience. The audience's uproarious laughter, mocked in the YouTube "Deadwood"-as-a-comedy spoof, is real. Annoying, but real.) Apparently "The Class" has the same problem. And producers Jeffrey Klarik and David Crane were on the defensive, humorously, because of early allegations that they were using a particularly "sweetened" laugh track when it's just a very happy live audience. In fact, the duo were so concerned about authenticity, they turned away THE LAUGH TRACK MAN.

Said Klarik: "When we went in to do the show, I swear to God we said, 'We don't want the laugh track man,' because there's this man who comes with this box. And it's - did you know this? - and he's like, 'You want a giggle? You want a chuckle? You want a surprised laugh?' And we said no, please don't bring it in. And so we used what we had and so it hurts my feelings when I read all this stuff about this laugh track. In fact, even when we were doing 'Friends,' we often had to turn down the audience reaction because it sounded like a laugh track."

The Laugh Track Man. We are forming a search and destroy team as you read this.

Of course, for "traditional" multi-camera comedies, NOT having a laugh track isn't a free pass to airing overly enthusiastic laughter (particularly when it makes the audience at home wonder if they're watching the same show). But for his part, Crane said he likes the old-school approach.

"What's wonderful about it is to shoot a show in front of a live audience and it changes the nature of the show and it changes how you perform it and the comedy feels hotter in a way. I mean - love single camera. It's cool. It's remote. But there's something about doing a live show in front of a real audience, and that's what you're hearing. You're hearing real people laughing."

Klarik: "And when we don't get a laugh, we go out into the stage and rewrite the line, and we keep doing it until we get a laugh."

No matter how "The Class" is recieved, you have to give them credit for trying, since it seems mighty easy to just call up The Laugh Track Man and buy a chuckle.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/sfgate/indexn?blogid=24

TV Critics Summer Press Tour
The S-word

By Rob Owen Pittsburgh Post-Gazette TV Editor in his blog “Tuned In”
(Rob Owen is President olf the Television Critics Association)

PASADENA, Calif. -- Some TV critics battered CBS's Nina Tassler with questions about serials, even though CBS is adding just two shows with continuing stories. The same question came up with ABC Entertainment president Stephen McPherson this morning, but it wasn't quite the same pummeling.

Mostly it was because Tassler took a half-dozen questions to answer the questions directly and McPherson was more up front, but it's still ABC that's filled its schedule with a glut of serials.

And now the producers are trying to claim their serials are not serials, the new, dreaded "S-word." Unbelievable. Read more in tomorrow's Post-Gazette.

• • • • • • • • • • •

CBS Entertainment president Nina Tassler attempted to portray "CSI: Crime Scene Investigation" as the underdog in its fight with ABC's "Grey's Anatomy" at 9 p.m. Thursday this fall, but ABC's Stephen McPherson was having none of it.

"I heard Nina was playing the rope-a-dope," he said. " 'CSI' and CBS have dominated that night, so I think they are the champions without question. We're coming on with a strong contended and hope to do some business there."

McPherson said ABC executives started thinking about moving "Grey's" in late 2005, scheduling it after the Super Bowl to help build its audience further, preparing it for a move.

"We knew it needed to be incredibly strong and be a self-starter on its own, outside of [the 10 p.m. Sunday] time period," he said. "It was a decision that was based on a year of thought."

• • • • • • • • • • •

Forgetful Showtime: At its press tour session last week, Showtime handed out a 60-page booklet that celebrates the network's 30 years. It included pictures from dozens of Showtime series and movies, but it omitted the network's best series, "Beggars & Choosers." Boo! Hiss!

• • • • • • • • • • •

Green party: The CW's Jolly Rancher green signage brightened the backyard of the Ritz-Carlton last night as critics mingled with the new network's stars.

As parties go, it was better than a traditional UPN party, but not as good as some WB parties of old. Star turnout was a bit meager, but CBS Corp. honcho Leslie Moonves was there with wife Julie Chen ("The Early Show," "Big Brother").

The new network's "Free to be" slogan was everywhere ("Free to be funny," "Free to be cool," "Free to be family," "Free to be fearless," "Free to be fabulous"), and pages were making T-shirts for TV critics with the slogans "Free to be critical," "Free to be cynical," "Free to be terse" and "Free to be quotable."

I skipped Sunday night's "Rock Star: Supernova" party, but heard from some people it was a good time. Tonight's a dinner with ABC's publicity staff, not a party, and the ABC party happens tomorrow night.

http://www.post-gazette.com/tv/tunedin/

Washington Notebook
Senators vow telecom battle

By Brooks Boliek The Hollywood ReporterJuly 19, 2006

WASHINGTON -- A pair of influential senators threw down the legislative gauntlet Tuesday as they threatened a floor fight over a telecommunications bill designed to make it easier for the big telephone companies to enter local cable markets.

Sens. Olympia Snowe, R-Maine, and Byron Dorgan, D-N.D., warned other lawmakers that they were prepared to fight the legislation because it failed to include "network neutrality" language.

The fight over network neutrality -- rules that prohibit the phone and cable companies from using their control of their networks from disadvantaging the people and companies who use them -- has become a hot issue in Congress.

Attempts by the senators to get the language included in the bill failed on an 11-11 vote by the Senate Commerce Committee on June 28.

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/thr/television/brief_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1002841481

TV Critics Summer Press Tour
Ted Danson's Rug

By Roger Catlin Hartford Courant TV Critic in his “TV Eye” blog

There has been a lot of talk about hair at press tour, but none more than about the hair of Ted Danson.

“Oddly, my hair became a topic of conversation in the beginning of ‘Cheers,’" the actor said at press tour.

“And I used to color” my hair, he says.

“I had a bald spot about this big when I started ‘Cheers,’ and I'd surreptitiously put my little brown thing on it and comb my hair over it,” he says.

“Then the tabloids said that I'm wearing a huge hairpiece. And I couldn't go, ‘No, no, I just color it in.’

They were wrong about the rug but only by a few years.

“About five years later, I indeed did have to wear a little divot hairpiece for Sam Malone,” Danson says. “So I put that in, and then one of the tabloids airbrushed my entire head and said that I'm one of the people who is totally bald.

“And I, once again, couldn't say, ‘No, no, I just wear this little . . '

“So I'm out of the closet,” he said.

For his role as a therapist in the fall sitcom “Help Me Help You,” he’ll go natural, with white hair and a bald spot.

“It’s very nice not to sit around with a bunch of ladies with silver things in my hair getting dye jobs," Danson says. "So I'm happy to be gray.”

(“Help Me Help You” begins on ABC Sept. 26).

That may have been the most newsworthy statement regarding hair at press tour so far. But it wasn’t the only one.

George Eads’ character on “CSI” went through some changes this season as well.

“I didn't use scissors for a while, got some complaints,” he said. “And I kind of found it kind of humorous.”

“And then I remember I needed some help from a service professional, and a police officer helped me out with his big, hairy, awesome-looking mustache, so I thought I'd grow that. And that kept me at home for a few days.”

(Laughter.)

Changing a hairstyle can be dangerous, and Eads said “I think I'm going to not mess around with it as much. I've really realized how much the fans get perturbed by it.”

Earlier, someone asked Leslie Hope, who starred as Jack Bauer’s wife in the first season of “24” and returns in the drama “Runaway” for The CW this fall, what he said was “kind of a silly question:”

It was about how the short-haired actress felt about wearing a long-hair wig in the show’s flashbacks.

After a moment, she replied: “It is kind of a silly question, I think.”

http://blogs.courant.com/roger_catlin_tv_eye/2006/07/ted_dansons_rug.html#more

TV Critics Summer Press Tour
T C A Notebook

USA Today TV reporters Gary Levin and Ann Oldenburg and USA Today TV critic Robert Bianco are in Pasadena, Calif., covering the annual Television Critics Association press tour.

They'll be filing periodic updates throughout the week.

'Betty:' Beautiful on the inside?

• If anyone takes offense at the title of this fall's ABC series Ugly Betty, Salma Hayek hopes they'll reconsider: The label is "sarcastic," explains Hayek, a producer of the show; it's adapted from Colombian "telenovela" Betty La Fea that's been a huge success in other countries. "Anybody that's not super-skinny and really tall, some people think ... they're ugly," she says. "I've personally seen some really tall, skinny models that I think maybe are ugly."

Though outfitted in braces and unfashionable garb, Betty (America Ferrara) is the show's heroine and moral center as an assistant at a fashion magazine filled with venomous rivals, including an editor played by Vanessa Williams. "There's a little bit of Betty in all of us," says executive producer Silvio Horta. "No matter what you look like, what you weigh, everyone feels in a way the outsider." —Gary Levin

We'll drink to that: Danson bellies up to the bar

Ted Danson is stepping up to the TV bar again.

A certified TV star who followed his long run as Sam the bartender in the classic Cheers with a successful stint as a grumpy doctor in Becker, Danson returns this fall in the ABC sitcom Help Me Help You. He plays a renowned therapist whose own life is in shambles. For Danson, it's the best combination of his two most famous TV roles. "I get to be the bartender/group therapist. Then I get to be the total idiot at the same time."

Unlike Becker, though, Dr. Bill is an idiot you're supposed to like — and that suits Danson fine. "I like playing someone who desperately want the world to like him. It's closer to home."

Still, in some ways, Help Me is a stretch for Danson. It's his first time starring in a one-camera, filmed sitcom (though he did do a guest stint on Curb Your Enthusiasm). And it's the first time one of his own shows has allowed him to use his real hair, which is all-gray and thinning. He wore a hairpiece through much of Cheers and dyed his hair for Becker. "I'm out of the closet. I'm tired of sitting around with a bunch of ladies with aluminum in my head getting a dye job."

One thing, however, remains the same. At 58, Danson remains a master of comic self-absorption.

"I think being shallow is ageless." —Robert Bianco

'Lost' details found

In May, ABC announced that Lost would ditch most of its low-rated repeats next season, running a small batch in fall and then going on a late-fall hiatus.

But until Tuesday, it was unclear just how long a breather it would take: Lost will premiere Oct. 4, air six or seven new episodes, and then get lost for 13 weeks, ABC Entertainment President Stephen McPherson told TV critics at their semiannual gathering.

In November, Day Break, a drama starring Taye Diggs, will takes Lost's Wednesday night slot. Lost then comes back with 16 consecutive new installments from February through May.

The move mimics Fox's game plan for 24, and reflects the fact that both heavily serialized shows lose momentum and hemorrhage viewers when they air repeats.

Producer J.J. Abrams, who just signed a lucrative new deal with Warner Bros., will nonetheless take a more active role on Lost and his other ABC shows this season and plans to direct a few Lost episodes, McPherson says. (Abrams was busy directing Tom Cruise's Mission: Impossible 3 last year.)

Despite its successes with Lost, Desperate Housewives and Grey's Anatomy, ABC finished third last season, and McPherson remains in a "rebuilding" mode. That explains why the network is adding 10 new shows by November, which poses a marketing challenge. "We know it's an aggressive schedule," he says, but "we've got a lot of work to do. There's risk in it, no question. I wish I had seven nights of programming I didn't have to change."

McPherson concedes that Housewives "stumbled" early last season. He says with the departure of executive producer Tom Spezialy, Housewives creator Marc Cherry will become more heavily involved and that based on early scripts, "the story line, the mystery is a lot stronger from the get-go." —Gary Levin

Serialized series heat up

Many of ABC's new shows are serialized, a big trend this fall patterned after viewers were hooked by 24 and Lost.

Included are dramas Six Degrees, Brothers & Sisters and The Nine, and comedies The Knights of Prosperity (about a plot to rob Mick Jagger) and Big Day (an entire season that revolves around a couple's wedding day). McPherson says the shows just happened to be the best among the pilots, but that if they succeed, such "appointment television" can help keep viewers loyal as digital video recorder usage grows.

"You have to have shows people need to watch at a particular time" or risking missing water-cooler conversation, McPherson says.

Of course, if they fail, viewers are left holding the bag, as the few loyal fans of Invasion were last spring. The plot was left unresolved because the decision to cancel the show was made only in May, once all the season's episodes had been completed. —Gary Levin

Cookin' with Kimmel

"Who's ready for a burger?" asks ABC late night talk show host Jimmy Kimmel.

Standing in the hot sun of a terrace overlooking the pool at the Ritz-Carlton, Kimmel grills burgers made from his own recipe — teriyaki, onion flakes, onion powder and garlic power — for Monday's lunch at the Television Critics Association conference.

"I sweated on each one," he says as he wipes his face with a white cloth and personally serves the press for about a half hour. Kimmel, who loves to cook, has a pizza oven and several grills on his back patio.

Kimmel soon finds out that new CBS talk show host Rachael Ray had given the hotel her recipe for mini-burgers, which were served Sunday. Critics compare the two, of course. But it comes down to personal taste.

Inside the cool dining room, Kimmel introduces members of the Jimmy Kimmel Live family helping him cook: Uncle Frank serves slaw, his childhood best friend Cleto the bandleader dishes up baked beans, Cousin Sal handles french fries and corn, and parking lot security guard Guillermo helps with condiments and salad.

Kimmel tells his lunch guests, "I've never been more dehydrated." But he's very proud of his burgers. "This is not like Paul Newman and his stupid popcorn. This is my recipe."

After he gives away his secret ingredients, he jokes, "On behalf of Rachael Ray and everyone at the Food Network, thanks for coming." —Ann Oldenburg

'Gilmore' goings-on

Gilmore Girls star Lauren Graham has heard all the fan complaints from last season, from Luke's secret love child to Lorelai's uncharacteristically wussy reaction, to her season-closing bed scene with Christopher. She's even agrees with some of them. "It wasn't my favorite stuff to play, to kind of be dictated to by Luke. But it was a believable conflict to me and a believable obstacle, so the end to me made perfect sense."

To be fair, Graham wasn't in a position to do anything about her complaints. Now-departed creator Amy Sherman-Palladino was famous for running the show the way she wanted — and she wanted to delay the marriage of Luke and Lorelai. Besides, Graham says, "If everything went the way the fans wanted it to go, the show would either be over or I'd just be calling Rory saying 'Well, what are you doing tonight?' "

Clearly, though, changes are coming that go beyond the behind-the-scenes change that replaced Sherman-Palladino with new producer David Rosenthal. On screen, Rory will have a new circle of friends, and Christopher will play a bigger role. But Lorelai will still have her pet, Paul Anka, despite Graham's desire to dump the dog. "I just am not a fan of dog comedy." —Robert Bianco

'Veronica Mars' shortens attention span

Speaking of complaints, Veronica Mars producer Rob Thomas is aware that fans thought his show was too convoluted and confusing last year. "Honestly, I think that was a problem with season two. It's something that we plan to correct in season three." How? Look for shorter story-arcs, fewer suspects and one less suitor for Veronica. Teddy Dunn's Duncan is off the show.—Robert Bianco

More cast members to hate 'Chris'

Changes on CW's comedy lineup, migrating from UPN with new episodes starting Oct. 1: Everybody Hates Chris will meet more uncles and other hangers-on, to broaden the show beyond school bullies and Chris' immediate family.

"We're going to be in the neighborhood a lot more," says inspiration and co-creator Chris Rock, while Chris runs for class president. "We'll still be in the school, but he can't be called n——- every week." Whoopi Goldberg turns up as neighbor in two episodes, starting Oct. 8.

Over on Girlfriends, Jill Marie Jones, who plays gal-pal Toni, is leaving the cast, forcing Joan (Tracee Ellis Ross) to cope with losing her best friend.

And All of Us producer Jada Pinkett-Smith explains to critics the decision to write out the character based on her and her marriage to actor Will Smith, focusing instead on Robert's ex-wife Neesee. "The paradigm that Will and I had in real life was a little difficult for people to relate to," she said.

To which Rock replied, "Hey, Bruce Willis loved the show." —Gary Levin

CW era dawns Sept. 20

The new CW network is ushered in Sept. 20 with the season premiere of America's Next Top Model, the soon-to-be-former UPN's biggest hit. New and returning series will surface the week of Sept. 25, except Veronica Mars, which returns Oct. 3, CW president Dawn Ostroff announced Monday. WB ends its 10-year run Sept. 17 with a marathon of key series pilots, and UPN will sign off in many cities earlier in September.

Haylie Duff will become a series regular on CW's resurrected 7th Heaven this fall, as her character, Sandy Jameson, joins a religious seminary. Most of the cast is signed to return, save for Camden kids Mackenzie Rosman (Ruthie) and David Gallagher (Simon), who might appear occasionally. —Gary Levin

More on CSI

• Though CSI seasons change, one thing never varies: Put the actors in front of the press, and inevitably, some ungracious comment about one of the other CSI shows will arise. This time it came from Gary Dourdan, who was discussing how well his cast gets along.

"We're very fortunate in that we're all kind of compatible," says Dourdan. "There's no divas on the set. ... I've been on shows, other shows, that it hasn't been this way. Marg and I went on the (CSI:) Miami show for a minute, and it wasn't that way. And I'm not going to say anything bad about Miami now, but when we went there, they didn't have that vibration that we have."

• Producer Carol Mendelsohn says viewer reaction to the season-ending revelation of a Sara/Grissom romance was better than she expected. She says she had heard fans were spilt 60/40 for, but the mail she's received has been overwhelmingly favorable.

"I don't know whether it was just that my assistant put all the 'pro' letters on my desk. But I read letters from students at Harvard, science teachers, viewers from Italy. And across the board, the fans wrote it was such a pleasure to see two adults, two professionals who are so good at their jobs, have found each other and are now engaged in an intimate and mature relationship that's not salacious."

It is, however, secret — at least for now. Mendelsohn says for the time being, viewers will know about the romance but the couple's co-workers will not. "In this one instance, the viewers will be ahead of our "CSI's."

• These days, Mendelsohn also has to make sure the show doesn't run afoul of an FCC that fined a similar CBS procedural, Without a Trace, for a scene depicting a teen orgy. "As an individual I can just state here that I hate to see television programming censored by a few individuals. ... Even if a thousand individuals or 10,000 individuals say that something offends them, suddenly you can't address certain issues on television. On a bad week we have 25 million-plus viewers. On a good week we've had as many as 30, 31 million viewers and even more." —Robert Bianco

'CSI' an underdog?

Don't count CBS' CSI out in its fall time-slot battle with ABC's Grey's Anatomy— not that anyone really would.

Even though CSI has never had any trouble defeating all comers in its Thursday slot, CBS Entertainment President Nina Tassler labels her show the "underdog" as Grey's moves to Thursdays at 9 come September. And the actors and producers of CSI, TV's most-popular scripted show, have embraced their network-invented role, lowering expectations while striking that we-don't-get-no-respect pose so popular with professional athletes.

"CSI has always been underestimated from Day 1 by everyone but the fans," says star Marg Helgenberger. "Our network has underestimated us. The critics have underestimated us. But the fans have not. ... With all due respect to Grey's Anatomy, ABC moving that show opposite us, I think, was the biggest motivator we could have had. We're all excited about it. I think it's given us like, 'Hey, we don't want to relinquish the throne that easily.' "

Still, just to be safe, CSI has a few circus tricks up its sleeve. The show will return with a two-part special that takes place behind the scenes at the Cirque du Soleil Vegas show Ka. The episode, says Helgenberger, will find Catherine and her family in jeopardy when someone slips something into Catherine's drink. —Robert Bianco

Drinking with Tommy Lee

The music in Tommy Lee's dressing room at CBS is so loud that it's impossible to say anything when he offers a shot of Jagermeister liqueur.

Lee and a small gang raise little paper cups Sunday night in a toast to having just taped Tuesday's episode of Rock Star: Supernova. But that was just the beginning of the Rock Star: Supernova partying Sunday night.

Later, a jam session rocked till after midnight at the mansion being used to film the second season of the reality show, which is in search of a lead singer for a band made up of Lee (formerly of Motley Crue), bassist Jason Newsted (Metallica) and guitarist Gilby Clarke (Guns N' Roses).

The band guys and contestants stepped up to microphones in the main room of the house and sang, played bongos, piano, guitar or tambourine, all doing cover songs (no originals allowed). Lee even drummed on the floor at times, since there was no drum set. And at one point, Lee and Phil Ritchie, a contestant from Ocean City, Md., got up and poured drinks on each other while dancing.

Rock Star didn't start off with a bang, but last week's Tuesday show added almost 1 million viewers — 5.3 million to 6.2 million — from Week 1 to 2. The party was a way to drum up interest in the show among TV writers.

"All I can do is be myself," says Lukas Rossi of Toronto. "I know I am the man for the job." He is thought to be a front-runner but faces stiff competition from Houston's Dilana Robichaux. Both have multicolor hair and numerous piercings.

"What I'd really like to achieve with this entire thing is obviously to win," she says, "but (also) to unleash the freaks out there, to show that even if you do look a little freaky or different doesn't mean you need to be judged or live a freaky lifestyle."

The party gave reporters a chance to take part in the scene and help drum up interest in the show. —Ann Oldenburg

http://www.usatoday.com/life/television/news/2006

TV Notebook
Coming in January, a Morning Show for Fox

By Jacques Steinberg The New York Times July 19, 2006

With Katie Couric and Charles Gibson departing morning television, Roger Ailes has decided to dip a toe in. Beginning in January, the 35 stations owned and operated by Fox Television Stations group, overseen by Mr. Ailes since last year, will begin broadcasting a live, one-hour morning show, to be seen beginning at 9 in most cities, Fox announced yesterday.

The show will generally forgo hard news for segments on entertainment and lifestyle, but it will undoubtedly have some of the feel of the Fox News Channel, which is producing the show with Twentieth Television. (Mr. Ailes created and continues to oversee the Fox News Channel.) The two main hosts of the new show, Mike Jerrick and Juliet Huddy, are hosts of Fox News’s “DaySide,” which they are to leave in the fall.

The announcement of the morning show represents the first major initiative by the Fox Television Stations group since Mr. Ailes became its chairman a year ago. But also noteworthy is the time slot in which Fox’s new show will appear.

At least for now, Fox has chosen not to compete with the three main network morning shows “Today,” “Good Morning America” and the “Early Show” — or with “Fox & Friends” on Fox News on cable — between 7 and 9 a.m., when those programs draw the most viewers. (In New York City and elsewhere, NBC broadcasts a third hour of “Today,” from 9 to 10 a.m.)

And, at least initially, Fox has chosen not to syndicate the show in the vein of “Live With Regis and Kelly,” the series that is perhaps its main competition at 9. “Live With Regis and Kelly” is produced by Buena Vista Television and is seen on many ABC stations.

In an interview yesterday, Dennis Swanson, president of operations for Fox Television Stations, said Fox believed that the stations could best distinguish themselves by producing local news from 7 to 9 a.m., but saw an opportunity for a national program in the 9 to 10 a.m. hour slot.

“We think the economics for doing this show are right,” Mr. Swanson said. “We’ve got plenty of experience in that regard. We wouldn’t enter into this project unless we thought there was a profit potential to it.”

Asked if the new show risked cannibalizing Fox News’s audience at 9 — when “Fox & Friends” leaves the air, and the daytime lineup begins — Bill Shine, senior vice president of programming for Fox News, said the programming was intended to be distinct enough to pose no such concerns.

“There are hundreds of millions of viewers out there,” Mr. Shine said. “We’re going after all of them.”

Mr. Shine added that another national show broadcast on Fox stations and distributed by Twentieth Television, “Geraldo at Large,” had not appeared to cut into Fox News’s audience.

In another morning news development, ABC News has decided to hire Jim Murphy, a former executive producer of the “CBS Evening News,” as a senior producer on “Good Morning America,” said an ABC News staff member who knew of the hire but was not authorized to disclose it. Though the program’s executive producer, Ben Sherwood, is leaving this fall, Mr. Murphy’s responsibilities and title have not been finalized, the staff member said. Mr. Murphy’s potential move to ABC was first reported yesterday on the Broadcasting & Cable Web site.

The Fox group includes stations in New York (WNYW, Channel 5), Los Angeles, Chicago, Dallas and Washington, as well as in Cleveland, Houston, Minneapolis, Phoenix and Orlando. Because the Los Angeles station already has a morning show at 9, and the station in Cleveland is planning to produce one of its own, Mr. Swanson said those stations might delay carrying the new national show until 10 a.m.

Mr. Ailes declined, through a spokeswoman, to be interviewed yesterday, deferring instead to Mr. Swanson and Bob Cook, president and chief operating officer of Twentieth Television.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/19/arts/television/19fox.html?pagewanted=print

TV Critics Summer Press Tour
The basics of ABC: Premiere dates and other stuff you'll want to know about

By Melanie McFarland Seattle Post-Intelligencer TV Critic in her TV blog July 18, 2006

I used to give ABC Entertainment president Stephen McPherson credit for being as reasonable and down-to-Earth as he is, and if I wasn't saddled with trying to put together the verbal equivalent of that climactic routine in "Flashdance" three times a day -- and failing with increasing frequency as my batteries run down -- I still would.

The truth is, I wish the guy came off as even a smidgen pompous, purely for entertainment purposes. McPherson's plain-spoken, normal guy attitude seems to be infectious among television executives who chat with us, which doesn't give us much material to work with here.

So let's skip straight to the information you're dying to know about. "Lost" returns Oct. 4, with J.J. Abrams back in the writing room. Though Damon Lindelof did well enough without Abrams, it'll be good to see what the "Mission: Impossible 3" director can do with the third season.

The downside of this is that "Lost" will only run for six or seven episodes, before taking a 13 week break. That's what we get for complaining about all those reruns, a three-month abandonment. McPherson acknowledged that running 22 episodes non-stop from the fall through the spring would be preferable in a perfect world, but the production schedule makes that impossible to do. "We just can't get the shows done in that amount of time," he said.

He'll have to hope that during "Lost's" excruciating downtime, we'll fall in love with "Day Break," a thriller that stars Taye Diggs. Having seen him in person, let me just say the man is a Godiva bar with legs. However! How much do you want to bet that Diggs' show will pay for displacing "Lost"? The scorn due to be heaped upon this show could be substantial.

Sure, it's too early to predict whether "Day Break" will be worth pushing "Lost" off the schedule until the spring, but take a little comfort in knowing that we don't have to deal with those annoying reruns or clip shows.

Next on the scale of shows we care about: "Grey's Anatomy" returns at 9 p.m. on Thursday, Sept. 21, where it will take on "CSI" and provide a strong lead-in to Abrams other production, "Six Degrees." McPherson doesn't expect to dethrone CBS, but again, this is where I was hoping his mouth would write checks the network couldn't cash. Instead, he said, "we're coming on with a strong contender and hope to do some business there."

Honesty -- what a snooze! Next: "Desperate Housewives" premieres at 9 p.m. Sept. 24, and there may be hope for the old hag yet. Marc Cherry, creator mastermind behind the delicious first season, has retaken the role of showrunner. (Tom Spezialy, the guy to blame for season two, has left the series. ) And, McPherson said, "The early scripts and the storylines and the arcs and the mystery, I think, are a lot stronger from the get-go."

ABC's new season actually begins Tuesday, Sept. 12, with two hours of "Dancing with the Stars." (Actually, it really begins with a new "20/20" on Sept. 8, but do you care as much? Probably not.) "Dancing's" competition shows will run for two hours for the first two weeks, then scale back to become the 90 minute lead-in support for the new comedy "Help Me Help You," debuting on Sept. 26. However, among the new series, "Ugly Betty," which starts Sept. 22, is the one to watch.

Indeed, ABC's schedule still gives us plenty to rant and rave about, emphasis on the rave part. But ABC's freshmen roster is one of the strongest among the major networks, although each series comes off with varying degrees of success. But even the ones that made me want to break things ("Men in Trees" - more on that with Anne Heche tomorrow) were watchable from start to finish.

Actually, I take that back - "Big Day," which operates under the assumption that people are dying to spend a season watching some tart's frou frou wedding day, is completely flushable.

There's always an element of doom to this game. But give credit to ABC for caring enough to entertain somebody, somewhere, for whatever amount of time that they remain on the air.

http://blog.seattlepi.nwsource.com/print.asp?entryID=105116

(From Marc Berman’s Wednesday, July 19, 2006, Programming Insider column at Mediaweek.com )
LIVE FROM THE TCA SUMMER PRESS TOUR IN PASADENA, CALIFORNIA

ABC: Opening Executive Comments

Growing ABC was the toast of the town just one year ago courtesy of Desperate Housewives, Lost and the recently introduced Grey’s Anatomy. But three things immediately concerning about the network this year are: 1) the collapse creatively of the residents of Wisteria Lane in season two, 2) Lost sharing the Wednesday 9 p.m. hour next season with new drama Day Break (and exiting for 13 weeks after just six or seven episodes) and, of course, 3) Grey’s Anatomy shifting to Thursday opposite CSI on CBS. Can the grand-slam of three keep ABC afloat in 2006-07, or is the comeback network heading for a downfall?

“What will change this year about Desperate Housewives is that Tom Spezialy has left the series, and Marc (Cherry) has taken over 100 percent of the show running, and that’s been a terrific change,” said Stephen McPherson, president, ABC Entertainment. “The early scripts and the storylines, and the arcs and the mystery are a lot stronger from the get-go. Everyone, including Marc, admitted that we stumbled a little bit at the beginning of last year. We answered so many questions at the end of the first season that we really spent too much time setting up the mystery, and setting up the new arcs. This year we are going to jump right in. You guys will be the judge of that when you see in the first couple of episodes, but they'll be all going through Marc's typewriter, which is a great thing.”

The real mystery to be solved, actually, should be why Marc Cherry took a back-seat role on Desperate Housewives this season. If there is a lesson to be learned, it is never to take the early success of any series for granted. As for Lost, the pending situation is entirely different:

“Lost is a very, very difficult show to produce,” noted McPherson. “If we could run 22 straight episodes, we probably would. But we just can't get the episodes done in that amount of time. We've seen some shows survive against American Idol and do well, and feel like when there are two good shows in a time period (Lost and Day Break), they can both do business.”

“We are going to have some additive stuff that allows people to extend their experience with Lost,” continued McPherson. “We won't have broadband episodes separately, but we're looking at a number of different opportunities where people can keep up, participate in, and have other kinds of additive experiences in between the runs. We just really listened to the audience about the repeats, and it felt like this was really the best way to run the show as the producers.”

Word of advice to ABC: Do not run just six or seven episodes of Lost, and then have it disappear for three months. And find a way to make sure you do a full season’s worth of episodes (which the network has not confirmed will definitely happen). Although following the same pattern as Fox’s 24, and returning in January, may be a long wait to avoid repeats, if you tease the audience with just a handful of episodes and replace it with an unproven drama you could alienate the viewers. It’s a mistake waiting to happen, and it could result in a large audience loss given we will be knee deep in American Idol mania by February. Give us Lost -- even make us wait -- but do not chop up the episode order.

On the subject of Grey’s Anatomy airing out of two unproven comedies (Big Day and Notes From the Underbelly):

“We definitely think Grey's Anatomy is a self-starter,” said McPherson. “And we really believe in these comedies. I think it's the first time that we are really going to go full board against Thursday nights. Certainly, you know, CSI and Survivor are incredibly strong competition. We think the cornerstone for us Thursdays is Grey's, but we also think we can do some business with both those comedies as well. I think they are really compatible to Grey's and to the whole night.”

While you can’t fault a network for being aggressive (and both CSI and Grey’s Anatomy will succeed against each other, despite potential erosion), expect the medical drama to mirror Wednesday this season when only one show, Lost at 9 p.m., garnered any real interest. Chances of Big Day and Notes From the Underbelly succeeding in the competitive Thursday 8 p.m. hour are nil.

As for the Emmy snubs this year for Desperate Housewives and Lost:

“Clearly it's because of the new system, I would assume,” said a stunned McPherson. “I mean, who wins the Emmys is one thing, but to have that kind of oversight just, to me, is remarkable. I think for one year for Lost to win it and then the next year to not be nominated, and for one of the Desperate Housewives to win the best actress and then for none of them to be nominated the next year, there's a problem. I've heard everything from "Well, maybe the blue-ribbon panels had never seen Lost.'” To me, then, there's a problem with the panels. But we are thrilled to have the nominations we have. Grey's Anatomy has gotten a tremendous amount of recognition, but there are just some odd, both positive and negative, things throughout the Emmys. And I hope that the Academy will look at it and realize that maybe the changes they made aren't all good and that they need to go back.”

While it was indeed bizarre for Lost not to snag an Outstanding Drama Series nomination, there was absolutely no reason for any of the Desperate Housewives to be nominated this season, even if Felicity Huffman was named Outstanding Lead Actress in a Drama last year. When a show slips – and, let’s be honest, Desperate Housewives sunk – there is no reason for fickle Emmy to take notice.

On the ABC Panel Front: SIX DEGREES
Thursday 10:00 p.m.

The Premise:
Six strangers living in New York City become friends after eventually meeting again through a mysterious web of happenstance and coincidence in this new drama from Lost creator J.J. Abrams.

Lead-in: Grey’s Anatomy

Competition: Shark (CBS), ER (NBC)

Who Was on the Panel:
Erika Christensen, Hope Davis, Jay Hernandez, Dorian Missick, Bridget Moynihan, and executive producers Bryan Burk, Raven Metzner, and Stuart Zicherman.

The Scoop:
For an inside look at Six Degrees, according to Stuart Zicherman:

“This show is about the web of people that fill our lives. It's not just about friends. It's about friends, enemies, lovers, rivals, mentors. And we all have a network of people in our lives that range from people much older than us to people much younger than us that come in and effectively change our lives. By the end of the first season, we expect that all the characters will have had an effect on each other in some regard, but it also doesn't mean these are the only six degrees that will come walking into the show in the course of the first season.”

The Reality:
Without CBS’ Without A Trace (which moves to Sunday) and out of the relocated Grey’s Anatomy, you might think that the odds are stacked in favor of Six Degrees. But with J.J. Abrams at the helm, the danger of his complicated type of story telling is potentially alienating an audience looking for something easy to digest before they call it a day. If Six Degrees is too over the top, viewers in search of a meaty drama (and tired of NBC’s competing ER) are likely to head over to new CBS legal drama Shark, which could benefit by the familiarity.

Chance of Survival for Six Degrees (Based on a scale of 1-1 to 10-1): 5-1

Did You Know?:
The last time ABC opened a fall season with a scripted drama was Murder One in 1995.

HELP ME HELP YOU Tuesday 9:30 p.m.

The Premise:
Ted Danson heads back to the world of sitcoms in this single camera, half-hour comedy about a collection of eccentric individuals in group therapy with a respected therapist, who may have more problems than his patients.

Lead-in: The Knights of Prosperity

Competition: The Unit (CBS), Law & Order: Criminal Intent (NBC), House (Fox), Veronica Mars (CW)

Who Was On the Panel:
Ted Danson, Jere Burns, Charlie Finn, Darlene Hunt, Suzy Nakamura, and executive producers Jennifer Konner, Alex Reid and Alexandra Rushfield.

The Scoop:
In terms of how Ted Danson prepares for a new series:

“My homework is to find the script and the writers that excite you and make you laugh and smile and all of that. So the homework is to have found two people, three people now, whose point of view about life I find really bright and really funny. And that attracts people like this cast and writers and directors. So it really starts with a really well-written, well-crafted script. And then everything else falls into place. So all of our jobs, I think, become just putting the material on and having fun with it. The mind-set is finding the right material."

The Reality:
Opposite four proven dramas, ABC was wise to counter-program with comedies. But if the network was really clever, it would have positioned the more familiar looking Help Me Help You (with the bigger name of Ted Danson as its star) in the lead-off time period. Out of unproven The Knights of Prosperity (which could quickly wear thin minus Mick Jagger in the pilot) and against The Unit, House and the relocated Law & Order: Criminal Intent, Ted Danson might be looking for a Cheers (or Becker) reunion sooner than he thinks.

Chance of Survival for Help Me Help You (Based on a scale of 1-1 to 10-1): 8-1

Did You Know?:
In between Cheers and Becker, Ted Danson was featured opposite short-lived CBS sitcom Ink in the 1996-97 season.

UGLY BETTY Friday 8:00 p.m.

The Premise:
An oversized square peg from Queens is hired as the assistant for the new head of a top-read fashion magazine because she is the one person in New York City he will not sleep with. Repulsed at first, Betty will win him over with her intelligence efficiency.

Competition: Ghost Whisperer (CBS), Crossing Jordan (NBC), Nanny 911 (Fox), Friday Night Smackdown! (CW)

Who Was On the Panel:
Alan Dale, America Ferrara, Mark Indelicato, Ashley Jensen, Eric Mabius, Becki Newton, Anna Ortiz, Tony Plana, Vanessa Williams, and executive producers Salma Hayek, Silvio Horta, James Parriott and Ben Silverman.

The Scoop:
The origins of Ugly Betty, which come from a telenovela, are as follows:

“The original telenovela was made in Colombia, and it was a phenomenon in Colombia,” explained Salma Hayek. “And I think it was groundbreaking, because usually telenovelas are a lot more melodramatic and this one was dramatic but had an amazing sense of humor. And then, it became an incredible success in all of the Latin countries and then in many places around the world. And I think it's because it's about the fish out of water, probably the person that is not conventional in the way they look or the way they talk, but that they are incredibly smart and hard workers. And, of course, they get ahead in life using that. Everybody wants to see these kinds of stories, but at the same time she is not a victim. She has a sense of humor about herself, and I think America is the best Betty ever by far.”

The Reality:
Opposite two dramas and two reality oriented competitors, it makes sense for ABC to counter-program with comedy. But like the majority of shows that try to be original, the obstacle Ugly Betty faces is alienating the audience with a lack of familiar feel. Plus, won’t the premise of a frumpy square peg wear prematurely thin?

Chance of Survival for Ugly Betty (Based on a scale of 1-1 to 10-1): 9-1

Did You Know?:
The only other show history to use the word ugly in the title was The Ugliest Girl in Town, an ABC sitcom about a young man (Peter Kastner) who dresses as a woman to help his photographer brother and ends up being hired as a model in England. It lasted four months in the 1968-69 season.

DAY BREAK Wednesday 9:00 p.m. (effective on Nov. 15 in place of Lost)

The Premise:
After a detective (Taye Diggs) is falsely accused of killing an assistant District Attorney, he wakes up the next day and relives the same nightmare over and over again. In order to get past this day, he must figure out who framed him and find the real killer.

Lead-in: Dancing With the Stars

Competition: Criminal Minds (CBS), The Biggest Loser (NBC), Justice (Fox), One Tree Hill (WB)

Who Was On the Panel:
Taye Diggs, Adam Baldwin, Moon Bloodgood, Meta Golding, Victoria Pratt, Ramon Rodriguez, executive producers Jeffrey Bell and Matthew Gross, and creator/co-executive producer Paul Zbuszewski.

The Scoop:
If Day Break manages to succeed, here is what creator/co-executive producer Paul Zbuszewski had to say:

“The season is a day. So in 13 episodes we have a payoff, a big payoff. And the following season would be another day. I mean, it could be three months later; it could be six months later, the point being Hopper would be at another crossroads in his life, different set of circumstances and, you know, chaos happens."

The Reality:
Frustrated fans of Lost tuning in on Nov. 15 and realizing their favorite drama is suddenly on hiatus might find themselves heading for the remote for the familiarity of Criminal Minds on CBS (at least until Fox’s American Idol returns).

Chance of Survival for Day Break (Based on a scale of 1-1 to 10-1): 5-1

Did You Know?:
If the plot of Day Break sounds familiar, just think back to Fox classic The X-Files. There was an episode on this very same subject matter.

BIG DAY Thursday 8:00 p.m.

The Premise:
The meticulous planning of the wedding of a young couple is broken down in 22 episodes (or less, of course, if there is no audience). Former Just Shoot Me star Wendie Malick stars.

Competition: Survivor: Cook Island (CBS), My Name Is Earl (NBC), ‘Til Death (Fox), Smallville (WB)

Who Was on the Panel:
Josh Cooke, Kurt Fuller, Wendie Malick, Steve Rannazzisi, Miriam Shor, Marla Sokoloff, Stephanie Weir, and executive producers Matthew Carlson, Josh Goldsmith, and Cathy Yuspa.

The Scoop:
In the event you are wondering if the subject of one individual wedding is enough to carry a sitcom for 22 episodes, according to executive producer Cathy Yuspa:

“There is a lot that goes down on a wedding day and a lot of guests that show up and a lot of family strife and, hopefully, a lot of dynamic set-up among these people that’s going to keep things very hot. The salad was the focus of the pilot, but we’ve got a lot of crazy stuff yet to happen.”

The Reality:
Although facing CBS’ Survivor” Cook Islands and NBC’s My Name Is Earl will be no easy feat, the sleeper success in the time period could be Fox comedy ‘Til Death, led by sitcom veteran Brad Garrett playing a role similar to Ray Romano on Everybody Loves Raymond. With the CW’s proven Smallville still a magnet for younger viewers, there won’t be much left for Big Day. Word of advice to the young couple: elope before the midseason axe swings!

Chance of Survival for Big Day (Based on a scale of 1-1 to 10-1): 10-1

THE NINE Wednesday 10:00 p.m.

The Premise:
Nine people face an unexpected twist of faith after they are all held hostage in a 52-hour standoff during a botched bank robbery attempt. Chi McBride (Boston Public), Timothy Daly (Wings), and Scott Wolf (Everwood, Party of Five) lead the ensemble cast.

Lead-in: Lost

Competition: CSI: NY (CBS), Kidnapped (NBC)

Who Was on the Panel:
Lourdes Benedicto, John Billingsley, Jessica Collins, Tim Daly, Dana Davis, Camille Guaty, Chi McBride, Kim Raver, Scott Wolf, Owain Yeoman, creator/executive producers Hank Steinberg and K.J. Steinberg, and executive producer Alex Graves.

The Scoop:
To the fans wondering if Kim Raver will be returning to Fox’s 24, according to the actress:

“You know, I have to be sort of careful what I say. They are keeping Audrey alive. Hopefully it will be me going back to play Audrey and not someone else. And there’s a specific reason that I can’t get into now, but yeah, hopefully – I mean, I am here now, and hopefully I will jump and do a couple of storylines there.”

The Reality:
Although former time period occupant Invasion seemed like a sure thing out of the compatible Lost, ABC was wise to abandon science fiction for the more familiar crime related programming theme. And the absence of NBC’s declining Law & Order, which shifts to Friday in place of new drama Kidnapped, could open the door to even more potential sampling. Since CBS incumbent CSI: NY is by no means a breakout hit, there would be room for The Nine, at least for the first six or seven weeks, while lead-in Lost (which will exit for a temporary rest in midseason) is still at bat.

Chance of Survival for The Nine (Based on a scale of 1-1 to 10-1): 4-1

Did You Know?:
Matthew Fox, who headlines Lost at 9 p.m., played Scott Wolf’s older brother in Fox serial Party of Five.

Press Tour Tidbits: Notes of Interest

ABC in Spanish:
ABC has announced an increased number of programs dubbed in Spanish for the 2006-07 season. Desperate Housewives, Grey’s Anatomy, Lost, Dancing With the Stars, George Lopez and the upcoming Ugly Betty will all be dubbed in Spanish, while the remainder of the network’s regular primetime line-up will be available with Spanish language subtitles.

http://www.mediaweek.com/mw/newsletters/proginsider/index.jsp

Washington Notebook
Reps. Seek EchoStar Compromise

By Ted Hearn Multichannel.com 7/18/2006

A few House lawmakers from rural districts are trying to broker a compromise to ensure that more than a half-million EchoStar Communications subscribers continue to receive out-of-market feeds of ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox programming.

Under a May Federal Appeals Court ruling, EchoStar is facing an injunction that would deny it the right to provide distant network signals to anyone in the United States. As of April 2002, EchoStar sold distant signals to 1.2 million customers, and about one-half were legally ineligible to buy the programming. But the court's ruling apparently would also require denial of service to the 600,000 customers who were legally receiving the programming.

The fate of EchoStar’s eligible subscribers has gained the attention of Reps. Rick Boucher (D-Va.), Chip Pickering (R-Miss.) and Charles Bass (R-N.H.), who have asked EchoStar and hundreds of network affiliates to reach a settlement.

“We all represent rural areas, and we have thousands of constituents who are eligible to receive out-of-market signals. They pass the test,” Boucher said.

EchoStar and DirecTV are allowed to transmit a network signal from New York and beam it around the country, but only customers with inadequate, over-the-air antenna reception are permitted to purchase the programming.

Broadcasters battled EchoStar in court because they want viewers to watch their local affiliates with local commercials.

Boucher and the other lawmakers convened a Capitol Hill meeting last Thursday, bringing the key parties together so that they understood the stakes involved from the lawmakers’ perspective. DirecTV is not involved in the current dispute.

The lawmakers are concerned about a harsh public backlash if the eligible customers are denied service. “You would have a massive letter-writing campaign to Congress from the eligible subscribers who are no longer getting their signals, who do not want to undergo the annoyance and expense of having to switch to another satellite provider or just prefer EchoStar for some reason,” Boucher said.

A compromise would require EchoStar and DirecTV to commit to provide local TV signals in all 210 markets within a certain period of time. EchoStar’s eligible customers would not be cut off. But some broadcasters want the deal to require EchoStar to pay restitution and to agree to migrate distant network subscribers to a local signal package.

“Our goal is to avoid disruption to consumers,” EchoStar spokeswoman Kathie Gonzalez said. “We very much appreciate the efforts of members [of Congress] to protect their constituents and facilitate the process.”

Boucher -- who did not say how long the parties had to reach a deal -- said he expects all involved to bargain in good faith.

“I am very optimistic,” Boucher said of a settlement. “The meeting achieved exactly what we wanted it to achieve. It showed to both sides that there is congressional interest.”

Legislating a compromise, he added, was not being considered, but that could change if a stalemate were to drag on. “If one party or the other proves recalcitrant here, I can imagine a legislative effort that would be joined by houses [of Congress],” Boucher said.

http://www.multichannel.com/index.asp?layout=articlePrint&articleid=CA6354449

Washington Notebook
Barton, Deal to Hold Retrans Roundtable

By Ted Hearn Multichannel.com

House Energy and Commerce Committee chairman Joe Barton (R-Texas) is planning to hold a roundtable discussion Thursday afternoon on carriage negotiations between local TV stations and cable and satellite TV operators, also known as retransmission consent, according to industry lobbyists.

Barton is expected to host the session along with Rep. Nathan Deal (R-Ga.), who in April withdrew a retransmission-consent-reform proposal -- which was not expected to pass -- in exchange for a Barton-sponsored private industry forum.

Deal has for years been concerned that broadcasters have been abusing retransmission consent to force cable to carry unwanted nonbroadcast programming on the expanded-basic tier, causing the package to swell in size and price to the detriment of cable consumers.

Cable-industry participants expected to attend include Insight Communications CEO Michael Willner and American Cable Association outside counsel Christopher Cinnamon. Cox Communications and direct-broadcast satellite provider EchoStar Communications are expected to send representatives.

It is also possible that a representative of Suddenlink Communications will attend. Suddenlink -- a cable operator formally called Cebridge Connections -- is in the middle of a heated carriage dispute with Sinclair Broadcast Group, which is demanding that the cable company pony up a onetime $40 million upfront fee and a $1-per-subscriber, per-month charge ($2.4 million annually) in order to maintain carriage of the ABC and Fox affiliates in Charleston, W. Va.

Sinclair owns the ABC affiliate (WCHS) and it has a local marketing agreement with the Fox station (WVAH). Suddenlink, which has refused to pay, and Sinclair have brought the Federal Communications Commission into the dispute.

On the broadcasting side, attorney Kurt Wimmer of Covington & Burling and Disney executive vice president of worldwide government relations Preston Padden are also expected to be on hand.

The session, which is closed to the media, is scheduled to begin at 4:30 p.m. and go for one hour. Energy and Commerce spokesman Terry Lane declined to comment.

Barton agreed to hold the forum as a concession to Deal, who wanted to add retransmission-consent provisions to Barton’s telecommunications bill (H.R. 5252), which has cable franchising reform as its centerpiece. Deal, who lacked a committee majority, never offered his amendment.

Among other things, the Deal amendment would have allowed any cable or DBS provider to seek arbitration to settle a carriage dispute with a local TV station after a 90-day window of private bargaining. The TV station, which could not pull its signal during arbitration, had to be affiliated with at least one cable network.

http://www.multichannel.com/index.asp?layout=articlePrint&articleid=CA6354450

The Business of TV
CEO says USDTV far from finished


By Brice Wallace Deseret Morning News Wednesday, July 19, 2006

DRAPER — An upstart operation done in by bigger forces? A revolutionary company that lost uphill battles on several fronts? A financially troubled firm whose rocky start eventually will be seen as a blip on the way to ultimate success?

Regardless of how a person might view U.S. Digital Television LLC, its founder and chief executive officer said Tuesday that the TV programming provider's history is not yet fully written, despite the expectation that the company will be acquired through bankruptcy court proceedings.

Steve Lindsley said Tuesday that he expects USDTV to continue to grow after the sale.

"We'll get through this period here and then emerge hopefully stronger than ever," he said.

The provider of low-cost, wireless, digital TV service filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy July 6 in Delaware. A bankruptcy court trustee, Alfred Thomas Giuliano of Marlton, N.J., is seeking a court order allowing him to keep the service operating until a company sale can be completed, Lindsley said. Several third-party investment groups have expressed interest in acquiring USDTV, and "our management team has aligned itself with one of the top investor groups and believes that they will win the bid process of acquiring the company," Lindsley said.

"We very much look forward to progressing with our dream of providing consumers with a low-cost, family-friendly alternative to cable and satellite."

Lindsley declined to identify that investor group but said it has telecommunication interests — "more than just video, but also broadband and telephony interests."

The likely outcome is that the buyer will purchase USDTV from bankruptcy and continue the service.

"Who that will be has yet to be determined, but we believe a group we're familiar with . . . is motivated to pick up a robust video offering because they have Internet and phone plans and need video to complete the triple-play bundle."

A creditors meeting will take place Aug. 3. Lindsley said the new owners likely will be known by late August and take over operations Sept. 1.

As for his role going forward, "that's in the hands of the new owners," he said. "But I anticipate a role on the management team, if not the CEO of the combined initiatives."

Formed in June 2003 and commercially launched in December 2005, USDTV leases portions of the digital spectrum from local television stations. Customers with a set-top box and antenna receive about 30 channels of "off-the-air" wireless digital TV service for $19.95 monthly as a low-cost alternative to cable or satellite TV.

The company reportedly had about 6,000 subscribers in Utah, part of a group of 16,000 in Salt Lake City, Dallas, Albuquerque and Las Vegas.

USDTV continues to provide service, and Lindsley expects that to continue. Prior to the bankruptcy filing, USDTV had about 120 employees, including about 50 in Utah. A skeleton crew remains, but Lindsley said he expects the company's call center to be operating in "a number of days" to allow customers to report problems or ask questions.

"It has been incredibly frustrating," he said of the company's recent situation. "My heart goes out to employees, partners, all the stakeholders, investors — everybody who believed in us and supported us. We are not through with the fight."

USDTV's effort was backed by $25.75 million from several partners, including Fox Television Stations Inc., Hearst-Argyle Television Inc., McGraw-Hill Broadcasting, LIN TV Corp., Morgan Murphy Stations and Telcom DTV LLC. Bankruptcy court documents indicate the company had estimated assets of between $1 million and $10 million. Lindsley declined Tuesday to be more specific about the assets but said the estimated debt was about $15 million.

Lindsley acknowledged that the young company had sporadic technical problems and a troublesome transition to a new billing system in May and early June. But he put the blame for the company's woes squarely on new broadcast partners that were expected to jump aboard USDTV's vision.

"The initial group was comfortable with our performance, but it was new funding sources, namely new broadcast partners, who would not step up and move the company forward," he said.

USDTV was "well on its way of proving the business model of a low-cost alternative" to cable service, he said, but the broadcast industry was unwilling to compete directly with cable.

Broadcasters and cable operators have been battling in federal government circles about whether cable will be forced to carry broadcasters' second digital channels on cable systems, Lindsley said. Broadcasters became nervous about possible investment in USDTV while that battle waged — "in other words, to take on cable directly with a cable product," he said.

Broadcasters also were worried that cable companies would refuse to clear new content offerings in local markets on their cable systems or not spend advertising money with broadcasters lined up with USDTV.

"Throughout the political and regulatory and competitive issues over the last seven months, it became clear that other broadcasters were concerned about taking on cable head-on, so they decided not to invest with the initial group. Ultimately, that's what sent the company into bankruptcy," Lindsley said.

"There was was really no way to adjust quickly enough to find other financing alternatives, and it was very frustrating to us."

He said he remains proud of the USDTV management team and its ability to develop the service, build content relationships, develop technology and forge distribution agreements.

"The key pieces were built from scratch, and I'm very proud of what we've been able to accomplish, and to have over 16,000 homes enjoy USDTV is a real testament to the work of our people," he said. "This has been a dream of our team and a hard-fought battle for many years. We're anxious as a management team to be able to get to our personal victory of providing this service to potentially millions of homes across America."

http://deseretnews.com/dn/view/0,1249,640195824,00.html

The TV Column
ABC Exposes Its 'Anatomy

By Lisa de Moraes Washington Post Staff Writer Wednesday, July 19, 2006; C01

PASADENA, Calif., July 18 ABC and CBS suits are locked in battle over who will win the highly anticipated ratings war this fall between CBS's "CSI" and ABC's "Grey's Anatomy."

Appearing before a couple hundred TV critics at Summer TV Press Tour 2006 Tuesday, suits from each network insist theirs will be the loser.

Managing expectations is one of the most important skill sets for a Hollywood suit: Winning the first week of the face-off between these two powerhouse dramas is great, but being the surprise winner gets you a banner headline in Variety.

Three days earlier, CBS's Nina Tassler stated firmly that she expects "CSI" to get kicked by "Grey's Anatomy," which is moving from its Sunday berth to the Thursday 9 p.m. slot.

"Who would have thought that 'CSI' would be the underdog?" Tassler said with a straight face -- and you thought TV comedy was dead.

Hooey, said ABC programming chief Steve McPherson of Tassler's performance.

"I heard Nina was playing the rope-a-dope -- it's kind of funny," he told the Reporters Who Cover Television on Tuesday.

" 'CSI' and CBS have dominated that night, so I think they are the champions, without question. We're coming on with a strong contender and hope to do some business there," he said.

The move of "Grey's Anatomy" was not a last-minute decision, as one critic suggested, but one based on a year of thought, McPherson said.

"We believed we needed to move it to build our schedule; that's one of the reasons we gave it the post-Super Bowl slot" in February, he explained.

McPherson detailed plans to try to recover momentum on ABC's two hit series -- "Lost" and "Desperate Housewives" -- that lost traction in their sophomore seasons.

The "Desperate Housewives" executive producer has left and creator Marc Cherry has "taken over 100 percent of the show-running," McPherson said, calling it "a terrific change."

"Everyone, including Marc, admitted that at the beginning of last year, we stumbled a little bit," he said.

"Lost" will come back for six episodes starting Oct. 4, go away, then return in the first quarter of 2007 and run straight through without interruption. That way, no reruns, he explained.

Plus, series creator J.J. Abrams will be back on "Lost" (as well as his two other ABC shows, "What About Brian" and the new "Six Degrees") full time, which McPherson said "will be a terrific asset for us."

When Abrams took time last year to direct "Mission: Impossible III," McPherson said, "we really missed him, so it's nice to have him full time."

For one season: Abrams is leaving ABC parent Disney, where he's been based, having recently cut a deal with Warner Bros.

"My reaction is really, 'Thank you for all your work and we look forward to the shows that we have on the air this year,' " McPherson said when asked to comment on his studio losing the services of the guy who helped put ABC back on the map.

Speaking of "Lost," it's a coincidence that ABC has added more serialized dramas to its lineup instead of closed-ended ones. Ditto that all five of its new comedies are single-camera shows and do not have a laugh track, McPherson insisted.

"We didn't say we don't want to do comedies with laugh tracks . . . We certainly went out there and said we want to break the mold. . . . The same-old, same-old is not working, so the traditional three-camera, couch-in-the-middle sitcom just didn't seem to be breaking out at all. There weren't great voices -- there weren't the Roseanne and Tim Allen voices behind those kind of shows."

McPherson dismissed a suggestion that single-camera comedy is riskier than sitcoms with laugh tracks. "Comedy is risky in general right now because it's kind of broken," he said.

ABC really messed up "Commander in Chief," McPherson acknowledged; the White House drama started strong, then took a nose dive before being canceled.

Given a do-over opportunity, "we would probably bring it on later in the season" and give creator Rod Lurie more preparation time, McPherson said. "He was the voice of that show. The week-to-week production of a series is a real education, and that was what was hard for him. If we had gotten way out ahead, we would have had a much better chance to be able to deliver a show week to week."

• • • • • • • • • • •

And here's another fun thing about Hollywood: While McPherson was telling reporters he "would like nothing more for my buddy [NBC entertainment chief Kevin Reilly] than to see NBC competing for the top spot this year" in the ratings, complimenting Reilly on the "great job" he's done of "developing some really interesting shows" and hoping Reilly will be "allowed to put his schedule on," NBC was upstaging McPherson by blasting an e-mail to the reporters sitting with their laptops in the ballroom with him, about having signed Spike Lee to develop an unspecified drama series.

It was one of those announcements-for-announcement's-sake that abound in Hollywood:

"Spike Lee was one of the first people that I wanted to make a priority for the network," said Katie O'Connell, NBC senior vice president, drama development.

"To say we feel incredibly lucky to be working with Spike Lee is an understatement," added Laura Lancaster, NBC Universal Television Studio senior vice president, drama and cable programming.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/07/18/AR2006071801804_pf.html

TV Critics Summer Press Tour
More humor for 'Housewives'

By Ellen Gray Philadelphia Daily News

PASADENA, Calif. - "Desperate Housewives," whose claim to be a comedy seemed occasionally suspect this past season, may be returning to its roots this fall.

With "Housewives" creator Marc Cherry in and show-runner Tom Spezialy out, ABC entertainment president Steve McPherson said yesterday he thinks "it's going to get a little back to the heart of it... a wicked comedy," albeit one with soap opera elements.

(So maybe the next guy they lock in a basement will get to be funny.)

Spezialy, whose credits include NBC's "Ed" and Showtime's "Dead Like Me," was brought in after the pilot, McPherson said, because Cherry, whose background was in comedy, had never run an hourlong show. But now, it seems, Cherry's ready to take back the reins of the show whose success, along with that of "Lost," helped launch TV's current trend back to serials.

McPherson won't promise that "Desperate" fans won't have to contend with reruns this season, but he did say he hopes to air more than the standard 22 episodes and plans to group reruns in blocks so viewers will at least know whether or not to tune in.

That's not quite the plan with ABC's "Lost," which will air six or seven original episodes in the fall, take a 13-week break while the network introduces "Daybreak," then return for an unbroken string of new episodes.

" 'Desperate' and 'Grey's [Anatomy'] repeat much, much better than 'Lost,' " McPherson said.

'Gilmore' tongue-twisters

I've never been one of those people who insist, every Emmy season, that the "Gilmore Girls" got robbed.

But if there were an award for Mastering Tricky Dialogue Under Trying Conditions, I might lobby for the entire cast.

Starting with star Lauren Graham, who plays Lorelai and who was here Monday afternoon with co-star Alexis Bledel - who plays her daughter, Rory - and her new boss, David S. Rosenthal.

Rosenthal moved up when creator Amy Sherman-Palladino and her producer husband Daniel left the show this spring after failing to agree on a contract for the coming season, and while a lot of hard-core "Gilmore" fans are worried about the transition, Graham, at least, seemed to be embracing it.

For one thing, she now expects to get scripts earlier than the night before shooting begins.

"Amy and Dan were last-minute writers, which plenty of people are," she said.

"Once they figured out that they could, because we could" memorize the dialogue so quickly, they knew they could do things that way, Graham said.

"I think if we'd had a harder time, they'd have had to adjust," she added. Memorizing is one thing, performing is another.

"It's also the word-perfect of it, and that's really a very specific thing," she said. "Because there's no changing anything, and I think that might loosen up a little bit, which to me is something I have wanted. Just a little bit, not like we're improvising, but just so that I'm not driving myself crazy with the kind of recitation, the focus on perfection. Instead, the focus can kind of go back on the emotion and sort of what I'm trying to do."

So were there a lot of multiple takes? "Oh, my God," she said. "I think that's a point of pride for them. And again, there are famous show-runners who are like this: David Kelley and Aaron Sorkin who, they hear it in their head in a certain way, and that's the way they want it and that's to be totally respected," she said. "It just made for a really long day."

Graham had earlier told reporters she'd had reservations about some of the things Lorelai had been up to in the past two seasons - mostly the long estrangement from Rory and the way, as one critic put it, she'd acted like a "wuss" in letting Luke (Scott Patterson) dictate the terms of her relationship with his newfound daughter.

She defended, though, the Palladinos' decision to put her in bed with Rory's father, Christopher (David Sutcliffe) in the season finale:

"I thought it was great," Graham said. "I can't believe people were upset. I thought it was so great, because that was such great drama. That is what people do... to me, that was what made her going against her natural instincts [in her dealings with Luke this season] make more sense... There's always been something between them. It's not like she picked up some new guy in a bar. That would be outrageous and out of character."

Graham said she hasn't decided whether she'd be willing to go beyond this season - when her contract's up - and that she hadn't thought of how she'd like to see the show end, but she does know how she doesn't want it to end: with "a cheesy double wedding."

"Gilmore Girls," she said, is the story of "three - I would include Kelly Bishop [who plays her mother, Emily] in that - powerful women navigating their way through life. I don't think it is guy-dependent."

http://www.philly.com/mld/philly/entertainment/television//15070630.htm?template=contentModules/printstory.jsp

TV Critics Summer Press Tour
When at Press Tour, Kindly Check Your Unbridled Enthusiasm and Garden-Variety Toadiness At the Door

By Ray Richmond The Hollywood Reporter in his blog “Past Deadline”

We all need someone we can lean on. That became apparent to me the day I started work as a talent coordinator and segment producer for "The Merv Griffin Show" in 1985, during the seminal talk show's dying days. My job was to edit movie promo clips and conduct pre-interviews with guests, feeding Merv questions and answers based on that advance chat to ensure that the show contained no spontaneity whatsoever. What I wasn't told by my fellow talent coodinators prior to my first pre-show meeting with Merv was that you were never to try to be funny in Merv's presence lest he grow offended at the sheer audacity of your thinking you might succeed in drawing a smile. So of course I pretty much immediately launched into a joke. Merv responded with complete silence, literally turning his back on me. Once the meeting mercifully concluded, one of my fellow coordinators frantically took me aside and gasped, "Oh God, we forgot to tell you: nobody can be funnier than Merv!"

Uhhhhh...yeah. Thanks for the tip.

With this 20-year-old story in mind, I'm committed to being there for any TV critics who may be new on the job and taking in their first Television Critics Association press event (currently going down in Pasadena) with the goal of sparing them the same sort of excruciating pain I experienced when Merv put a well-meaning neophyte in his place.

You see, the TV critics have unwritten rules at these affairs, an ingrained code of conduct that first-timers no doubt find perplexing, not to mention unnerving. If you don't know how to properly behave, there is guaranteed to be embarrassment, admonishments, angry stares, wagging fingers and, in rare cases, the outright withholding of meaningless chit-chat. You risk being ostracized, isolated, gossiped about, possibly even placed on the TCA's version of probation (having your key access to the prison cell-size official association suite at the hotel taken away).

To guard against such public humilation and potential trauma, I submit the 10 Iron-Clad Unwritten Rules of TCA:

1. Critics do not applaud at any session no matter what! And when company drones in attendance take to clapping, critics are expected to assume the "Buddha Position" (arms crossed, legs crossed, staring blankly straight ahead, all of the body's muscles in complete repose). The louder the surrounding applause, the more blank and emotionless the expression and inert the limbs.

2. The more popular the star attending a session happens to be, the less outwardly impressed the critic must appear -- demonstrating a palpable indifference to the celebrity's standing via what's known as the "You ain't all that!" line of questioning and level of recognition. (Does not apply if the star is too hot to speak to and simultaneously breathe properly, such as in the case of Salma Hayek.)

3. When asking a question of anyone (executive, producer or star) on a panel, never address he or she by first name. It's not "Ted" but "Mr. Danson." You are not their friend. You are their journalistic overlord. And asking for autographs? Only if you want to be strangled to death. You are not a fan and are not in attendance to help them feel good about themselves or their project. At TCA, skeptical is the new curious. Always has been, come to think of it.

4. If you ask any question during a session that smacks of ass-kissing, your chances of ever achieving the respect of your fellow critics hovers close to zero. Better to let others do the asking until you get the lay of the land.

5. If you still insist on asking a question and are fortunate enough to draw the attention of one of the network pages who control microphone access, be as rude as possible. Jump up and down. Interrupt with impunity. Wave your arms frantically. Holler "Over here on your right!" at three-second intervals until acknowledged. Fall to the ground clutching your chest, feigning a heart attack. Then scream, "I've fallen and I can't get up!" or, while experiencing a miraculous and instantaneous recovery from the heart episode, yell, "I don't know about you guys, but I'm not gonna let these bastards get away with this!" If you don't approach this task with the firm conviction that you are the center of the universe and the other critics mere orbiting pieces of space trash, you'll never get a chance to speak. But again, don't worry about making a scene to get your shot. It's simply how this game is played.

6. If a fellow critic asks a question of a network executive that elicits a shifty, evasive, awkward, uncomfortable, testy or ignorant response, be sure to follow it up by asking the same question in a slightly different way. And then again if necessary. Be sure to work yourself into a hostile lather. Rinse. Then repeat during each subsequent network executive session.

7. Laughing during sessions is permissible, but it must by driven by the proper motivation. You cannot chuckle because you genuinely like the person and believe he or she is a stitch. The laughter can only emerge as a temporary, reflexive, otherwise dispassionate reaction to a single amusing moment and then immediately followed by a quick recovery and a mumbled, "Ha. Funny."

8. You can eat the free food supplied by the hotel and covered on the networks' dime but cannot appear to be enjoying it excessively. It is adequate sustenance, nothing more. To imply otherwise is to effectively abandon your power. The meals must be reflected as moderately satisfying at best. Regular and increasingly frustrated complaints about the poor quality of the gratis grub are encouraged.

9. If you speak to a fellow critic about the general news value of this year's press tour while it's in progress, it must pale in comparison -- using such descriptions as "sucks" or "bites" -- while recalling the quality and excitement of every past event. And if someone misses a session and inquires as to how it went, you are duty-bound to reply, "Oh God, it was painful. Didn't get a thing out of it. (Insert names here) were so lame."

10. If you try to sneak a "plus one" into any network party, expect to be fixed with the evil eye by many out-of-town attendees who are there by themselves. Taking along a friend or family member is not the politically savvy thing to do, implying that special (read: unethical) favors have been sought and unjust enrichment bestowed. Like smoking a cigarette in the bathroom in 7th grade, it is unlikely to escape the attention of someone with an ax to grind and will surely haunt you to your grave.

So anyway, there you go, newbies. No need to thank me. It's all just about giving back for me.

http://www.pastdeadline.com/

TV Critics Summer Press Tour
Success is messing with Taye Diggs

By Suzanne Ryan The Boston Globe TV Writer in the Globe’s “Viewer Discretion” blog July 19, 2006

Taye Diggs doesn't like being questioned about his work.

That was the impression he left today at the Television Critics summer conference here in Pasadena, California.

Diggs is starring in a promising-looking drama on ABC this fall called "Day Break." He will play an innocent cop who is framed for murder. In an odd twist, this cop will keep re-living the same day of his life without understanding how this supernatural event is happening. As he repeats each day, he tries to solve the mystery of who killed the victim. But meanwhile his family and loved ones are in danger.

It's a confusing premise, no? Well, we critics had a few questions about it. Unfortunately for us, Diggs got tired.

"You'll have to forgive us if we come off as a little sarcastic or maybe defensive. But we knew that we would be dealing with a lot of these questions," he said.

"Everybody here, we all know what we're doing. ...The dog isn't going to have the shoe in his mouth every single time," he said, referring to a scene that repeats three times in the pilot.

"That would be bad TV. We're not dumb."

And then Diggs said my favorite part.

"I'm Taye Diggs. I wouldn't sign on for that."

Okay Diggs. I like your work but let's not go crazy. There's a reason your last drama, "Kevin Hill," did not survive.

And now you've managed to annoy the nation's television critics before your new show even premieres.

Brilliant.

Modesty, man. Modesty.

http://www.boston.com/ae/tv/blog/

TV Critics Summer Press Tour
“Ugly Betty’ could be big

By Diane Holloway Austin American-Statesman in her TV blog Wednesday, July 19, 2006

If buzz and goodwill turn into ratings, the surprise hit of the new season just might be “Ugly Betty,” ABC’s new hourlong comedy-drama based on the beloved Colombian telenovela “Betty la Fea.”

The new adaptation has the Hollywood muscle of Salma Hayek behind it (she’s one of the executive producers) and one of the freshest new stars to come along in years, America Ferrera.

Betty, for you telenovela virgins out there, is a fish-out-of-water girl from a close-knit Mexican American family. She has bushy eyebrows, braces and is a bit heavier than the super-slim women society loves.

In the series opener, Betty, a smart young woman with dreams of working in publishing, gets dumped by her boyfriend but lands an unexpected job — at a glamorous fashion magazine, where her smarts will take her far but her looks will be ridiculed. Yes, there are echoes of “The Devil Wears Prada,” but “Betty” has a lot more heart and resonance.

“Every day of my life I have Betty moments,” said Ferrera, whose credits include “Real Women Have Curves” and “The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants.” “I’m Latina, not a typical girl and I’m in this business where there are lots of opportunties for rejection. I didn’t even know I was fat until I started acting.”

In real life, Ferrera isn’t really fat; she’s just not super-slim. Nor is she even remotely ugly. To achieve her Betty look, she wears fake eyebrows, baggy clothes and fake braces.

“When I’m in costume, I never feel more confident and pretty on the inside,” Ferrera said. “There’s a little light that shines in Betty, and it’s wonderful being her.”

As to suggestions that some people may think the show’s title is cruel, Hayek insists it is not.

“The title has a lot to do with the tone of the show,” she said. “It’s sarcastic. We’re making fun of the people who would think she’s ugly. I don’t think she’s ugly.”

Ferrera says her fake braces are like a retainer she can “pop out whenever I want to go to the craft cart,” where food is served on the set. She unapologetically likes to eat.

“And we encourage her,” Hayek said. “Go to the craft cart, go to the craft cart!”

“And I’m very obedient,” Ferrera said grinning.

Hayek started her movie career working in telenovelas and appears in “Ugly Betty” as a telenovela character in a show Betty’s family watches. Very over-the-top and hilarious. I could be wrong, but I think this one could be a hit.

Testy Taye

Taye Diggs, who stars in ABC’s serial drama “Day Break,” got a bit testy with questions about how the show would keep viewers coming back if there’s lots of repetition. The premise of the show is that Diggs’ character, a cop, is blamed for a murder he didn’t commit and is forced to live the day over and over until he figures out how to get out of the mess he’s in.

“It’s a TV show, and we know what we’re doing,” he snapped. “We’re not dumb. I’m Taye Diggs. I wouldn’t sign on for something like that.”

Well, excuuuuuuuuse me!!

http://www.austin360.com/blogs/content/shared-gen/blogs/austin/tvblog/

TV Critics Summer Press Tour
Bridget Moynahan stars in new ABC drama

By Suzanne Ryan The Boston Globe TV Writer in the Globe’s “Viewer Discretion” blog July 19, 2006

I caught up with Bridget Moynahan today, Tom Brady's leading lady who is here in Pasadena, California, promoting her role on the new J.J. Abrams fall drama “Six Degrees.”

Since the ABC show is shot in New York, it's not going to interfere with her spending time with our quarterback, she said here at the Television Critics Association summer conference.

“I think the schedule is going to be five days a week. We’ll still have weekends free,” she said. “What’s nice about it is there are six main characters so the schedule is going to be flexible.”

Moynahan’s character is a successful advertising executive with a handsome boyfriend. In the pilot episode, she will ask this man to marry her but he will refuse.

Moynahan told me she's in favor of a woman proposing. “I like the idea. I just didn’t like the idea of him saying no. What is that about?”

You read it here first Tom

http://www.boston.com/ae/tv/blog/

TV Critics Summer Press Tour
Death March With Cocktails

Network whims, low ratings, older skew can all kill a show -- it's a business, after all (Continued)

By Tim Goodman San Francisco Chronicle Wednesday, July 19, 2006

(07-19) 04:00 PDT Hollywood -- This country's fifth network, the CW, came and went on here Monday with a rush of activity, given that it has only two new series to offer. There was much hope in the air now that UPN and the WB have merged. Important people believed -- or at least spoke out loud their opinion -- that the best of two networks would now make one network very strong.

Not that anyone really cared about that (first, prove it, second, we'll believe it when we see it and only after it's been independently verified by the black-gowned Jesuits or whatnot in the Catholic Church who investigate miracles).

What people really wanted to know about were two series central to the CW's existence: "Gilmore Girls" and "Veronica Mars." Nothing else mattered. ... Honestly, it hurts a lot to think about it because viewers invest so much in shows and characters, but the television business is just that -- a business. If shows don't get ratings, they die. If shows skew older than the network wants, they die. If shows cost more than they're worth, they die. If a network wants to go in a different direction -- wink, wink, watch me blink -- then it will go in a different direction and your show will die, outraged Internet bloggers be damned. Helpful reminder: It's a business.

This was also illustrated elsewhere in the CW's day. Chris Rock was funny in a laconic, do-I-really-have-to-be-here way, mostly because he's funny no matter what he does. He also talked, with "Everybody Hates Chris" co-creator and writer Ali LeRoi, about race and how it plays in television. Now, LeRoi is smart and funny and he totally gets the business. Which means, he knows that television is a business first, a righter of moral wrongs last, and if not last, then 107th at least. So, after being repeatedly asked about the lack of black dramas on television and what to do about it, he said this:

"The only reason that Hollywood even exists is because Jewish people couldn't be on Broadway. They decided to make another business where they could do what they wanted to do. So if somebody wants to see a black drama, then (author) Tyler Perry is the model. He goes, look, I know how to market to these people. I know what they want. I'm going to find a medium and a forum where I can do a piece of work that these people like, because they'll buy it. You know, hey, if you don't like dealing with network executives, then write a book. Nobody has the right to be in show business. Nobody has the right to be on a TV show. We all argue about, you know, I'd like to see more representation about this and more representation about that. But at the end of the day, dude, you got to sell some soap. And if you are not selling soap, they got no interest in you. So black drama, smack drama. Man, I don't care. It's about making a good show for the audience that's buying the product. Find your audience and sell them what you can sell them."

Someone asked CW Entertainment President Dawn Ostroff if she was aware that fans of "Everwood" had, apparently, erected a Ferris wheel across from her office. Like everyone else, she had no idea what the hell the person was talking about. The Ferris wheel had appeared in the last episode, but that also didn't ring a bell with Ostroff.

For the record: "It was an agonizing decision not to bring 'Everwood' back," Ostroff said. But the network liked its newest drama, "Runaway," better. "Everwood skewed much older. ... It was a painful decision," she said.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2006/07/19/DDGJ1K0QTM1.DTL&type=printable

Nielsen Notes
As summers go, a real stinker for ABC

By Toni Fitzgerald MediaLifeMagazine.com staff writer July 19, 2006

Last year, ABC had the biggest hit of the summer and was the No. 1-ranked network among adults 18-49 in mid-July.

What a difference a year makes. This summer ABC is dead last among the Big Four networks, with its adults 18-49 average down 17 percent, from a 2.3 to a 1.9, from last summer despite better ratings for June’s NBA finals.

ABC has two of the lower-rated reality shows of the summer and had zero shows in the top 15 among 18-49s last week. It had just three shows, “Grey’s Anatomy,” “Wife Swap” and “Primetime,” in the top 25.

That’s a big switch from last summer, when ABC’s “Dancing With the Stars” was the top-rated show and “Brat Camp” had just premiered to an impressive 3.9 adults 18-49 rating.

ABC is perhaps the best example of a trend that has stretched from last summer to this one, and that is that a network needs one very strong show and one medium-sized hit to perform well.

Just as it held true for ABC last summer with “Dancing” and “Camp,” which later faded, it’s been the case for NBC and Fox, the only networks showing improvements over last summer.

Fox’s “So You Think You Can Dance” is the summer’s No. 2 original program, and “Hell’s Kitchen” is a steady top-10 performer. The network is No. 1 this summer with a 2.4 average, up 14 percent over last summer’s 2.1.

NBC’s “America’s Got Talent” is the summer’s No. 1 original program, and “Last Comic Standing” is a top-five staple. NBC ranks No. 2 for the summer with a 2.2 average, up 10 percent over last year.

Meanwhile, ABC’s shows have been flops. “How to Get the Guy” was yanked only a few weeks into its planned six-week run, and “Master of Champions” hit a new series low last week at 1.2.

Yet the network could still yet revive this summer, since it really only takes two hits to do it. It has two new shows premiering over the next week: “The One: Making a Music Star,” a sort of behind-the-scenes “American Idol,” debuted last night at 9 p.m. and singles-at-the-beach show “One Ocean View” debuts next Monday.

Meanwhile, in English-language broadcast ratings for the week ended July 16:

Among adults 18-49, Fox finished No. 1 with a 2.5 average rating and 8 share, followed by NBC at 2.1/7, CBS at 2.0/6, ABC at 1.7/5, UPN at 0.8/2, and the WB at 0.7/2.

Among adults 18-34, Fox led with a 2.6/9, NBC at 1.7/6, CBS at 1.5/5, ABC at 1.3/5, the WB at 0.8/3, and UPN at 0.7/3.

Among adults 25-54, Fox finished first at 2.5/8 and CBS and NBC tied for second at 2.5/7, followed by ABC at 2.0/6, UPN at 0.8/2, and the WB at 0.7/2.

Top five (18-49s): 1. Fox’s “MLB All-Star Game” 4.6; 2. Fox’s “So You Think You Can Dance-Wed.” 3.8; 3. Fox’s “So You Think You Can Dance-Thu.” 3.7; 4. NBC’s “America’s Got Talent” 3.5; 5. NBC’s “Last Comic Standing” 3.3

Top five (total viewers): 1. Fox’s “MLB All-Star Game” 14.42 million; 2. NBC’s “America’s Got Talent” 11.1 million; 3. CBS’s “CSI: Miami” 10.61 million; 4. CBS’s “CSI” 10.34 million; 5. Fox’s “MLB All-Star PreGame” 10.21 million

Bottom five (18-49s): Tie-108. WB’s “7th Heaven,” UPN’s “Veronica Mars,” WB’s “What I Like About You,” WB’s “Twins,” Fox’s “24-8 p.m.,” Fox’s “24-9 p.m.,” UPN’s “Cuts-Wed.,” UPN’s “Cuts” 0.6; Tie-117. WB’s “One Tree Hill,” UPN’s “Veronica Mars” 0.5

Bottom five (total viewers): 114. UPN’s “Veronica Mars” 1.43 million; 115. UPN ‘s “Eve-Wed.” 1.40 million; 116. UPN’s “Cuts” 1.38 million; 117. UPN’s “Cuts-Wed.” 1.37 million; 118. WB’s “One Tree Hill” 1.1 million

Show on the rise: “Premios Juventud 2006,” Univision, Thursday 8 p.m. The awards show drew its best numbers ever among total viewers (5.4 million), 18-49s (3.1 million), 18-34s (2.0 million), 12-17s (600,000) and 2-11s (868,000).

Show on the decline: “Windfall,” NBC, Thursday 10 p.m. The NBC drama series, a summer burnoff that was supposed to air last spring, sank to a series low for the third week in a row, a 1.8.

http://www.medialifemagazine.com/artman/publish/printer_6056.asp

Nielsen Notes
'Runway' off to a fast start

By Gary Levin, USA Today

•Solid takeoff. The third-season premiere of Bravo's Project Runway (and first in summer) averaged 2.4 million viewers Wednesday, matching last season's finale as the most-watched program in the network's history.

•Aaaargh! USA's premiere of Pirates of the Caribbean, capitalizing on the record-smashing box-office take of its sequel, averaged 7.4 million viewers Saturday. It beat all broadcast networks and ranked first among cable shows last week.

•Scary but good. The premiere hour of TNT's Stephen King anthology series, Nightmares & Dreamscapes, averaged 5.2 million viewers Wednesday and 4.8 million for a second episode that followed. TNT's The Closer was cable's top series with 6.4 million Monday.

•Sibling help. CBS took last place with Saturday's rebroadcast of Showtime's Brotherhood premiere (3.4 million viewers). The move didn't exactly help the pay-cable series, which averaged 158,000 in its regular Sunday slot, down from 454,000 for the previous week's opener.

•Got talent? America's Got Talent dipped to 11.1 million viewers Wednesday for its first semifinal round, but the premiere of a half-hour results show on Thursday plunged to 6.4 million. The series, which has yet to approach last summer's Dancing with the Stars phenomenon, still remains this slow hot-weather season's top original series.

•Home runs. Fox's Major League Baseball All-Star Game batted 14.4 million viewers Tuesday, the biggest audience since 2002 and up from 12.3 million last year. It ranked first for the week. ESPN's Home Run Derby on Monday averaged 6.8 million. And the sports network's annual ESPY Awards nabbed a record 3.6 million viewers Sunday, up from 3.3 million last year.

•She sees viewers. The premiere of Lifetime's latest, drama Angela's Eyes, saw 2.6 million viewers Sunday. USA drama Psych dropped to 4.7 million Friday from 6.1 million for last week's opener, falling behind lead-in Monk, which dipped only slightly to 4.9 million from last week's 5.1 million.
http://www.usatoday.com/life/television/news/2006-07-18-nielsen-analysis_x.htm

TV Critics Summer Press Tour
ABC Dropping 'Tonight' From World News

By Ben Grossman Broadcasting & Cable 7/19/2006

ABC July 19 will officially change the name of World News Tonight to World News With Charles Gibson.

The weekend editions of the newscast will be called World News Saturday and World News Sunday.

ABC announced the change at the Television Critics Association network presentations in Pasadena, where Gibson is expected to appear live from the Middle East.

Gibson took over in May.

http://www.broadcastingcable.com/article/CA6354537.html?display=Breaking+News

TV Critics Summer Press Tour
Not ''Tonight''

By Rich Heldenfels in his Akron Beacon Journal TV blog

ABC has a press conference this morning with Charles Gibson (who will talk to us in Pasadena via satellite) and has tied some news announcements to the occasion. Including this one:

''ABCs evening newscast, 'World News Tonight,' has changed its name to 'World News With Charles Gibson,' ABC News President David Westin announced. The change is effective today...

'' 'The program we air at 6:30 p.m. each night remains our flagship broadcast, but it has evolved well beyond thirty minutes of television,'' said Mr. Westin. ''With an afternoon webcast downloaded by millions, and updated content available throughout the day on ABCNEWs.com, 'World News' is always on.''

http://blogs.ohio.com/beacon_tv/

TV Critics Summer Press Tour
Justice is not served

By Alan Sepinwall Newark Star-Ledger Wednesday, July 19, 2006

So there I was, standing in front of FX president John Landgraf, listening to him deftly fend off one question after another about the "Rescue Me" rape scene, and I started thinking, "Maybe this guy has a point."

Then, I watched last night's episode.

Landgraf was at press tour last week, sitting in the audience as mustachioed documentary guy Morgan Spurlock took questions about the new season of "30 Days." A lot of other executives who had a cloud over their heads like the "Rescue Me" controversy might have bolted the room at the end, but Landgraf hung around and took increasingly pointed questions for more than a half an hour, finding half a dozen different ways to say, "I understand your position, but I respectfully disagree ..."

He seemed largely unfazed by all the uproar, but at one point admitted, "Do I like being criticized for supporting antisocial behavior? My mom is a feminist. I work with a lot of women. I love and respect women. I get upset when I hear people say we're putting misogynistic shows on the air."

When I talked to Denis Leary and "Rescue Me" co-creator Peter Tolan shortly after the episode aired, Tolan insisted the incident "will be answered in karmic ways in later episodes," and Landgraf concurred.

"Within a typical broadcast television scheme," he said, "you have to have justice within the context of an episode most of the time. I don't believe that's the way life works. Ramifications are very complicated."

Okay, fine. I've been really clear in my take on the episode, but I was willing to keep an open mind, hoping that, even though Leary and Tolan don't seem to realize what they wrote in that initial scene, they had some kind of devious justice in mind for Leary's Tommy Gavin.

Whoops. Major, major spoilers for last night's episode to follow, so if you don't want to know, you really should skip down to the next item, or else go over to the press tour blog for a transcript of my interview with new "Gilmore Girls" show runner David Rosenthal; it's much less contentious than this.

Basically, at the end of the episode, Tommy's pathetic, clingy, widowed ex-girlfriend Sheila (Callie Thorne) drugged him with a combination of Rohypnol and Viagra and, while he was passed out on the couch, had sex with/on him.

Excuse me while I go pour bleach over my entire body to cleanse myself from the experience of watching that.

First of all, karmic justice for Tommy isn't having an attractive woman dope him up and have her way with him. Karmic justice is sending him to "Oz" to share a cell with Adebisi for an afternoon.

No, Sheila doing this to Tommy -- at the end of an episode where Marisa Tomei's previously tough character broke down in tears and repeatedly succumbed to Tommy's charms in the bedroom -- is yet another male fantasy, just like the "she secretly wants to be raped" aspect of the original scene with Tommy and his ex-wife, Janet. Tommy Gavin/Denis Leary apparently drives women so wild with desire that they'll resort to insane, aggressive measures to get him into bed.

When I listen to Landgraf or even Tolan, they sound smart and reasonable enough that I want to give them another chance. Then I see things like last night, and I feel inclined to smash the TV the way Sheila trashed Tommy's apartment.

http://www.nj.com/columns/ledger/alltv/index.ssf?/base/columns-0/1153286796257580.xml&coll=1#continue

I had no idea that Echostar had that many legal DNS subs, 600,000 is a lot. Conventional wisdom on how many DNS subs DirecTV has would have to be increased I would think. Much more than the estimates seen on this board. Interesting.

Tuesday’s network prime-time ratings are now at the top of RATINGS NEWS (the first post in this thread).

TV Critics Summer Press Tour
Lost: The no-win scenario

By Alan Sepinwall Newark Star-Ledger Wednesday, July 19, 2006

Multiple choice time, "Lost" fans. Which of the following scheduling scenarios would you most prefer:

A) The same arrangement as the last two years, with 22 episodes strung out over nearly 40 weeks, with long stretches between original episodes in early winter and mid-spring.

B) ABC following the "24" model of holding all the episodes until January and airing them on consecutive weeks, but leaving a six-month gap between seasons.

C) ABC airing the first six episodes in the fall, then taking the show off the air for three months before the remaining 16 air uninterrupted.

You have to pick one of those. You are not allowed to pick options D) 22 consecutive episodes beginning in September; or E) 52 new episodes every year, plus original Web content, mobile phone episodes and possibly stories that can be downloaded directly into your cerebral cortex.

Given the nature of TV production, D is all but impossible, and E would make everyone involved (including you) go insane in short order. So ABC president Steve McPherson had to choose among A, B and C -- and, as of now, he's going with C.

"Lost" will premiere on Oct. 4, air six weeks in a row, then make way for 13 straight episodes of "Day Break," a "Groundhog Day"-esque thriller with Taye Diggs as a cop who lives the same bad day over and over. When "Day Break" wraps its run, "Lost" will come back for the rest of the season.

"We feel like, in a way, these are cycles," McPherson said. "I guess, if you want to relate it to a reality show, in terms of a show coming on for a cycle in the fall and a cycle in the spring. But, you know, we felt this was the best choice, to not have it off from May until January. We're going to see how it works. And we'll have to spend a fair amount of money marketing it and make sure that we launch both the fall and the spring piece."

http://www.nj.com/columns/ledger/alltv/index.ssf?/base/columns-0/1153286796257580.xml&coll=1#continue

I had no idea that Echostar had that many legal DNS subs, 600,000 is a lot. Conventional wisdom on how many DNS subs DirecTV has would have to be increased I would think. Much more than the estimates seen on this board. Interesting.

Sadly, jim, I have found the "estimates" on this board and others often have nothing to do with reality.

They have to do with what programs people like ("How could those idiot network execs cancel that show, everybody watches it!") or anti Dish, DirecTV, Comcast, etc. diatribes from those who for whatever reason enjoy ripping.

Then those rips are taken as gospel and get repeated as fact.

Since Dish has been in legal jeopardy over its DNS policies for years, these numbers have been available from time to time. And note -- they are as of 2002.

Sadly, jim, I have found the "estimates" on this board and others often have nothing to do with reality.

They have to do with what programs people like ("How could those idiot network execs cancel that show, everybody watches it!") or anti Dish, DirecTV, Comcast, etc. diatribes from those who for whatever reason enjoy ripping.

Then those rips are taken as gospel and get repeated as fact.

Since Dish has been in legal jeopardy over its DNS policies for years, these numbers have been available from time to time. And note -- they are as of 2002.
I agree, it's just that the "estimates" made here were so obviously waaay off the mark it gave me a "whoa!" moment. It's nice to see the actual data.

TV Critics Summer Press Tour
Clothes call

By Alan Sepinwall of the Newark Star-Ledger in the “All TV In Hollywood” blog Wednesday, July 19, 2006

Over the weekend, I promised Katie Couric and CBS News president Sean McManus that I would ask Charlie Gibson about his wardrobe choices when he came to press tour -- but that was before we found out Gibson would be appearing via satellite from Jerusalem. It's one thing to ask a guy about his clothes when he's on the stage; another when he's in a war zone, possibly wearing a flak jacket.

But when Gibson and "World News" producer Jon Banner came up on screen, it was in a relatively peaceful spot in Cyprus, and no protective gear was in evidence. So a couple of questions in, I got the microphone and said, "Charlie, I apologize in advance, because I made this promise before I knew you'd be appearing here from the Middle East, but who are you wearing, and how much thought do you put into your wardrobe choices?"

Gibson, who had been briefed that the question might be coming, laughed and said, "I don't know. Ask Katie."

"She wanted me to ask you," I replied, sheepish.

"I have four ties and five suits," he said, "and whichever one is on the right in the closet, that's the one I put on."

http://www.nj.com/weblogs/tv/index.ssf?/mtlogs/njo_alan/archives/2006_07.html#162810

Overnights in the 18-49 Demo
'The One,' ABC's newest reality bomb

Premiere pulls a dismal 1.1 rating in 18-49s
By Toni Fitzgerald MediaLifeMagazine.com staff writer Jul 19, 2006

ABC now has three strikes against its summer slate. Coming on the heels of reality show disappointments “How to Get the Guy” and “Master of Champions,” the network’s newest series, “The One: Making a Music Star” hit a new low.

The two-hour “One” premiere averaged a 1.1 adults 18-49 overnight rating, according to Nielsen figures, placing fifth in its 9 p.m. timeslot. “One” became the lowest-rated new summer reality series debut this season, more than half a point below the debut of CBS’s “Tuesday Night Book Club” last month.

The program dipped all the way to a 0.9 rating in its second half hour before rebounding to a 1.2 at 10 p.m. It finished behind even Univision during its two-hour run.

“Club” and “Guy” were both yanked after a handful of outings. “Champions” remains on the schedule after dipping to a 1.2 last week.

“One,” which is based on a Spanish-language series from Endemol, puts 11 wannabe singers in a house and watches them compete both on and off the stage for a recording contract. It’s different from “American Idol” in that cameras follow the contestants 24 hours a day, meaning the show is a blend of singing and soap opera.

Perhaps ABC simply premiered the show too late. There are already three summer programs, NBC’s “America’s Got Talent,” Univision’s “Cantando Por un Sueno” and CBS’s “Rock Star: Supernova” showcasing wannabe singers.

A live results show is scheduled to air tonight at 10 p.m., but after last night’s dismal ratings, ABC may rethink airing the show twice a week.

Meanwhile, Fox was No. 1 for the night with a 2.8 rating and 8 share in 18-49s, ahead of CBS at 2.6/8, NBC at 2.5/8, Univision at 1.5/5, ABC at 1.2/4, WB at 0.7/2 and UPN at 0.4/1.

At 8 p.m., CBS was No. 1 at 2.6 for "Big Brother 7: All-Stars," followed by Fox at 2.5 for a "House" repeat, NBC and Univision each at 1.9 for "Fear Factor" and "La Fea Mas Bella," ABC at 1.6 for "According to Jim" and "George Lopez" repeats, WB at 0.7 for "Gilmore Girls" and UPN at 0.4 for "Veronica Mars."

At 9 p.m., NBC's "Last Comic Standing" led at 3.2, followed by Fox's "House" repeat at 3.0, CBS's "Rock Star" at 2.7, Univision's "Barrera de Amor" at 1.6, ABC's "One" premiere at 1.0, WB's "Girls" repeat at 0.7 and UPN's "Mars" rerun at 0.4.

At 10 p.m., CBS's "48 Hours Mystery" led at 2.4, followed by NBC's "Law & Order: Special Victims Unit" repeat at 2.3, ABC's "One" at 1.2 and Univision's "Premios Juventud: Acceso Total" at 1.1.

Among households, Fox won the night with a 5.5 rating and 9 share, ahead of CBS and NBC at 4.4/8, ABC at 2.7/5, Univision at 1.9/3, WB at 1.2/2 and UPN at 0.9/2.

http://www.medialifemagazine.com/artman/publish/article_6089.asp

TV Critics Summer Press Tour
Tim Daly faces (TV) mortality

By Bill Goodykoontz Arizona Republic TV Critic in his Critic’s Tour blog 07/19/2006

PASADENA, Calif. -- Tim Daly is among the stars of one of ABC's best new shows: The Nine, about a group of people whose lives converge when they're held hostage for 52 hours in a bank robbery gone awry.

So naturally we asked him about The Sopranos.

So naturally we asked him about The Sopranos.

He plays a degenerate gambler/TV writer on that show (and a degenerate gambler/cop on The Nine; hmmm). Will he be back for the final eight episodes?

"As you know, I can't tell you anything," he said. "I don't know if they come to TCA (the critics' tour), or if it's too public for them, but you can't talk about what happens on The Sopranos."

They do come here sometimes, as a matter of fact, and he's right. They say almost nothing.

"I will say this," Daly continued (ears in room perk up). "I have not yet been whacked. So I suppose there's hope that that character will show up again. I would like to have him sort of polished off, because I think he deserves it. He's kind of fun.... It kind of feels like David Chase's alter ego, being a TV writer. So I would like to have him killed in a very unique and interesting way."

Death by laptop, maybe? Just think of the product-placement possibilities.

http://www.azcentral.com/blogs/index.php?blog=5&blogtype=Entertainment

TV Notebook
It Takes 'Talent' To Kill This Trend

By Tom Shales Washington Post TV Critic Wednesday, July 19, 2006; C01

Go ye therefore and be famous for 15 minutes -- or so, approximately, goes the gospel according to Andy Warhol. His prediction that everybody would get his or her quarter-hour in the spotlight -- or, more likely, on television or in a pop-up on the computer screen, may have erred on the side of generosity: Five minutes, not 15, seems a more plausible estimate now.

With the number of available channels exploding exponentially, America's celebrity shortage grows increasingly severe. Stars can't be stamped out on a conveyor belt like creatures concocted at Willy Wonka's chocolate factory -- but almost. And, to mix metaphors further, it turns out there's an audience that will patiently and even avidly watch the sausage being made -- first on Fox's phenomenally popular "American Idol" and now on NBC's shameless and slavish imitation (with some of the same producers involved), "America's Got Talent," airing again tonight at 8 on TV's most pathetically desperate network.

"Talent," hosted by affable Regis Philbin, doesn't draw nearly as many suckers into the tent as "Idol" does, but then "Idol" had three years to grow into a sensation. This year it averaged 30.2 million viewers for its Tuesday night edition and 31.2 million for its Wednesday night installment, when winners from previous nights were announced. The July 5 episode of "America's Got Talent" on NBC pulled in only 12 million viewers, and the following week's show, on July 12, only 11.2 million.

Will the downward trend continue with tonight's show, or will some mysterious factor (the other channels go dead) result in a rebound? Such shows are cheap to produce, what with amateurs providing the "entertainment" and has-beens dominating the panels of "judges" who rule on who stays and who is jettisoned into the horrific void of anonymity. The acts on NBC's show are generally of a much lower quality than Fox's (an embarrassing flip-flop considering that NBC's Johnny Carson and David Letterman used to make jokes about what a lowly fiasco Fox was) and suggest a change of title is in order: "America's Got Talent -- But You Won't Find It Here."

For all the mediocrity religiously poured into it, however, even as resolute a shambles as "America's Got Talent" has managed to produce a moment or two of affecting spontaneity, something to knock a viewer right off his couch. Last week it happened near the end of the two-hour telecast.

The Millers, as they call themselves, are a pair of adolescent brothers, one of whom -- the older and more handsome of the two -- strummed guitar and sang, unmemorably, while the other -- younger, dumpier and more childlike -- played the blazes out of a harmonica, which seems at some point in the past to have become an inseparable part of his physiognomy.

Piers Morgan, the requisite snippy British judge ("Talent's" version of "Idol's" Simon Cowell), issued his verdict on the Millers, telling the harmonica player, "I think you ought to sack your brother" and go solo. The ugly remark elicited an unexpectedly touching response: The little brother, tears in his eyes, hugged his partner and vowed not to break up the act, with the crowd applauding its emotional approval.

It was a tender and seemingly genuine moment, one that almost made sitting through the previous two hours of inanity worth it -- the puppeteer with two unfunny bird marionettes, the scantily clad hula-hoop babe who billed herself as Hoopalicious (wisely keeping her real name concealed), a cute but hokey yodeler (is there still a market for yodelers?) who after an introductory yodel or two turned to the band and barked, "Hit it, guys," as if we'd all been teleported back to, say, 1954 and a Mackless "Ted Mack and the Original Amateur Hour."

"Talent's" early ratings may have been higher, but many of the acts were worse. The early editions of the show supplied that crazy fix of schadenfreude that "American Idol" delivers in its audition phases, when the tone-deaf singers and oblivious klutzes take the stage and perform hilarious exercises in stupefied mortification. Some of the worst of the "Idol" acts have remained in the spotlight longer than a few of the "winners," perhaps partly because their self-delusion takes on a sweet aura of innocence.

On Chuck Barris's masterpiece of kitsch, "The Gong Show," many of the contestants were so showbiz-savvy that they made their performances as bad as possible, playing a kind of mano a mano game with the audience that was funny but slick and packaged. At their ghastly best and worst, though, "Idol" and even "Talent" offer performers who appear truly unaware of how dreadful they are, and while many in the studio audience jeer and boo (they are performers, too), some of us watch at home and can't help being touched as well as tickled by the truly terrible. Our hearts go out to them.

From the look and sound of the opening installments, "America's Got Talent" is that one show too many that has killed many a television trend. It has no charm, it's edited into anarchy, and its so-called judges (also including the vacuous Brandy and frighteningly primitive David Hasselhoff) could hardly be less articulate.

Brandy: "Taylor, you were awesome." Hasselhoff: "You guys did a great, great, great, great, great, great job . . . It was just really great." Morgan: "You are what this show is all about" (sounding exactly like Cowell). There was also a lot of blowing away. "You so blew me away with Godzilla," Hasselhoff told a puppeteer who'd done his version of the monster movie. "I was expecting you to blow us away," Morgan told a juggler. "The first time I saw you, I was completely blown away," Brandy said of a man who dressed dogs in drag.

If only the winds of Burbank would grow strong enough to blow the whole lot of them away, NBC programming executives occasionally crashing into walls.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/07/18/AR2006071801808_pf.html

TV Critics Summer Press Tour
ABC's Gibson: International Coverage Crucial

By Ben Grossman Broadcasting & Cable 7/19/2006

In the wake of the exploding conflict in the Middle East, ABC World News With Charles Gibson anchor Gibson took the opportunity to stump for maintaining or bolstering budgets for international coverage.

"What’s really important is that we do maintain people around the world and coverage around the world and bureaus around the world," he said. "To all the ABC executives in the room, it’s really important."

Gibson, along with executive producer Jon Banner, spoke to reporters Wednesday morning live via satellite from Cyprus, the destination for many civilian evacuations from the conflict in Lebanon.

But Banner stressed that not having bureaus everywhere (such as Cyprus) actually freed up money for coverage, as communication and transportation innovations have lessened the need for bureaus in certain areas.

"I don’t think the amount of money we spend here, which quite honestly compared to keeping a bureau is very small, takes away from the resources of covering a story. If anything it adds resources to covering a story," he said of Cyprus.

Gibson said that the current situation in the Middle East is a perfect example of the necessity of an anchor to travel.

"The players change very fast," he said. "Unfortunately, the situation with Ariel Sharon has brought in a whole new generation of politicians in Israel, and I don’t know them. So to come over here calls attention to the story … and also is a tremendous learning experience for me."

But Gibson was quick to point out that his presence should not detract from the reporters who regularly cover the region.

"I’m very mindful that the people who regularly cover the beat know it best, and I don’t want to do anything in terms of anchor travel to preempt the prerogative of the people that know it best."

Banner also said that in the wake of injuries to journalists including ABC’s Bob Woodruff, safety continues to be a major factor in deciding from where to report.

"Bob’s injuries are on our minds constantly," Banner says. "We take as many precautions as we can and it is our responsibility to not do anything foolish, but we have a job to do and it at times involves risk. Our senior management is involved in a lot of decisions.

"Prudence is the word you keep in your mind," Gibson added.

When questioned about his political beliefs, Gibson said his perceived lack of bias was a source of pride.

"I take it as a badge of honor if you don’t know which way I lean," he said. "I try not to lean either way."

Banner also pointed to the attention being paid to the race between Gibson, CBS’ Katie Couric and NBC’s Brian Williams that will begin this fall as proof that the genre is still very relevant.

"The renewed focus makes all those questions about the vitality of the evening news disappear," he said.

http://www.broadcastingcable.com/index.asp?layout=articlePrint&articleID=CA6354726

NBC continues to seduce press attention during the ABC days at the Critics tour. Yesterday it was Spike Lee. Today it is a fall season promo deal with Netflix:

TV Notebook
NBC Uses Netflix to Market Fall Season

By Steve Donohue Multichannel.com 7/19/2006

NBC cut a deal with Netflix to offer the DVD distributor’s 5 million subscribers premieres of new NBC shows six weeks before they make their broadcast premieres.

Under the agreement, announced Wednesday, Netflix subscribers will be able to order DVDs containing the premiere episodes of NBC’s Studio 60, Sunset Strip and Kidnapped beginning Aug. 5.

NBC and Netflix said they’ll hype the offer by running promos on NBC and its owned-and-operated stations, along with banner ads on Netflix.com (www.netflix.com) and print ads inside the company’s red DVD mailers.

The network’s NBC Universal cable siblings, including USA Network, aren’t involved in the effort.

http://www.multichannel.com/article/CA6354600.html?display=Breaking+News

TV Critics Summer Press Tour
Alphabet Soup

By Peter Ames Carlin The (Portland) Oregonian in his “Greetings From the TCA”: blog Wednesday, July 19, 2006

So ABC is in the midst of kicking off a fairly middling new season -- nothing seems all that exciting or all that awful, so what's a critic to do? Still, it's always nice to spend an hour in the company of entertainment president Steve McPherson, who seems so nice and cool that it's sort of unsettling.

Remember back in the day when NBC's Jeff Zucker and CBS's Les Moonves would spend a significant part of their presentations snarling about one another? Or when UPN execs would rip WB's execs, or everyone in the biz would speak bitterly of Fox's propensity for not only swiping their show ideas, but getting the faux versions on the air BEFORE the originals could debut? McPherson doesn't roll like that.

Instead, he talks about his recent bike ride with his Fox counterpart Peter Liguori. He takes family vacations with NBC's Kevin Reilly, and when someone sets him up to rub the peacock gang's beaks in the dirt, he smiled warmly. "Listen, I'd like nothing more for my buddy than to see them competing for the top spot this year," he said.

Curses!

Later, McPherson admitted instantly that the network had completely screwed up "Commander In Chief," which started so strongly last year, but then cashiered its creator/exec producer Rod Lurie, and then collapsed. He admitted that "Desperate Housewives" had lost some creative ground in its second season.

So given all this humanity how can we summon the bile to go ballistic on such limp new fare as "Big Day" (a sitcom set entirely on one couple's wedding day) and "Notes From The Underbelly" (a sitcom about another couple's impending parenthood)?

And maybe that's the sinister point behind all of McPherson's niceness. It's menschiness as a weapon. Double-reverse hostility. Killing with kindness.

So that was yesterday and this morning's first gig was a satellite visit with Charles Gibson, who is off covering the action in the middle east. Big news here is that "World News Tonight" lost its "Tonight." Now we have coffee mugs to prove it, too. Someone asked after Gibson's wardrobe -- a response to the Couric wardrobe questions from a few days back -- and ABC's new anchor chuckled and said (claimed?) that he owned a total of four ties and five suits, which he coordinates by moving from left to right with each passing day.

http://www.oregonlive.com/oregonian/weblog/index.ssf?/mtlogs/olive_theoregonianblog/archives/2006_07.html#162845

TV Critics Summer Press Tour
Death March With Cocktails

Good Morning America: All Hell Is Breaking Loose
By Tim Goodman San Francisco Chronicle in his TV blog “The Bastard Machine” July 19, 2006

Charles Gibson was on the satellite this morning from Cyprus, a subtle but effective reminder that he may not have pulled down the headlines that Katie Couric did when he got the network anchor job, but he's actually doing the job and doing what the network wants - bringing some gravitas to the world's biggest news story.

It's just part of the job description of a network news anchor that if war breaks out or a natural disaster happens, you get parachuted in. What good does it serve? Who knows. But you have to have your man on the ground. Or in Couric's case, woman (first solo female anchor in broadcast network history, in case you didn't get the press release). Middle Eastern countries firing rockets at each other? Yep, that qualifies. So instead of sitting in the luxurious confines of the Ritz-Carlton hotel in balmy Pasadena, Gibson was sitting in a director's chair, via satellite from Cyprus. No rocket fire could be heard.

ABC News has decided to change its long-running nightly news title from "World News Tonight" to "World News with Charles Gibson." In case we didn't get that part, the network handed out coffee mugs.

And Gibson was in Cyprus to monitor not only the evacuation of Americans from a very volatile region but to be The Face of the News Division in a World Hot Spot, which is what big anchors do.

"I always carry my passport," Gibson said. He noted that he was sure that Peter Jennings never forgot his. Taking over for Jennings was handled in a much more low-key manner than Couric's ascension to Dan Rather's chair. Though Gibson was first asked to take over anchor duties when Jennings died, he passed on the job partly because he was well-entrenched as host of "Good Morning America," ABC's successful morning show, and partly because he was asked to do the job on a limited, short-term basis and declined. If people know you're in the chair for only a short time, Gibson said from Cyprus, "then the job is never really yours."

Unfortunately for ABC News and all involved, the network gave "World News Tonight" to a relatively unknown anchor team that didn't quite work out. Bob Woodruff was parachuted into Iraq and was badly injured in the process. Elizabeth Vargas later announced she was pregnant. After a lull, the decision was made to give Gibson the job and have the whole operation go in a different direction.

And now, how long will he keep the job? "Till they kick me out."

These via satellite conferences are always strange affairs. We had Couric here in the hotel - between jobs, to be fair, so there's no way she could be in the Middle East - and CNN's Christiane Amanpour here nearly against her will because she was desperate to get where the action is. When the news stars are in the hotel with us, getting bizarre and embarrassing questions isn't so unfortunate. For instance, someone asked Couric what her wardrobe will be like when she's on the nightly news and she tersely asked back whether anyone had asked Gibson that question. So, there he was, warship behind him, when it did, in fact, get asked.

"I don't know. Ask Katie," Gibson said. "I don't know if she took a shot at me with that or what. I have four suits and five ties and whatever's on the right in the closet I put on."

So now we know. Life can resume. To his credit, Gibson said normal people don't really care much about all the hoopla over him or Couric or even Brian Williams taking over these iconic anchor jobs. I'm not sure he's right about that, but it's the right sentiment (particularly in the region.)

With Couric's much-hyped hiring taking effect Sept. 5, Gibson (and Williams) have a chance to give their respective newscasts a jump-start in the ratings war. The bottom line on all these newscasts, all these brand-name anchors, is that they produce ratings results. Gibson wasn't shy about evaluating the new "World News with Charles Gibson" entry.

"I happen to think ours is the best, so let's get it on."

Indeed. And world events seem to be cooperating with everyone.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/sfgate/indexn?blogid=24

TV Critics Summer Press Tour
"Gilmore" survivors exhale

By Aaron Barnhart Kansas City Star in his blog “TV Barn” Wednesday, July 19, 2006

Is Lauren glad Amy is gone?

Lauren, for those of you not fully initiated into the cult of the “Gilmore Girls,” is Lauren Graham, who plays the flaky, funny mom on “Gilmore Girls,” and Amy is Amy Sherman-Palladino, the flaky, funny writer-producer who created and has overseen the show since it signed on the WB network six years ago.

Recently the CW network, which is picking up where the WB left off, announced it could not reach a new deal with Sherman-Palladino and her husband, Dan, also a producer on the show.

“Gilmore Girls” would continue on the CW, but Team Palladino would not. Fans were mortified.

“The news we’ve all been dreading has now been made absolutely, 100 percent, painfully official,” Michael Ausiello wrote rather dramatically at TVGuide.com.

But after the Monday press conference before the nation’s TV critics to promote “Gilmore Girls,” you couldn’t help thinking that Graham was glad the Palladinos had left, and that the show is going to be better off without them.

When Graham mentioned early in the session that she wasn’t a huge fan of a major storyline from Season 5, ears perked up. Graham was referring to her character Lorelai becoming estranged from her daughter Rory (Alexis Bledel), even though — as fans at the time complained — the whole point of the show is the mother-daughter bonding thing.

That passed, but the Palladinos tinkered again last season. Lorelai got engaged to her boyfriend Luke (Scott Patterson), only to turn into a meek, submissive type who let herself get ordered around.

Again, Graham offered that morphing from a strong woman into a doormat “wasn’t my favorite stuff to play.” Nor, judging from online bulletin boards, was it viewers’ favorite stuff to watch. These “Gilmore Girls” scripts were produced by the Palladinos.

When a critic pointed out to Graham that she had just said she loved the first script of the new, Palladino-free season, her eyes widened.

“If you write anything that makes me sound like I said something negative about Amy and Dan, I will be upset,” said Graham. “But they really, you know, liked to run things in a certain way that was specific to the two of them and that was more, I guess, hands-on.”

The CW announced Monday it will begin programming Sept. 20. The new “Gilmore Girls” season will start Sept. 26.

Overheard at the tour:

• “Just make it funny and people will (want to) see it. Most things suck. If something’s funny, people will know.” — Chris Rock, explaining why he’s not worried about “Everybody Hates Chris” moving to a new network (CW) and a new night (Sunday)

• “I read The Da Vinci Code , loved it … but there were not enough characters in that book. I was thinking like Veronica thinks: OK, how many characters are there? And there were only like four or five they had introduced, and I went through all of them and I figured it out by Page 200.” — actress Kirsten Bell of “Veronica Mars,” on how having to deal with the show’s convoluted storylines has made her sharper

• “I think of it as the gift that keeps on giving.” — actress Leslie Hope of the new CW thriller “Runaway,” on being recognized as Mrs. Jack Bauer four years after her character was killed off of “24”

• “We always say, ‘If one of the Mowrys got it, then we all got the role.’” — actress Tia Mowry, who got the part on the CW comedy “The Game” that her twin sister Tamera also auditioned for

• “You know what’s exactly like ‘The Sopranos’? World Cup soccer. The Italians won. Everybody watched. And now they’ll go away for four years.” — publicist Keith Marder, warming up the critics before the CW presentation

http://blogs.kansascity.com/tvbarn/2006/07/are_the_gilmore.html

TV Critics Summer Press Tour
A 'terrifying' romance on 'CSI'

From Maureen Ryan’s Chicago Tribune blog “The Watcher” at the TCA Summer Press Tour

It's a tube truism that the TV shows that attract the most passionate fan bases are genre programs: sci-fi shows, vampire dramas, teen-centric fare such as "Everwood" and "Veronica Mars."

Well, that truism is wrong.

“CSI,” which is as popular and mainstream as a program gets, has one of the most ferocious fan bases around -- so TV writers found out about a minute after the show’s sixth season finale aired in May.

In the final scene of that episode, Sara Sidle (Jorja Fox) and Gil Grissom (William L. Petersen) were shown in an intimate, bedroom setting. Clearly something was going on between them, and (according to executive producer Carol Mendelsohn) it had been going on for a while.

Fans flooded various Web sites, including this one (here and here), to parse, debate, analyze and spew opinions about what happened between Sidle and Grissom. The floodgates opened, and if television critics hadn’t been aware of the show’s passionate fan base before, they surely were by the end of May.

“Going into the seventh season, I love the fact that everybody cares about our show,” Mendelsohn said in May.

Still, Naren Shankar, another executive producer on the show, said that “CSI” writers knew that the final scene would cause controversy among fans.

“It’s impossible to find a scene or a moment when you’re dealing with that type of situation that isn’t going to [tick] off half the people,” he said after a panel on the program at the biannual Television Critics Association convention in Pasadena, Calif.

Still, the producers and actors for the show all agreed that it was time for Grissom and Sidle, who’d flirted for six seasons, to show their relationship in a new light. “It was the right thing to do for those characters and when we talked about it, everybody felt that. Everybody felt it was the right moment,” Shankar said.

Mendelsohn insisted that the glimpse into the characters’ private lives wasn’t provoked by “CSI’s” upcoming Thursday night showdown with the soapier “Grey’s Anatomy.”

“We are going to do the same season we set out to do,” Mendelsohn told reporters after the “CSI” session. “We’re not going to change our game because of `Grey’s Anatomy.’”

For her part, Fox says she was “thrilled” to get the script pages with that intimate scene between Grissom and Sidle.

“I had sort of been gearing up from the beginning of the show that that might happen,” she told critics during the press session, noting that it’s never been entirely clear, even to those who work on the show, whether the two were an item before either arrived in Las Vegas to work as crime scene investigators.

“It’s also terrifying because I think there’s a certain peace that comes with doing more of a procedural show,” she noted. “There’s been about 50 percent of the audience who would like to know more about the characters and about 50 percent who would really rather stick to the [crime scene] stories. And I think the writers did something bold and brilliant by trying to just really follow their hearts, which is what I think we try to do.

“When you’ve got a split that is that significant, all you can really do is to kind of just tell what you feel passionate about and hope that people go on the road with you,” she added. “But it is really exciting, yeah, and scary, because then you step out into these story lines and you’re like what if they go badly?”

“CSI’s” producers said the story line involving Grissom and Sidle is a natural evolution of the Grissom character, who’s been around the kind of misery and deviance that is the cause of so much crime, and tried to remain in his own little world -- but even he couldn’t stay there forever.

“In Sin City, our CSI’s go out in the field every night and they solve these crimes, but as Naren has said to me, it’s bailing the ocean with a thimble,” Mendelsohn said. In Season 7, “we’re going to explore what effect does this have on Catherine [Willows, played by Marg Helgenberger], Grissom, the rest of the team. We will push Grissom to an emotional place, a sabbatical of sorts.”

(Petersen, who’s doing a play on the East Coast in the fall, will be out of the show for two “CSI” episodes, Shankar noted.)

“What do you do when something you’ve kept at bay for the longest time, which is really the sadness and the misery of a certain part of this job, actually gets through your defenses?” Shankar said.

“Part of what we were doing with Grissom and Sara being together is, here’s a guy who for the first time in maybe his life is reaching out to another human being,” he noted. “This is a very guarded and private person. It’s even difficult to say what was the interaction with [recurring character] Lady Heather -- you could make the argument that it was more academic and intellectual than physical. But here is something that he is doing that is uncharacteristic.

“And that prompts the question -- Why? He’s going through some changes. He’s kind of in a position where he’s feeling like [asking the questions], `Is this all that I am? Am I a guy who just likes to finish the crossword puzzle? Am I more than that? And if I am more than that, what am I and who am I going to share that with?’

"And that’s really the longer term [theme], in the sense of Grissom as the spine of our show - that’s where we’re going.”

http://tempo.typepad.com/entertainment_tv/

Now cable operators seem to have found a new argument against a la carte: Amerticans are too stupid to know what they want to see -- and pay for.

Cable TV Notebook
Author: Too Many Choices Paralyze Consumers


By Linda Haugsted multichannel.com 7/19/2006

Boston -- Too many choices paralyze consumers, causing them either to reject a purchase or to seek out a competitor that offers a simpler option, according to Prof. Barry Schwartz, author of The Paradox of Choice.

Speaking on marketing in an era of too much choice, Schwartz said the challenge for marketers is less about providing information to consumers than it is selecting the appropriate information to make a choice simpler.

As an example, he noted he no longer goes to a bookstore with thousands of choices, preferring instead to use an online retailer that will suggest eight additional titles for him based on a recent purchase.

Given too many choices, consumers may make a selection, but it’s often based on the wrong criteria, leading to long-term dissatisfaction. For instance, employees given a huge menu of 401K retirement-savings options are likely to select a poorly performing, but safe, money-market option. Other consumers may analyze all of their options and make a choice but still be dissatisfied because it’s almost impossible to find a feature set that is perfect, he said.

“The task is to find the ‘sweet spot,’” Schwartz said, adding that offering that offers just enough choice for the majority, without triggering paralysis.

Reactors on the Cable & Telecommunications Association for Marketing’s CTAM Summit panel here argued that cable is managing choice.

Operators minimize choice at the point of sale, noted Page Thompson, senior vice president and general manager of video services for Comcast. After the sale, the choices increase in the form of video-on-demand content. Thompson said consumers see that choice as value-added, citing consumer surveys that note an increase in satisfaction and lower churn among consumers with access to VOD.

“Our biggest problem was that customers wouldn’t believe it was free,” he added.

Ken Dice, executive vice president of U.S. networks for Discovery Communications, joked that his company is “part of the problem,” with all of its products and platforms. But, he added, Discovery “leans back on the brand,” positioned as the trusted expert that consumers seek when making choices.

http://www.multichannel.com/index.asp?layout=articlePrint&articleid=CA6354767

Cable TV Notebook
With Landis leading, OLN climbs back

Ratings rise on performance of new U.S. star
By Toni Fitzgerald MediaLifeMagazine.com staff writer Juyl 19, 2006

Perhaps America’s interest in bike racing wasn’t as closely tied to Lance Armstrong as many thought.

Though ratings for the Tour de France on OLN have dipped a lot this year, the first Tour since Armstrong’s retirement, they’ve been on an upswing over the past week. Credit the exhilarating run by American Floyd Landis or a greater interest in bike racing overall since Armstrong won his first of seven titles in 1999.

Whichever the reason, OLN’s marquee event is actually holding up okay without its big star. Though overall viewership for the first 16 days of the Tour is down 48 percent from last year, from an average 438,000 viewers to 231,000, ratings have climbed since Landis slipped into serious contention.

Last Thursday, July 13, a day after Landis surrendered the yellow jersey that he regained yesterday, primetime viewership averaged 416,000. That’s a mere 18,000 behind viewership for the same day last year, and a full 141,000, or 51 percent, above OLN’s 275,000 primetime average during second quarter, according to Nielsen data analyzed by Turner Networks.

On three of the five most recent nights for which ratings are available, ending Sunday, OLN drew more than 300,000. That’s after averaging barely half that, 189,000, the first five days of the Tour.

OLN credits the recent surge to both Landis and the start of the mountain stages, which a spokeswoman says always pumps ratings. That portion began last Wednesday.

The network says the ratings declines have been about where it expected, in line with falloffs for other sports when their stars retire, such as the NBA without Michael Jordan. The Tour will still be one of the network’s highest-rated events of the year.

So why is cycling still popular? Armstrong set up an expectation within the U.S. that an American could win, and Landis, a former Armstrong U.S. Postal Service teammate, has proven it true.

Landis’ back story is nearly as interesting as cancer survivor Armstrong’s.

The son of a Mennonite truck driver, Landis was told by his parents growing up that he’d be eternally damned if he kept up his obsession with bike riding. Though he remains religious and has reconciled with his parents, they still don’t own a TV and have to go to the neighbors’ house to watch him.

Too, Armstrong helped kicked off a biking renaissance in the U.S., ensuring that many who became interested in the sport because of him stuck around after he left. Since 1998, road bike sales have jumped 389 percent, according to the Bicycle Retailer and Industry News.

And USA Cycling says more people are involved in the hobby than ever before, with memberships in road cycling clubs up 20 percent nationally since 1999.

Meanwhile, in other cable ratings for the week ended July 16:

Top five networks in primetime (18-49s): USA, TNT, TBS, ESPN, FX

Top five networks in primetime (total viewers): USA, TNT, ESPN, Fox News, TBS

Top movie (18-49s): USA’s "Pirates of the Caribbean" (Saturday, 8 p.m.) 3.63 million

Top sporting event (total viewers): ESPN's "Home Run Derby" (Monday, 9 p.m.) 6.79 million

Shows making the top 10 among 18-34s, 18-49s and 25-54s: ESPN’s “Home Run Derby” (Monday, 8 p.m.); USA’s “Pirates of the Caribbean” (Saturday, 8 p.m.); USA's "WWE Entertainment" (Monday, 10 p.m.)

Show on the rise: "ESPYs," ESPN, Sunday, 9:41 p.m. The awards show’s 14th incarnation drew its biggest audience ever, 2.5 million households, 8 percent better than last year’s old record of 2.3 million.

Show on the decline: “Psych,” USA, Friday, 10 p.m. After averaging 6.1 million total viewers in week one, and becoming the most-watched basic cable debut this year, “Psych” fell off more than 20 percent to 4.7 million viewers in week two. That was still No. 9 on basic cable for the week.

http://www.medialifemagazine.com/artman/publish/article_6057.asp

Cable TV Notebook
Comcast, CSTV Team On New Sports Net

By John Eggerton Broadcasting & Cable 7/19/2006

Comcast and the CBS-owned college sports programmer CSTV Networks are going in 50-50 on a new regional sports network dedicated to a single college conference.

The MountainWest Sports Network (MWN), which debuts Sept. 1, will carry sports from the nine Mountain West Conference Schools to Comcast subs in Utah, Colorado, and New Mexico at launch, specifically on expanded basic in Salt Lake City and digital tiers in Denver, Colorado Springs and Albuquerque.

Comcast, which has a number of regional sports networks, will manage MWN, and CSTV will be added to the basic tier of the Comcast systems launching the channel. This is CSTV's first foray into regional sports networks.

Those markets are host to half the schools in the conference, which comprises Air Force, Brigham Young, Colorado State, San Diego State, TCU, UNLV, University of New Mexico, University of Utah and Wyoming.

The network will carry a constant variety of sports, including 25 football games, 75 men’s basketball games, women’s basketball, swimming, diving, soccer, and tennis, as well as pep rallies, press conferences, and coaches shows.

Some of the MWC coverage will also air on CSTV and Comcast's Outdoor Life Network, or Versus, as it is rechristening itself in September.

The conference carriage deal also covers rights to Comcast VOD, high definition, wireless, Web sites, iTunes, and podcasts.

http://www.broadcastingcable.com/index.asp?layout=articlePrint&articleID=CA6354774

Washington Notebook
Retrans Roundtable In Works

By John Eggerton Broadcasting & Cable 7/19/2006

House Energy & Commerce Chairman Joe Barton (R-Tex.) and Rep. Nathan Deal, Republican from Georgia, will host a roundtable meeting this week between stakeholders in the retransmission consent debate, according to a Barton staffer.

Deal motormanned an effort to add retransmission consent reforms to the national video franchising bill. Barton had said the issue was a nonst, was not introduced, but apparently the roundtable was promised. Chairmen frequently promise continued discussions as a quid pro quo for legislators agreeing not to introduce a potentially contentious amendment.

Barton made a point of keeping his version of a telecom reform bill focused on franchise reform, in contrast to the omnibus Senate version.

Deal spearheaded a letter to FCC Chairman Kevin Martin back in December suggesting that the commission should reconsider retrans as it works through the issue of family-friendly tiers and a la carte cable service.

FCC Chairman Kevin Martin has pushed both as a way to give consumers, particularly parents, more control over cable content as a response to activist group concerns about indecent programming.

The cable industry countered by offering family friendly tiers voluntarily, but says unbundling its channels from service tiers will essentially unravel its business model and disadvantage smaller nets that depend on being bundled to gain carriage.

In the letter, Deal, Ed Markey (D-Mass.) and six other House members wrote of their concerns that retrans deals--in which broadcasters negotiate compensation for carriage of their TV stations on cable--have helped drive the bundling of family-friendly and unfriendly channels. That's because many deals involve not cash but agreements to carry co-owned cable networks, FX for the Fox stations, for example, or MSNBC for NBC stations.

http://www.broadcastingcable.com/index.asp?layout=articlePrint&articleID=CA6354785

TV Notebook
Win a Lovely Winged Lady!

Emmys Are $350 Scammies
By: Rebecca Dana New York Observer Date: 7/24/2006 Page: 1

On July 18, the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences announced the nominees for the 27th annual News and Documentary Emmys—150 production teams, some consisting of more than 30 people. This year, the awards are more exclusive than ever: Under its new one-statue policy, the academy will provide the winning team in each category with only one trophy.

Unless, that is, the team chooses to buy more.

Call ’em the Scammies!

The most coveted prize in TV news is, in fact, easy to come by. It just takes cash. For $350 a pop, any member of the winning news teams can pick up a supplemental trophy. Given the size of the nominated crews, that can mean a dozen or more statues in each of the 29 Emmy categories. Everybody gets a prize—and the academy gets thousands, if not tens of thousands, of dollars.

“It’s a victimless crime,” said former CBS News president and Emmy judge Andrew Heyward. Reluctant to appear ungrateful, Mr. Heyward hastened to add: “This is not an Abramoff-type scandal we’re talking about here. Of course it is not an actual crime.”

Years ago, the academy gave free statues to all the winners. In recent years, it had cut the maximum down to five.

“We noticed there was some inflation of the roster of team members last year,” academy president Peter Price said. “In one of our awards ceremonies, one of the teams included 46 people. That was a little bit over the top.”

This year’s nominations tilted heavily toward Hurricane Katrina and Iraq. PBS, the perennial front-runner, led with 33 nominations; the Discovery Times Channel, Hallmark, Showtime and Univision brought up the rear with one apiece. NBC had 19 nominations, CBS 16 and ABC 14. With the Web gaining prominence as a video-delivery system, nytimes.com edged out washingtonpost.com, three to two.

Who knows how many statues those nominations will produce? Last year, in the Outstanding Live Coverage of a Breaking News Story—Long Form category, NBC won for its coverage of the death and funeral of Ronald Reagan—an honor that covered the work of 22 different people.

Emmy-glomming is a longstanding industry tradition. TV is a collaborative process, and it is rarely perfectly clear who worked on a particular story long enough or hard enough to merit a spot on the application. Sometimes considerable politicking goes into the preparation of the entry forms, each of which requires extensive paperwork, a two-page essay and a $300 fee.

“At a show like Dateline, for example, they have to decide which of 500 segments they’re going to enter in a given year,” said Paul Sparrow, an Emmy-winning producer and an executive at the Newseum in Washington, D.C. “A lot of that is political. Which producer is in favor right now? Which correspondent on the upswing? I know that there are times when the producers have to pay for the entries themselves because the networks chose to nominate someone else.”

Mr. Price said that network nominating committees have a tendency of “trying to be broadminded” when filling out the applications. The one-statue policy was meant to curb that urge.

But the lure of the statue—designed, according to official literature, by Louis McManus, an engineer at Culver City’s Cascade Pictures and modeled on his wife, Dorothy—is hard to resist.

“Here’s the thing about the Emmys,” said John Reiss, the executive producer of the NBC Nightly News: “You don’t have to explain them to anyone. Theoretically, the Peabodys are much more prestigious. But tell somebody you won a Peabody or a Dupont, even, and they’re like, ‘Oh, that’s nice. Pass the salad, please.’”

Mr. Reiss has won five Emmys, “which in the world of Emmys is a paltry sum,” he said. Four of the five he deserved, he said, and one was what he calls a “drive-by Emmy,” meaning he did nothing to earn it other than “work that day and get my name on the application.” He stores them on the floor of a guest bedroom in his home, which is permissible under the strict and unspoken conventions of network TV.

Peter Jennings, for instance, kept his Emmys strategically on view in his office bathroom. Diane Sawyer has 11 Emmys, but no one at ABC News has ever seen them. Walter Cronkite hid all but two of his 10. Edward R. Murrow stored his nine in a box in the attic and eventually, it is said, just threw them out.

“I have 12,” said Mr. Heyward. “They’re tucked away where you’re only likely to run into them if you’re foraging in the storage room for a misplaced book or an old piece of electronic equipment.” Later in the conversation, he remembered he actually has 13.

ABC News and Sports president Roone Arledge reputedly insisted on being included on every application his network submitted. He thereby accumulated a staggering 36 Emmys, which, departing from protocol, he kept in a display case right behind his desk. Former ABC producer Neal Shapiro remembered being called into Mr. Arledge’s office after Mr. Shapiro had decided to leave for NBC, where he would eventually become president of the news division.

“As Roone’s talking to me, telling me it’s a big mistake to go to NBC, the sun’s streaming in, and there’s this Emmy glow behind Roone,” he said. “He lit up like Zeus.”

The broadcast networks set aside significant amounts of money every year to apply and pay for awards dinners. Individual figures vary, but a single magazine show can spend upward of $10,000, said three producers, one from each network. Those ample sums are accompanied by extensive griping about the vagaries of the judging process, which is done by many volunteers, not all of them pillars in the industry, who are not required to screen each entry in its entirety.

Mr. Sparrow, who has judged many times, offered a defense: “The people watching those entries are trying to do a good job,” he said. “Sometimes politics come into it. ‘Oh, another story on the Holocaust’—that kind of thing.” Still, the judges struggle to be fair. “In two or three minutes, you know whatever this is a piece of junk or a really good segment,” he said.

Mr. Price, on top of his statue-limiting measures, has earned good marks from television executives for his efforts to even out the judging process. As to the price of the awards, he said, “it’s a big résumé item. If you are eligible for an Emmy and it was $7,500, you’d probably still want to buy it. It’s an important credential. It beats the Kiwanis Club of Bismarck, N.D.”

As proof of the value of an Emmy, he recalled his first ceremony as president of the academy.

“I was looking over the table assignments for the awards,” said Mr. Price, a former publisher of the New York Post, who began his career as a reporter for The Wall Street Journal. He came across a table labeled “NYT”: “It was practically next to the kitchen. I said, ‘What’s this?’ Whoever was doing the seating had no idea what ‘NYT’ meant. I looked at the people at the table—Arthur Sulzberger Jr., Janet Robinson, Bill Keller—and I was like, ‘This is the bloody masthead of The New York Times! What are they doing here?”

Once he figured it out—The Times had been nominated for a 90-minute documentary called Bioterror, based on the reporting of William J. Broad, Stephen Engelberg and Judith Miller—he moved the “NYT” table as far forward as possible. “I couldn’t put it front and center,” he said, “but I did put it in the front row at the end, on the corner. It was one of the most miserable evenings of my life. The award they were up for was the very last one, and we didn’t get to it until 10:25 or so. The whole time I was thinking, ‘Please God, if you’re there, let them win.’”

They did. Mr. Price went to greet the Times people. In receiving the award, he said, they displayed none of the dismissive pretenses of their television counterparts.

“I came to congratulate them, and Arthur Sulzberger asked me if we could get the statue delivered as quickly as possible,” Mr. Price said, “so they could display it in the corridor with their Pulitzers.”

http://www.observer.com/printpage.asp?iid=13106&ic=NYTV

TV Critics Summer Press Tour
Fixing "Desperate Housewives''

By Charlie McCollum San Jose Mercury News in his blog Wednesday, July 19, 2006

Even ABC executives acknowledge that "Desperate Housewives'' lost at least some of its creative glow and a fair measure of buzz last season. (Let's be honest: At times, the show sucked -- but the network suits won't go that far.)

Much of the downturn stemmed from some messy behind-the-scenes turmoil involving storylines and the tone of the series. Now, says ABC Entertainment boss Stephen McPherson, creator Marc Cherry will take back full-time oversight of the show with all the scripts going through his computer.

"Marc admitted that at the beginning of last year the show stumbled a little bit,'' says McPherson. "They spent too much time setting up the mystery. This year, they'll jump right in. 'Desperate Housewives' will get back to the heart of it, which, tonally, was a wicked comedy.

"The early scripts and the story lines and arcs and the mystery are a lot stronger from the get-go.''

OK, we're crossing our fingers on that one and hoping for the best.

http://blogs.mercurynews.com/aei/charlie_mccollum/index.html

Nielsen Notebook
ABC's Record Bust with "The One"

By Scott Collins Los Angeles Times Staff Writer in the Channel Island TV Industry blog July 19, 2006

ABC's Tuesday debut of the reality show "The One: Making a Music Star" delivered the worst ratings for any series premiere in the network's history and the second-worst in broadcast TV history, according to Nielsen Media Research.

An average of 3.2 million total viewers tuned in to the two-hour event Tuesday night, or roughly one-third of the audience for a repeat of Fox's hit medical drama "House" (9.1 million). The carnage among the targeted adults aged 18-49 audience was even worse, with a miserable 1.1 rating/3 share. ABC was thus slapped down by CBS' similarly themed "Rock Star: Supernova," the talent competition that seeks singers for Tommy Lee's new band, which did a 2.8 rating/8 share.

"The One" can be thought of as a kind of combination of "Big Brother" and "American Idol," in which young singing contestants live together in the same house.

With the exceptions of NBC's "America's Got Talent" and Fox's "So You Think You Can Dance," this has been a very tough summer for reality shows overall, and Tuesday was no exception. NBC's "Fear Factor" and "Last Comic Standing" sunk to their lowest demo ratings so far this year. And the latest edition of "Big Brother" continued to trend downward on CBS.

But none of these shows matches the ratings disaster that afflicted ABC. Earlier Tuesday, ABC entertainment boss Steve McPherson lamented too many recent "bad reality" programs that have copied other, more successful shows. Does that bode an early death for "The One"? Stay tuned.

http://hollywoodhotline.typepad.com/watcher/

Cable TV Notebook
Comcast, CSTV Team On New Sports Net

By John Eggerton Broadcasting & Cable 7/19/2006

Comcast and the CBS-owned college sports programmer CSTV Networks are going in 50-50 on a new regional sports network dedicated to a single college conference.

The MountainWest Sports Network (MWN), which debuts Sept. 1, will carry sports from the nine Mountain West Conference Schools to Comcast subs in Utah, Colorado, and New Mexico at launch, specifically on expanded basic in Salt Lake City and digital tiers in Denver, Colorado Springs and Albuquerque.

Comcast, which has a number of regional sports networks, will manage MWN, and CSTV will be added to the basic tier of the Comcast systems launching the channel. This is CSTV's first foray into regional sports networks.

Those markets are host to half the schools in the conference, which comprises Air Force, Brigham Young, Colorado State, San Diego State, TCU, UNLV, University of New Mexico, University of Utah and Wyoming.

The network will carry a constant variety of sports, including 25 football games, 75 men’s basketball games, women’s basketball, swimming, diving, soccer, and tennis, as well as pep rallies, press conferences, and coaches shows.

Some of the MWC coverage will also air on CSTV and Comcast's Outdoor Life Network, or Versus, as it is rechristening itself in September.

The conference carriage deal also covers rights to Comcast VOD, high definition, wireless, Web sites, iTunes, and podcasts.

http://www.broadcastingcable.com/index.asp?layout=articlePrint&articleID=CA6354774

Offer not valid in San Diego and Las Vegas where Cox still doesn't have a carriage agreenment for CSTV or the MWC RSN.

TV Critics Summer Press Tour
Desperate' to regain series' 'Lost' momentum

By Marisa Guthrie The New York Daily News Staff Writer Wednesday, July 19th, 2006

PASADENA, Calif. - Marc Cherry and J.J. Abrams, the creative talents behind two of ABC's top-rated shows - "Desperate Housewives" and "Lost," respectively - will be much more involved in their series' day-to-day operations this year, according to Stephen McPherson, the network's head of entertainment.

"Everyone, including Marc, admitted that at the beginning of last year ['Desperate Housewives'] stumbled a bit," said McPherson, addressing TV writers at the network's semiannual presentations.

Midway through the season, however, Cherry resumed show-running and scriptwriting duties, and this season he'll continue that level of involvement.

The scripts "will be all going through Marc's typewriter," said McPherson.

ABC will also have Abrams' full attention this year. He was sidelined from "Lost" and the network's midseason drama "What About Brian" (which returns Oct. 9 at 10 p.m.) because he was directing Tom Cruise's "Mission: Impossible III."

Although Abrams defected last week from ABC's in-house studio, Touchstone Television, to sign a lucrative film and TV production deal with Warner Bros., he's committed to the upcoming seasons of "Lost," "What About Brian" and the new drama "Six Degrees," about a group of New Yorkers connected by the thinnest of threads.

"We're really excited to have him back full time this year," said McPherson. "We lost him to 'MI:3' last year. This year, it won't be a factor at all."

Abrams will write and direct multiple episodes of the show this year. "Lost" returns Oct. 4 at 9 p.m. with six new installments, then takes a 13-week hiatus, until February, to make room for "Day Break," a new crime drama starring Taye Diggs as a detective wrongly accused of murdering a district attorney.

The strategy is designed to eliminate the many repeats that fans have found so annoying.

But the attention and plaudits bestowed this year on "Lost" and, to a slightly lesser degree, "Desperate Housewives," aren't reflected in the recently announced Emmy nominations. Neither "Lost" nor "Housewives," the previous winners in the drama and comedy categories, was even nominated this year. And McPherson, who opened his session here with a jab at Emmy voters, obviously feels the sting of rejection.

"To have that kind of oversight to me is remarkable, and it's sad for a show like 'Lost,' one of the best shows on the air - maybe one of the best shows of all time," said McPherson.

"For one year to win it and the next year to not be nominated, for one year one of the 'Desperate Housewives' [cast] to win the best actor [award] and the next year for none of them to be nominated ... I hope that the academy will look at [the new system] and realize maybe the changes that they made weren't all good and they need to go back to the old system."

http://www.nydailynews.com/entertainment/ent_radio/v-pfriendly/story/436146p-367465c.html

TV Critics Summer Press Tour
Verizon Adds NFL Net

By Glen Dickson Broadcasting & Cable 7/19/2006

Verizon is moving NFL Network from its premium sports package on its FiOS television service to its core FiOS TV Premier, which features over 180 channels and has been the most popular offering for the nascent fiber-to-the-home service.

In addition to NFL Network’s regular programming, Verizon is also carrying NFL Network’s high-definition feed and NFL Network on Demand. NFL Network previously was part of the FiOS TV Sports package, which offers over a dozen different sports channels for $5.95 per month. The FiOS move is the second piece of telco TV news in the last week for NFL Network, which announced a carriage deal with AT&T's U-Verse last Thursday.

"It was an easy call to make NFL Network, with its live games, football news and features, available to more FiOS TV customers," said Terry Denson, VP of FiOS TV content strategy and acquisition, in a statement. "And as more viewers embrace high-definition TV, they can watch their favorite NFL football teams in stunningly brilliant high definition on our fiber-optic network."

http://www.broadcastingcable.com/index.asp?layout=articlePrint&articleID=CA6354817

Equipment Notebook
World's biggest plasma TV on sale in September

dailymail.com

The makers of Panasonic equipment are to start taking orders in Japan for a 103-inch plasma TV, the world's largest.

Matsushita Electric Industrial Co. Ltd. announced today that the first orders would be taken on September 1.

Matsushita said shipments could start as early as the end of September, and it expects the TV to sell in Japan for around 6 million yen ($50,000).

Matsushita, the world's largest consumer electronics maker, has said it aims to sell 5,000 units of the 103-inch plasma panels per year worldwide, with TV demand counting for a little less than 20 percent of that figure.

Measuring 2.4 metres by 1.4 metres and weighing 215 kg, the 103-inch panel is bigger than a double-sized mattress and almost as heavy as an upright piano.

The plasma panel used in the Matsushita TV will be just one inch larger measured diagonally than a 102-inch model developed by Samsung SDI Co. Ltd. The South Korean company has not launched the model commercially.

Matsushita held a 21.6 per cent share of the global plasma TV market in January-March, followed by LG Electronics Inc. and Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. according to DisplaySearch.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/news.html?in_article_id=396512&in_page_id=1770

Critic’s Notebook
''Rescue Me''

By Rich Heldenfels in his Akron Beacon Journal TV blog

Once again, I've been a techno-idiot. Wrote this yesterday ago but neglected to post it on the blog. So here it is. The ''tonight'' references refer to Tuesday, when I wrote this.

(Note: Some content may be unsuitable for younger readers.)

I have tried to put ''Rescue Me'' behind me. I tried to shrug off Denis Leary's comments to TV Guide, suggesting that those of us worried about the rape episode either hadn't watched the show or were just being politically correct. I even talked about the show recently with a New York City firefighter -- who is a 9/11 survivor -- and tried to take in his relaxed view of the show generally. (He thought it was unrealistic, but that such treatment w as hardly unique to firefighters. Police officers, he noted, have been portrayed unrealistically on TV for years.)

But when I sat down to watch a preview copy of tonight's ''Rescue Me,'' the smoke was coming out of my ears -- so much that no firefighter could have stopped it. Leary's egomania hits new highs in the episode, and its distaste for women is even more noticeable.

The issue is, simply put, foreplay. Not one but two different women in the episode are supposedly so enamored of Tommy Gavin and his, um, endowment, that they have their way with him in a briskly mechanical manner that appears to involve no warmup at all -- minimal activity before coitus, and a lot of clothing kept on during the act.

You might concede that some of the covering up is intended to meet FX's content standards, but the show has pushed those limits beyond what we see here. Instead, there's an incredible self-congratulation on display, an insistence to the viewers that women find Gavin's endowment not only irresistible but all they require for sexual satisfaction. And that fits all too sadly with the rape episode, where Gavin's prowess was supposedly so great that it overwhelmed any objections his ex-wife had at first when Tommy assaulted her.

Of course, there were other plot strands in the episode. And I admit that I have been watching the show differently than I did before the rape episode. But that's what television can and does do -- change how we think about characters or a series in a moment in a single telecast. And ever since that rape -- I'm not falling for Leary's claims that it was something else -- ''Rescue Me'' has felt very, very wrong.

http://blogs.ohio.com/beacon_tv/

TV Critics Summer Press Tour
Grilling Jimmy Kimmel

From Maureen Ryan’s Chicago Tribune blog “The Watcher” July 19, 2006

Jimmy Kimmel made my lunch on Tuesday.

Well, in the interest of full disclosure, he made burgers for dozens of other TV writers and critics -- I had a veggie burger, which was cooked by another chef. But the reviews of Kimmel’s burgers, made according to a recipe he has honed for years, were quite positive.

Why on earth is a late-night talk show host donning an apron, standing over a hot grill and flipping burgers -- outside, no less, in 110-degree California heat? Because he has a show, “Jimmy Kimmel Live,” on ABC and needs to remind an entire convention of critics about him and it.

Twice a year, the Television Critics Association convenes -- this July it is in Pasadena, Calif. -- for what’s called press tour. That “tour” word is actually a misnomer: There are a few field trips, but for the most part, the assembled members of the print and online press don’t go anywhere.

They sit for three weeks in hotel ballrooms as cable and broadcast networks present Q&A sessions on new and hot returning shows. Actors, producers and executives are barraged with questions, some good, some bad, some downright inexplicable.

And there are promotional events. CBS unveiled a fall campaign in which eggs across America will be imprinted with messages about the network’s shows. During one snack break, AOL hyped an online reality show, “Gold Rush,” by giving out ingot-shaped candy bars. After her presentation, Rachael Ray, who has a syndicated program debuting in the fall, invited critics to a lunch of mini-burgers and salad.

But unlike Kimmel, she didn’t cook the grub herself. Drenched in sweat and surrounded by his cohorts on the show (Uncle Frank, cousin Sal, bandleader Cleto), who served up fries and sides, Kimmel manned the grill for more than 30 minutes, fielding questions from the press as he sweated profusely over his burgers.

Later, after he had toweled off and recovered a bit from being “the most dehydrated I’ve ever been in my life,” he talked about why he had come to press tour to cook for the very people who could potentially roast him alive.

“If you meet someone and have a pleasant encounter with them, you might be less likely to attack them,” he said, neatly summing up why the networks make their big stars and top writers and executives come to press tour.

Yes, but the press will still ask pesky questions, no matter how many burgers and candy bars you give them. For instance, I asked Kimmel if the Pontiac promotions woven into his show, which have been extremely prominent in recent months, have gone too far.

“I think we do a better job than some other shows,” he said, citing sports broadcasts as being particularly sponsor-centric. “We try not to jam it in people’s faces.”

He noted that because of the company’s sponsorship, “there are certain things we like to do, that other shows don’t get to do,” citing the show’s Pontiac music series as a case in point.

Well, another point of the press tour is that I got to ask Kimmel that question one-on-one. I got to see his nearly flame-broiled hands and the sweat dripping from his brow. And I got to hear his final assessment of his lunchtime promotional event:

“I hope I didn’t wind up poisoning every TV critic in America.”

http://tempo.typepad.com/entertainment_tv/

Cable Nielsen Notebook
Sci Fi Scores with Eureka

By Anne Becker Broadcasting & Cable7/19/2006

Sci Fi Channel's premiere of Eureka ranked as the network's highest-rated series telecast ever with a 3.2 household rating and more than 4 million total viewers, according to Nielsen Media Research. The two-hour premiere of the series, about an unknown U.S. town of geniuses, ran at 9 p.m. Tuesday night (July 18).

Eureka's ratings are almost in line with the blockbuster numbers posted by Sci Fi's 2002 Steven Spielberg-produced miniseries Taken, which ran over 10 days in two weeks and averaged a 4.1 rating and nearly 5 million viewers.

Eureka, Sci Fi's first scripted original series launch since Battlestar Galactica, was the top-rated cable program on Tuesday and beat out broadcast competition including ABC's The One: Making of a Music Star. It averaged 1.7 million viewers 18-49 and 1.9 million 25-54.

http://www.broadcastingcable.com/index.asp?layout=articlePrint&articleID=CA6354845

TV Critics Summer Press Tour
Press Tour Serialized Drama

By Lisa de Moraes Washington Post Staff Writer in her blog “Moraes On TV”

Note to cast and producers of the many new serialized dramas who plan to participate in Q&A sessions at Summer TV Press Tour 2006:

Critics are going to ask how you plan to get viewers to commit to your show, given how many serialized dramas are already on the air, how many new ones are debuting this coming TV season, and the major time commitment required to keep up with a serialized drama because you can't, you know, miss an episode.

This is a reasonable question. Embrace it -- answer it, or find some pressing personal engagement to keep you from attending your show's session at press tour.

Participants in Q&A sessions for several serialized shows have already appeared at the tour and you'd be surprised how many panelists have seemed surprised and/or put out by the question.

Take Taye Diggs, for instance. Diggs stars in the new ABC drama series "Day Break" as a narcotics undercover police officer who is framed for the murder of an assistant D.A. By the end of the day, things aren't looking good for our hero, only when he wakes up, it's the same day and the whole thing starts all over again. Think "Groundhog Day" -- except in front of the cast or producers who got their knickers in a knot when one critic did just that.

Turns out, "Day Break" is totally different than "Groundhog Day" because, as an example, in "Groundhog Day" Bill Murray couldn't die. In "Day Break," Diggs' character could get killed -- only then "we're all out of work," exec producer Matthew Gross explained to critics. Which means, um, Taye Diggs' character does not die. Which brings us right back to "Groundhog Day."

Moving on to the question of Taye Diggs and how his show is going to stand out in a sea of serialized dramas, the cast and crew never really did provide much of an answer. After a while, Diggs finally told critics,

"You'll have to forgive us if we come off as a little sarcastic or maybe defensive. But we knew that we would be dealing with a lot of these questions. I just need to remind you that this is something very special to us."

Oh -- special to THEM. Well,then!

"We all know what we're doing," Diggs continued. "So when you ask us a question like, how do we get somebody to view in who hasn't been watching regularly -- you know, how do you get anybody to view in?....All these questions that you are asking, I could ask, how does someone do that for 'Desperate Housewives'?

"It's a TV show and we know what we're doing -- do you know what I'm saying?....We're not dumb. I'm Taye Diggs. I wouldn't sign on for that."

Oh yeah? Then explain "Kevin Hill."

http://blog.washingtonpost.com/tvblog/

Technology Notebook
TV Of The Future

Web, Interactive TV Dominate Media Panel
By Mike Reynolds Multichannel.com 7/19/2006

Boston -- The migration of content from what was the province of cable’s video services and the impact it is having on operators, content providers, advertisers and vendors was the menu item during a breakfast session entitled “It’s All About MEdia” at the Cable & Telecommunications Association for Marketing’s CTAM Summit here Wednesday.

The gains made by MySpace.com (www.myspace.com), YouTube.com (www.youtube.com) and Yahoo! (www.yahoo.com) and the proliferation of user-generated video were mentioned repeatedly throughout the session, with one attendee referring to the “consumer as competitor.”

However, the amount of people’s entertainment time spent with YouTube “is still a very small percentage,” said Joan Gillman, senior vice president of interactive TV and advanced advertising at Time Warner Cable.

She noted that the people who are producing content for MySpace and YouTube “want to be discovered.” They want to make it to the “big screen,” which gets bigger as HDTV-set sales continue to grow. “TV is still the place where the best video product is consumed,” she added.

Speaking of enhanced picture quality, Charter Communications executive VP and chief marketing officer Bob Quigley said the end game for the operator with the platform is that “we’re expanding as quickly as we can.” But with bandwidth constraints and other advanced services in the mix, “something has to give. We don’t want to miss the beat. As long as cable is agile, we can take advantage of this consumer movement.”

Michael Snyder, senior VP of marketing communications at Comcast, said the nation’s largest cable distributor is offering some movies in HD via its On Demand application in its home market of Philadelphia. He added that the product is another example of “what we do better than the competition,” and something the operator is considering positioning from a marketing standpoint.

The discussion also drifted toward the opportunities the new platforms present to advertisers. “Look to the Internet, it’s measurable. It’s important to the ad community to have some kind of measurement,” said Everstream president Charlie Lougheed, adding that telcos are measuring everything they can.

Panelists cited privacy and ethical issues as impediments to the dissemination of highly specific user data for products like video-on-demand usage.

Gillman said that in order to extract more detailed data, Time Warner would have to ask customers to “opt in” for more specifics, but in her view, the aggregate numbers are “quite compelling” all the same.

On the interactive front, Gillman said the operator and NBC Universal were finding some interesting results with polling for Bravo’s Top Chef and the Peacock’s Last Comic Standing within the 3 million Time Warner homes that have access to interactive-TV functionality.

Whereas “two-screen” polling yielded response rates of 1%-2%, she said, the ratios were much higher when polling was done with a remote control. She added that an episode of Top Chef elicited a 30% response rate among those watching the show in interactive-TV-enabled Time Warner homes, while the July 10 installment of comic competition series Last Comic Standing generated responses from 12% of viewers watching in those homes.

Andy Schuon, CEO of International Music Feed, said cable doesn’t have to cede music-video traffic to Yahoo! and YouTube. He added that consumers will embrace cable as a big distributor of music video, saying that it was the place where the form was launched 25 years ago. “They will come back,” he said, provided cable “jumps into the game.” IMF -- which, Schuon said, has deals with satellite providers and Verizon Communications’ FiOS TV -- is ready to roll out 100 hours of VOD product.

The panelists also agreed that cable has plenty of high-quality content -- it’s just that the consumer doesn’t necessarily know it’s there.

“There’s a lot of content to filter,” said Tom Rosenstein, VP of business development at SeaChange International, noting that cable operators would be well served to get their hands around what’s offered on TV and the Web and to present it in a guide that would enable subscribers to customize viewing to their personal tastes.

Edward Huguez, executive VP of sales and marketing at Starz Entertainment Group, said company officials had gone through Comcast’s On Demand platform and there are “500 different buttons. It’s hard to determine value when we don’t even know what’s on.”

Asked to weigh in on what the landscape would like five years down the road, Gillman said Time Warner will be able to give consumers content when and where they want it. “Today, we have time-shifting. Five years from now, we’ll have the portable piece in place,” she added.

Snyder envisioned where the various platforms and devices won’t be differentiated in consumers’ minds and homes. “Five years out, everything will be one place, just on Comcast,” he said.

Schuon said cable needs to have more compelling content that will invite more consumers in. “We’re in show biz, after all,” he said, adding that he anticipates that guides will become more sophisticated and act as an index. “You’ll call up Tiger Woods and get his appearances on The Tonight Show, or Tiger Woods at the U.S. Open.”

The breakfast was sponsored by Multichannel News and sister publication Broadcasting & Cable, and the session was moderated by Tom Steinert-Threlkeld and Max Robbins, the respective editors in chiefs of the publications.

http://www.multichannel.com/index.asp?layout=articlePrint&articleid=CA6354773

TV Critics Summer Press Tour
How About the Title ‘The Knights of Mick Jagger?’

By Christopher Lisotta TVWeek.com in the “Critical Eye” TV Press Tour blog Wednesday, July 19th, 2006

Rob Burnett, one of the producers of the recently re-titled ABC comedy “The Knights of Prosperity,” said he and his writing partner Jon Beckerman did not at first consider rocker Mick Jagger as the mark for the show’s hapless would-be thieves.

“We first pitched using Jeff Goldblum,” Burnett said at the show’s TCA session Wednesday morning. As the show became more developed it was ABC Entertainment President Steve McPherson who suggested going with Jagger, a name that Burnett and Beckerman thought was out of their league. Don’t feel bad for Goldblum, though—he’s got his own series next season on NBC.


Jagger’s people were approached, and Mick himself read the script and approved. That lead to a lightning-fast five-hour shoot in New Zealand for Jagger’s surprisingly funny cameo shots in the pilot, which was initially sold as “Let’s Rob Mick Jagger.”

The Jagger storyline will resolve by the end of the season, and for a second season the Knights of Prosperity, as the group of thieves call themselves, will target someone else.

So the working title is now “Knights of Prosperity” because the show—which was being called “Let’s Rob … ” in the press and by ABC—was “too fragmented” for the original title, Burnett said. There were plenty of fun facts revealed about the “Knights” cast at the session as well. For instance, star Donal Logue really had a crappy job when he was a struggling actor in New York (imagine that), where he worked the night shift at a hotel cleaning bathrobes.

Co-star Lenny Venito’s Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, accent is the real thing. Venito, who plays one of Tony’s crew members on “The Sopranos,” is actually the son of a retired NYPD officer. And the far-from-homely Sofia Vergara was a dental student in Colombia before coming to the U.S. to act, a tidbit of information that prompted one female critic to whisper to a colleague (by colleague, I mean me) how impossible it would be for the amply breasted Vergara to lean over a patient to do a root canal.

My colleague got her answer. “All this voluptuousness wouldn’t let me finish,” Vergara admitted with a saucy smile.

http://blogs.tvweek.com/?cat=5

TV Critics Summer Press Tour
Death March With Cocktails:

Day 10
By Tim Goodman San Francisco Chronicle in his TV blog “The Bastard Machine”

This post brought to you by Diet Coke. Which I'm living on, essentially. We're 10 days in. I've been here 11. Hey, only nine more to go! I'm wondering now how many times I can listen to another producer say he or she ABSOLUTELY knows where the show is going. Don't lie to me like I'm Montel Williams!

If I could find one of those hatches they have on "Lost" I'd be down it. Perhaps it would lead to Pie 'N Burger.

I'm getting more tired. And more cranky. But at least ABC has a whole network full of good new series, which helps keep certain people awake. This is the advent of the blog tour - a significant number of writers and critics are either blogging or using the Wi-Fi connection in the ballroom to surf the net and not listen to people say the idea for their series was "organic."

I'm learning to blog while simultaneously listening to people spin, ask pointless questions or chatter amongst themselves about how the really, really, really hot Latina actress (theme alert!) from "The Knights of Prosperity" moved in two doors down.

But also, on a more serious note, a significant number of critics this year are talking less about their thoughts on new series and more about the pros and cons of blogging and what it does to the critical process. A good portion of the assembled masses is not blogging. But a whole bunch of us are. Of that latter group, not everybody is doing it willingly and some are having real issues with where to draw the line on letting personal minutia get in the way of dispensing actual information or some type of critical analysis of what they are seeing.

Obviously, that's an individual choice. I'm trying to figure it out as I go, but in truth made peace with the decision when I started the blog a few months ago, not when I arrived here for the press tour. Back then, I rarely wrote in the first person in The Chronicle (a decision that will be continued), so revealing personal facts or writing in the first person in a blog was both oddly uncomfortable and oddly freeing. That said, I think a lot of people blogging from here are too focused on their own navels and pointless day-to-day activities, but that's their choice. While it's true that the so-called blogosphere partly allows and partly demands a certain openness and intimacy, at some point too much information is precisely that.

For me, blogging the Death March With Cocktails makes perfect sense and my guess is we'll do it like this every time. I may not get the balance right this tour, but it will work itself out eventually. The Bastard Machine, however, is really just another platform for me, not the main one. Part of me can't wait to get back to being in the old school paper writing original material instead of reverse-engineered blog entries, part of me can't wait to tell you about ABC's party tonight.

It's a strange new world. And given enough Diet Coke, I'll be awake to tell you about it.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/sfgate/indexn?blogid=24

TV Critics Summer Press Tour
'Ed' writers return with 'Knights'

By Rob Owen Pittsburgh Post-Gazette TV Editor in his blog “Tuned In” Wednesday, July 19, 2006
(Rob Owen is President of the Television Critics Association)

PASADENA, Calif. -- It seems like every show Rob Burnett and Squirrel Hill native Jon Beckerman create wends its way to your living room TV set in a roundabout way. "Ed" started as a half-hour comedy for CBS and ended up a one-hour comedy-drama on NBC.

Their latest series, ABC's "Knights of Prosperity," began its life as "Let's Rob Jeff Goldblum" and later was known as "Let's Rob Mick Jagger" and then just "Let's Rob..."

The comedy series, airing at 9 p.m. Tuesday this fall, concerns a group of down-on-their-luck New Yorkers who conspire to rob Mick Jagger in an effort to have enough money to open leader Eugene's dream bar. Donal Logue ("Grounded for Life") stars as Eugene.

Beckerman said Goldblum's roots in Pittsburgh had nothing to do with considering him for the show's titular victim.

"We thought he was someone who was potentially gettable," Beckerman said after the show's press conference this morning. "He wasn't someone who when we pitched the network, they would say, 'How are you going to do this show?'"

Beckerman said because Goldblum has his own series in the works at NBC, he was unavailable, but he chatted with Goldblum and said the actor "got a big kick out of it."

ABC Entertainment president Stephen McPherson suggested going after Jagger, though the producers thought that was a long shot. But Jagger agreed and shot his cameo in the pilot in New Zealand after a Rolling Stones tour.

The show's title was changed to "Knights" out of fear that using Jagger's name in the title would over-sell it. The rock icon is not expected to appear in many episodes and has committed to nothing beyond the pilot.

"We think of Mick as being an amazing cherry on a delicious sundae, but we didn't want to tell viewers it's 'The Mick Jagger Show' and they tune in and it's not," Burnett said.

For "Ed" fans, Beckerman said "Knights" will offer the same sense of humor.

"There are clearly a lot of dissimilarities, but I think the style of writing and the comedy is very, very similar. People who really appreciate the comedy side of 'Ed,' as opposed to the law cases and even the more dramatic stuff, I hope they'll find this show very much in line with the same sort of stuff," Beckerman said. "So for better or for worse, there's major overlap."

Beckerman said the show's concept -- characters spend a season of a TV show trying to rob Mick Jagger -- appealed to him because it had a backbone on which to hang weekly episodes.

"It seemed like a way to have a source of stories," he said. "The stakes are high. They're trying to do the crime."

When "Ed" began life as a single-camera comedy for CBS in 1996, Burnett said CBS honcho Les Moonves said the show would never work in that format. Now they're premiering a single-camera comedy on ABC, which adds no new traditional sitcoms this fall.

"It's been no struggle at all" to get the network on board with the format, Burnett said. "Everyone seems to want them."

In success, the show will continue to follow the same characters as they embark on a new season-long quest a year from now, but what that would be, the producers have not decided.

Since "Ed," Beckerman's life has gotten busier. Wife Nell gave birth to daughter Ruby last June. She's already been to a few Pittsburgh haunts when visiting her grandparents.

"We've given Ruby the grand tour," Beckerman said. "We brought her to The Original [Hot Dog Shop in Oakland]. It was the first destination off the plane. Unfortunately, I don't think she was able to sample the cuisine at that point in her life. I think next time, she'll get her first hot dog and fries, and that's something I'll look forward to."

• • • • • • • • • • •

The questions we ask: A critic just asked about a raccoon that "acts" in the pilot of the Anne Heche show "Men in Trees." Turns out, for a scene where the raccoon runs down the stairs, it was actually a dog in a raccoon costume. The things we learn on press tour!

Producers said the raccoon would be, not recurring, but "racooning" on the show. Oy. Then a critic asked if the raccoon and a dog on the show share a trailer (they don't). And still another critic wondered if, because raccoons are nocturnal, producers woke the raccoon up to film during the day (they did).

Executive producer Jenny Bicks admitted it was a mistake not to have the animal stars on the "Men in Trees" press conference panel.

• • • • • • • • • • •

NBC promo: Netflix subscribers will have access to the pilot episodes of two new NBC fall series, "Kidnapped" and "Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip," beginning Aug. 5.

Netflix subscribers can add these shows to their personal queues now at Netflix.com. DVDs will be mailed first-class with postage-paid return via the United States Postal Service, the company's usual distribution method.

• • • • • • • • • • •

Tonight's the ABC party, and although my cold still lingers, it's not as awful as it had been, so I'll venture out to try to get some details on the new seasons of "Desperate Housewives," "Grey's Anatomy" and other ABC series.

http://www.post-gazette.com/tv/tunedin/

TV Critics Summer Press Tour
Not With My Underbelly, You Don’t

By Christopher Lisotta TVWeek.com in the “Critical Eye” TV Press Tour blog Wednesday, July 19th, 2006

Jennifer Westfeldt has no desire to get too close to her character’s experience on the ABC comedy “Notes From the Underbelly.”

Westfeldt plays a young married woman who finds out she’s pregnant. At the “Underbelly” press tour session Wednesday morning, one critic reminded the producers and Westfeldt, who is not pregnant in real life, that in many cases actresses who become expectant during series have been asked to hide their underbellies for the sake of their characters. But in this case, being an actress and actually getting pregnant might work to the show’s advantage.

Westfeldt stopped the critic right there.

“I’m not taking that question,” she said. “I have a dog. It’s a lot of responsibility.”

In one scene in the “Underbelly” pilot, a very prominent picture is displayed of actors Sunkrish Bala and Melanie Paxson, who play another expectant couple. Shot Vanity Fair-style, a shirtless, meditative Bala rests his head on what appears to be a very pregnant Paxson’s belly.

“That was my first day on the job,” Bala said.

“And it wasn’t my belly,” Paxson said, noting they had a real woman heavy with child stand in for her. Some creative Photoshopping placed Paxson’s head on top of the body.

“I have a huge picture of it at home,” Paxson said.

“Did you get a picture?” Bala asked incredulously, adding to the argument that press tour is as revelatory for the participants as it is for reporters.

Paxson, who can teach the likes of Katie Couric and Rachael Ray a few things about being perky, was asked by a critic if she still gets recognized for her series of plastic bag commercials from a few years back, where she appeared with an eclectic array of B-listers, including former Chicago Bears coach Mike Ditka.

Turns out she does, especially when people hear her distinctive voice.

But brand marketing executives, take note:

“People say ‘you did those Hefty commercials,’” she said. “And I say ‘no, Glad.’”

Westeldt was asked if she ever considered making her hit indie film “Kissing Jessica Stein” into a TV show.

“I felt it was a film and one story,” she said, before adding she didn’t know any movies that had been “converted to successful series.”

That created a few “huh?” faces among the assembled critics. While the Sapphic-themed “Kissing” was definitely a closed-ended story, Westfeldt might want to rent DVDs of the TV series “M*A*S*H,” “Alice” and “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” to name just a few, and acquaint herself to some examples of film-to-TV successes.

http://blogs.tvweek.com/?cat=5

TV Critics Summer Press Tour
The Remaining Schedule

Thursday, July 20th: Off Day
Friday, July 21st: NBC
Saturday, July 22nd: NBC
Sunday, July 23rd: Off Day
Monday, July 24th: Fox
Tuesday, July 25th: Fox
Wednesday, July 26th: PBS

Be sure to check in to the Hot Off The Press Thread at least a couple of times over the weekend to see what NBC is up to and to get a preview of what Fox executives and stars will be saying next week.

TV Critics Summer Press Tour
The return of Elvis (the furry one)

From Maureen Ryan’s Chicago Tribune blog “The Watcher” July 19, 2006

There’s a raccoon in Vancouver who needs to call his agent.

At the TCA press session for new ABC show “Men in Trees,” which stars former Chicagoan Anne Heche as a self-help guru stuck in a small town in Alaska, the raccoon who figures prominently in the pilot was discussed at length.

In fairness to my colleagues, many asked two-fer questions, one about the raccoon, then usually a follow up question that was about the content of the show (which has potential but is too contrived by half, in my humble estimation).

In any case, we sure did learn a lot about the raccoon. His name is Elvis. He is nocturnal, so he must be woken to commune with his dramatic muse. He does not share a trailer with the dog who plays his stunt double (long story, but in a scene of the raccoon running away, the raccoon is actually a dog in a raccoon suit. No, I did not know you could put a dog in a raccoon suit either. Or that anyone would want to).

“It’s a mistake that he’s not here,” laughed executive producer Jenny Bicks, who added that Elvis is from Vancouver, where the show is shot. “He’s a local hire,” she noted, to much laughter.

The session did range into other areas. One critic asked Anne Heche how her life was going and tried to say, ever so gently, that she seemed very….

“Sane?” Heche asked, with a smile.

“I am blessed. I worked very hard to get here,” said a serene-seeming Heche, who was also asked about her role on the show as a self-help guru.

“Clearly I never had a life coach,” she joked.

And the raccoon?

"Best actor I've ever worked with," Heche said.
He’ll be back in the second episode, critics were assured. He’s a recurring character.

Or, as “Trees” actor John Amos put it, a “raccooning character.”

Mwah!

http://tempo.typepad.com/entertainment_tv/

Offer not valid in San Diego and Las Vegas where Cox still doesn't have a carriage agreenment for CSTV or the MWC RSN.

Who cares about those two markets anyway? By the way, what Conferences are UNLV and San Diego State in?

Oops.

Never mind.

Look, the arena at SDSU is "Cox Arena". They will get a deal made. Before the first kickoff.

TV Critics Summer Press Tour
More bodies in motion in the world of "Law & Order''

By Charlie McCollum San Jose Mercury News in his blog Wednesday, July 19, 2006

The world of "Law & Order'' keeps spinning, with more cast changes at "L&O: Criminal Intent.'' Follow closely, there will be a quiz.

First up: Julianne Nicholson (last seen in "Conviction,'' a failed spinoff of the "L&O'' franchise) will replace Annabella Sciorra as Chris Noth's partner.

Eric Bogosian ("Love Monkey'') is jumping on board to replace Jamey Sheridan as the head of the Major Case Squad. Sheridan had been boss for the first five seasons.


Nona Gaye will be the new assistant DA the unit deals with as Courtney B. Vance, another original cast member, slips off into the sunset.

Can we suggest handing out name tags at the show's first read-through for the new season?

http://blogs.mercurynews.com/aei/charlie_mccollum/index.html

Good news about Eureka. That's typically the kind of show that nobody but me watches and sees an early grave.

TV Critics Summer Press Tour
Caution: Actress Is Flammable

By Ben Grossman of Broadcasting & Cable at bcbeat.com July 19 2006

As excited as I was for Salma Hayek, I am equally jazzed for the upcoming appearance of Anne Heche. As we all know, while Salma Hayek drives me crazy, Heche has the tendency to pull a crazy. We already had Shannen Doherty crying and whining about her treatment by the media, so a Heche meltdown is probably too much to ask for I suppose.

Other highlights from Day Two of ABC’s Press Tour show:

Sofia Vergara of The Knights of Prosperity can bring the yuks as well as looks. Loved her answer when asked why she started her own clothing line: “Money.”

Speaking of the show, the creators have no idea what it’s going to be called by the time it launches, so stop asking. You may have previously known it as Let’s Rob... It’s pretty apparent neither the creators nor the network like the title, so if you ever wanted to name a sitcom, now is your chance.

Then again, the room seems to laugh at everything Vergara says. Gimme a break, worshipping some Hispanic actress just for her looks. Pathetic.

Want to really piss off a room of grumpy TV critics? Do as one woman did and ask an entire panel of actors to give a “readers digest version” of their characters. Loved the cohesive groan of the entire room...it was like back in school when the teacher announced a pop quiz. Translation:Watch the pilot, lady.

http://broadcastingcable.com/blog/1380000138.html

TV Critics Summer Press Tour
Jiminy Glick Award Nominations

By Scott Collins Los Angeles Times Staff Writer in the Channel Island TV Industry blog July 19, 2006

The competition is already heating up for Channel Island's very own 1st Annual Jiminy Glick Awards!

Named in honor of Glick, Martin Short's famously clueless show-biz interviewer on Comedy Central, the Glicks salute questions asked during press conferences at the Television Critics Assn. press tour in Pasadena that merit distinction for being off-point, ill-informed, irrelevant or simply batty.

Of course, NBC and Fox have yet to host their TCA sessions, so plenty more Glick contenders will emerge later this week. But the field is already strong, as indicated by the following sample:

• "Where do you get the bear spray? Where can you buy it?" - To Jenny Bicks, creator of ABC's "Men in Trees," which is set in Alaska

• "When using an ATM, do you find yourself getting nervous?" - To the cast and creators of ABC's "The Nine," a drama about the aftermath of a bank robbery

• "Do you try to solve mysteries? Like, if you are just sitting watching a mystery movie or something, would you try to figure it out before the credits roll?" - To Kristen Bell, star of CW's "Veronica Mars"

• "What makes you really cranky and irritable? Is there anything?" - To the usually perky cooking expert/talk host Rachael Ray

• "I'm very serious, looking for a serious answer from you: Have you ever had an experience where you truly felt there was an angel or a higher being looking out after you?" - To Rick Worthy, star of ABC Family's "Fallen," about a character who's half-man, half-angel

http://hollywoodhotline.typepad.com/watcher/

TV Critics Summer Press Tour
Anne Heche Is Crazy Funny

By Ben Grossman of Broadcasting & Cable at bcbeat.com July 19 2006

See, now how I can make fun of how Anne Heche used to have a tall cup of the crazies when she makes fun of it herself much better than I ever could?

When asking if she had turned a corner in the koo-koo department, as one writer struggled with the way to ask if she was feeling a little more…um…Heche jumped in with a crazy look in her face and jokingly barked, “Sane?” Then she answered the question by beginning with the line, “I’ll let myself speak for myself…” Nice.

But the clear highlight of the panel discussion: The same lady who asked the “readers digest version of your character” question to the panel this morning just asked Anne Heche the same thing! I honestly thought three reporters around me were going to jump her and pound her like those female Muy Thai boxers from the upcoming Oxygen movie.

Here’s when you know a show is probably going to suck: when half the questions at press tour from the media are about animals in the show, like a damned raccoon, as well as beauties like whether bear spray is a real thing. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Men In Trees.

To quote another famous animal: Ruh-roh.

http://broadcastingcable.com/blog/1380000138.html

TV Critics Summer Press Tour
Anne Heche No Longer Crazy

By Christopher Lisotta TVWeek.com in the “Critical Eye” TV Press Tour blog Wednesday, July 19th, 2006

The critic that broached the question at the “Men in Trees” press tour session Wednesday afternoon was a little bit more delicate than I was in my headline, but series lead Anne Heche had no problem stepping up and answering the tough questions.

He started gently, asking for a “status report” on how Ms. Heche was “doing.”

“It seems like you’re totally … ,” he paused, searching for the most respectful word.

“Sane?” Heche suggested.

“Sane,” he confirmed, with more than a little relief that Heche herself had said it.

“I’ll let myself speak for myself,” she said confidently. “Obviously I’m sitting up here with a group of incredible people.

“I’ve worked very hard to get here,” she said. Clearly, Heche is a long way from the place she was in 2001, when her alien language skills and penchant for skulking around California’s Central Valley waiting for galactic visitors was making international headlines.

Besides Heche’s improved mental status, a klatch of male critics couldn’t let go from asking about the appearance of a raccoon in the pilot, which profiles a New York self-help book writer (Heche) who finds herself in a male-dominated small town in Alaska after she breaks up with her fiancé.

“Trees” creator Jenny Bicks confirmed that it was a real raccoon and not a CGI creation. The raccoon, Elvis, got rave reviews from Bicks for his professionalism.

“If anyone wants to hire a raccoon call me,” Bicks said.

“Best actor I have ever worked with,” Heche added.

But Elvis also had a double for a scene where his character had to run quickly. A terrier, Boomer, was a double for Elvis, complete with raccoon suit.

“He was local hire,” Bicks said of the Canadian Boomer.

Bicks quickly realized she had missed an opportunity with the session.

“It’s a mistake they are not here,” she said of Boomer and Elvis.

Another critic asked co-star John Amos, who has seen his character killed on several series, if he was nervous that might happen again now that he’s playing the owner of a local puddle-jumper airline.
When Amos protested, the critic said “Well, you do fly a small plane.”

Amos said he thought the plane might shake in the third season when it’s time to renegotiate his contract, but Bicks assured Amos his plane would be flying safely for a long time.

http://blogs.tvweek.com/?cat=5

Good news about Eureka. That's typically the kind of show that nobody but me watches and sees an early grave.


I forgot to TiVo it, CP95...do you know offhand if it is being repeated? Of course I could always go to their website......

Good news about Eureka. That's typically the kind of show that nobody but me watches and sees an early grave.
That is good news, haven't watched it but have been looking forward to it.


Fred, upcoming airings.

07/21/2006 07:00 PM EUREKA PILOT
07/22/2006 03:00 AM EUREKA PILOT
07/23/2006 04:30 PM EUREKA PILOT
07/24/2006 11:00 PM EUREKA PILOT

TV Critics Summer Press Tour
Brothers and Sisters: A Great Cast Wasted?

By Ben Grossman of Broadcasting & Cable at bcbeat.com Wednesday, July 19, 2006

ABC’s Brothers and Sisters was the only pilot not sent out by the networks, which immediately fires up red flags that trouble is a brewing.

To make matters less certain, when asked about that fact to open the show’s TCA panel, the creators hemmed and hawed for awhile, trying to explain it away with having to recast some parts, including Sally Field joining the show as Calista Flockhart’s character’s mother.

Optimism did not exactly brim from their responses, which included something about the pilot being a Trojan Horse for the actual show. Yikes.

It would be a shame because with a cast that includes Field, Flockhart, and Ron Rifkin among others, there is a nice team assembled.

And the post-Desperate Housewives slot that helped birth a little show called Grey’s Anatomy won’t hurt either.

If the show bombs, just for the hell of it my bet is ABC rescues Ugly Betty from Friday night hell and gives it a shot Sundays at 10.

***

So the “reader’s digest” lady reporter just began asking a question and the entire audience literally began booing her before she could finish. Outstanding! But instead of her typical stupid inquiry, she audibled to another stupid question to all the ladies about how they feel about their characters from a “female girl” perspective.

I have to find out this woman’s name, they should name this press tour after her.

http://broadcastingcable.com/blog/1380000138.html

TV Critics Summer Press Tour
Charlie Gibson: look sharp

By Bill Goodykoontz Arizona Republic TV Critic in his Critic’s Tour blog 07/19/2006

It had to happen.

In Katie Couric's session here earlier this week, someone asked whether she'd given any thought to what she would wear on her first broadcast when she takes over as anchor of the CBS Evening News. Some people thought it was a sexist question, others didn't. (I thought it was fair game, given the way networks trade on celebrity, looks, etc., but I get the other side, as well.)

Couric joked that she was going to consult Gibson's stylist. Sean McManus, the president of CBS News and Sports, wondered if we were going to ask Charlie Gibson what he was going to wear.

Yes, as a matter of fact. Gibson, the anchor of the broadcast that just Wednesday was renamed World News with Charles Gibson (they dropped the "Tonight" to reflect the rise of 24-hour webcasts and downloads and whatnot), appeared by satellite from Cyprus. He got the question -- clearly he'd been briefed on it -- and was ready with his answer:

"I don't know. Ask Katie."

He's seen Couric's comments, it seems.

"I don't know if she took a shot at me with that or what that was about," he said. "I have four ties and five suits, and whichever one is on the right in the closet, that's the one I put on."

Now, I don't for a minute believe that's true. I suspect his clothing allowance exceeds my annual salary. Still, however much of a clotheshorse he is or is not, we asked him a question and he answered it in such a way as to not be off-putting but also to not let us dwell on it. Well-played.

http://www.azcentral.com/blogs/index.php?blog=5&blogtype=Entertainment

TV Notebook
ABC pulls up Mideast anchor

By Paul J. Gough The Hollywood Reporter July 20, 2006

NEW YORK -- ABC sent its anchor back to New York after several days in the Middle East and NBC was apparently leaning that way although both networks were continuing with their expanded reporting presence in the region.

The Mideast crisis hit its eighth day Wednesday and has engaged high-profile journalists like NBC's Brian Williams, ABC's Charles Gibson, CNN's Anderson Cooper and Fox News Channel's Shepard Smith.

NBC and ABC decided late last week to send their anchors, a decision that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars each day.

And while they weren't saying how long they would remain in the region, ABC confirmed that Gibson was scheduled to leave Cyprus for New York after Wednesday's broadcast.

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/thr/television/brief_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1002876483

TV Critics Summer Press Tour
Live from the Television Critics Association press tour

USA Today TV reporters Gary Levin and Ann Oldenburg and USA Today TV critic Robert Bianco are in Pasadena, Calif., covering the annual Television Critics Association press tour. They'll be filing periodic updates throughout the week.

Anne Heche on climbing 'Trees'

Anne Heche's role in ABC's Men In Trees is sort of anti-type casting.

For her first star part in a TV series, Heche plays a relationship/life coach who writes find-a-man self-help books. "Clearly, I've never had a life coach," says Heche.

The role may seem to be an odd match for the actress, but Heche says she was drawn to the character's faith in romance and interest in self-exploration. Plus, she was looking for a TV series because she now has a husband (cameraman Coley Laffoon) and a child (Homer, 4), and TV offers stable employment.

"It seems like the greatest job on earth and I've been trying to get it for five years," she says.

Heche, of course, went through a very rough public stint, which she chronicled in her autobiographical Call Me Crazy. Which led a critic to ask her, haltingly, how she was doing, because she seemed at peace with herself and very, well ... "Sane?" Heche broke in.

"I'm very blessed. I worked very hard to get here. ... What else can I say?" —Robert Bianco

How much Mick can we expect?

Mick Jagger is one of the biggest stars of ABC's fall lineup, even if viewers may hardly see him. But the title of Let's Rob Mick Jagger was shortened to Let's Rob..., changed to The Knights of Prosperity, and might change yet again before its Oct. 17 premiere. The show stars Donal Logue as leader of a gang of inept burglers (that would be the knights) intent on looting the Rolling Stone's luxe Manhattan pad.

Logue and the other knights are "innocent and they're naive in some ways," he says. "They're people that people overlook all the time,but they want a bit of what's theirs. And I think in a way, it helps make them more sympathetic."

A potential problem: Jagger has yet to commit to any future episodes beyond an inspired turn in the pilot, which might impact the success or failure of their scheme. And should the show succeed, its characters will try to pull off some other caper in subsequent seasons, which "forces us toreinvigorate, challenge ourselves (and) come up with abrand-new exciting premise," says co-creator Rob Burnett, David Letterman's longtime producer. So "we want to be careful not to oversell Mick."

They can't oversell Sofia Vergara, the show's "hottie" as Esperanza, a strong woman who volunteers to join the knights. The actress had a different career in mind: "I went to three years of dental school in Colombia," she told critics. "But then all this voluptuousness didn't let me finish." —Gary Levin

No more 'Tonight'

ABC tonight drops the Tonight from its flagship evening newscast.

The network has renamed the broadcast World News with Charles Gibson, a recognition of how daily webcasts, podcasts and radio reports — now planned at all the major networks — make the operation an all-day news outlet.

"World News is not on only at night, so we've caught up with with we've been doing for some time," Gibson told TV critics via satellite from Cyprus, where he's covering the evacuation of Americans from Lebanon. Gibson's name in the title also is new; the broadcast has been called simply World News Tonight since Peter Jennings' death last year.

Executive producer Jon Banner says the addition of Gibson and the move of Katie Couric to CBS may boost interest all around. "You have two morning powerhouses going to the evening news," Banner says. "The renewed focus makes all those questions about the evening news' vitality from time to time disappear." —Gary Levin

http://www.usatoday.com/life/television/news/2006-tv-press-tour.htm

TV Notebook
E-Ring zapped again

NBC has announced a burn off of a remaining E-Ring episode for Saturday, August 5th. (I frankly forget how many E-Rings remain.)

But late Wednesday the network quietly announced it would show a two-hour “Dateline” from 8-10 ET/PT.

So E-Ring disappears.

Again

Eureka was fun to watch. Glad it did well.

TV Critics Summer Press Tour
In Hindsight

By Diane Werts Newsday Staff Writer in her TV Press Tour blog

Press tour isn't just about looking ahead to upcoming shows and the fall season. It's also about looking back to figure out what-the-heck-happened-there?

ABC, for instance, seems to have squandered at least two potential hits last season -- "Commander In Chief," which premiered to huge ratings before going into a creative and scheduling tailspin, and "Invasion," which should have benefited from a huge Wednesday night "Lost" lead-in.

Network programing chief Steve McPherson admitted here that ABC screwed up "Commander," dumping creator Rod Lurie when production fell behind schedule, then pulling the show off the air, then bringing it back under new producers, plus monkeying with time slots throughout. Looking back, McPherson says, he'd "probably bring it on later in the season and led Rod prep for it longer than he had a chance to. He was the voice of that show. I think the week-to-week production of a series is a real education, and that was what was hard for him," coming from features like "The Contender" and "The Last Castle."

"In the case of 'Invasion," he said, ABC ran the show an entire season, despite considerable viewership falloff from "Lost," because "we felt like the work was really good and stuck with it till the end. The storytelling got better and better, and there were some brilliant performances." In hindsight, maybe the time period wasn't right, he wondered. But ABC never tried moving the show, either. "Those are the difficult ones," McPherson said, "the ones that you really can't point to flaws in the show and in your heart of hearts answer the reason it didn't work." With "Invasion," though, the ratings falloff "was dramatic and continued to erode throughout the year."

Less dramatic but maybe more discouraging because of the series' longstanding audience devotion was creative unsteadiness over at The WB with "Gilmore Girls" (which this fall moves to the new merged WB/UPN network, The CW). Fans raged on the internet all last season about drippy storylines for Alexis Bledel's Rory, wimpiness from Lauren Graham's normally spirited Lorelai, and general off-the-rails plotting in such developments as Luke's "surprise" daughter.

"It wasn't my favorite stuff to play," Graham sort of grudgingly admitted here, clearly not wanting to say anything negative about recently exited series creator Amy Sherman-Palladino. The colorfully opinionated producer and her director-husband Dan Palladino left the series after contract disputes with the studio, and some fans saw the season-ending bed-sharing of Lorelai and baby-daddy ex Christopher as a sort of one-finger salute on their way out the door. After waiting so long for Lorelai to get together with Luke, devotees couldn't fathom all the flip-flopping behavior.

"It was a believable conflict, and a believable obstacle between them," Graham carefully declared, hemming, hawing and umm-ing her way around critics' questions, "and that's why the end to me made perfect sense. Because she tried to be in a place that wasn't natural to her, that wasn't who she is. And ultimately she couldn't take it anymore."

But it all felt an awful lot like justifying. Both Graham and Bledel gingerly alluded to changes in the "structure" of the writing staff that implied they might now have more input in the characters, or at least more insight into plotlines, under new showrunner David Rosenthal. He worked on "Gilmore Girls" under the Palladinos last year after such credits as "Hope & Faith" and "Spin City."

Rosenthal put the best face on it during his joint CW panel with Graham and Bledel. "Life is full of drama and conflict and confusion, and choices you make and choices you regret, and choices you fail to make and regret," he said carefully. "It certainly presents a lot of dramatic and personal issues, and that's the stuff of good drama. So yeah. She [Amy] has left us with a very full plate."

If they can take a big enough bite out of it, "Gilmore" might yet continue to fixate its passionate fanbase past this season. "I really support David," said essential star Graham, "and I hope that we have such a great season that it feels like there's reason to keep going."

http://newsday.typepad.com/entertainment_tv_tour/

TV Critics Summer Press Tour
Not So Tactful Critics and ‘Brothers & Sisters’


By Christopher Lisotta TVWeek.com in the “Critical Eye” TV Press Tour blog Wednesday, July 19th, 2006

Critics at the press tour aren’t exactly the most tactful bunch.

Take this afternoon. One critic asked series regular Rachel Griffiths at the session for ABC’s family drama “Brothers & Sisters,” now that she has gotten “through this baby business” was she ready to get back to working in television?

Griffiths gave the critic quite a face over the term “baby business,” which apparently referred to the birth of her child.

“After I sold my baby,” Griffiths said to big laughs. “Oh, did I do well. A TV deal is nothing. My babies go for millions.”

Griffiths was planning on staying away from a series before talking to the show’s producers.

“I agreed to a meeting, and really hoped they would be *******s,” she said, “and was utterly charmed.”

Initially creator Jon Robin Baitz envisioned star Griffith’s co-star Calista Flockhart playing a baker in a cupcake factory, “but it seemed under-dramatic to everyone but me.”

Instead Flockhart’s character was changed to be a politically conservative radio host.

“She’s not Ann Coutler,” director Ken Olin said to one concerned critic. “She’s not insane.”

“Brothers & Sisters” is something of a mystery to critics, since ABC has not released a copy of the pilot. The show has traded out from the original pilot Betty Buckley, who played the mother in the sprawling family drama, for Sally Field. That wasn’t the only change; Matthew Rhys took over the role initially played by Jonathan LaPaglia.

The network “invited us to try again,” Baitz said of the extensive re-shoots that are required thanks to the casting changes.

But back to the tactful critic department. Another of my colleagues asked Field about her last ABC series venture, “The Court,” which died a very early death in 2002.

“Thank you for mentioning that,” Field said sweetly. “Can you please spell out your name for me? ”

Field admitted she knew before “Court” hit the air it was going to tank, but she was philosophical about it.

“You always face failure in life,” she said. “It’s better to fail with a big, huge, loud splat.”

She noted ABC was a very different place, and had high hopes for the new series.

“If we splat, I hope it’s really bold and colorful,” she said.

One critic asked about the apparent “Alias” connection to “Brothers,” considering “Alias” alums Patricia Wetting, Ron Rifkin and Balthazar Getty are co-starring and Olin is directing.

Executive producer Marti Noxon said the joke on the set was the new series was really just a place for the “Alias” characters to hide undercover.

“Jennifer Garner will appear in fifth or sixth episode and say ‘psych,’” Noxon said.

http://blogs.tvweek.com/?cat=5

Washington Notebook
Willner: Get Rid of Must-Buy

By Ted Hearn Multichannel.com 7/19/2006

A cable-operator executive Wednesday urged a group of House Republicans to eliminate a law that requires cable subscribers to buy their local TV signals before any cable networks, saying that the change would create regulatory parity with satellite-TV providers, according to a communications lobbyist familiar with the proposal.

Insight Communications CEO Michael Willner pitched the idea of eliminating the "must-buy" basic-cable requirement in a private meeting on Capitol Hill ostensibly about retransmission consent -- the legal name given to private carriage negotiations between local broadcasters and cable or satellite TV providers.

The meeting was called by House Energy and Commerce Committee chairman Joe Barton (R-Texas), who attended along with Reps. Nathan Deal (R-Ga.), Charles Bass (R-N.H.), Paul Gillmor (R-Ohio) and Fred Upton (R-Mich.).

Deal and Bass have been concerned that local TV stations have been abusing their bargaining power vis-à-vis cable in a manner that is increasing the size of expanded basic with unwanted programming and causing the price of the package to swell, both to the detriment of cable customers. TV stations claim that retransmission consent is functioning properly as a free-market carriage mechanism.

Willner, according to the communications lobbyist, told the lawmakers that it was unfair to force cable subscribers to buy the broadcast-basic tier when satellite-TV subscribers do not face an identical burden.

Barton aides, the communications lobbyist said, interrupted Willner at that point to note that he was raising an issue unrelated to retransmission consent, the reason for the meeting.

A cable industry lobbyist confirmed Willner's proposal, adding that Willner said it was a big issue, but there were other issues, as well. The lobbyist added that Willner’s point was that satellite and cable customers are treated differently.

Under federal law, the basic tier -- which remains price-regulated by local franchising authorities until the cable system demonstrates that 15% of area households subscribe to other pay TV providers -- has to include all local TV signals. Cable operators do have the option of including cable networks in the basic tier.

Cable subscribers can't buy expanded basic or HBO without first purchasing the basic tier, which, in effect, is a government-imposed buy-through requirement. Meanwhile, a cable operator with a regulated basic tier can't require a subscriber to buy expanded basic prior to buying HBO.

Satellite-TV subscribers do not need to buy a local-TV-station package. Moreover, satellite-TV providers do not even need to offer local TV stations, although EchoStar Communications offers such a package in about 165 markets and DirecTV in about 130. The United States has 210 separate TV markets.

Cable operators and programmers have been hostile to mandatory carriage of local TV stations since the day it became law in October 1992. Cable fought it all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court but lost in a 5-4 vote in 1997.

Willner's proposal was not new. For years, Cablevision Systems chairman Charles F. Dolan -- in speeches and Senate Commerce Committee testimony -- has called for elimination of the must-buy requirement, saying that it discriminated against cable networks to which customers assigned greater value.

"It is difficult to imagine a more unique and counterintuitive regulation," Dolan said in an October 2001 speech to the Media Institute in Washington, D.C. "It is a concept invented solely for the cable industry and, in this era of formidable competition, we believe its time has passed."

http://www.multichannel.com/index.asp?layout=articlePrint&articleid=CA6354852

The Digital Revolution
Panasonic To Ship $70K, 103” PDP In Dec.

By Greg Tarr TWICE 7/19/2006

Secaucus, N.J. — Panasonic formally announced that it will begin selling in December the 103W-inch 1,080p plasma TV, which made its debut at International CES, at a $69,999.95 suggested retail price.

The TH-103PZ600U, which is being billed as “the world’s largest plasma display,” will be produced in limited quantities on a build-to-order basis through select high-end A/V specialty dealers, but will come with a three-year in-home limited warranty, which Panasonic said is “unprecedented in the industry.”

“Panasonic didn’t create the world’s largest plasma TV as a technology demo for a trade show,” Andrew Nelkin, Panasonic’s display group VP, said in statement announcing the price. “We created it because, as worldwide sales of plasma TVs continue on a meteoric rise, the market is seeking bigger displays on which people can experience the high definition lifestyle.

“As important as it is to provide customers with the biggest and the best image, it is equally as important to Panasonic to provide extreme customer satisfaction,” said Nelkin. “With that goal in mind, we are offering customers an industry-first three-year in-home limited warranty with the 103-inch plasma. We believe our plasma TV customers are entitled to extra assistance to ensure they enjoy an easy transition to HDTV and get the full value of their investment.”

The TH-103PZ600U is said to have a contrast ratio of 4,000:1, and 4,096 equivalent steps of gradation. Its effective display area is more than 89.3 inches wide by more than 50.2 inches high.

“The super-size 103-inch 1080p panel is equivalent in size to four 50-inch Panasonic plasma displays,” Panasonic said.

The 103W-inch plasma TV joins Panasonic’s comprehensive line of plasma TVs including models in the following screen sizes: 37W inches, 42W inches, 50W inches, 58W inches and 65W inches (1,080p).

The 65W-inch 1,080p model, TH-65PX600U, will carry a $9,999.95 suggested retail price, and will ship in September, the company said.

The 103W-inch and other Panasonic PDPs, will be covered by Panasonic’s recently announced Panasonic plasma concierge program, which provides advice and answers from trained specialists to help users setup and use their Panasonic PDP displays.

Due to size and weight, the 103W-inch model will require custom installation service, the company said.

http://www.twice.com/article/CA6354788.html

That is good news, haven't watched it but have been looking forward to it.


Fred, upcoming airings.

07/21/2006 07:00 PM EUREKA PILOT
07/22/2006 03:00 AM EUREKA PILOT
07/23/2006 04:30 PM EUREKA PILOT
07/24/2006 11:00 PM EUREKA PILOT


Thanks Jim -- it's now TiVoed

So, I wonder how ABC's "The One" would have looked on that 103" Panny Plasma?

TV Critics Summer Press Tour
ABC's 'Betty' could be belle of the fall

By Melanie McFarland Seattle Post-Intelligencer TV Critic Thursday, July 20, 2006

America Ferrera sat in front of TV critics Tuesday afternoon, looking completely different from the character she plays on ABC's "Ugly Betty," which premieres Sept. 22. If you've seen Ferrera in "Real Women Have Curves," or "The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants" you know that she's a lovely person by the standards of Hollywood and Middle America.

But if you haven't, once the show premieres, it may be hard to recognize her without the braces, frizzy hair, thick glasses and ugly poncho with the word "Guadalajara" screaming across the front. One critic acted as if he didn't when she was sitting on the panel in front of us. "I'll take that as a compliment," Ferrera said.

By the way, the only reason I'm focusing so much on Ferrera's looks is because her series requires her to dress the part of the title. "Ugly Betty" stands a good chance of sailing in the wake of "The Devil Wears Prada," although the original "Ugly " came first. ABC's version has been adapted from a Colombian telenovela.

ABC is hoping that Americans will be able to relate to Ferrera's character, a plump girl who has been hired at a high-fashion magazine because she's the only assistant with whom the handsome, clueless new editor won't sleep.

The point of the series, explained Ferrera and executive producer Salma Hayek (who displayed less cleavage than the last time she spoke with critics) is to showcase the ways in which beauty radiating from the inside trumps the skin-deep variety every time.

" 'Betty' is the most beautiful opportunity that's ever come across my path," Ferrera said, adding that it has always been her mission "to represent a whole generation of young women who don't recognize themselves in anything they're watching. Whether it be magazines or TV or movies, they're invisible. And to me, it's an honor to take on this role, and I love, love, love being her."

One thing we didn't love, love, love was the name change: It originally was titled "Betty the Ugly," which to us, poetically reflected Betty Suarez's uphill battle in the face of fashion's superficiality. Producers explained that "Ugly Betty" is actually the proper translation of the title, which isn't quite right, because the original series is called "Yo soy Betty, la fea," which translates to "I am Betty, the ugly."

That's surface quibbling. If audiences in the U.S. can embrace the series, the only name we'll be praising will be America, the beautiful.

Other ABC stuff

Let's skip straight to the information you're dying to learn. "Lost" returns Oct. 4, with J.J. Abrams back in the writing room. Though Damon Lindelof did well enough without Abrams, it'll be good to see what the "Mission: Impossible 3" director can do with the third season.

The downside is that "Lost" will only run for six or seven episodes, before taking a 13-week break. That's what we get for complaining about all those reruns, a three-month abandonment.

ABC Entertainment president Stephen McPherson acknowledged that running 22 episodes nonstop from the fall through the spring would be preferable in a perfect world, but the production schedule makes that impossible. "We just can't get the shows done in that amount of time," he said.

He'll have to hope that during "Lost's" excruciating downtime, we'll fall in love with "Day Break," a thriller that stars Taye Diggs. Having seen him in person, let me just say the man is a Godiva bar with legs. However! How much do you want to bet that Diggs' show will pay for displacing "Lost"? The scorn due to be heaped upon this show could be substantial.

Sure, it's too early to predict whether "Day Break" will be worth pushing "Lost" off the schedule until the spring, but take a little comfort in knowing that we don't have to deal with those annoying reruns or clip shows.

Next on the scale of shows we care about: "Grey's Anatomy" returns at 9 p.m. on Thursday, Sept. 21, where it will take on "CSI" and provide a strong lead-in to Abrams' other production, "Six Degrees." McPherson doesn't expect to dethrone CBS, but said, "We're coming on with a strong contender and hope to do some business there."

Next: "Desperate Housewives" premieres at 9 p.m. Sept. 24, and there may be hope for the old hag yet. Marc Cherry, creator mastermind behind the delicious first season, has retaken the role of showrunner. (Tom Spezialy, the guy to blame for season two, has left the series.) And, McPherson said, "The early scripts and the story lines and the arcs and the mystery, I think, are a lot stronger from the get-go."

ABC's new season actually begins Tuesday, Sept. 12, with two hours of "Dancing With the Stars." (Actually, it begins with a new "20/20 " on Sept. 8, but do you care as much? Probably not.) "Dancing's" competition shows will run for two hours for the first two weeks, then scale back to become the 90-minute lead-in support for the new comedy "Help Me Help You," debuting on Sept. 26.

Indeed, ABC's schedule still gives us plenty about which to rant and rave, emphasis on the rave part. But ABC's freshmen roster is one of the strongest among the major networks, although each series comes off with varying degrees of success. Each one was watchable from start to finish.

Actually, I take that back -- "Big Day," which operates under the assumption that people are dying to spend a season watching some tart's frou-frou wedding day, is completely flushable.

There's always an element of doom to this game. But give credit to ABC for caring enough to entertain somebody, somewhere, for whatever amount of time that these series remain on the air.

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/printer2/index.asp?ploc=t&refer=http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/tv/278123_tv20.html

Cable Nielsen Notebook
Sci Fi Scores with Eureka

By Anne Becker Broadcasting & Cable7/19/2006
Except that AFTER I'd programmed my DVR, they moved it back 5 minutes, so I missed the end! !#@$!%&$-heads.

Xesdeeni

The TV Column
The Winds of Wardrobe

By Lisa de Moraes Washington Post Staff Writer Thursday, July 20, 2006; C01

PASADENA, Calif., July 19 News division Q&A sessions at Summer TV Press Tour 2006 give critics a welcome break from the superficial chatter with stars of new series to discuss Things That Matter with Very Important TV Journalists.

Things like what Charlie Gibson is wearing, and whether he should go by "Charlie" or "Charles" now that he's anchor of ABC's evening newscast.

And, how about this for Things That Matter: ABC News announced Wednesday that its evening newscast will henceforth no longer be called "World News Tonight."

"Tonight" is out, because ABC News is expanding the brand with news updates throughout the day on its Web site and an afternoon Webcast, too.

ABC News also announced it has added "With Charles Gibson" to the show title because "he's our anchor and it is only appropriate that the broadcast should bear his name," ABC News President David Westin explained in a prepared statement in case the critics didn't understand.

The air was electric with excitement in the Ritz-Carlton Huntington ballroom before the session with Gibson.

A few days earlier, one male critic -- we'll call him Alan Sepinwall of the Newark Star-Ledger -- had asked Katie Couric what she planned to wear on her first night as anchor of "CBS Evening News."

And though just a few weeks earlier, when she was a TV journalist at NBC, Couric had been tickled pink with a "Today" show segment on Katie Fashion, and though CBS News President Sean McManus reports to a guy who wants to sex up the news, McManus and Couric got all sniffy with Sepinwall for having asked the question. McManus wondered out loud whether Sepinwall had put the same question to Charlie Gibson before he started anchoring ABC's newscast.

Sepinwall hadn't, but promised he would when Gibson appeared at a Q&A session later in the tour.

Of course that was before Sepinwall knew Gibson was going to be beamed in via satellite from Cyprus, adding that extra layer of what-the -- ness to the question:

While you're covering the bloodshed in the Middle East, could you tell us who you're wearing?

Still, Sepinwall is a man of his word, and the question had to be asked. Gibson's people had been prepped in hope of avoiding one of those withering "what qualifies you to cover me" exchanges to which Gibson can sometimes be prone.

"I'm told he'll make a joke about it at the beginning, and if he doesn't, I'll ask," Sepinwall told The TV Column in an exclusive pre-Q&A interview.

"Don't make it the first one," advised another critic sitting nearby.

It was the second question, after "Are your bags always packed now?"

"I apologize in advance because when I made this promise I didn't know you would be coming to us from Cyprus; what are you wearing and how much thought do you put into your wardrobe choices?" asked Sepinwall, who was wearing Gap.

"I don't know -- ask Katie," Gibson said, dodging the question.

"She wanted me to ask you ," Sepinwall said.

"I don't know if she took a shot at me with that or what that was all about," Gibson replied. "I have four ties and five suits and whichever one is on the right in the closet, that's the one I put on."

Gibson indicated with his thumb and index finger how much he thinks viewers care about all the intrigue surrounding who got to be the anchor of ABC's evening newscast.

But he also explained in great detail how he got the job:

According to Gibson, Westin told him he wanted Gibson to anchor the newscast temporarily because he had "a new concept" for the program.

"We never could agree as to how long that finite period should be. . . . And I said to him, 'Honestly, David, if people know when you're going to get out of the chair before you ever sit down in the chair, then you never really have the job. . . . If what you really want to move to is a sort of new concept of 'World News' then get on with it now.' "

But the co-anchor idea, which Gibson said "had a lot of merit," was "stillborn" when Bob Woodruff was injured in Iraq and Elizabeth Vargas became pregnant, he said.

"It's sort of an accident of circumstances that I'm here, but very pleased to be so."

Asked about his competitors, Gibson called Couric "a Spence mom" -- her daughters attend the tony New York private school where Gibson's wife until recently was headmistress -- and NBC's Brian Williams "a terrific broadcaster" for whom he has "an enormous amount of respect."

Gibson took a hard line on the Charlie-vs.-Charles question:

"If you've listened over the years to the introduction on 'Good Morning America' the announcer has always said 'Charles Gibson' and then people who were on the program always called me 'Charlie.' And I sign my checks 'Charles.' . . . The name is 'Charles' and the nickname is 'Charlie' . . . so there's really nothing new on that on 'World News.' "

One critic asked whether Gibson thought it was more important for a network news division to "flood the zone" in a hot news region, as McManus said he has done in the Middle East, or to maintain bureaus in these regions. Gibson came down strongly in favor of bureaus: "One of the things that you fight hardest for is to maintain the budgets that give us good representation all around the world. It's better if you've got people in place. . . . What's really important is that we do maintain coverage around the world and people around the world and bureaus around the world. It's really key."

Then a critic mentioned that Ted Koppel had appeared at Summer TV Press Tour 2006 a few days earlier and said no American broadcast network has a news bureau in India -- the world's largest democracy, with three times the population of the United States -- which he said was indicative of the problem with the networks' foreign news coverage. The critic wondered what Gibson thought of that.

Gibson began to do a soft-shoe. It went like this:

Ted's not wrong, but also -- well, Jon made a good point about that.

He was referring to Jon Banner, his exec producer, who was sitting next to him. Turning to Banner, Gibson said, "Well -- you should make it."

Then Banner began to do the soft-shoe. It went like this:

I think big countries deserve big coverage and Jim Sciutto, our senior foreign correspondent, was in India for a week, did a three-part series just five, six months ago and was in China to do the same thing. So I think the idea and the advantage of air travel and satellite feeds and the ease that we can communicate from around the world allows us to spend an awful lot of time and effort covering places that we don't necessarily have permanent offices in.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/07/19/AR2006071902033_pf.html


(Picture by Craig Sjodin -- ABC)

TV Critics Summer Press Tour
The face rings a bell

By Alan Sepinwall of the Newark Star-Ledger in the “All TV In Hollywood” blog July 20, 2006

ABC's non-party party was a weird but successful affair. It had all the traditional non-party hallmarks: bad venue (a children's museum/zoo on the edge of Pasadena), cramped space, too loud music and, in a new twist, minimal lighting, so once the sun went down you had to squint to see if you could recognize anyone. (Rumor has it Eva Longoria was there, but between the darkness and her own petite size, ain't no way I was going to spot her.)

But for all the problems, it was the most productive evening I've had at the tour. I sat down and listened to "Desperate Housewives" creator Marc Cherry reaffirm his status as the most honest man in show business by telling critics in detail everything that went wrong with the show last season and why it was his fault.

A friend and I hit "Lost" showrunner Carlton Cuse up for as much information about the new season as he was willing to offer, plus answers to some unresolved issues from last year. I had good interviews with Tim Daly and America Ferrera, stars of two of the season's best new shows ("The Nine" and "Ugly Betty," respectively).

I'll be writing about all of that in the coming days and weeks as I have a chance to transcribe all those interviews. But the personal highlight of the night involved, of all people, Calista Flockhart.

Now, I was never a huge "Ally McBeal" fan. I was already complaining about shark-jumping (or whatever we called it in the days before jumptheshark.com existed) by the dancing baby episode, which was midway through season one. But Calista was the star of the most buzzed-about show on television, and she was a Rutgers alum, so tour after tour, I would go and talk with her at Fox's non-party parties. And every meeting always began the same way:

Me: "Hi, Calista. Have time for a few questions?"

Calista: "Sure. Don't I know you from somewhere?"

Me: "Um, yeah... I'm one of the TV critics. You see me every six months at one of these things."

Calista: "I know that, but you look exactly like somebody I know."

Me: "Who?"

Calista: "I can't remember."

This would happen every. single. time. Then "Ally McBeal" went away, and so did Calista, to spend the last five years raising her son. But now he's ready for school, and she's ready to return to acting, as star of ABC's new ensemble drama "Sons & Daughters." (Which, by the way, is the only show on any network where critics weren't sent a pilot episode to watch -- and that includes a midseason Fox show where everything is being thrown out but the title and the premise.)

So as I was wandering around the musuem grounds, I saw a throng gathered around a tiny woman who, after some squinting, I recognized as our former heroine. I walked over, waited for Calista's personal publicist to disperse the gaggle, and sat down for my interview, joined by a few other critics. One of them reminded Calista of an encounter they'd shared at the TCA Awards years ago, and asked if she remembered him. She said she did, then turned to me and asked, "Do you remember me?"

Not exactly sure how to respond (I mean, she was Ally McBeal, you know), I said, "Yes, but do you remember me?" She smiled and said she did, and I reminded her of her recurring confusion over who I reminded her of.

Without missing a beat, she said, "Craig Carlisle." She then suggested I Google him. A few hours and interviews later, I returned to my hotel room, fired up the laptop and, after some diligent web-searching, I found my man: a playwright and theater director who's worked on both coasts, in whose "Bob Funk" Calista appeared back in '99. (And, since she was in the theater for years before "Ally McBeal," they probably worked together in other shows.)

Mystery solved. It always weirded me out when she would be on the verge of recognizing me and then lose the name at the last second. So now I know. And if "Brothers & Sisters" is a hit and our paths are going to begin crossing again twice a year, I'll have a new opening line: "Hey, Calista, I'm the guy who reminds you of Craig Carlisle. Have time for a few questions?"

http://www.nj.com/weblogs/tv/index.ssf?/mtlogs/njo_alan/archives/2006_07.html#163115

TV Critics Summer Press Tour
Flat-panel TVs get less pricey faster

By Michelle Kessler USA Today

SAN FRANCISCO — Lower-than-expected demand for flat-panel TVs is spurring makers to cut prices — setting the stage for a bargain-filled back-to-school and holiday shopping season.

A year ago, a 37-inch flat-panel model typically cost about $4,000. Now, some can be found for as little as $1,100, says television analyst Rosemary Abowd at Pacific Media Associates. From January to May, the most recent data available, average flat-panel prices tumbled more than 12%, she says.

Expect prices to fall even more in coming months, Abowd says. TV makers generally offer discounts during the busy fall and winter shopping seasons.

Prices "are good and are only going to get better," says television analyst Chris Connery at researcher DisplaySearch.

Why the glut? Optimistic TV makers overestimated demand.

LG.Philips LCD last week reported disappointing earnings and warned of an inventory glut. The joint venture of electronics giants LG and Philips is a leading maker of TV displays, a component that usually accounts for more than 50% of a flat-panel's cost. Philips Electronics this week reported a 69% drop in quarterly profit because of the shortfall.

Rival AU Optronics has reported similar supply worries. So did 3M, which makes other flat-panel parts. (Another TV maker, Samsung Electric, issued a stronger report, but many analysts say it was because of share gains, not market strength.)

These TV makers and others thought sales would surge in advance of the World Cup this month, especially in soccer-mad Europe. That would have provided a welcome boom during a normally slow time. But the sales jump never happened.

The industry is still growing fast. Almost 42 million flat-panel liquid crystal display (LCD) sets are expected to be sold this year, about double the 21 million sold last year, DisplaySearch says. Sales of a competing kind of flat-panel, plasma, also are rising.

"Growth isn't falling off the face of the Earth, it's just not as explosive as some people thought," Abowd says. She says companies may also have overestimated the number of people with enough disposable income for a flat-panel.

Companies already are adapting. LG.Philips cut its capital equipment budget. Glassmaker Corning lowered its flat-panel sales estimates.

It's difficult to say how long the oversupply will last during the slow summer sales months. JPMorgan equity analyst J.J. Park predicted in a recent research note that it would endure well into the second half of the year. But Park expects prices to pick up near the end of the year and into 2007. TV makers may also take advantage of low component prices to expand their often-thin margins.

http://www.usatoday.com/money/industries/technology/2006-07-18-flat-tv_x.htm

Eureka was fun to watch. Glad it did well.
I liked it too, lot of good looking women on this show as well, too bad it's on crappy looking SciFi. :)

Nielsen Notes
A 'One' night stand?

Alphabet's new series way out of tune
By Rick Kissell Variety.com

ABC's music talent competition "The One" opened Tuesday night to cancel-me-now ratings.

Promos for the Alphabet skein called it "The show Fox didn't want you to see," but apparently most Americans weren't interested either.

The two-hour preem averaged a shockingly low 1.1 rating/3 share in adult 18-49 and 3.08 million viewers overall, according to Nielsen. It's the weakest premiere for any reality show on any net and also below all series bows in ABC history.

And among all series premieres on the Big Four broadcast nets, only 2003 Nathan Lane laffer "Charlie Lawrence" on CBS opened to a lower 18-49 score (0.9/3).

In adults 18-49, the preem of "The One: Making a Music Star" -- based on the smash Spanish Endemol skein "Operacion Triunfo" -- lagged not only NBC, Fox and CBS but also Univision, Sci Fi, FX and MTV.

ABC declined to comment on the numbers Wednesday and was sticking to its plan of … airing its second seg Tuesday.

Fox, meanwhile, seemed to take some glee in ABC's Tuesday troubles, offering in its Wednesday morning ratings analysis to reporters that the show's weak start "proves yet again that regardless of all the wannabes and imitators, there is only one 'American Idol.' "

Puny numbers rep a blow to ABC, which is suffering a tough summer ratings-wise and was counting on twice-weekly "The One" to give it some momentum heading into fall.

Net has had no luck at all with its summer launches -- with "How to Get the Guy" and "Master of Champions" busts as well -- and some of its top scripted skeins like "Lost" and "Desperate Housewives" are drawing tiny auds with repeats.

Critics are cheering the net's fall offerings, but thanks to meager summer circulation and no "Monday Night Football" in early September, the net won't be able to promote the shows to large auds on its own air.

TV Critics Summer Press Tour
'Ugly' looks good to ABC

By David Bianculli New York Daily News TV Critic July 20, 2006

PASADENA, Calif. - In its quest to launch a Friday-night hit this fall, ABC is playing ugly.

"Ugly Betty," that is, the new title of its hour-long comedy-drama series based on Colombian telenovela "Yo Soy Betty La Fea."

"It was a phenomenon in Colombia," executive producer Salma Hayek explained, calling the original version a groundbreaking work. "Usually, telenovelas are a lot more melodramatic. And this one was dramatic, but had an amazing sense of humor."

The ABC version, whose new "Ugly Betty" title recently was changed from the much more intriguing "Betty the Ugly," stars America Ferrera as an ambitious, intelligent and kind-hearted young woman who lands a job as an assistant at a fashion magazine. She achieves this even though her full figure, mouth full of braces and clueless fashion sense (on the first day of work she wears a bullfight-red poncho embroidered with the word "Guadalajara") make her stand out glaringly from all the runway-model types around her.

"I didn't know how fat and ugly I was until I started going on auditions," Ferrera said, displaying the same charm as her character (and a lot more poise and polish). "I don't feel that way inside."

She added, though, that she didn't think the big (fake) braces and loud clothing were extreme exaggerations.

"I walked through New York City," said the actress, who was raised in California, "and found a couple of Bettys like myself on the street - so it's not outlandish."

Hayek makes a cameo appearance in the premiere, playing - overplaying, actually - a sexy nurse in a TV telenovela seen by Betty's family. It's a role Hayek intends to continue because she enjoys it so much.

"I'm the only one who started in telenovelas," Hayek said, referring to her "Ugly Betty" cast, which also includes Vanessa Williams and Eric Mabius. "It was a lot of fun to go back and do it, making fun of myself."

Meanwhile, fellow executive producer Ben Silverman thinks that while the telenovela form is suddenly in vogue, the one that inspired "Ugly Betty" is especially resonant.

"It is an eternal show," Silverman said of "Betty Le Fea." "It is 'Cinderella.' It is 'My Fair Lady.' It has worked a thousand times in a thousand places in a thousand ways, and it was a story we really wanted to tell."

And they will tell it on Friday nights, when a lot of dateless people may be looking for something to watch on TV.

http://www.nydailynews.com/entertainment/ent_radio/story/436501p-367790c.html

TV Critics Summer Press Tour
Some Casting Notes

Camryn Manheim has signed to join CBS'’s "Ghost Whisperer" as a series regular, in the role of Jennifer Love Hewitt's friend. Manheim is best known for her role as Ellenor Frutt on "The Practice."

CBS's "Close to Home" has added two new members to its cast: John Seda, who has appeared in a number of films and television shows such as "Third Watch," "Law & Order," and "Twelve Monkeys," and Cress Williams, who has made appearances on shows such as "Grey's Anatomy" and "Veronica Mars." Both will be portraying detectives.

NBC Universal Television Studio has signed Spike Lee for a one-year development deal. Lee recently directed a pilot for CBS as well as the 2005 miniseries "Miracle Boys," and will now be working with NBC to create new dramas for the network.

Roger Bart, the late wacko druggist on “Desperate Housewives,” has joined the cast of the Sci Fi Channel's new miniseries "The Lost Room" to play the villain. The series stars Peter Krause as a detective who finds a portal to another universe.

http://www.medialifemagazine.com/artman/publish/cat_index_26.asp

(From Marc Berman’s Thursday, July 20, 2006, Programming Insider column at Mediaweek.com )
On the ABC Panel Front

THE KNIGHTS OF PROSPERITY Tuesday 9 p.m.

The Premise:
In the wake of a co-worker’s death, an aging janitor (Donal Logue) who dreams of opening a bar recruits a group of misfits into his gang – the Knights of Prosperity – for a heist to finance their dreams. The initial target: rock legend Mick Jagger.

Lead-in:
Dancing With the Stars

Competition:
The Unit (CBS), Law & Order: Criminal Intent (NBC), House (Fox), Veronica Mars (CW)

Who Was on the Panel:
Donal Logue, Josh Grisetti, Maz Jobrani, Kevin Michael Richardson, Sofia Vergara, and executive producers Rob Burnett and Jon Beckerman.

The Scoop:
Since you all must be wondering what is was like to shoot the pilot with Mick Jagger, according to Rob Burnett:

”He was great. To his credit, we flew to New Zealand to shoot his stuff there because they had just finished a huge tour in that part of the world. I believe he delayed his vacation a day or two for us, so he had all the reason to be cranky and exhausted, but he couldn't have been nicer, couldn't have been more professional. And most of the stuff that he did was, you know, was really kind of a framework.

Some of the gags came from him, and he ad-libbed. He had a lot of energy. He seemed to have a fun time doing it, and he was great. I remember when we were shooting it we had a very short amount of time, about five hours, which was not a lot to shoot all we had to. As Jon and I were standing there we wondered whether this was going to be good or bad. As soon as he did the first thing, we just looked at each other and smiled and said this is going to be a breeze, which it was.”

The Reality:
The Knights of Prosperity (which was originally called Let’s Robb Mick Jagger…, then Let’s Robb) could certainly benefit by airing out of the red-hot Dancing With the Stars. But the severity of the competition and the absence of Mick Jagger after the pilot makes this creative, but potentially limited looking sitcom a definite long-shot. Although ABC could benefit by the absence of other comedies in the time period, sometimes it’s safer to go with something more familiar, and The Knights of Prosperity is anything but. Plus, after Mick Jagger leaves the novelty might quickly wear thin.

Chance of Survival for Let’s Rob
(Based on a scale of 1-1 to 10-1): 6-1

Did You Know?:
Legend has it that Mick Jagger tried out for the role of Dr. Frank N’ Furter in 1975’s The Rocky Horror Picture Show.

NOTES FROM THE UNDERBELLY Thursday 8:30 p.m.

The Premise:
After a couple (Jennifer Westfeldt and Peter Cambor) finds out they are going to have a baby, they have a difficult time keeping it a secret from their family and friends. Embarking on the journey of pending parenthood, their carefree lifestyle is now a thing of the past.

Lead-in: Big Day

Competition:
Survivor: Cook Islands (CBS), The Office (NBC), Happy Hour (Fox), Smallville (CW)

Who Was on the Panel:
Sunkrish Bala, Peter Cambor, Rachel Harris, Melanie Paxson, Michael Weaver, Jennifer Westfeldt, and executive producers Kim Tannenbaum, Eric Tannenbaum and Stacy Traub.

The Scoop:
Since Notes From the Underbelly is a sitcom about a woman having a baby, what happens to the series after he or she is born? According to executive producer Stacy Traub:

“I think there are a lot of funny things that happen when you are pregnant, so that's the arc, kind of, in the first season. That's where some of the stories will come from. Once they have the baby, I think your life gets even crazier and funnier, and what happens to your relationship when there's a kid in it and you haven't slept in weeks and your sex life isn't what it was right away -- all of those things. So that's what we'll be looking at. I mean, the show as a whole is always going to be looking at the relationship between the couple and between their friends and where they are in their life. That's universal.

The Reality:
Without the benefit of proven lead-in support, and opposite two competing comedies (not to mention CBS stalwart Survivor: Cook: Islands), the limited Notes From the Underbelly is likely to be history by November, seven months short of a full-term pregnancy! Don’t get too used to this.

Chance of Survival for Notes From the Underbelly
(Based on a scale of 1-1 to 10-1): 10-1

Did You Know?:
The last series to focus on the stork was failed ABC medical drama Having Babies, which briefly aired in the spring of 1978.

MEN IN TREES Friday 9:00 p.m.

The Premise:
During a speaking engagement in Alaska, a relationship coach and successful author (Anne Heche) discovers that her fiancé is cheating on her. After canceling the wedding, and getting caught in an Alaskan snowstorm, she begins to enjoy her new surroundings. James Tupper, Abraham Benrubi (ER), Suleka Mathews, Derek Richardson and former Good Times Dad John Amos co-star.

Lead-in:
Ugly Betty

Competition:
Close To Home (CBS), Las Vegas (NBC), Duets/Trading Spouses: Meet Your New Mommy (Fox), Friday Night Smackdown! (UPN)

Who Was On the Panel:
Anne Heche, John Amos, Suleka Matthews, James Tupper, and creator/executive producer Jenny Bicks.

The Scoop:
Although you might think leading out of an unproven lead-in could be problematic, according to creator/executive producer Jenny Bicks:

”I'm thrilled, and I think we couldn't ask for a more fun lead-in with Ugly Betty. And I think there's a whole world of women at home on Friday nights that will really enjoy this show, and it's a great opportunity to build a really loyal audience, and it's going to be fun. It's going to be a fun kind of real female-driven block.”

(Editor’s note: Make that a very short-lived female driven block.)

The Reality:
What might sound reminiscent to Northern Exposure looks like nothing more than a pale imitation. While the competition is not necessarily steep, without the benefit of any lead-in support or a strong lead acting presence (sorry Anne Heche, but you will always be your alter-ego “Celestia” in my book), Men In Trees will be up a tree on the low HUT level Friday.

Chance of Survival for Men Trees
(Based on a scale of 1-1 to 10-1): 9-1

Did You Know?:
John Amos, who is fondly remembered as struggling father James Evans on sitcom Good Times, initially played the same role on parent sitcom Maude. But his name on Maude was Henry Evans.

BROTHERS & SISTERS Sunday 10:00 p.m.

The Premise:
After the patriarch of a large but scattered family dies unexpectedly, the children must work to balance their personal lives with family business, including the trials of raising an autistic child. Former Ally McBeal star Calista Flockhart leads an ensemble cast that now includes two-time Academy Award winner Sally Field in place of former Eight is Enough step-mom Betty Buckley.

Lead-in: Desperate Housewives

Competition:
Without A Trace (CBS), Sunday Night Football (NBC)

Who Was on the Panel:
Calista Flockhart, Sally Field, Dave Annable, John Pyper-Ferguson, Balthazar Getty, Rachel Griffiths, Sarah Jane Morris, Matthew Rhys, Ron Rifkin, Patricia Wettig, and executive producers Jon Robin Baitz, Ken Olin (Wettig’s husband and former thirtysomething co-star) and Marti Noxon.

The Scoop:
Although some theatrical stars balk at the small screen, Sally Field is embracing it, with an ongoing Emmy winning role on NBC’s ER and a short stint on ABC legal drama The Court. Here is what she had to say about the medium:

”Basically, I think it's a very interesting time in television. It really is. I mean, television obviously has to compete with a lot of other things and is having to change and grow and try new things. I think, without sounding like I'm kissing somebody's behind, ABC has really just absolutely rethought the whole thing. And it's very interesting to see how much creativity they are inviting in, how many chances they are taking.”

The Reality:
Although leading out of Desperate Housewives (which had better improve in quality next season or more viewers are likely to head south) is certainly a plus, facing CBS’ relocated Without A Trace could be an obstacle. With NBC expected to attract many of the available male viewers courtesy of Sunday Night Football, Brothers & Sisters is gunning, no doubt, for the available females. But will there be enough left opposite Without A Trace? While there is room for more than one hit series in a time period, Grey’s Anatomy this isn’t.

Chance of Survival for Brothers & Sisters
(Based on a scale of 1-1 to 10-1): 4-1

Did You Know?:
Brothers & Sisters was also the title of a short-lived NBC comedy in 1979 with Chris Lemmon and J.R. shooter Mary Crosby that tried to capitalize on the then red-hot Animal House fever. It lasted barely three months.

Press Tour Tidbits: Notes of Interest

ABC Renames World News Tonight:
ABC’s evening newscast, World News Tonight, has changed its name to World News with Charles Gibson to reflect the arrival, of course, of the new anchor. Historically, ABC renamed its evening newscast World News Tonight in July 1978 with the debut of anchors Frank Reynolds, Peter Jennings and Max Robinson. In September 1984, it became World News Tonight with Peter Jennings. After Jenning’s death in August 2005, it morphed back to just World News Tonight.

More on ABC News with Charles Gibson:
At a session with Charles Gibson and executive producer Jon Banner via satellite from Cyprus, here is what each had to say about the totally changed network newscast environment. Although the buzz will be on Katie Couric this fall, once the early curiosity factor dies down, keep an eye on the well-respected Charles Gibson.

Jon Banner:
”I won't speak for Charlie, but I am very excited. Two morning powerhouses going to the evening news shows that the evening news is a vital part of driving news and information to Americans. And I think competition has always helped the evening news from the days of Tom and Dan and Peter, and I think it will help all of us again. And the renewed focus sort of makes all those questions about the vitality of the evening news disappear in my mind.”

Charles Gibson:
”I know that all of you -- and I understand why -- focus on the competitive aspects of this and make it sort of "Brian vs. Katie vs. Charlie." But I really don't look at it that way. I have been a consumer of the ABC evening news. I watched it really since it began. I watched it even under different names before World News Tonight. And I go back to watching Huntley-Brinkley when we first got a television set, and I fell in love with politics and evening news programs.

I just think these are great programs. And they are the end-of-the-day product of extraordinary news organizations. I happened to have worked for this one for almost 35 years, and I love this organization, and to be able to anchor what I consider is its signature news broadcast is -- I don't want to sound like a boy scout -- but it really is an honor.”

The Path to 9/11:
In a panel focusing on upcoming ABC miniseries 9/11, which airs on Sept. 10 and Sept. 11, here is how Gov. Thomas H. Kean, Chair of the 9/11 Commission/Senior Consultant describes the project:

“It was five years ago this September that the United States was attacked on its own mainland soil for the first time since the War of 1812. On that day more people died than died at Pearl Harbor. The commission I headed was given a job by the Congress of the United States to tell the story of 9/11, and, secondly, and just as important, to make recommendations that we learned from that story of ways in which we could make the American people safer.

What we found in that report as we told our story was 19 people who came into this country to do us harm, and our United States government failed in every way to stop or even slow down the plot at any stage. We never thought that our report -- we looked over two million documents, interviewed over 3,000 people -- we never thought it would become a best-seller, but it did. But what I like so much about this project is it tells a story of the conspiracy, and more people will see this than will ever read our report.

So my hope is that if people see this and understand the plot and understand the recommendations that need to be implemented that we learned from the plot, it will be a better and safer country. So I'm delighted to be part of it and glad to be here today.”

http://www.mediaweek.com/mw/newsletters/proginsider/index.jsp

TV Critics Summer Press Tour
Ally, er, Calista is back

By Chuck Barney Contra Costa Times TV critic in his TV Freak blog

Oh boy, did Calista Flockhart look excited to be back among all the critics and reporters at the press tour! Through much of the panel discussion for "Sons & Daughters," Flockhart's first TV project since the demise of "Ally McBeal" five years ago, Flockhart sat nearly motionless, appearing rather uncomfortable and staring off into space.

It got to the point where I wanted to rush the stage just to see if if it was really her -- or an audio-animatronic version of the cigarette-thin star.

OK, Calista did utter some words ... at least a few. She told us that she still gets called "Ally" out on the streets and said her new character -- a right-wing TV pundit -- is so "fundamentally different" from the one she played on the show that made her famous. She also said that she felt now was the right time to return to television because her adopted son, Liam, is 5-years-old and entering school. Other than that, she pretty much gazed off into space.

We can only hope the show itself is a bit more engaging.

http://www.cctextra.com/blogs/tvfreak/2006/07/ally_er_calista_is_back.html

TV Critics Summer Press Tour
Not “Lost” After All

SPOILER ALERT: DON'T READ FURTHER IF YOU'D NEVER WANT TO KNOW EVEN A SINGLE THING THAT MIGHT HAPPEN THIS SEASON ON ABC'S "LOST": (YES, THIS MEANS YOU.)

Now that it's safe to talk, I'll issue another, non-all-caps disclaimer: I'm never absolutely sure that the producers of "Lost" mean exactly what they seem to be saying.

But what executive producer Carlton Cuse seemed to be saying at an ABC party last night was that Desmond (Henry Ian Cusick), the character who emerged at the end of this past season as the show's central figure, only to be put in a position where it looked as if he might have died, didn't.

Die, I mean.

"It would be very stupid of us to kill Desmond," said Cuse, who'll still happily defend the decision to knock off Libby (Cynthia Watros).

"Desmond will be back on the show next year," he said.

Cusick, by the way, was nominated for an Emmy as a guest star this season. Here's hoping he gets to move up to a different category next year.

Cuse would also like me to point out that one of his former series, "The Adventures of Brisco County Jr.," just came out on DVD.

http://www.pnionline.com/dnblog/ellengray/archives/003641.html

Wednesday’s network prime-time ratings are now at the top of RATINGS NEWS (the first post in this thread).

Overnights in the 18-49 Demo
From bad to worst for ABC's 'The One'

Second airing of 'Idol' wannabe sinks deeper
By Toni Fitzgerald MediaLifeMagazine.com staff writer July 20, 2006

Expect “The One” to be getting the boot any second now.

One night after posting ABC’s worst-ever series debut, "The One: Making a Music Star" sank even lower in its second outing, from a 1.1 to a 1.0 adults 18-49 overnight rating in its 10 p.m. timeslot. What’s worse, a rerun of the show’s two-hour Tuesday premiere averaged a startlingly low 0.6 from 8 to 10 p.m., tying with UPN for sixth in the timeslot.

It may end up the lowest-rated night in ABC’s history among 18-49s. The network managed just a 0.7 for the evening, tying the WB for fifth place and giving ABC its worst night of the year. It finished behind Univision every hour of the night, and earned just one-third of the Spanish-language broadcaster’s average at 8 p.m.

The 10 p.m. results episode of the show, in which the wannabe singers began to be eliminated, averaged a mere 2.6 million total viewers, 600,000 fewer than the previous night.

It’s hard to imagine ABC, which already yanked “How to Get the Guy” because of low ratings, letting this stinker remain on the air much longer.

The show is an “American Idol” ripoff that follows the contestants off stage and into their personal lives as they reside and train together while competing for a recording contract. The network promoted the show well, and other singing competitions, such as CBS’s “Rock Star: Supernova” and Univision’s “Cantando Por un Sueno,” have performed decently this summer. But viewers simply weren’t interested in bringing a “Real World” element to a simple singing competition.

Meanwhile, Fox led for the night among 18-49s with a 3.5 rating and 11 share, ahead of NBC at 2.8/9, CBS at 2.3/7, Univision at 1.6/5, ABC and the WB both at 0.7/2, and UPN at 0.6/2.

At 8 p.m., Fox led at 3.2 for the first hour of "So You Think You Can Dance," followed by NBC's 2.5 for "America's Got Talent," CBS's 2.2 for "Rock Star: Supernova," Univision's 1.9 for "La Fea Mas Bella," WB's new and repeat "Blue Collar TV" at 0.9, and ABC and UPN each at 0.6 for the first hour of "One’s" rerun and an "America's Next Top Model" rerun.

At 9 p.m., Fox's second hour of "Dance" was No. 1, averaging a 3.8, while NBC's second hour of "Talent" followed at 3.6. CBS's rerun of "Criminal Minds" was No. 3 at 2.2, followed by Univision's "Barrera de Amor" at 1.7, WB's "One Tree Hill" repeat at 0.6, and UPN and ABC tied again, at 0.5 for "Eve" and "Cuts" reruns and the second hour of "One."

At 10 p.m., CBS's "CSI: NY" rerun led at 2.5, ahead of NBC's "Law & Order rerun at 2.3, Univision's "Don Francisco Presenta" at 1.2 and ABC's 1.0 for the "One" results show.

Among households, NBC led for the night with a 5.7 rating and 10 share, ahead of Fox at 5.4/9, CBS at 4.9/9, Univision at 1.9/3, ABC at 1.7/3, WB at 1.4/2 and UPN at 0.9/2.

http://www.medialifemagazine.com/artman/publish/article_6119.asp

TV Critics Summer Press Tour
Icon as a Dirty Word

By Lisa de Moraes Washington Post Staff Writer in her blog “Moraes On TV” July 20, 2006

Every season there's a troubled show. The show that is announced for a network's prime-time schedule but never actually debuts; or it debuts but gets yanked immediately. Critics know to look for the red flags.
This season they've zeroed in on ABC's new "Sons and Daughters," starring a large ensemble cast that includes Calista Flockhart, Ron Rifkin, Rachel Griffiths, Sally Field, Patricia Wettig, and Balthazar Getty, among others.

ABC describes it as a drama about the California-based Walker family, made up of "intertwined and somewhat damaged adult siblings who embrace one another unconditionally while striving to reflect the perceived perfection of their role model parents" who will in the days ahead "navigate waves of temptation, deception and grief."

It's the only new series on which critics have yet to see a pilot episode.

"Every season there's a troubled show," one critic said as he kicked off the show's Q&A at Summer TV Press Tour 2006, setting the right tone for the session.

"I never got the sense, not having made television before, that we were ever troubled at all," the show's creator Jon Robin Baitz assured critics. Baitz is best known for his plays, though he's written episodes of "The West Wing" and "Alias.".

"It was more a matter of, in recasting [Red Flag], opening it up [Red Flag] and finding the most alive version of the story [Red Flag].

"But I never had a sense of anybody's panic about what we were doing. In fact, exactly the opposite: They seemed -- the network and the studio -- seemed so enthusiastic that they invited us to try it again [Red Flag]," he said.

"If anything I would say that there was a great response to the pilot [Red Flag]," chimed in exec producer Marti Noxon. "But people felt...that we needed to do some...creatively we went in some different directions [Red Flag] with characters. And then although we felt like we wanted the temperature to be a little bit different [Red Flag], to have an opportunity for the family to be shown having a little bit more fun [Red Flag]. It's the exact same story, just told from a slightly different point of view [Red Flag]. "

"When did you start shooting?" one critic wanted to know.

"Last week [Red Flag]," Baitz said.

"It felt like the pilot was sort of the Trojan Horse [Red Flag] for the actual show, or the workshop model [Red Flag] for it, and then we got a chance to come back and actually make the real one [Red Flag]," he added.

The Q&A started very late because cast and producers got stuck out on the 134, due to a pileup. Then, Flockhart, who'd been rushed through hair and makeup, sat on stage looking limp and vacant, in a greige sort of dress -- like a young-ish Whistler's Mother. Thank goodness for Rachel Griffiths, who livened things up when she started sharpening her claws on Flockhart.

"Calista was a big draw for me," she said when asked what brought her back to series television after doing HBO's "Six Feet Under."

"Apart from being a gorgeous actress, she's an icon."

A little gasp escaped from the critics' region.

Griffiths had called Flockhart an "icon."

"Icon" is Hollywood-speak for "older than me."

(Griffiths is in fact about 3-and-a-half years younger than Flockhart.)

"I watched ['Ally McBeal'] and it carried me through my lonely twenties," Griffiths said.

Another gasp.

http://blog.washingtonpost.com/tvblog/

TV Critics Summer Press Tour
“Breaking” Out

Fans of Fox's "Prison Break" may notice some changes this season, with the actors who play both the vice president (Patricia Wettig) and her brother (John Billingsley) having found new jobs on ABC.

Billingsley's found a showier part on "The Nine," an ensemble piece about a group of people drawn together after they live through a hostage crisis, while Wettig's co-starring with Calista Flockhart, Rachel Griffiths, Sally Field and Ron Rifkin in the family drama "Brothers & Sisters."

Billingsley said yesterday that his "Prison Break" role was being recast, while Wettig today said she didn't know exactly what they'd be doing about the evil vice president.

"I'm a little evil in this one," too, she said. "It's my new thing."

http://www.pnionline.com/dnblog/ellengray/archives/003640.html

TV Critics Summer Press Tour
Changes on Wisteria Lane

By Chuck Barney Contra Costa Times TV critic in his TV Freak blog

At the bustling ABC stars party Wednesday night, we just had to corner "Desperate Housewives" creator Marc Cherry to get his reaction to all the flak his show took from critics last season and glean some insights into where it's headed. Fortunately, Cherry, one of the nicest men you'll ever meet in Hollywood, was forthcoming on both fronts.

"I thought some of the criticism was legitimate and some of it was a bit unfair. I think we did some really amazing stuff, but not consistently enough," said Cherry, who pointed out that the show lost a "little of its sense of humor" and didn't do a "sufficient enough job of integrating the main characters into each others' lives."

Now here are some things you can expect to see early on this season. Don't peek if you don't want to know:

Mike (James Denton), who was run down by Orson (Kyle MacLachlan) in the May finale, will begin this season in a coma. The big mystery of the season will focus on Orson, who has become romantically linked with Bree (Marcia Cross). Who is this guy? What kind of shady things lurk in his past? What happened in his first marriage?

By the second episode, Bree and Orson will marry, much to the dismay of her neighborhood friends, who have their reservations about the mystery man.

On another front, while visiting Mike in the hospital Susan (Teri Hatcher) will meet another man and have an affair.

http://www.cctextra.com/blogs/tvfreak/2006/07/changes_on_wisteria_lane.html

TV Critics Summer Press Tour
ABC says: "Let's Rob... 'Prison Break' "

By Melanie McFarland Seattle Post-Intelligencer TV Critic in her TV blog July 20, 2006

Actors get around. Especially on television.

Though viewers accept the peripatetic nature of the acting game, we still come across some weird situations. Like ABC's (purely unintentional, we're sure) depletion of "Prison Break's" ranks. John Billingsley is a prominent regular in the new ABC drama "The Nine," which means he will no longer appear in "Prison Break" as the brother of President Reynolds. He told critics that Fox is casting another actor who looks like him.

For that matter, President Reynolds is going to look a lot different too. Patricia Wettig told us today that she's committed to the Sunday night drama "Brothers & Sisters," which means we should expect to see another actress playing the Fox drama's evil leader during its second season.

There's another connection to "The Nine" and "Prison Break" in Camille Guaty, who played Sucre's girlfriend Maricruz, his reason for busting out of the clink. If we don't catch up with her at the Stars Party, we'll hit up "Prison Break's" producers for the skinny during Fox's turn. (Update: Guaty confirmed that while her "Prison Break" character is still alive, she doesn't know if she'll be playing her. But she's keeping her fingers crossed.)

Such crossover between shows isn't unprecedented. Last season Tina Majorino held prominent roles on HBO's "Big Love" and UPN/The CW's "Veronica Mars." Things get even more interesting. Majorino plays Mac, Veronica's best friend. In "Big Love," Majorino's character is Sarah Henrickson's best friend. Sarah is portrayed by Amanda Seyfried, also known as Lilly Kane, Veronica Mars' best pal before she was murdered in season one.

Feel free to sing the chorus of "Circle of Life" anytime you want.

On a related note, Kim Raver and Tim Daly, who are also on "The Nine," don't know what that means for their respective characters on "24" and "The Sopranos."

"They are keeping Audrey alive," Raver said of Jack Bauer's great love, who must be wondering where the hell he is. "Hopefully it will be me going back to play Audrey and not someone else. And there's a specific reason that I can't get into now."

As for Daly's down-and-out screenwriter J.T. Dolan, "I suppose there's hope that that character will show up again. I would like to have him suitably polished off, because I think he deserves it. He's kind of fun."

http://blog.seattlepi.nwsource.com/tv/archives/105163.asp?source=rss

TV Critics Summer Press Tour
With a Cherry on top

By Robert Philpot Fort Worth Star-Telegram in the Yelling Fire in a Crowded Theater blog

As some press-tour pals and I enter the ABC party, we spot Desperate Housewives creator Marc Cherry sitting with some friends, including producer writer-producer Jeff Greenstein and another writer-producer whose name I don't catch (it appears to be Joe Keenan, judging from several Web-site reports). Some producers take a little drawing out, but we barely ask Cherry a question before he starts talking about the next season.

On the uneven second season: "I didn't know I was creating a hit, so I didn't know there'd be a second season. ... The biggest problem I had last year was I was writing too much on the fly. Did a little of that the first season, but clearly got away with it. One problem is that I think we just had a little less planning time.

"What's been really cool about this year is I only took a week's vacation ... these guys came in, and we had a so much stronger look at the entire year. There's still things we're answering and figuring out for ourselves, but just in terms of walking into a season, I really feel we know what we're doing."

On what's in store for the characters: Bree (Marcia Cross) marries Orson, the dentist played by Kyle MacLachlan, by the second episode _ and he becomes the focal point of the season's mystery. Bree's estranged son, Andrew (Shawn Pyfrom), also returns, in a way that Cherry promises will be surprising and funny. Mike Delfino (James Denton) is going to remain in a coma for a while. "But we have a great new love interest, Dougray Scott" for Susan [Teri Hatcher], Cherry says. "His [character's] wife is in a coma, and he and Susan become 'coma buddies,' and then stuff starts happening."

Xiao Mei is going to be eight months pregnant at the beginning of the season, and Carlos and Gabrielle (Ricardo Antonio Chavira and Eva Longoria) will be dealing with the arrival of the baby and going through a nasty divorce. Lynette (Felicity Huffman) will struggle with the presence of Nora (Kirsten Warren), the woman who had a child with Tom (Doug Savant). And Edie (Nicollette Sheridan) has a "sexy, troublemaking young nephew" come to live with her.

And, Cherry says, the mystery and the humor will both be stronger this year, and the lead women will have more scenes together.

On the show getting passed over in the Emmy nominations: "Here's my thing about the Emmys. Am I bummed? Sure! But I just go, 'I just gotta work harder this coming year.' And I really feel good about it. I was a guy who was broke and unemployed and had to borrow money from my mom. 'Oh wow, I didn't get nominated for an award.' I think I can handle that one."

http://blogs.dfw.com/yelling_fire/2006/07/with_a_cherry_o.html

Fred,

Have you run across anything related to CBS HD and the 2006 NFL season?

[Actors get around. Especially on television.

Though viewers accept the peripatetic nature of the acting game, we still come across some weird situations. Like ABC's (purely unintentional, we're sure) depletion of "Prison Break's" ranks. John Billingsley is a prominent regular in the new ABC drama "The Nine," which means he will no longer appear in "Prison Break" as the brother of President Reynolds. He told critics that Fox is casting another actor who looks like him.

For that matter, President Reynolds is going to look a lot different too. Patricia Wettig told us today that she's committed to the Sunday night drama "Brothers & Sisters," which means we should expect to see another actress playing the Fox drama's evil leader during its second season.


Well, that's certainly no surprise. After all, there are only a precious few struggling actors in Hollywood and there are soooo many parts to go around! :rolleyes:

Seriously, I was wondering about how this casting news would impact one of my favorite shows, 'Prison Break'......? I thought actors were signed to something called a "contract" when they signed on for a major role in a TV series that obligated them to actually, you know, work for that series for a few years (or as long as it stays on the air). Replacing John Billingsley won't be that hard, as he was mostly heard and not seen, but Patrica Wettig was a major character and re-casting her will be an unpleasant shock to the audience. What is this, soap opera?

Have you run across anything related to CBS HD and the 2006 NFL season?

Same as last year, 3 games per week.

http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?p=7881566&&#post7881566

RemyM is correct, AAF.

TV Critics Summer Press Tour
Call me crazy, but only in the magical world of TV would Anne Heche be a life coach

By Melanie McFarland Seattle Post-Intelligencer TV Critic in her TV blog July 20, 2006

Critics go through a tumultuous emotional cycle during the course of press tour. Can you blame us? Think about it -- right now, Seattle is one of the few places in the country that doesn't feel like the inside of a demon's lunchbox. I hear the Emerald City is downright pleasant.

However, I am trapped here in the L.A. area along with about 200 other people. Granted, here isn't so bad in comparison to other places on Earth. The Ritz Carlton is a lovely hotel with verdant gardens I wish I had time to frolic in. Although the ballroom's icy temperature makes Condoleezza Rice's heart seem warm and comforting, the crystal chandeliers are a nice distraction.

But truth be told, we're all losing it to some degree. This is the part of tour when pleasant resignation ferments into fatigued resentment. In a few days, just call us the Haters Club. Please, publicists, ask me what I think of your show next Monday. I need to entertain myself, and you're overdue for a deep, cathartic cry.

That's still a ways off. Like I said, now we're just tired and squishy, so "Men in Trees" star Anne Heche got off easy.

This is where my editor wants me to tell you why Heche's "Men in Trees" made me want to break things, as indicated previously. The answer is, I'm saving the full explanation for the review. I will tell you this, though -- the rancor inspired by watching the pilot was not a reaction to Heche, but to the way her character was written.

In "Trees," Heche plays a relationship coach who tosses it all out of the window when she finds out her fiance is cheating on her. This happens as she's about to land in Alaska to promote her latest book. She decides to stay and in getting lost, cue the swell of violins, tries to find herself.

Recalling Heche's personal struggles led a few of us to question how anyone would take the author of "Call Me Crazy" seriously as a Giver of Romantic Advice (Steve Martin and Ellen DeGeneres should organize a viewing party for kicks) or a level-headed person.

Naturally, we had to ask. "You've obviously turned some corners in your life," someone eased in, adding that sitting before us, "It seems like you're totally...uh..."

"SANE?" Heche boomed.

And the ice was broken. Heche knows that a broad segment of the population still sees her as that loopy Celestia woman who stumbled down the highway long ago. But unlike another formerly troubled soul we've seen on this tour, Heche also knows that the best way to deflect those lingering questions is to handle them with levity.

"Clearly I've never had a life coach," she joked, "You know, I've stumbled through and I've made so many mistakes, and I'm pretty good with where I am."

That makes one of us.

http://blog.seattlepi.nwsource.com/print.asp?entryID=105165

Sports On TV
NFL Net Nabs New Game

By Ben Grossman Broadcasting & Cable7/20/2006

The NFL Network has acquired broadcast and naming rights to the NCAA’s post-season college football bowl game that was awarded to the city of Houston earlier this year.

The game will be played on Thursday, Dec. 28, the network’s first open Thursday night after it airs five straight Thursday NFL telecasts from Nov. 23 to Dec. 21.

The network has yet to announce an official name and presenting sponsor for the bowl game. It also gained rights across all media platforms, as well as the rights to sell presenting sponsorships to the game.

It is the third post-season NCAA game the network has acquired this year, following acquisitions of the Insight Bowl and the Senior Bowl.

http://www.broadcastingcable.com/index.asp?layout=articlePrint&articleID=CA6355014

TV Critics Summer Press Tour
Anne Heche, "Men In Trees'' and the sanity clause

By Charlie McCollum San Jose Mercury News in his blog

Some late night notes from The Tour:

• One of Wednesday afternoon's ABC sessions was with the cast of the new "Men In Trees,'' a comedy-drama about a self-help dating guru who ends in an Alaskan town largely populated by men. (Written by Jennie Bicks from "Sex and the City,'' It's better than it sounds.) Much of the questioning (and I'm not making this up) centered around the role of Elvis the Raccoon who plays a prominent role in the pilot. Turns out Elvis is a recurring character (or will be after all the publicity) and has a stunt double: a dog. (Apparently, real raccoons don't run fast enough for some scenes.)

But the best exchange came when a reporter asked star Anne Heche, whose very public emotional train wrecks were the stuff of tabloid legend, about her current state of mind.

Reporter: "You seem to be very much at peace with yourself. You've obviously turned some
corners in your life. Can you give us kind of a status report of how you're doing and everything? It seems like you're totally ...''

Heche: "Sane?''

Point to Anne Heche.

• Marc Cherry, creator of "Desperate Housewives,'' was holding forth at Wednesday night's ABC party, taking any and all questions about the state of the show, which most of the reporters on hand thought went pretty far south last season. Basically, a standup Cherry fell on the sword (or perhaps multiple swords) and said the problems would be fixed without once passing blame on anyone else.

Props to Marc Cherry.

• And, finally, we have another breakout from "Prison Break''.

Patricia Wettig, who has been pretty damn memorable as nasty Vice President Caroline Reynolds on the show was here promoting her role on the new "Brothers & Sisters'' -- which happens to be produced by her husband, Ken Olin. Which made reporters wonder if she was going to do double-duty. Nope, sez Wettig.

"I don't know how they are going to deal with it,'' she said. "I had to make a choice. And it
was kind of hard for me to choose against my husband and his good writing. So I'll be on this one instead.''

Since Reynolds is at the heart of the conspiracy driving the main story line in "Prison Break,'' there should be some interesting questions for the "Prison Break'' folks when they meet the press next week.

(One posting note: I'll be on the road most of today, visiting the sets of "The Shield'' and "Grey's Anatomy.'' So stay tuned.)

http://blogs.mercurynews.com/aei/charlie_mccollum/index.html

Thanks Jim -- it's now TiVoed
Fred, if you don't mind watching online video, Sci Fi is showing the entire pilot episode on their new Sci Fi Pulse website.

Check it out here (http://www.scifi.com/pulse/) .

Thanks Russ. I'll use that as a fall-back if I never get to it on TiVo!

TV Critics Summer Press Tour
Desperate to improve

By Tom Jicha Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinal TV and Radio Writer July 20, 2006

Marc Cherry, creator/executive producer of Desperate Housewives, finally has come clean and admitted that his reaction to the second season of his show was the same as many fans. It was “painful,” Cherry said at ABC’s star party.

The series that was a phenomenon in its first season never got off the ground in its second season. Freshmen year was a breeze because Cherry basically took events in his own life, especially his troubled relationship with his mother (Bree in the series), and embellished upon them for TV.

Last year had to be invented largely from whole cloth, which proved more challenging than anticipated. Cherry and his staff got started later than they should have and spent the rest of the season playing catch up.

They have learned their lesson. Cherry and the writers came back around Memorial Day and have already mapped out the core storylines for the coming season. The criticism that the show did not have the housewives interacting enough also has been addressed.

Bree (Marcia Cross), who is drawn to kooks, will marry another one, Orson, the newcomer played by Kyle McLachlan, who ran down James Denton’s Mike Delfino. It’s a union the other housewives will find troubling. They can’t decide whether Orson is a good guy or bad guy (bet the latter).

Mike will remain in a coma for about the first third of the season, a scenario that will set up another big storyline. While keeping vigil at the hospital for Mike, Susan (Teri Hatcher) will meet another man, whose wife also is in a coma across the hall. The two of them will fall in love.

When Mike comes to, it creates a juicy triangle, which becomes an even juicier quadrangle, also involving Edie (Nicollette Sheridan).

Denton revealed a couple of other tidbits. “Mike will be a different guy when he wakes up. There’s also the possibility that his involvement with Orson could be a case of mistaken identity.”

That’s as far as he would go. “You’ll have to watch.”

Teasers like this are the reason networks produce series stars for their party.

A GREAT WAY TO START IT UP:

You never know until you ask. The new ABC sitcom The Knights of Prosperity revolves around a collection of goofballs and losers, who conspire to improve their sorry lots in life by robbing Mick Jagger’s lavish New York penthouse. Jagger appears briefly in the pilot.

As the show was being developed, the working title was Let’s Rob… with the producers scrambling to fill in the ellipsis.

Having Jagger as the first target was originally a wish list joke, executive producer Rob Burnett said. Burnett said the writers compiled a long roster of potential victims. “As we got closer to the pilot, I believe it was (ABC Entertainment President) Steve McPherson who threw out the name Mick Jagger.”

Burnett reacted as you might expect. “Yeah, sure, Mick Jagger, go get him.”

The idea seemed so preposterous that the writers began mocking it, doing imitations of Jagger calling them for the part. “We just thought it would never happen,” Burnett said.

Even after Jagger’s people agreed to read the script, Burnett thought they were just being polite. He was shocked when he got word Jagger himself read the script and was going to call.

“We chatted about the show and whatnot. Next thing we knew, he said he would do a cameo in the pilot.”

When you can get Mick Jagger for an untested sitcom, you go to the end of the world to make it happen. Burnett took a crew all the way to New Zealand, where the Stones had just appeared. Jagger couldn’t have been more gracious and cooperative, according to Burnett.

“I believe he delayed his vacation a day or two for us, so he had all the reason to be cranky and exhausted.” Instead Jagger enthusiastically threw himself into the spirit of the role. He even contributed some ad-libs and jokes.

“He seemed to have a great time doing it,” Burnett said. “He was great.”

YUK, YUK:

Anyone ever tell you that you have a great laugh? You might have a future in show business.

The stars of The Knights of Prosperity revealed one of the dirty little secrets of TV, which makes laugh tracks even more vile. Studios actually import professional laughers to pump up the volume. “They hire somebody to sit in the audience and laugh,” Lenny Venito said. “It’s so obvious. It just feels so dirty.”

One of the encouraging trends of this season is that none of the new ABC comedies has a laugh track, which is probably why the actors were willing to be so forthcoming.

Venito’s colleague, Maz Jobrani, recalled working on a sitcom that had to resort to this trickery. “The (professional laughers) were reading the paper. They weren’t even paying attention. (On cue) they would go, ‘Ha, ha, ha,’ then go back to reading the papers.”

Donal Logue, the nominal star of the ensemble, said there is a caste system for live audiences. “When you’re not on, like, Will & Grace, where there’s a big waiting list to come in, they have to bus in canned audiences that do it for a living. That’s a pretty interesting psychological profile, the group of those people.”

Sounds like a sitcom in the making: The Laughers.

http://blogs.sun-sentinel.com/tv/2006/07/desperate_to_im.html

TV Critics Summer Press Tour
Searching for clues

By Chuck Barney Contra Costa Times TV critic in his TV Freak blog July 20, 2006

I would love to tell you that I got "Lost" executive producer Carlton Cuse in a headlock at the ABC party Wednesday and forced him to spill the beans about that blasted island, the Others, Desmond, Walt, those dudes in the Arctic, and all the rest of it.

Didn't happen.

What did happen is that I got Cuse alone for a while over dinner and prodded him to chat -- in vague generalities -- about Season 3, which launches on Oct. 4. Here's some of what he said:

• Harold Perrineau, who plays Michael, will not be back as a regular. "We hope to tell more of his story, but it won't be immediately," Cuse said. So don't expect to find out any time soon about what happened to Michael and Walt after they were freed by the Others.

• Season 3 will be "more vibrant and less dark" than last season, with more "emphasis on action-adventure and romance." Said Cuse, "We had hoped to get to more romantic storytelling last year," but the plots dictated a different direction. To those ends, the producers are about to cast two new female roles that will serve as "romantic interests for various characters over time." (Look for an announcement sometime in the next two weeks).

• We'll see much more of the Others this season and their society and way of life. (I suspect that the new female characters will be Others).

• Desmond (Henry Ian Cusick) didn't die in that big hatch explosion in May's finale. So look to see more of him this season.

• Co-creator J.J. Abrams, who was busy last season shooting "Mission Impossible 3," will be around a bit more this season. He co-wrote the Season 3 opener and plans to direct Episode 7, the installment that follows the show's 13-week hiatus.

Production on Season 3 starts in Hawaii on Aug. 7.

http://www.cctextra.com/blogs/tvfreak/2006/07/searching_for_clues.html

This is admittedly marginal, but Osment has appeared in a number of TV series…and the TCA has an off day….

TV Notebook
Haley Joel Osment Hospitalized After Car Crash

By Michael Muskal Los Angeles Times Staff Writer July 20, 2006

Haley Joel Osment, the child actor who mesmerized audiences in "The Sixth Sense," was hospitalized this morning after the car he was driving flipped over in La Canada Flintridge, according to the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department.

Osment, 18, apparently lost control of his 1995 Saturn and hit a brick pillar with a mailbox on Flintridge Avenue, just east of Chevy Chase Drive about 2:10 a.m., a department spokesman said. The car flipped over on its roof, and came to rest a short distance away.

Osment was taken to Huntington Memorial Hospital in Pasadena. The injuries were not regarded as life threatening, the spokesman said.

At a morning news conference at the hospital, Dr. Paul Gilbert said the actor had a possible fracture of the scapula, a fracture of one rib and some cuts and abrasions.

"Haley Joel Osment wants everyone to know he will be OK," Gilbert said.

The cause of the crash remains under investigation, the sheriff's spokesman said.
http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/la-072006osment,0,6728479.story?coll=la-home-headlines

Nielsen Notebook
Sci Fi’s new ‘Eureka’ strikes gold

MediaLifeMagazine.com—The premiere of ABC’s “The One: Making of a Music Star” will go down as the worst premiere in network history, and the second-worst on any Big Three network of all time.

But if you needed more perspective on just how bad it stunk, how about this: Sci Fi’s new dramedy “Eureka” drew nearly one-third more viewers in the same two-hour 9 p.m. timeslot.

“Eureka,” which averaged more than 4 million total viewers, became the most-watched scripted series ever on Sci Fi, besting “Battlestar Galactica” and “Stargate: SG1.”

Meanwhile, another cable debut that night, the former NBC show “The Contender,” was far short of a knockout for ESPN. Though the show did better last year’s timeslot average by 16 percent, it pulled just a 1.1 household rating over two hours starting at 10 p.m.

By contrast, “Contender” averaged a disappointing 5.1 rating in its first-season broadcast premiere.

http://www.medialifemagazine.com/artman/publish/cat_index_31.asp

TV Critics Summer Press Tour
Breaking out

By Chuck Barney Contra Costa Times TV critic in his TV Freak blog July 20, 2006

It will be interesting to see how Fox's "Prison Break," which launches its second season Aug. 21, plans to handle the defection of two actors who have moved on to other shows.

Both Patricia Wettig, who played the evil vice president on "Break," and John Billingsley, who played her brother, have taken jobs with ABC. ("Brothers & Sisters" and "The Nine," respectively). Wetting's new series is being produced by her husband, Ken Olin.

Billingsley told us that his role was being recast, but Wettig said she didn't know exactly what the producers are doing about her role and storyline.

"I don't know how they are going to deal with it,'' she said. "I had to make a choice. And it was kind of hard for me to choose against my husband and his good writing. So I'll be on this one instead."

We'll check in with the "Prison Break" gang during Fox's portion of the tour next Monday.

http://www.cctextra.com/blogs/tvfreak/2006/07/breaking_out.html

TV Critics Summer Press Tour
Brothers and Sisters: A Great Cast Wasted?

By Ben Grossman of Broadcasting & Cable at bcbeat.com Wednesday, July 19, 2006

So the “reader’s digest” lady reporter just began asking a question and the entire audience literally began booing her before she could finish. Outstanding! But instead of her typical stupid inquiry, she audibled to another stupid question to all the ladies about how they feel about their characters from a “female girl” perspective.

I have to find out this woman’s name, they should name this press tour after her.

http://broadcastingcable.com/blog/1380000138.html

That is wrong! But so outstanding. :)

Actually, after reading so many blogs from this tour, I have lost a lot of respect for many of the critics.
Many seem to revel into being on a first-name basis with TV stars and love the party aspects of being in "Hollywood".
Others appear to get their enjoyment from making fun of TV stars, producers or shows.
So, it has been a pretty disturbing tour as far as I am concerned.
A lot of the real bad stuff I just don't post -- no reason you guys have to be subjected to it.

Actually, after reading so many blogs from this tour, I have lost a lot of respect for many of the critics.
Many seem to revel into being on a first-name basis with TV stars and love the party aspects of being in "Hollywood".
Others appear to get their enjoyment from making fun of TV stars, producers or shows.
So, it has been a pretty disturbing tour as far as I am concerned.
A lot of the real bad stuff I just don't post -- no reason you guys have to be subjected to it.


You're saying you've seen stuff worse than, "'thin as a cigarette" in re: to Calista Flockhart or the [RedFlag] article in the Washington Post or the guy from Broadcasting and Cable about how the critics love Hispanic woman? Man, I thought this was the worst of it. Except for the labeling of a fellow critic's questions as "stupid", Broadcasting and Cable guy again, or talking about how another critic eats or does this or that. These people can be cruel.

Hmm, still no news on SG-1 and Atlantis?

Thought we'd see those early since they were the season premieres. Guess we have to wait till Sci Fi Wire posts them.

Perhaps this is why Sci Fi didn't make any mention of both shows:

LOSERS

SciFi's "Stargate SG-1/Stargate: Atlantis" --- This SciFi Network franchise took a laser hit to the gut on Friday night in the two shows' latest season debuts. Ratings for the original "Stargate SG-1" (1.7 million) are down 15 percent from the season average earlier this year, while spinoff "Stargate: Atlantis" (1.9 million) dropped 10 percent.Source (http://www.ajc.com/search/content/auto/epaper/editions/thursday/living_44ebdeb57401f1270039.html)

I agree that Ben Grossman of B&C has been generally pretty awful, Antonio.

I am a bit surprised that Lisa de Moraes has apparently been a bit off her game but she has gotten a few snarky comments in. It is just that usually she is so much more artful (and fun!) about it.

But yes there has been far worse -- usually self absorbed "Look Ma! I am in Hollywood!" typ stuff.

Perhaps this is why Sci Fi didn't make mention:


Source (http://www.ajc.com/search/content/auto/epaper/editions/thursday/living_44ebdeb57401f1270039.html)


Let's wait for this week's numbers. The massive heat wave last week may well have had some effect on numbers. We'll see.

TV Critics Summer Press Tour
The Trouble With UHD

Catch-All Nets Prove Problematic for Advertising
(TVWeek.com HD Newsletter)

It seemed like a good idea at the time.

When NBC Universal devised a high-definition strategy for its cable networks, the company opted not to create separate simulcast HD channels for Bravo, USA Network and Sci Fi Channel. Instead, the company launched a stand-alone network in 2004 that could run content from all three networks as well as repurposed movies and TV shows from the NBC Universal library.

But the result, the network called UHD, has become a weak anomaly among HD networks. It features 1980s relics such as "The Equalizer" and "Knight Rider" instead of NBCU's most popular shows.

One member of the online audio-video fan community AVS Forum derided the channel as "a waste of bandwidth." That's the ultimate insult in a business controlled by cable operators who view HD channels as hogging three times the space of standard-definition channels while delivering scant few viewers.

In addition, some fans say popular HD programming is going to waste.

Sci Fi Channel's critically acclaimed "Battlestar Galactica" is shot in HD and is an on-target program for HD's male early-technology-adopting demographic. But episodes don't make their way around to UHD until a year after they run on Sci Fi, much to the frustration of fans.

This tactic might seem odd for a company that's embraced cross-platform programming, airing episodes of "Battlestar" on NBC or Sci Fi's "Ghost Hunters" on USA.
The difference is the cross-platform efforts were promotional.

The main problem with regularly running new episodes of NBC Universal's "Battlestar," "Monk," "Dead Zone," "Project Runway" and "Stargate: SG-1" on UHD is that advertisers pay considerably less for a spot on the HD stand-alone network than for a spot on Sci Fi, USA or Bravo, according to media buyer sources.

So if the HD version is made available on UHD at the same time as the standard-definition version on a show's flagship network, fans might switch to the HD version, thus cannibalizing ratings on the higher-priced networks. And costing NBC Universal ad revenue.

Simulcast networks such as ESPN HD or TNT HD don't have this problem, as both networks run the same programming and commercials.
Other complications exist too.

To get all of NBCU's most popular shows on UHD, many productions would have to be upgraded to HD, and the company might have to negotiate the right to repeat the episodes on the HD channel.

But the primary concern about -- and the main drawback to -- the catch-all UHD channel as it is now, is the lack of available ad revenue. (Of course, this is a Catch-22 because ratings will stay modest, and ad rates will stay low, as long as there's no first-run programming driving viewership.)

Bruce Leichtman, president of Leichtman Research Group, said simulcast channels make more sense from a consumer standpoint.

"What's most natural to the consumer is a channel that echoes the schedule they're used to," said Mr. Leichtman said. "Eventually you're going to have HD channels for [all NBCU's networks], but until then I think it would be smart to make UHD into USA HD."

UHD is not alone in this dilemma.

MTV's catch-all network MHD and Discovery Networks' Discovery HD Theater face a similar risk of cannibalization, and both are mostly stocked with programming that's already well-worn from running on their main channels.

But UHD's problem is more pressing, as the company has so many scripted dramas that viewers are increasingly accustomed to finding in the HD format.

Sci Fi's Thomas Vitale, senior VP of programming and original movies, said the company currently views UHD as a separate distribution window, like home video or pay-per-view.

"We really do care about UHD … but first we need to build 'Battlestar Galactica' on the Sci Fi Channel," he said. "But that window [the time between when a show debuts on Sci Fi and appears in UHD] will eventually shrink."

Until that window shrinks to the point where first-run HD viewing is a real option, Sci Fi, USA and Bravo fans will have to continue to wait -- and wait -- for the HD versions of their favorite shows.

http://www.tvweek.com/page.cms?pageId=193

TV Critics Summer Press Tour
What's in a name? A lot, if it's Mick Jagger

By Bill Goodykoontz Arizona Republic TV Critic in his Critic’s Tour blog 07/20/2006

PASADENA, Calif. -- Knights of Prosperity is one of the "buzz" shows this fall, certainly among comedies; its cast and creators showed up to talk about it.

But really, wouldn't it be a lot funnier if they were here to talk about Let's Rob Mick Jagger, which was one of the earlier versions of the title? Now THAT'S a title that grabs you, and tells you exactly what the show is about. I mean, come on, you'd really never need to check the weekly listings to find out what was going on.

As it turns out, Knights of Prosperity is just the latest working title, and is indeed an improvement over the one that came before: Let's Rob....
That one was just stupid. Knights of Prosperity isn't a whole lot better, and the fact that it is a working title gives you some hope ... no. Rob Burnett, co-creator of the show (and of the late, great Ed, one of my first faves as a TV critic), said later at the ABC party to just get over it, Let's Rob Mick Jagger is out.

Dang.

"Honestly, I think any combination of words in the English language that you can put together has been a title that we've discussed for this show at this point," Burnett said during the session. "We've talked about a million of them."

If you want to know how much they're struggling, here's a clue: "If anyone has suggestions for a title, we're open to them," Burnett told critics. That's like asking my 3-year-old son for golf lessons. Doesn't happen very often.

The FIRST title was Let's Rob Jeff Goldblum, but they never planned on keeping that -- "He was really just a placeholder."

I'm sure that made Goldblum feel great. Then again, Mick Jagger's Mick Jagger. At least in the first episode, which may or may not be the only one in which he appears. He's actually quite funny in it, playing a sort of heightened version of what you might expect a rich rock star to be. But the producers aren't sure how much more, if any more, access they'll have to Jagger, which is another reason for the name game.

"We want to be careful a little bit not to oversell Mick," Burnett said. "We think of Mick of being an amazing cherry on a delicious sundae, and not the sundae."

Wow. There's an image.

"And you start telling the viewers, you know, 'Oh, it's the Mick Jagger show, it's the Mick Jagger show,' and then they tune in and it's not the Mick Jagger show, it seems very short-sighted to us."

Yeah, he's right. It's not like anyone in Hollywood has ever misled us before.

http://www.azcentral.com/blogs/index.php?blog=5&blogtype=Entertainment

TV Critics Summer Press Tour
Calista Flockhart wafts back to TV

By Diane Holloway Austin American-Statesman in her TV blog Thursday, July 20, 2006

Good news, “Ally McBeal” fans! Calista Flockhart has just a little bit of meat on her delicate bones. Not to say she’s even remotely average in weight, but the once skeletal waif now has actual arms and possibly even thighs. It was hard to tell with her little-girl dress and Minnie Mouse platform shoes.

Flockhart is part of the enormous ensemble cast of ABC’s new family drama “Brothers & Sisters,” which also stars Rachel Griffiths, Sally Field, Ron Rifkin, Patricia Wettig and many, many more.

During the press conference featuring 14 of the show’s closest colleagues, Flockhart appeared to drift into outer space from time to time. Mouth slightly agape, she seemed completely disconnected from her surroundings … a willful attempt to be somewhere, anywhere but in front of 100 reporters.

In “Brothers & Sisters,” Flockhart, who is still hailed on the street as Ally by unforgiving fans, plays a conservative radio talk-show host.

“I wanted to make a different choice with this,” Flockhart said, cruising in for a brief landing from whatever flight she had taken. “This character is very real; Ally was fantastical. And I like this because the responsibility is off me because it’s such a different playing field.”

Flockhart says she chose to return to TV now because she’s been away for five years, and her son is now 5 and heading off to kindergarten. (Yes, as far as we know, the intensely private actor is still with Harrison Ford.)

From dental student to hot stuff

Sofia Vergara, a Colombian actor who co-starred in the quickly axed sitcom “Hot Properties” (she played a sexy real estate agent), has landed another gig as a sexy thief in ABC’s “Knights of Prosperity” (formerly “Let’s Rob …). Before she became an actor, she went to dental school for three years in her homeland.

“All this voluptuousness didn’t let me finish,” she told a group of appreciative male reporters. “I had to take advantage.”

Anne Heche IS sane

Anne Heche, famous for her experiment with lesbianism as Ellen DeGeneres’ partner for a few years, is now a happy hetero who claims she’s found sanity. You may recall that she had some sort of “break” when she told everyone she had been abducted by aliens and had many alternate personalities.

Anyway, now she’s starring in ABC’s delightful new drama “Men in Trees,” which is a nice female twist on the old “Northern Exposure” series of romance and adventure in Alaska. She plays a relationship self-help author who moves to Alaska, which is mostly populated by men. Heche joked that the last self-help book she actually read was titled “Call Me Crazy” — which she wrote.

“Clearly I’ve never had a life coach,” she said. “I’ve stumbled so many times and made so many mistakes, I’m just happy to be where I am,” she said.

Elvis lives

In other news from “Men in Trees,” a stunt raccoon named Elvis is prominently featured in the show’s pilot. Heche says he’s the “best raccoon I’ve ever worked with.” Elvis had to use stunt double for a scene that shows him running down a street, because raccoons don’t really run; they waddle. So a dog named Boomer was fitted with a raccoon suit for the task. Seriously. I’m NOT making this up, although I really wish I were.

http://www.austin360.com/blogs/content/shared-gen/blogs/austin/tvblog/

Perhaps this is why Sci Fi didn't make any mention of both shows:

LOSERS

SciFi's "Stargate SG-1/Stargate: Atlantis" --- This SciFi Network franchise took a laser hit to the gut on Friday night in the two shows' latest season debuts. Ratings for the original "Stargate SG-1" (1.7 million) are down 15 percent from the season average earlier this year, while spinoff "Stargate: Atlantis" (1.9 million) dropped 10 percent.

Source (http://www.ajc.com/search/content/auto/epaper/editions/thursday/living_44ebdeb57401f1270039.html)

As much as I enjoy Stargate, I never watch it until the dvds come out because the PQ on Sci-Fi is horrid. (D*, but it's no better on Cox).

As much as I enjoy Stargate, I never watch it until the dvds come out because the PQ on Sci-Fi is horrid. (D*, but it's no better on Cox).
Isn't it though? I have SciFi on Comcast, Dish and DirectV, and they all look like crap. Our local FOX affiliate runs syndicated Stargate episodes late night sometimes, they run them in letterbox format and the PQ is very good, much better than you would think. I'd swear that it's from HD transfers it looks that good, but it's 4x3 letterboxed. It's too bad SciFi couldn't at least be as good as that, instead of the plain terrible, bit-starved, soft mess that it is.

AIUI, NBC/UNI crams SciFi on to the same transponder as all the rest of NBC/Uni's cable networks and this is part of the reason it looks so bad.

Judging from that article it looks like it will still be years before we get HD versions of those cable-channels.

BG is slated for HD-DVD and depending on actual dates and seasons released I may have to crank up the will power and forego watching SciFi Channel.

OLN Could See Ratings Surge for Tour

By Glen Dickson Broadcasting & Cable 7/20/2006 5:07:00 PM

OLN's coverage of the Tour de France cycling race could see a ratings spike tonight and through the weekend as news of U.S. rider Floyd Landis' resurgence filters through the Web. If you don't want to know the latest Tour results, don't read on--just watch the Thursday-night coverage.

Landis, one of the favorites for this year's Tour in the wake of seven-time champ Lance Armstrong's retirement, held the yellow jersey of the race leader going into Wednesday's stage in the Alps but faltered badly on the last climb and lost over 10 minutes to the field, slipping from first to 11th overall. In Thursday's stage, however, Flandis rebounded with a heroic stage win, leaving the pack early on a solo breakaway and gaining back almost all of his eight-minute-plus deficit. Landis now lies a close third, merely 30 seconds behind leader Oscar Pereiro of Spain.

Landis' comeback leaves the Tour up for grabs heading into the race's last three stages. With an easy stage slated for Friday and the usual ceremonial ride into Paris scheduled for the finish Sunday, the final individual time trial on Saturday morning, which will be carried live by OLN starting at 8:30 EST, should decide the outcome of the 2006 Tour. Landis, a strong time-trial rider, has a good chance to make it eight years in a row for the U.S. and become the third American, behind three-time winner Greg LeMond and Armstrong, to win the Tour de France.

OLN has had exclusive live U.S. broadcast rights to the Tour since 2001 (CBS does a taped weekend wrapup show on the race) and enjoyed the mass appeal of cancer survivor Armstrong's annual marches to victory. But OLN's ratings for the first week of the 2006 Tour were down 50% compared to 2005, when Armstrong was chasing his seventh title. Ratings this week have been on a similar pacing, says OLN spokesperson Amy Phillips, though the network has seen "slight bumps" during several mountain stages in the Alps. Part of that ratings increase can be attributed to Flandis being either in or near the lead during those stages, and the rest can be ascribed to cycling aficionados knowing that the mountain stages are the most critical days of the Tour, says Phillips.

OLN is careful to run promos that tease each evening's rebroadcast without giving away the day's results, and will continue to do so with Landis back in contention.

"Our promos are very topical," says Phillips, who notes that promos have been undergoing constant tweaking due to the topsy-turvy standings of this year's Tour.

http://www.broadcastingcable.com/index.asp?layout=articlePrint&articleID=CA6355154

TV Critics Summer Press Tour
A very special 'CSI' Thanksgiving

From Maureen Ryan’s Chicago Tribune blog “The Watcher” July 20, 2006

Carol Mendelsohn of “CSI” was asked after that show’s Q & A session what her reaction was upon hearing that “Grey’s Anatomy” and “CSI” would be going head to head. “Finally we’ll get more promotion” she said of her reaction. “CBS steps forward when we need it, but everybody always thinks that the successful shows will take care of themselves. … we just beg and beg for more promotion.”

Well, they’re getting it. Just scheduling a press tour session for a 6-year-old show demonstrates that CBS is not going down without a fight.

Mendelsohn noted that the show is casting several major guest stars at the moment, though she didn’t have names to give out yet.

“Our Thanksgiving episode will be a very, very special episode,” Mendelsohn said. There will be an exorcism and a haunted house and “we’ll be inviting the viewers to guess who [the guest star is] — it’s revealed at the end of the show.”

A few spoilers regarding the two-part season-opener of “CSI”: George and Catherine are at a bar and somebody slips “a little something in my beverage,” said Marg Helgenberger, who plays Catherine Willows. “There’s something very significant that happens with my character in that episode that’s stretched over the two-parter involving my being in jeopardy and my family being in jeopardy. And it comes to this big, big dramatic conclusion.”

One final “CSI” note (and let a thousand message boards go to Defcon 5 over this one): I asked executive producer Naren Shankar about the fact that many fans had always hoped for a Grissom-Catherine relationship. “I have a hard time seeing that one,” Shankar said. “They’re sort of like brother and sister.”

http://tempo.typepad.com/entertainment_tv/

TV Critics Summer Press Tour
Ben the Frank

By Christopher Lisotta TVWeek.com in the “Critical Eye” TV Press Tour blog Thursday, July 20th, 2006

When the fall 2006-07 season begins, Ben Silverman will be able to say something no other executive producer can: he is the only guy in broadcast television who has a drama, comedy and reality series on the network schedules.

While he is returning with NBC’s “The Biggest Loser” and “The Office,” he’s debuting a six-year passion project, ABC’s “Ugly Betty.”

Ever since Silverman was an agent at William Morris, he’d been trying to get the project—an English-language adaptation of one of the most successful Spanish-language telenovelas in history—on U.S. television.

The first attempt was as a half-hour comedy, but the tone was off. Another write couldn’t find the voice. But once Silverman added producer Selma Hayek and writer Silvio Horta, things took off.

While “Betty” is plenty campy and fun, there are some serious issues of race and class being discussed in the series, Silverman said after the show’s TCA session Tuesday. The modest Latin American family that title character Betty comes from is in stark contrast to the WASP-y media dynasty her boss stands for. For Silverman, it is a true picture of New York City.

“People cast in a hyper-P.C. way,” he said. Every arresting officer is Latin, every judge is black, and every criminal is white. They kind of reverted to a reverse PC. We’re showing a real issue here, in that her dad has issues with the HMO, they live in row houses in Queens. We’re not pretending to populate one world. The fact is there are issues that relate to being a first-generation immigrant that go deeper. It’s not like you wake up in America and you’re Warren Buffett. We want to show there are elements that make certain journeys harder, and to reflect that in an honest way. I just hate that you can’t have a dialogue. I’d rather live in the bull’s eye of ‘why are you calling it that’ or being provocative, if it enables people to have a conversation.”

http://blogs.tvweek.com/?cat=5

TV Critics Summer Press Tour
Green jackets and where's the veep?

From Maureen Ryan’s Chicago Tribune blog “The Watcher” July 20, 2006

It's official: After nearly 10 days at TCA press tour, I've lost the ability to think in story form and can only offer this list of tiny bits and bites of information. Make of it what you will...

• It really is a game of numbers with the networks. Not talking about ratings here. But at the summer press tour, there was an unfortunate desire to cram the stage with as many people as possible. The panel on “The Nine” had 13 people on stage. Same with “Betty the Ugly’s” panel – 13 people on stage, only a few of whom spoke. What’s up with that?

• Kim Raver was part of the panel for “The Nine,” and as her co-star Tim Daly noted, she’s made quite the career of numbers-oriented shows. She was on “Third Watch,” then moved to “24,” and is now on “The Nine” (a very watchable ABC thriller about the aftermath of a bank robbery). If only Raver had time in her schedule, she should think about a guest stint on “Numbers.”

• Speaking of Kim Raver, she said “24” producers are keeping her character, Audrey Raines, alive, and “there’s a specific reason for that.” She didn’t rule out showing up on the Fox drama when it returns in January.

• John Billingsley, on the other hand (my favorite “Star Trek: Enterprise” actor), will not be returning to “Prison Break” as the vice president’s toothless brother. Billingsley said his duties on “The Nine” prevented him from returning to the Fox show. Also not returning to “Prison Break”: Patricia Wettig, who plays the scheming vice president. She’s on “Brothers and Sisters” this fall.

• Speaking of “Numbers,” there are two trends going on with the names for network shows this fall: numbers and one-word titles. We’ve got “Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip,” “30 Rock,” “Six Degrees,” “The Nine,” and “20 Good Years.” And then there are all the one-word titles, which are confusing the heck out of everyone here at TCA and no doubt owe a bit of debt to “House.” Anyhow, someone will mention “Kidnapped” when they actually mean “Vanished” or “Runaway” or “Justice” or “Standoff” or maybe even “Heroes” or “Shark” or “Jericho” (and this one is full of extra pizzazz) “Smith.” Regarding this plethora of nearly interchangeable titles, I have one word for networks: “Enough.”

• During a session on the new CW’s comedy block, “Everybody Hates Chris” executive producer Ali LeRoi talked about multicultural casts – and the frequent lack thereof — on television. “Who’s sitting in this room?” he said to the assemblage of largely white critics. “You know, that’s the world. Even on our show, we try to deal with the world. We have white characters on the show, black characters, we fold in some Asians and some Latinos. We just put them in there, and we don’t make a big deal out of it. For me, honestly, I think J.J. Abrams has done about the best job, barring Shonda Rhimes in ‘Grey’s Anatomy,’ of really just presenting a full multi-ethnic cast without condescension. Just put the people in there and let them play roles. They exist and that’s the end of the story.”

• Two other tidbits on the presentation for “The Nine”: Star Chi McBride, who plays the manager of the bank that is robbed on the show, noted that he “worked at First National Bank of Chicago before I got into show business, and sometimes you think about who you would be if you hadn’t chosen the career path that you ended up choosing. And for me, this was that guy.”

• The funniest moment of that session was when the “Nine” cast was asked what experiences they drew upon to portray the nine characters’ experience of being held hostage in a bank. “I was on ‘Wings’ for eight years, so I have a lot of personal experience with hostage situations,” “Nine” star Tim Daly cracked.

• Speaking of things that are entirely irrelevant, the outfits that the CW network made its pages wear were a trip. The pages run around the room in every press session, giving microphones to members of the press who raise their hands and indicate they want to ask questions. Well, on Monday, the CW, which is really pushing its “fun” new green promotional materials, logo, etc., made its pages wear white shirts, white shoes, white pants -- and bright green sports jackets. Honestly, they were crazy ugly. If that weren’t bad enough, on the back, in huge letters, they said “Free to be helpful.” No, really.

• By comparison, what ABC did to its pages is merely a misdemeanor of accessorizing. Its pages wore khaki pants, white shirts and dark blazers -- quite fetching ensembles, in fact. But then the pages were forced to wear white gloves as well. What, did ABC not want its pages to actually touch critics? Not that I don’t understand that, but still.

• Speaking of fashion trends in television, there was a big laugh involving the co-creators of “Six Degrees,” both of whom have charmingly rumpled hair and nerdy black glasses, as if they were sporting “J.J. Abrams chic.” They did indeed both bear a passing resemblance to the “Lost” guru. But the glasses were just for show, producer Stuart Zicherman joked. “These are just to look smart,” he said of his specs.

• The funniest line from the “Brothers and Sisters” panel was when the dozens of assembled actors and producers were talking about how and why Sally Field was cast on the ensemble family drama. Ken Olin, an executive producer of “Alias” and “Brothers and Sisters” (which also stars “Alias” actor Ron Rifkin) joked that “Sally knows where Rambaldi is.” For the four people in the room who got that joke, it was hilarious.

http://tempo.typepad.com/entertainment_tv/

A Reminder
TV Critics Summer Tour

The nation’s TV critics continue their summer tour in Pasadena CA this weekend. NBC executives and stars will face the critics Friday and Saturday.

The Hot Off The Press thread will continue to have up-to-the-minute highlights of the TCA Tour throughout the weekend.

So make sure to log on a few times to check out the latest developments over the weekend.

Isn't it though? I have SciFi on Comcast, Dish and DirectV, and they all look like crap. Our local FOX affiliate runs syndicated Stargate episodes late night sometimes, they run them in letterbox format and the PQ is very good, much better than you would think. I'd swear that it's from HD transfers it looks that good, but it's 4x3 letterboxed. It's too bad SciFi couldn't at least be as good as that, instead of the plain terrible, bit-starved, soft mess that it is.
I agree. I often times catch the syndicated episodes of SG-1 and Atlantis when they run on the weekends on my local FOX station. I'm really surprised at the great quality, even though they're not HD.

Speaking of ScFi's Stargate's, are the first two episodes from last week available online anywhere? With all the talk of multi-platform delivery, I spent 30 mins looking but couldn't find anything. Except for torrents of course..

I dont watch stargate anymore. But indeed when i was flipping the channels the syndicated versions look much better than originally broadcast on SCIFI. I seen a number of syndicated SD 4x3 broadcast on the HD channels that fooled me into think it's HD... well at least for a couple of seconds. I'm pretty sure that the syndicated reruns on SpikeTV of the Shield look better. I sort of hate original series broadcast on FX, USA, TNT, SCiFI, etc. They always look far worse than they should. I find myself on a DVR watching those last.

oh it's not provider related as I've seen it on different sources.

Amazing isn't it? It's a crying shame the original airings on SciFi look so bad. Those syndicated versions look like they have been down-converted from HD they look so good. Zoom them up to full 16x9 and they blow away the SciFi PQ.

TV Critics Summer Press Tour
"Brothers & Sisters" looks good on paper

By David Kronke Los Angeles Daily News Television Critic July 20, 2006

On paper, "Brothers & Sisters" looks to have everything going for it, boasting a cast that includes Sally Field, Calista Flockhart, Rachel Griffiths, Ron Rifkin and Patricia Wettig and a creative team including playwright Jon Robin Baitz, Marti Noxon ("Buffy the Vampire Slayer" and Ken Olin ("Alias").

On the other hand, the series is the only new show that has not been screened for critics; a couple of roles have been recast (Field is a late addition) and the tone has been retooled: All the makings of a troubled production.

"I never got the sense that we were troubled at all," Baitz told members of the Television Critics Association Wednesday afternoon in Pasadena. "It was recasting — I never got a sense of anyone's panic. In fact, the network let us try again."

"We decided the temperature needed to be a little different," Noxon added. "We felt the family should have a little more fun."

Well, OK. But the producers seemed either unable or unwilling to give reporters whether or not Tom Skerritt, who portrays the family's patriarch, will appear in episodes beyond the pilot. In the brief cut-down shown to critics, his character is seen collapsing into a pool; Skerritt's name doesn't appear anywhere in the show's promotional materials.

It took three separate questions before Olin finally admitted that they didn't have a deal with Skerritt to appear in any more episodes. After that, a journalist whose laptop with access to the hotel's spotty wi-fi pointed out that ABC's "Sons & Daughters" website mentioned the death of the patriarch as part of its series description.

You want another reason to fear something less than the best? Baitz declared, "This family is, in some ways, America," and that the show is "the TV equivalent of new journalism."

For her part, Field said, "If we splat, I hope it's colorful. Big, bold and colorful."

http://www.dailynews.com/portlet/article/html/fragments/print_article.jsp?article=4071461

Below, from Left, Calista Flockhart, Rachel Griffiths and Sally Field speak with reporters at the TCA~Summer Tour.

TV Critics Summer Press Tour
Heche's charm offensive

By Hal Boedeker Orlando Sentinel Television Critic in the Sentinel’s TV Guy blog July 20, 2006 4:08:45 PM

Anne Heche has made her share of headlines with her book "Call Me Crazy" and her love life. But she seemed at peace Wednesday meeting critics to promote "Men in Trees," an ABC comedy-drama in which she plays a life coach who moves to Alaska.

One critic wanted a status report on how she was doing and said, "It seems like you're totally ..."

Heche interrupted, saying, "Sane."

Laughter and applause swept the room. But if critics had been lukewarm about this show, the session may have moved them to give it another look -- especially after the comments of creator Jenny Bicks and her revelations about the animal cast.

When asked about "Men in Trees" being compared to "Northern Exposure," Bicks said she was flattered. She noted that her show is different. It's told from a woman's view. "It's a journey of self-discovery through a world primarily of men, which 'Northern Exposure' obviously had a different bent," she said.

Critics were fascinated by a raccoon named Elvis who will be a recurring character. Bicks revealed that the raccoon has a stunt double who's a dog.

"We also had a dog in a raccoon suit for the shots when the raccoon was running down the stairs, because raccoons don't really run," Bicks said. "They lope. So we have Boomer the terrier, also a fine actor."

One writer asked the actors if they'd like a life coach. "Clearly, I have never had a life coach," Heche said. "What would I like coaching on? I've stumbled through and made so many mistakes, I'm pretty good with where I am."

Heche was effusive about doing a television series. "It seems like the greatest job on Earth, and I've been trying to get it for the last five years," she said.

Bicks was a writer and executive producer on "Sex and the City." ABC lists "Men in Trees" as a drama. But it seems more comedic. So is her new show more a drama or a comedy?

"I see it as a dramedy," Bicks said. "Coming from 'Sex and the City' for six years ... I guess we are listed as a comedy, but we always felt that we were both."

"Men in Trees" will follow "Ugly Betty" on Fridays this fall. "Ugly Betty" has emerged as a critics' darling at this conference. But ABC could have another pleasant surprise in "Men in Trees." If Heche can charm cynical critics, maybe she can win over the country.

http://blogs.orlandosentinel.com/entertainment_tv_tvblog/2006/07/heches_charm_of.html

TV Critics Summer Press Tour
Charlie Sheen Seeks $24M Payday

By Scott Collins Los Angeles Times Staff Writer in the Channel Island TV Industry blog July 20, 2006

Charlie Sheen got his Emmy nomination. Now he wants his reward.

The star of the hit CBS comedy "Two and a Half Men" is about to demand a big hike in his paycheck, two sources familiar with the matter say, possibly to as much $1 million per episode, or $24 million per year. That would be about five times what the actor currently makes and would vault him into the stratosphere of TV's highest-paid actors. The six leads of NBC's "Friends" made $1 million apiece in that show's final seasons.

Sheen's co-stars, Jon Cryer and 12-year-old Angus T. Jones, are also seeking fat raises, although neither makes as much as Sheen. The negotiations with Warner Bros. Television, the studio that makes "Men," are expected to start officially on Friday and could take weeks or even months to resolve.

Technically all three actors are under contract at least through the 2006-07 season. But Warner Bros. earlier this month concluded lucrative deals to syndicate the comedy on cable network FX and elsewhere. The cast members are now coming forward for their share of the loot, some of which may be paid in the form of advances against future profit participation in the show.

Sheen and Cryer just received their first-ever Emmy nominations for their work on the show (Sheen as a lead, Cryer as supporting actor), bolstering their agents' cases for a pay boost. Though not particularly loved by the critics, "Two and a Half Men" is TV's most-watched comedy and will likely prove a gold mine for Warners.

It's already been an eventful year for Sheen. In April, his wife, Denise Richards, filed for divorce with a 17-page court filing that was lurid even by Hollywood's extreme standards. Richards alleged the actor threatened to have her killed and was addicted to drugs and pornography. However, after a flurry of depositions in recent days, the pair are close to a custody agreement for their two young daughters, people familiar with the situation say, although sizable financial issues remain. It's unclear what impact, if any, a pay hike for Sheen would have on the divorce.

A Warner Bros. spokeswoman declined to comment. Calls to representatives for Sheen, Cryer and Jones were not immediately returned.

http://hollywoodhotline.typepad.com/watcher/

(Photo below: By Michael Buckner / Getty Images )

The Hot Off The Press thread will continue to have up-to-the-minute highlights of the TCA Tour throughout the weekend.

So make sure to log on a few times to check out the latest developments over the weekend.

Jeez fred, don't you ever sleep or go outside? ;)

Not that often during the upfronts or the summer and winter critics tours :)

TV Notebook
Which Anchors Put Themselves In The Line Of Fire?

(accesshollywood.com)

Mere miles from St. Tropez, where celebrities like Paris Hilton, Liam Neeson and Pamela Anderson and Kid Rock were recently spotted enjoying the sand and sun, the world has erupted into a very frightening place.

And once again, American news correspondents are braving life-threatening dangers to bring viewers and readers the story of the escalating violence in Israel's war against Hezbollah in Lebanon.

NBC's Martin Fletcher is in Israel, where he and his crew came within seconds of becoming war casualties.

"A rocket fell 100 yards in front of us, straight in our line of driving," Fletcher told Access Hollywood. "Five seconds later we would have been hit. We just saw this flash of red flame, a huge explosion."

Reporting from Haifa, where Hezbollah rockets rain down indiscriminately, presents a danger unique to even seasoned war correspondents.

"It's completely random," Fletcher told us. "Rescue workers carry victims to the train station. So, once you do this job, you accept that your fate is in someone else's hands."

Despite the risk, anchors and reporters continue to flood into the Middle East.

NBC's Brian Williams and ABC's Charles Gibson are already in the danger zone. NBC's Ann Curry filed her first report from Beirut Wednesday.

The decision to enter a war zone remains a choice.

More than 70 journalists have died covering the Iraq War. And in January, ABC's brand-new "World News Tonight" co-anchor, Bob Woodruff, was seriously injured when the convoy he was riding in was hit by an explosive device in Iraq.

Risking their own safety to provide the depth of coverage needed is nothing new for network and cable news anchors.

Once called the "most trusted figure" in American public life, according to the Museum of Broadcast Communications, Walter Cronkite spoke eloquently on opening communications with the North Vietnamese following his visit to the war-torn region.

Dan Rather reported from Baghdad, and interviewed Saddam Hussein after Iraq invaded Kuwait.

As the "World News Tonight" anchor, Peter Jennings reported from both the Gulf War and the war in Iraq.

NBC's Tom Brokaw, who flew around the globe as an anchor to cover breaking news, may have even faced a potential threat to his life at home.

A letter containing anthrax was sent to Brokaw as part of the 2001 anthrax attacks. Brokaw did not open the tainted letter, but two NBC News employees were infected.

The big question remains: what about Katie?

Katie Couric, who takes over the CBS Evening News in September told Access Hollywood that at this point, she would not venture into the Middle East hot spot.

"I think the situation there is so dangerous, and as a single parent with two children, that's something I won't be doing," Katie said.

http://www.accesshollywood.com/television/ah950.shtml

TV Critics Summer Press Tour
Critics find Hollywood a wacky blast

If you think the content on TV is nuts, wait until you hear what's going on behind the scenes.
By Neal Justin Minneapolis Star Tribune

LOS ANGELES -How hot is it in Hollywood? It's so hot that James Gandolfini's knee spontaneously combusted, delaying filming of "The Sopranos" for another eight years. It's so hot that Michael Jackson refuses to return to California in fear that he'll lose his whiteness. It's so hot that chef Wolfgang Puck is cooking caviar omelettes on the sidewalk. It's so hot that Calista Flockhart was spotted eating an entire Popsicle. By herself.

But seriously, folks.

You can't blame the record-breaking heat for the craziness that routinely takes place in the entertainment capital of the world, where I'll be stationed through the end of July as part of the TV Critics Association press tour, an event in which castaways from the Island of Misfit Toys interact with the small screen's biggest names. Here's a taste of what that combination has wrought:

Buttons and birds

The Hallmark Channel must be running dry of tearjerker movies-of-the-week because its evening soiree last week revolved around its airing of the Oscar-winning documentary "March of the Penguins." Or maybe executives were hoping that party guest Dick Van Dyke would break into his "Mary Poppins" waddle with the pair of penguins on loan from the San Diego Zoo. Van Dyke, always a good sport, reminisced about that classic scene poolside with four or five of us when the subject turned to legendary comedians he's worked with. Red Buttons' name came up and everyone shared their favorite stories of a man who had a zinger for every occasion. Van Dyke remarked that he had heard a rumor that Buttons had fallen down the stairs. Probably nothing to it, he said. Next morning, news broke that Buttons had died of vascular cancer.

Up, up and away

Forget Superman. The greatest caped crusader is "Monkey Woman." At least that's what you would have thought the way writers hovered around the contestant from Sci Fi's new reality series, "Who Wants to Be a Superhero?" The scantily dressed would-be heroine mingled at a cable party along with other costumed cast members, including "Fat Momma," who nearly slapped me into outer space after I yanked on her belt of plastic doughnuts.

Spared that indignity, I found myself in the buffet line next to the legendary Stan Lee, founder of Marvel Comics and the show's executive producer. I remarked that this was quite an event because it was bringing together two of the greatest legions of geeks: TV critics and comic-book fans. "Yeah," he said. "And I'm the king of them all."

Chain of fools

I pity the fool who tries to put Mr. T back in chains. The "A-Team" alum, on hand to promote his self-help series on TV Land, greeted writers in a tailored suit. Mr. T said he put away the jewelry and bad attitude for good after seeing the destruction caused by Hurricane Katrina. He said the gold is now "in his heart." He also revealed that the "T" now stands for being nice, working hard, loving your neighbor and feeding the hungry. There's got to be a "T" in there somewhere.

The shell game

CBS revealed a new marketing campaign in which consumers might find snappy slogans printed on the shells of eggs they buy at the supermarket. Did I say snappy? You be the judge. "CSI: Crack the Case on CBS."Amazing Race: Scramble to Win on CBS." Just one more reason to switch to EggBeaters.

A different kind of grilling

CBS held a party in the Rose Bowl, which was a great treat since I probably won't be getting there as a Gopher fan anytime soon. But after a couple of hours, I felt queasy. It was either the sight of cranberry-flavored hot dogs or 59-year-old James Woods running around with his 20-year-old girlfriend. Whatever, I needed a reprieve. I needed an In-N-Out Burger.

For the uninformed, the In-N-Out is simply the greatest thing to happen to fast-food restaurants since the invention of the straw. I always have to make a pilgrimage to one of its castles when I'm in town. If you visit, avoid the drive-thru -- even though that means committing L.A.'s cardinal sin of leaving your car -- and step inside. There, you'll see more than a dozen cooks working furiously on fresh, perfect burgers in an open kitchen. It's as thrilling as going to the Los Angeles Orchestra.

But don't tell this to any TV executives. They'll want to make it into a series.

http://www.startribune.com/1706/story/561781.html

Seriously, I was wondering about how this casting news would impact one of my favorite shows, 'Prison Break'......? I thought actors were signed to something called a "contract" when they signed on for a major role in a TV series that obligated them to actually, you know, work for that series for a few years (or as long as it stays on the air). Replacing John Billingsley won't be that hard, as he was mostly heard and not seen, but Patrica Wettig was a major character and re-casting her will be an unpleasant shock to the audience. What is this, soap opera?

I wonder why an agreement like Peter MacNicol was able to arrange couldn't be similarly brokered for Patrica Wettig. MacNicol signed on to be a regular on 24 next season but will also continue playing his role on Numbers on CBS.

Her character is too significant to not arrange it so she could at least make guest appearances on Prison Break. Some creative rewriting of scripts could maintain and perhaps even increase the ominousness and mysteriousness of her character by limiting her appearances to only rare occasions.

In any case, trying to pull a fast one on fans by switching out an actor for the same character is not a good idea. Some call it the "Darin Game."

I guess whoever wrote her contract for "Prison Break" didn't pay close enough attention.

And soaps do it all the time without missing a beat. :)

FWIW, I'm watching Eureka now that I recorded on one of Cox's digital simulcast channels and the PQ is pretty good.

TV Critics Summer Press Tour
Sitcom Me Up

By Roger Catlin Hartford Courant TV Critic in his “TV Eye” blog July 20, 2006

The show was pitched as “Let’s Rob Jeff Goldblum” – without permission of that actor. It became “Let’s Rob Mick Jagger” after the rock star agreed to be the target of the elaborate scheme at the center of the comedy. Now it’s known as “The Knights of Prosperity” – in part to allow another celebrity to be the target of a heist next season.

But the cast of the ABC comedy is pretty stoked to be working in any way with the charismatic lead singer of the Rolling Stones, who will appear in it occasionally.

“Start me up!” quoted cast member Lenny Venito. “Huge fan. Huge Stones fan.”

“I saw the Stones in San Diego in 1981 I think it was,” says series star Donal Logue. (“I was born in 1981,” piped another cast member, Josh Grisetti, who actually was).

It doesn’t throw Logue. “I grew up in a small town on the Mexican border. And so to think about in some weird way that your world and Mick Jagger's would be brought together is probably the highlight of my weird career,” he said. “So it's pretty fantastic.”

“The Knights of Prosperity,” which lists Jagger as an executive producer, starts Oct. 17 on ABC.

http://www.bloglines.com/public/TCABlogs

TV Critics Summer Press Tour
Inside 'Grey's' vault

By Robert Bianco USA Today July 20, 2006

No producer is more protective of her show's secrets than Grey's Anatomy creator Shonda Rhimes, who locks her writers and stars under Hollywood's most effective cone of silence. And she has no intention of lifting it.

"As usual," Rhimes told reporters Thursday during a visit to the Grey's set, "I don't like to tell you anything that happens in the season. But I can tell you one thing: One of our first guests is going to be Diahann Carroll, the fabulous Diahann Carroll."

Though we can't say what will be in them, you can expect some big episodes at the start of the season, as Grey's readies itself to battle CSI in its new Thursday 9 ET/PT time slot. The first episodes, says producer/director Peter Horton, are "not only great, but pretty significant. ABC wants people to be captured on that night."

http://www.usatoday.com/life/television/news/2006-tv-press-tour.htm

TV Critics Summer Press Tour
Raccoons in Trees

By Roger Catlin Hartford Courant TV Critic in his “TV Eye” blog July 20, 2006

Anne Heche plays a self-help guru who goes to Alaska in ABC’s fall drama “Men in Trees.” But a lot of the questions had to do with an expressive raccoon named Elvis seen in the pilot episode. Here are some of the hard-hitting questions that elucidated:

• It's gotta be hard to get a stunt raccoon like that. First of all, is that a real raccoon rather than an animatronic?

• When you are shooting him in Vancouver, was he from somewhere else? Did you have to fly him up there?

• If we go back to the raccoon for a minute, since Elvis was in the credits that we got at the end of the pilot we got, can we assume he's a recurring character?

• And number two, I want to see if I've gotten this straight. The raccoon had a stunt double who was a dog.

• Could we get back to the animals for a second? Do Elvis and Boomer share a trailer on the set?

• I have a different question, but first of all, a raccoon is a nocturnal creature and they're also really irritable. They really are, so do you wake them up during the day if you have to film during the day? What is that like to take them and film them?

Because you may want to know, here are the answers:

Yeah. That is the very best raccoon,” said show creator and executive producer Jenny Bicks, who played along. “If anyone ever wants to hire a raccoon, call me. That is Elvis the raccoon, and he is infamous and famous.

“I believe he gave you your space,” she said to Heche. “You worked well with him."

“Best actor I've ever worked with,” Heche replied.

“He was local hire," she confirmed, cheekily.

"A 'raccooning' character,” actor John Amos piped in, a play on the word recurring.

“We also had a dog in a raccoon suit for the shots when the raccoon was running down the stairs," Hicks revealed. "Because raccoons don't really run. They lope. So we have Boomer the terrier, also a fine actor.”

So there was a dog as stunt double. “However,” she advised, “I would not tell the dog that. The dog thinks its stunt double was the raccoon. It's complicated.”

The two animals don’t share a trailer on the set, she said, mostly because they have different schedules.

“Raccoons are nocturnal animals; they sleep through most of [the day],” Bicks said. “So Boomer is up when Elvis is asleep.”

Following all this attention over the animals – from exclusively male reporters, the series star was reassured about the drama, which was expected to draw largely female audiences.

“See?” Heche said. “Men will watch.”

“We do find,” Bicks said in her best producer voice, “that men very much enjoy the raccoon.”

“Men in Trees” starts Sept. 22 on ABC.

http://www.bloglines.com/public/TCABlogs

TV Critics Summer Press Tour
'Knights' needs rescuing from its title

By Melanie McFarland Seattle Post-Intelligencer TV Critic Friday, July 21, 2006

When it comes to predicting a series' success, nailing down a good title is three-quarters of the battle. Right? Dangle the perfect moniker, and audiences might come.

If that's true, ABC's comedy "The Knights of Prosperity" -- a working title that's really not working -- is in trouble.

It's not the only series. Many of fall TV's freshman titles don't give you a clue as to what you're signing up for. That became clear the other day, when a friend excused herself to go watch a pilot. Which one? I asked. "You know, that new Fox show about the kidnapping. What is it called? 'Kidnapped' ?"

"No," I said, " 'Kidnapped' is on NBC."

"You mean 'Runaway,'? " someone offered, but no, that's Donnie Wahlberg's series on The CW. We all tossed other names around in a confused fog before landing on it: The show in question is called "Vanished," which like "Kidnapped," is about disappearing rich people.

"Runaway," meanwhile, is on the teen-targeted CW, which makes a person think it should be about some edgy, misunderstood kid. But no, it refers to a middle-age guy (Wahlberg) and wife (played by Leslie Hope) and kids fleeing the FBI.

That's merely confusing. "The Knights of Prosperity," now that sounds lame.

Disappointing, because "The Knights of Prosperity" is one of those series that I really, truly hope will work. The ensemble, which includes Donal Logue, Lenny Venito, Kevin Michael Richardson, Sofia Vergara and Maz Jobrani, has tremendous chemistry. And the characters are lovable. Eugene Gurkin (Logue) leads an ineffectual crew of working-class stiffs who make robbing Mick Jagger their sole purpose in life. His partners include Gourishankar Subramaniam -- called Gary for short (Jobrani) -- as well as a guy who goes by Squatch (Venito), a boulder of a man named Rockefeller Butts (Richardson) and a flinty sexpot called Esperanza Villalobos (Vergara).

Great names, right? So why haven't the producers figured out what to call this show? Before "Knights" was "Knights," the series had been called "Let's Rob Mick Jagger," which started a buzz about it, mostly because Jagger agreed to do a priceless cameo.

That was shortened to "Let's Rob ..." kind of a bummer, but still OK. That got kicked, executive producers Rob Burnett and Jon Beckerman explained, because it sounded too ambiguous, and besides, after these losers succeed or fail at robbing Jagger (which will play out to the end this season) they'll move on to other schemes.

The producers have season two figured out, and they can't even tell you what the series is going to be called.

ABC is home to a couple of TV's best titles "Lost" and "Desperate Housewives." "Desperate's" name announces its tongue-in-cheek flavor. "Lost" sounded so mysterious that in its first season, people couldn't help but be drawn to it. Another option is to dream up a kooky title that'll challenge people to get past it, promising to reward those adventurers with tremendous television. ("Battlestar Galactica's" devotees know what I'm talking about.)

But there's a fine line between success and sucking, and "Knights of Prosperity" does not smell sweet. So, yeah, Burnett and Beckermen have a problem to solve and not much time in which to solve it. The pair shouldn't get too depressed, though.

Most of ABC's fall series are poorly titled.

Try talking people into watching "Ugly Betty." See if they don't laugh at you. Really, I dare you. I only say this because of the e-mails I've received about the series, which have been along the lines of "Are you serious?"

At least that's provocative. "Day Break," does that speak to you? Taye Diggs is in it, and he plays a cop, but so what? "Six Degrees": What, Kevin Bacon has a show now? "The Nine," "Big Day," "Men in Trees." Huh? What? Who? "Notes From the Underbelly" doesn't exactly make your heart flip either, but it gets a pass. Before it was a crappily named series, it was a so-crappy-it's-cleverly-named book.

And this isn't just ABC's problem either. CBS is bringing us "Smith," which doesn't mean anything to the average viewer, so that series' best hope is in putting other names -- Virginia Madsen, Ray Liotta and executive producer John Wells -- front and center so the title becomes secondary. Ditto for "Shark" and James Woods, and NBC's "30 Rock" and Tina Fey. At least they have recognizable stars; I like Ron Livingston, but do enough people care about him to see what Fox's "Standoff" is about?

ABC does have one title that speaks for itself, "Brothers & Sisters," which is set to follow "Desperate" on Sundays at 10, and an impressive cast that includes Calista Flockhart, Rachel Griffiths, Sally Field, Ron Rifkin and Balthazar Getty. It has the opposite problem: Nobody has seen the pilot because the producers had to recast roles and reshoot it.

I guess there are worse things than an unfortunate name. Right, Gary?

Tooth be told

Sofia Vergara has smarts and pulchritude, and she knows it. Now all she needs is to be on a decent television show. Last year, ABC took those curves and wasted them on "Hot Properties," in which she played a role that may as well have been filled by Charo. She wasn't stuck there for long, though. It was one of the first series of 2005-06 to be razed. (Thank goodness; if it had made it through the season, our national IQ would have sunk to new lows.) Now she's in "The Knights of Prosperity."

What's interesting is, but for a twist of fate, this international model could have been a dentist. Didn't happen, as she explained in what may be the press tour's best quote so far: "I went to dental school for three years in Colombia, but all this voluptuousness didn't let me finish."

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/printer2/index.asp?ploc=t&refer=http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/tv/278302_tv21.html

TV Critics Summer Press Tour
An In Depth Look at “Lost”

Key and Locke
By Alan Sepinwall of the Newark Star-Ledger in the “All TV In Hollywood” blog Friday, July 21, 2006

So as I mentioned earlier, ABC's non-party party was very productive. I wrote up the Marc Cherry gaggle for the All TV column that will be posted Friday morning, but only had minimal room for the stuff with "Lost" showrunner Carlton Cuse. But if you want some post-morteming on the last season and some mild spoilers for the new one on the island, keep reading.

Because this was a three-way interview with another reporter and there were a lot of digressions, this won't be a straight transcript, and not all the questions were asked by me.

Fans seemed much more satisfied with this year's finale than last year's.

"Damon and I feel like mission was accomplished. We were very cognizant of the fact that people seemed dissatisfied with the first season finale, so we tried to put more stuff in the second season finale."

I've gotten several theories on the four-toed foot, including a passage from a book called "Headlong Hall" that describes that exact thing. Is it an homage to that, or does it have some larger purpose?

"We wouldn't have put it in the show if it didn't have purpose. It's not really an homage. The foot and the statue that it was a part of are part of the mythological history of the show."

(NOTE: The next day, I e-mailed Cuse the relevant passage from "Headlong Hall," and he wrote back, "Amazing! I admit that is not our source or inspiration for our four-toed statue but it is a cool coincidence nonetheless.")

Does everything on the show have a purpose, or are some things just coincidences?)

"Some are homages. When a character is reading An Incident at Owl Creek, that's an acknowledgement of the theory -- it's a book about a guy whose life is flashing before his eyes as he dies -- that was us saying we're aware of that theory."

I know some fans who are skeptical about how much you and Damon (Lindelof) really know about the answers to all the mysteries, but they say the brilliance of how your fanbase has evolved is that there are so many different theories on message boards that, when the time comes to show your cards, you can just go on-line, cherry pick the best ideas and tweak them a little.

"I wish it was that easy. That would be great if we could actually do it. I think the mistake that most of the people who theorize about the show make is trying to come up with a very simple unifying theory. Einstein was looking for a unified field theory, they're still looking. That's not to say there aren't theories that explain most properties of matter, but they don't all come together in one single theory, but there's obviously unity in the universe. It doesn't reduce down to a single, simple sentence."

I know you don't want to spoil anything, but what are the broad strokes of season three?

"The show's going to be about our characters' interactions with The Others, it's going to be more of an action-adventure year, more romance, we hoped to get to romance last year but the story didn't get us there. It'll be more character-oriented, less mythologically-oriented, last year was very dark and intense and in the hatch. This year, we're going to find out about The Others, what they want, what they're up to. But it's not just about them. It's about seeing them through the window of our characters."

After Desmond's ex-girlfriend went to all this trouble to find him, wouldn't it be a pretty mean surprise if she discovers the island and he died turning that key?

"That would be a pretty mean surprise. I think it would be very stupid of us to kill Desmond. Desmond will be back."

(At this point, I breathe a sigh of relief, because if Desmond's alive, so are Locke and Eko. There follows a debate over whether I'm taller than the guy who plays Eko. Moving on...)

How will J.J. (Abrams) coming back to TV full time change things, especially since he has two other shows on ABC?

"He is going to co-write the season premiere episode and hopefully direct the seventh episode of the season, which will be the first episode of the second pod of episodes (after the 13-week hiatus so the bulk of the season can air without repeats in early '07). We're very happy to have JJ's very fertile and creative brain in the process, but Damon and I will continue to run the show on a day-to-day basis."

Getting back to Desmond, something I'm curious about since we seem to be done with the hatch: what's the purpose of having to punch in the numbers if all someone had to do to stop the electromagnet permanently was just to turn the key, and not die doing it?

"Desmond thought he was going to die if he turned the key. He wasn't ready to commit suicide. And only in that moment of intense desperation, he had no other choice. Kelvin went down and he couldn't turn the key, and he said to Desmond, 'I'm a coward, and you're like me; you're a coward, too.'"

(There is some discussion of characters who only appear in flashbacks, like Jack's father.)

And he's Claire's dad, right?

"You're like a lawyer, man. I can't -- that's good."

Claire's episode was the first time the flashbacks took place entirely on the island. Is that something you're going to do more of, especially since some of the characters seem to have run out of interesting pre-island stories?

"It's an option open to us. Clearly, if we were going to do Henry Gale's flashbacks, you might want to see what his life was like on the island."

How much of a season is planned out far in advance? Is there room to change things?

"There's room for flexibility, but there's an overarching structure in place. Henry Gale was only going to be in two episodes, but we loved Michael Emerson so much he was in eight. We love the organic quality of television, to see what an actor does with what you've written and respond to that."

Was the decision to kill Ana-Lucia and Libby made before or after you wrote Libby into the flashback scenes in "Dave"?

"The plan with Michelle (Rodriguez) was always going to be that she would be on the show for one year, and we planned for her demise from the beginning. Cynthia (Watros) we added later. We felt people would be surprised by Ana-Lucia's death, but adding Libby to it would really amp things up. Plus, she was a character the audience liked, where Ana-Lucia was more of an antagonist. Michelle did a great job with her role but she wasn't playing a sympathetic character."

If Libby had become a beloved character, would she have still died?

"That's a hard question to answer. We have a certain plan for characters but we watch what the actors to and react accordingly. We got to a certain point and didn't feel like we had enough stories for her."

But then why put her into that "Dave" flashback if you knew you were never going to deal with it later?

"That's assuming we won't deal with it. Like Christian Shephard, that character was dead before we learned much about him. We hope you will learn more about Libby's character and feel differently down the road."

But we know Hurley can't meet her, because he would have recognized her on the island. She looked different in the asylum, but she didn't look that different.

"There are many story devices available. I can't be too specific about it."

Those deaths were also shocking because it was the first time you didn't do a lot of interviews saying, "Somebody's going to die tonight!"

"We realized it was a big mistake for us to have publicized that someone was going to die when Shannon did, because it just motivated the fans. We are not the CIA, it's not impossible to find things out. And it kind of ruined it. it was much better to keep it really low-key. We made a vow, Damon and I, 'we're not going to reveal anybody's death.' It ruins it for people, and it's impossible to keep a secret if you warn people."

Speaking of characters who left without their stories being resolved, should I assume Michael and Walt are gone for good?

"They're not going to be around immediately, but they're still a part of the show."

So you'll deal with what, if anything, Walt's powers are and how he got them?

"Again, without being specific, there are many unanswered questions about Michael and Walt that we are going to answer."

Was Walt missing all season because you were afraid Malcolm (David Kelley) was going to grow three feet any day now?

"That wasn't really it. It was more about that character, what Damon and I were interested in was 'What price would you pay to get your child back?' The price that Michael paid was so extreme, it didn't seem possible that he could remain a member of this society after what he'd done. Banishment goes back to Greek literature. The ultimate form of punishment in Greek literature wasn't death; it was banishment. He's been banished from the island, and that to us represented the ultimate punishment for his actions, but it doesn't mean his story is over."

http://www.nj.com/weblogs/tv/index.ssf?/mtlogs/njo_alan/archives/2006_07.html#163515

TV Q&A
Ask Matt

(from the Ask (TV Critic) Matt (Roush) column at TVGuide.com
By Matt Roush TVGuide.com TV Critic

Question: Thanks for your first review of Dexter. You asked yourself if it's the first serial-killer hero on TV. Do you remember Profit with Adrian Pasdar as the new vice president of a multibillion-dollar conglomerate? He wasn't a real serial killer, but all his actions to get power were pure evil. Your review made me think of this (first?) evil hero. I know people didn't flock to the series, but it became a real cult show (even if all the episodes weren't aired — thanks, DVD!). Do you think the audience is now ready to care about that kind of character? — Hudson

Matt Roush: I think it's probably wise that Dexter is airing on a pay service like Showtime, where none of those tiresome my-morality-should-be-your-morality watchdog groups will have any impact. In my circle of colleagues, even those with stronger constitutions were pretty much creeped out by this show, though all agree that Michael C. Hall is astonishing as the deeply disturbed Dexter, who preys on bad guys who've slipped through the system (which makes him sort of an avenger against evil who uses methods that would normally classify him as evil).

Is the audience ready for it? I guess we'll find out in October. I know I am, but then I read and thoroughly enjoyed the novels on which this series is based, so I guess I'm not the most objective observer here. I certainly wouldn't recommend it without giving viewers due notice about what they're in for. And speaking of controversial antiheroes, read on about the summer's biggest bad boy....

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Question: Flash back to a few weeks ago when everyone was in an uproar over Tommy raping his wife on Rescue Me. Now move ahead to this week's episode, where we have Sheila, Tommy's ex-girlfriend (and widowed cousin-in-law), drugging Tommy, raping him while he is unconscious, then wrecking his place and planting booze on him to make it look like he had been drinking. I'm not sure if that first episode was any more difficult to watch than this week's. I bet the old double standard is going to show up big time here. I doubt there will be very few cries of outrage. In fact, there may even be a few comments that he deserved it. The difference here is that Janet did enjoy herself, no matter how strange the situation. Tommy, on the other hand, was unconscious and unaware of what was being done to him, and Sheila could get pregnant. To top it off, he now thinks he has fallen off the wagon and is having violent blackouts. I love this show with all of its hard-to-take personalities, and I wouldn't want a thing about it to change. I just wish other people would understand that this is the entire point of the show, and why it's called Rescue Me and not Saved. These people are all in need of rescuing. — Valerie

Matt Roush: Yes, it just keeps getting more and more twisted, doesn't it? At this point, the only woman in the show who hasn't jumped on top of Tommy is his sister, and believe me, I'm not recommending they go there — there are limits, even for Rescue Me (I hope). Thanks for this letter; it saved me from printing an even lengthier diatribe against the show, and your final sentence convinced me this was the way to go this week. I couldn't agree more.

I'm still troubled by Tommy's sexual assault on his wife and its aftermath: Janet coming back for more as the sexual aggressor (I'm not even getting into the issue anymore of whether she "enjoyed" it, which I think is a too-simplistic reading), Tommy hooking up with his brother's ex-wife in a revenge tryst, and then this latest bizarre twist with the jealously out-of-control Sheila. This has been a very polarizing season, with charges of misogyny coming from both male and female members of my critical community (with whom I've discussed the show at length during press tour). It's not just Tommy's treatment of these women that irks so many viewers, it's the psychology of the women in his life and the feeling that there's a lot of macho wish-fulfillment going on here.

At the same time, many feel as I do, and as Valerie seems to: Rescue Me is fearlessly mining some dangerous, even unstable, ground with this story line, which, it should be mentioned, is only one of many compelling threads this season. Tommy isn't taking an easy path to redemption. In fact, he's just sliding deeper into the abyss and dragging us with him. If a darkly comedic drama like this isn't allowed to disturb us like few shows have done before, then what's the point of doing it?

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Question: I've heard nothing but good things about ABC's upcoming Betty the Ugly. However, I think it has a huge obstacle to overcome: the mean-spirited, degrading and, yes, ugly title. This is even more of an issue now that the name has been changed to Ugly Betty, an even less poetic and more derogatory description. I realize that we're supposed to empathize with Betty and recognize her talent, intelligence and "inner beauty." But when the very name of the show is an insult, how can we set that aside? It certainly doesn't help that the perfectly attractive America Ferrera (who's had to play variations on this role in virtually every movie she's acted in) is made up to look like such a caricature. Do you think the show's quality can overwhelm its reductive title? In short, what's in a name? — Ryan

Matt Roush: Excellent question, and during ABC's press-tour presentation this week it came up a couple of times. The producers insist the new title is closer in translation to the title of the original telenovela on which this hourlong comedy is based. As executive producer Salma Hayek put it: "It's actually sarcastic. We're making fun of it. We're not really calling her ugly. We're making fun of the people that would think that [she's] ugly. I think she's beautiful." As for her exceedingly nerdy look, the charming and beaming America Ferrera said: "When I'm in character and I'm wearing Betty's costume, I never feel more confident, more beautiful and more pretty on the inside.... I wish that I one day as America [could] feel the way that I feel when I'm Betty. Because when I'm Betty, there's a light that shines from the inside, and it's so wonderful to be her."

The show is very stylized, and at moments seems as if it's being awfully cruel to Betty, but deep down, it's actually very sweet and enchanting. So if anyone has a problem with the title, it's their problem, not the show's. Especially once you see it in action. Still, I suppose it could be a liability for a country as uptight as ours (it didn't hurt the series in the many nations where the telenovela has been a big success). I absolutely think the show can overcome its title. What may end up killing it is its Friday time period.

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Question: I know you are really busy at the press tour (thanks for all the detailed Dispatches), but I was just wondering if you might want to comment on the TV Week Critics Poll. Do you agree or disagree with any specific shows in the top 25? Actually, I was really wondering if you might want to comment on the fact that CBS did not have a single show in the top 25. What does that say about the American public, and CBS for that matter, that America's No. 1 network (a title they often shove down our throats) does not have a single "top tier" show? Oh, and how great is Psych? I know it killed in the ratings, so is renewal just around the corner? My guess is yes. — Steve

Matt Roush: I'm very fond of Psych, and I look forward to returning home in a week so I can catch up on the episodes beyond the pilot. Its renewal is a lock, I'm sure. As for the TV Week poll: I'm not in the least surprised that CBS isn't represented on that list. When we make a list like this (I'm just speaking for myself), we tend to dwell on the shows that are out of the ordinary, and even the best and most popular of the CBS shows — by which I mean their well-produced procedural crime dramas — have the feel of the routine about them, thanks to their overexposure.

CBS does a very good job "broadcasting" to a mass audience, and many of their shows are solid, but there's a sameness to the lineup that tends to keep any individual show from standing out, especially in a year that includes such amazing hours as Lost, Grey's Anatomy, 24, House, Rescue Me, The Shield, Deadwood, Battlestar Galactica, Veronica Mars, The West Wing and Everwood, to name just a few of the other dramas that made the top 25. (I'll admit I was surprised to see Prison Break and Boston Legal on the list, if not HBO's annual overpraised cult item Big Love.)

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Question: Why is Fox making such a mess out of the rebroadcast of 24? First, they skipped two hours, and then the next week they skipped another 12 hours. They left out some great material: Kim's reappearance, the deaths of Edgar and Lynn, Secretary Heller. It has been very frustrating. Why the tease? They should have either rebroadcast it in its entirety or not at all. — Melissa

Matt Roush: No argument here. The experiment obviously didn't work ratings-wise (as if repeating serialized programming ever does), but what is Fox going to put on Fridays for the rest of the summer that will do that much better? Talk about generating ill will. Way to go, Fox.

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Question: It seems that the fundamental problem with the Emmys wasn't addressed with the new nomination process, which is that they are based on only the submitted episodes. So shows and actors that are consistently very good don't get credit for the consistency. Instead, a show has to have only one really good episode to submit. — Joe

Matt Roush: Exactly. If the blue-ribbon panels are so short-sighted and close-minded — OK, let's just say ignorant — that they can't understand that the episode being screened is meant as a prompt, not as a substitute for an entire season of work, then they have no business judging these shows and performances. It's the not-so-secret shame of this entire process.

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Question: I just saw a commerical last evening for a new fall show on CBS called The Class. The glimpses I caught actually looked funny, so I thought I'd ask if you'd heard anything about this show yet, and if you had any opinions on it? — Carrie

Matt Roush: I've seen the pilot, and I sat through the presentation during CBS' portion of the press tour, which only confirmed my affection for this offbeat show. The Class breaks the usual sitcom rules by introducing an unusually large and disparate group of characters, loosely yoked by all having gone to third grade together. Once you get past that setup, it's all about the characters, and a quirkier, more likable bunch you're not likely to meet all season. (To be honest, some of my coworkers are as passionately against this show as I am for it, and I'm at a loss to understand why.) I am reasonably confident this will be a good fit to launch CBS' Monday comedy lineup, and it should get a passing grade for the season.

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Question: Do you think that CBS' Smith will last the whole season? — Lisa B.

Matt Roush: Hard for me to say. But if you're asking me if it should last the season, I'm still at a loss. The pilot (from John Wells) is extremely well made, introducing us to a glamorous team of criminals plotting an elaborate heist that goes slightly awry, hinting at repercussions and complications to come. My problem with the show is that, unlike morally challenging shows like The Shield and The Sopranos, there's not much humanity or complexity to these characters, who come off like ciphers initially. That could change, and the show could become as suspenseful as its pilot felt shallow. But the big question mark is how dark CBS viewers are willing to go, from NCIS to the edgier The Unit to the ethically bankrupt Smith. Will it be too much?

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Question: Thanks so much for your review of the new USA series Psych. I had read a scathing review of it in an entertainment mag and almost decided to skip it. Luckily, I tuned in and have really enjoyed the first two episodes. It's the perfect companion piece for Monk. This show has real potential, and I hope others aren't discouraged by the "snarky" reviews by critics who don't see how much better Psych is than 70 percent of the comedy the Big Four networks are producing these days. Thanks for turning me on to what I think is a diamond in the rough. — Vance H.

Matt Roush: My pleasure. I'm not sure what magazine you were reading (how disloyal of you!), but most of the reviews I read were largely positive, although some naturally chose to compare it unfavorably to Monk. I think the show and star James Roday are a delight, and I hope the numbers hold throughout the summer.

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Question: Is this the end of the HBO dynasty? I mean, HBO really set the standard for cable programming by having a small lineup of great shows and showcasing them one or two at a time (a formula that FX is using quite successfully). Now I'm wondering if it has fallen asleep at the wheel. While Showtime and FX are preparing shows such as Rescue Me, The Shield, Weeds and Sleeper Cell, HBO seems to be canceling a show every other month. Am I paranoid, or does the channel have some sort of master plan that no one knows about? Because if my math is correct, by the year 2008 The Sopranos, Deadwood, Rome and The Wire will all be gone. — JoeJo

Matt Roush: I think it's fair to say that HBO is in a slump, and with more franchises nearing the ends of their runs, the network does need to step up and create another breakout show or two. I love Entourage, but it seems to lack the cultural oomph of Sex and the City — and I'm sorry, but Big Love is not the sort of show to build a network night around. Even with HBO's track record, coming up with new hits isn't as easy as it looks.

I've been arguing for the last few years that FX has stolen much of HBO's thunder in the buzz market (if not in Emmy nominations). And while Showtime's numbers pale by comparison, it is showing surprising signs of life lately with its recent series development. But any end-of-an-era proclamation is a bit premature. As everyone likes to say, this business is cyclical, and HBO is only one or two shows away from a turnaround. Some of its best shows ever are still on, so let's not write its six-feet-under eulogy just yet.

http://tvguide.com/tv/roush/askmatt/

TV Critics Summer Press Tour
'Housewives' on neighborhood watch

By Ann Oldenburg USA Today

PASADENA, Calif. —Desperate Housewives has been humbled.

The show's creator, Marc Cherry, held court at a table Wednesday night at the ABC party for the Television Critics Association, and he conceded he made some "boneheaded creative decisions" last season. But he said that for the new season, "everything will reach a certain bar, and some of it will go into history as classic TV."

A bunch of the Housewives cast was there: Felicity Huffman and show hubby Doug Savant, plus Eva Longoria, Brenda Strong and Andrea Bowen. Teri Hatcher, Marcia Cross and Nicollette Sheridan couldn't make it because of shooting schedules.

Savant gushed about what he has seen of the new shows: "OK, how many times have you heard someone say 'I'm excited'? But I'm genuinely excited. We just finished shooting our first episode, and tomorrow we start Episode 2. The scripts are funny and eventful."

He also made light of the show being shut out of the Emmys, except for a nomination for guest star Alfre Woodard. "Felicity has already won one. She called me on the day of the Emmy nominations and said, 'Oh, it's another year you didn't get one.' "

"That's not true," Huffman chimed in.

Though his cast was all about putting a shine on the season to come, Cherry patiently explained his thoughts about last season, which did well in the ratings but was bruised by critics. "The phenomenon of the first year had me kind of stumbling across the finish line and collapsing," he said. "I kind of literally picked my head up and said, 'I have to do another year?' "

He said he has learned about himself. "I don't know that we believed all the hype the first season, and I don't know that we believed all the criticism the second. I kind of think a little is correct in both areas."

At this point, he said, "I have such little ego about this. I'm just the guy learning how to do the job."

A couple of veteran actors on hand might have been able to give him a tip or two. Ted Danson, who has been absent from series TV since Becker left CBS in 2004, talked about playing "silly men." He plays one in new sitcom Help Me Help You: a therapist who could use a little help himself.

And former Ally McBeal star Calista Flockhart fielded questions into the night about her series Brothers & Sisters, a sibling drama that will be Desperate Housewives' companion on Sundays. Sally Field heads up the clan, and when someone noted that Field, 59, didn't look old enough to play her mom, Flockhart, 41, replied: "She's so not. It's a good thing that I look really young."

Flockhart also talked about being a mother, which was especially appropriate because the celebration took place at the Kidspace Children's Museum.

"My son (Liam, 5) has been a definite change of my life in all the clichéd ways and in other ways I never expected — changed my priorities, changed my plans, changed what I care about ... just changed."

Some newer faces chatted about work: Kim Raver said she hopes she can still play Audrey on Fox's 24 and do ABC's The Nine drama at the same time.

And clothes: Nine co-star Chi McBride said his coral cashmere blazer was made by "wonderful tailor" Alonso Burdi. McBride almost got pizza on it and joked, "I don't need to make my dry cleaner rich."

http://www.usatoday.com/life/people/2006-07-20-abc-party_x.htm


Picture below by Chris Pizzello, AP

TV Critics Summer Press Tour
On the set of “Grey’s Anatomy”

By Diane Holloway Austin American-Statesman in her TV blog

Usually when a show gets to be as hot as “Grey’s Anatomy,” the cast ignores the press because they just don’t need us any more.

Not so with “Grey’s.” A smallish band of TV critics was invited to tour the mammoth hospital set today, and everybody — except Isaiah Washington, who was in Washington, D.C., on NAACP business — was on hand to gab. Very relaxed, very nice and VERY cold. Just like a real hospital.

Because creator Shonda Rhimes had threatened them all with death if they spill any serious plot secrets, we don’t actually know the fate of Izzie, the doctor who fell in love with a heart transplant patient and lied to move him up on the list. You may recall, amid gallons of tears, that patient, Denny, died anyway with a sobbing Izzie lying beside him in her formal prom dress.

“I really don’t know what’s going to happen with her, said Katherine Heigl, who plays Izzie. “All I know is that I’m here now. Izzie did quit at the end of last season, and I don’t know if she’ll be back into medicine. But I’m back on the show.”

On this, the cast’s second day at work after hiatus, Heigl was the only member of the medical ensemble NOT wearing scrubs. That’s probably a hint we should take to heart.

During hiatus, Heigl filmed a movie and got engaged. Other than that, not much happened. Despite some critics predicting Izzie should be punished severely for her ethical lapse, Heigl is sympathetic to Izzie’s actions — and actually teared up talking about the (literally) heart-stopping finale.

Chandra Wilson, the pint-sized dynamo who plays caustic Dr. Bailey, is understandably thrilled with her recent Emmy nomination (supporting actress in a drama) and heard about it while on a promotional tour in Milan. Yes, “Grey’s” airs in Italy.

“I just might wear my scrubs to the awards,” Wilson giggled. “I’d like to. … It would be fun.”

Meanwhile, Dr. McDreamy, aka Patrick Dempsey, says his struggle this season is to make sure Dr. Shepherd isn’t “castrated” by the two women in his life — his wife Addison and Meredith. Fans want him to choose Meredith, played by Ellen Pompeo, but Dempsey says he doesn’t know whose bed he’ll wind up in.

By the way, reed-like Pompeo isn’t fazed by getting to have hot sex in the operating room with the doc that fans swoon over.

“Patrick is like my brother,” she said. “It’s really no big deal.”

Second time Emmy nominee Sandra Oh, who plays Dr. Yang, says she’s happy to be the show’s comic relief from time to time.

“I don’t want her to change very much,” Oh said. “I love how blindly ambitious she is — and her total disregard for anyone who disagrees with her. She’s exceptionally literal, which I think makes her really funny.”

http://www.austin360.com/blogs/content/shared-gen/blogs/austin/tvblog/

TV Critics Summer Press Tour
MyNet sticks to stripped format

By Kimberly Nordyke The Hollywood Reporter July 21, 2006

PASADENA -- MyNetworkTV executives are committed to making their stripped primetime dramas work -- and they have no doubt that they will succeed.

That was the message delivered here Thursday during the new network's inaugural presentation at the Television Critics Assn. press tour, taking place at the Ritz-Carlton Huntington Hotel.

In his opening remarks, Fox Television Stations CEO Jack Abernethy touted the new network as the first to provide 52 weeks of original programming.

The network launches Sept. 5 in more than 94% of the country with two Twentieth Television-produced dramas -- "Desire" and "Fashion House" -- airing Monday-Friday over 13 weeks, with recaps of each airing every Saturday.

During and after the session, Abernethy was grilled about his standards for measuring success in terms of viewership -- a line of questioning that CW president of entertainment Dawn Ostroff also faced Monday about her network, which also is launching in September.

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/thr/television/brief_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1002877171

TV Critics Summer Press Tour
MNT: All Novelas, All the Time

By Jim Benson Broadcasting & Cable 7/21/2006

After making a heavy investment in English translations of Spanish-language telenovelas, Fox’s MyNetworkTV (MNT) has abandoned plans to proceed with a slate of reality shows it had put into development in the event the new programming format launching the network fails.

“We will be all telenovelas, all the time,” Fox Television Stations CEO Jack Abernethy said.

“We originally did announce reality but now we’re going in this direction,” added Twentieth Television Programming President Paul Buccieri, appearing with Abernethy and talent, including Fashion House stars Bo Derek and Morgan Fairchild, at the Television Critics Assn. press tour Thursday in Pasadena, Calif.

Buccieri noted Twentieth, which is supplying programming for the venture (with Fox looking at providing only a small dedicated staff), has been actively acquiring scripts and developing future telenovela slates. It will start production on multiple telenovela arcs prior to the network launch Sept. 5.

The programming executive, who is personally leading the telenovela production effort, serving as the de facto executive producer, also revealed that MNT will no longer use the umbrella titles of Desire and Secret Obsessions for the closed-ended scripted series. Twentieth decided that it would be better from a branding standpoint to develop each under a separate title, he said.

Pressed about why MNT would stick with the telenovela format if it does not initially work, Abernethy equated the idea of switching gears with being akin to Lifetime moving to men’s programming had its female-only strategy gotten off to a slow start.

Buccieri suggested that other networks, which have retreated from their initial enthusiasm over telenovelas, attributing the delays to a search for the right business models, were “afraid” of the large time period commitments needed to do them in the manner that has made them the world’s most popular programming format. The programs traditionally run as one-hour, closed-ended strips, though none of the networks appear to be going in that direction now (ABC adapted the American version of Ugly Betty as a weekly series).

The launch of MyNetworkTV, meanwhile, could be hampered by declining ratings this summer for UPN, since Fox now controls the lame-duck network’s affiliates in the nation’s largest markets.

“UPN has been trending down lately, which is a little bit of a concern since we will draw off of this,” Abernethy said.

Since UPN and The WB will not fold into The CW until Sept. 20, there will be a two-week overlap when the Fox stations and other netlet affiliates signing onto MNT will have to carry two networks.

Abernethy said the Fox duopoly stations will run MNT in prime time and stop carrying UPN programming entirely on Sept. 5. The issue is what happens in other markets that are contractually obligated to UPN and WB.

Some stations invested in the success of MNT from financial and branding standpoints may be motivated to shift UPN and WB rerun fare to the overnight hours. Some MNT affiliates have suggested that they are closely examining their contracts to see if they will follow Fox’s lead and stop running the other programming early.

Geared toward adults 18-49, MNT has been cleared so far in 94% of the U.S., including 97 of the top 100 markets. Abernethy predicted that more affiliates will run MNT’s two-hour block of telenovelas in pattern in prime than The CW.

http://www.broadcastingcable.com/index.asp?layout=articlePrint&articleID=CA6355180

Sports On TV
Psst, ABC and TNT, Woods-Faldo feud is a grudge match

By Michael McCarthy USA Today 7/21/2006

Golf is one of the few sports where players gallantly call penalties on themselves. But sometimes former players turned broadcasters get carried away with the gentleman's bit. They whisper from the tower about a player stroking a putt a 100 yards away. They airily dismiss news beneath the dignity of the game.

Take analysts Bobby Clampett of TNT and Peter Alliss of ABC during TNT's opening-round coverage of the 135th British Open on Thursday. This week, Tiger Woods made no secret he was holding a grudge against ABC analyst Nick Faldo for Faldo's on-air zingers during the Buick Invitational. British bookmakers cheerfully laid 25-1 odds the two would come to blows during their Thursday-Friday pairing.

Yet there were Clampett and Alliss blowing it off as a tempest in a teacup. "There is no bad blood here, there just isn't, and regardless of what the media is trying to build up, these guys have no problem with one another," said Clampett. "Tiger gets that (criticism) from everybody. ... We express our opinion, and he respects that we have an opinion." British broadcaster Alliss dismissed the reports as complete "nonsense," don't you know?

Really? If Woods and Faldo are willing to admit there's a problem, why are network analysts so eager to dismiss it? Doesn't a little sizzle make good TV? Not to mention it's in bad taste for some media members (usually ex-jocks) to act superior by blaming the rest of the darned media.

The combined TNT/ABC team did a nice job Thursday of relating the quirky appeal of the British Open, the playing challenges of the burnt-out Royal Liverpool course and its proximity to The Beatles' stamping grounds.

But what TNT and ABC need this weekend is an analyst willing to tell it like it is, not insult viewers' intelligence. Someone, in other words, like Faldo. Maybe fans will get lucky, and he won't make the cut.

Action makes 'Ultimate' a contender

There's a brawl shaping up on sports TV this summer pitting the new sport of mixed martial arts against the sweet science of boxing: Spike TV's The Ultimate Fighter and ESPN's The Contender.

The marriage of the Ultimate Fighting Championship and the male-targeted Spike is working.

This year's third season of Ultimate Fighter averaged a 1.8 household TV rating — 3.1 with the elusive audience of men 18 to 34 years old coveted by sponsors. Spike now airs six UFC shows. The Ultimate Fighter 4: The Comeback debuts Aug. 17.

UFC President Dana White says the shows have become an assembly line for new TV talent. The UFC catapulted in popularity after Spike's live telecast of Forrest Griffin's victory against Stephan Bonnar in 2005, a slugfest that's drawn comparisons to Marvin Hagler vs. Thomas Hearns.

White's goal: create a live, weekly UFC card, similar to the old Tuesday Night Fights series on USA Network. "Spike had the (guts) to say: 'We'll do a live fight,' " says White.

For Spike, the UFC is a cost-effective way to deliver sports programming without having to pay for one of the big-time pro sports, says general manager Kevin Kay.

"It's bigger than boxing now. When guys say, 'Did you see the fight last night?' they're talking about the UFC, not boxing."

Despite star producers such as Sugar Ray Leonard, Sylvester Stallone and Survivor's Mark Burnett, Contender flopped on NBC and was canceled after one season.

Based on ESPN's two-hour premiere Tuesday, the sports network is not making the same mistake as NBC.

The episode focused more on action in the ring than stories about the boxers' personal lives. It generated a 1.1 rating; 1.3 with men 18 to 34.

Unfortunately, ESPN, like NBC, continues to edit matches while Spike shows them straight. Appearing on CNBC's The Big Idea with Donny Deutsch this week, Leonard promised: "This time around (the show) will be even more boxing-specific." Smart move.

http://www.usatoday.com/sports/columnist/mccarthy/2006-07-20-weekend_x.htm

Sports On TV
ESPN giving 'Outside the Lines' a more timely time slot

By Michael McCarthy USA Today 7/21/2006

Starting Monday, ESPN is revamping its weekday programming lineup, making Outside the Lines its first live news show of the day. ESPN will move OTL to a 3:30 p.m. ET time slot from its current slot of around 12:40 a.m.

As part of the change, the award-winning investigative program will expand to 30 minutes from 20 minutes and be renamed Outside the Lines First Report from Outside the Lines Nightly.

Longtime anchor Bob Ley says the new time slot will enable OTL to provide more in-depth coverage of breaking news and more interviews with newsmakers.

As an example, Ley says, the show would take the lead and "do an entire show" around a major breaking story, such as a possible indictment of San Francisco Giants slugger Barry Bonds for perjury.

As of Monday, ESPN's weekday lineup will look like this: Outside the Lines First Report at 3:30 ET, NFL Live at 4, Rome is Burning at 4:30, Around the Horn at 5, Pardon the Interruption at 5:30 and SportsCenter at 6.

Outside the Lines Sunday will continue to air weekly at 9:30 a.m. Ley will continue to host the Sunday morning SportsCenter.

"An afternoon version of Outside the Lines is indicative of ESPN's commitment to investigative journalism," Norby Williamson, ESPN's executive vice president of studio and remote production, says in a statement.

Importantly for Ley, the new version of the show will air live. The current version is mostly taped. That's a big deal internally with the troops at ESPN, who usually do their best work on live shows such as SportsCenter, he says.

"We're adrenaline junkies. Nothing beats live TV," says Ley, whose team includes reporters Jeremy Schaap, Mark Schwarz and Kelly Naqi. "In the evening, you're getting one of the last bites out of the news cycle. It's a challenge to define something that's not playing directly off the headlines."

The show premiered in May 1990 as a monthly program. Since then, ESPN chiefs have increased its frequency: It went weekly in 2000, then daily in 2003. "We've learned how to speak to fans the way we want to be spoken to. They trust us," Ley says.

http://www.usatoday.com/sports/2006-07-20-otl-switch_x.htm

TV Critics Summer Press Tour
Fairchild Proud To Be an MNT B**ch

By Jim Benson of Broadcasting & Cable at bcbeat.com

She’s a bitch, and proud of it.

“Oh honey, I’ve been a bitch so long I couldn’t do it any other way,” actress Morgan Fairchild is telling television critics. She plays one in MyNetworkTV’s upcoming telenovela, Art of Betrayal.

The guy who asked Fairchild about how she likes being stereotyped in that way tells her his newspaper can’t use the word “bitch.” He wonders aloud if she would be okay if he substituted it with “she-devil.” Whatever, buddy.

And what’s better than having two bit, eh, she-devils get into cat fights? “I’m sure they’ll put us in the mud,” Fairchild says, referring to the battles between her and rival Bo Derek’s character. “There is a big audience for that.”

You’d think calling an actress a bitch would be enough low blows for one day--but not with this group. Another critic asks Fairchild how she feels about Derek being referred to in the press release as a “renowned sex symbol” and her only as, well, Morgan Fairchild. This is a tough room.

He refuses to accept the actress’ explanation that the release was really referring to both of them as “sex symbols,” so Fairchild relents, saying she just feels “lucky that I’m still standing.”

Not sure if she’s referring to her career or showing up at this press conference.

http://broadcastingcable.com/blog/1380000138.html

TV Critics Summer Press Tour
"Shield" Your Eyes

By Diane Werts Newsday Staff Writer in her TV Press Tour blog July 21, 2006

Forget about this fall season.

TV critics can't wait for 2007.

That's when "The Shield" returns with new episodes on FX. And judging by the season premiere screened here, this relentless tour de force isn't just firing on all 8 cylinders, it's blasting on 12.

The 10 episodes of the sixth season (starting probably in January, maybe March) focus rivetingly on fallout from the shocking murder of strike team squad member Lem. Actor Kenneth Johnson joined his former castmates today at the "Shield's" Hollywood soundstage, eager to see the first episode after he was offed by a grenade from the hand of fellow renegade cop and close friend Shane (Walton Goggans), who was led to believe Lem had turned on the team. These upcoming episodes were originally thought to be the series' end. But creator Shawn Ryan decided he had more stories to tell, through a final 13 to be shot next year for airing in 2008.

"We wanted to not rush past that crime while we were wrapping up everything else," said Ryan, who's been building meaty storylines for all the supporting characters – not to mention the eventual resolution of star Michael Chiklis' series-launching shot to the head of a detective spying on his crooked crew.

Forest Whitaker returns as the spooky internal affairs lieutenant who's out to nail Vic, by any means. And those means look to be getting downright lethal by the final scenes of this season premiere. "You can't see the line anymore," the police chief warns Whitaker's obsessed character, deftly echoing the murky attitude of Vic and fellow cops who plunge daily into the cesspool of those mean streets.

Whitaker will appear in the season's first two episodes, at least, Ryan said teasingly. The softspoken creator tries to maintain an air of mystery about a series so consistently electrifying, fans can't decide whether they want to know what's going to happen, so they can brace themselves, or wait to be surprised, so their jaws can drop.

That happens more than a few times in this kick-butt return, which ranges through a hostage crisis at a free clinic, porno store robberies, more Salvadoran gang warfare, even a brawl in the squad room, and one cop's surprisingly suicidal actions. Amazingly, every member of the extended cast gets fine screen time – even recurring characters like the Salvadoran woman snitch caught in the crossfire between Whitaker and Chiklis – yet the episode never feels rushed.

All the threads from last season are picked up, too – Danny's baby (Catherine Dent gets a breathtaking scene with Cathy Cahlin Ryan as Vic's suspicious wife), Claudette's promotion to captain, Vic's promise to "retire" to hang onto his pension. "The Shield" never forgets where it came from, finally plunging strange straightarrow detective Dutch into a call at a house crawling with cats. (Remember his disturbing twist with the stray at his doorstep?) It begins like a bit of comic relief, then does a horrific 180 to become yet another shocker in this masterful episode.

Wish I could tell you more, but the "Shield" folks would probably kill me.

And I'd hate to miss a minute of what looks, again, like the most amazing "Shield" season ever.

http://newsday.typepad.com/entertainment_tv_tour/2006/07/shield_your_eye.html

TV Critics Summer Press Tour
Ya had a long day

By Robert Philpot Fort Worth Star-Telegram in the Yelling Fire in a Crowded Theater blog

Seems like the best way to handle Thursday is one long, diary-style post. Here's a look at the past 13 hours or so.

7 a.m.: I don't know what it means when Daniel Powter's Bad Day is the first song to enter your head in the morning, and the second is John Lennon's Instant Karma. This does not bode well.

7:45 a.m.: I depart for Starbucks, where I haven't been in days. As I walk across the hotel bridge, I spot John Amos, starring in the upcoming Men in Trees but probably still best-known for Good Times, even though he's done a ton of work since then. I walk a little fast so I can open the door to the main hotel building for him. I can't really think of anything to say, so I say, "I enjoy your work," which is true enough. "Thanks," he says.

He's flying back to British Columbia, where Men in Trees is filmed, and as we walk to the lobby, we talk about the heat in Pasadena. And then I tell him that the temperature in Fort Worth was 90 degrees at 1:40 a.m. Central Time. This causes Amos to _ I'm dancing around this a little, because of Star-Telegram standards _ take the Lord's name in vain. And then we part.

8:20 a.m.: I return from Starbucks, with my unsipped venti black coffee. I set it down on my room's desk, and it promptly falls over, spilling on the desk, the phone, the carpet, the bed, and a few other places (but fortunately, not the laptop). This doesn't cause me to take the Lord's name in vain, but I do utter a stream of obscenities.

8:30 a.m.: After mopping up some of the mess myself, I lift up the phone to call housekeeping and tell them my room might need a little extra care today. There's a pool of coffee where the mouthpiece rests. I can hear the woman who answers, but she can't hear me. I'm thinking maybe coffee isn't good for a phone mouthpiece. I leave, and tell the front desk of my problem.

8:37 a.m.: I'm the first person to board the shuttle for all the day's activities, which is scheduled to depart at 8:45 a.m. "You're an early bird," a publicist tells me. "Well," I say, "You tell reporters 8:45 a.m., they think you mean 9." My deadline-stressed editors will understand what I mean.

8:38 a.m.: Linda, the bus driver, is a friendly sort, so I chat her up as other people board (I'm proud to say that the next two people on are also Texans). She used to drive a school bus in the Inland Empire, that oddly named conglomeration of cities such as Riverside and Ontario not too far east of the Los Angeles megaplex. Wasn't too bad a job, she says, except for the heat.

Now she's driving shuttles, stretch limos, other transport stuff. I ask her if she's driven anyone famous. She can't remember their names without a little help, but it turns out two of her favorites were Richard Chamberlain and Patrick Duffy, whom she chauffeured during the January press tour. She has also ushered R&B group Black Eyed Peas and the new version of INXS, with singer JD Fortune. All of them were very nice, she says. Teens going to prom, however, aren't always so nice. So who's she schlepping around today? A bunch of critics. But we're nice to her.

9:30 a.m. (most times approximate from here on): We arrive at ASI Entertainment in North Hollywood (which is now calling itself "NoHo" _ no, you make the joke) to learn about audience-research methods for TV pilots. We are brought into a room that's like a large indoor theater, except for the screens only being two 27-inch (I'm guessing) TVs and for the gadgets attached to the chairs, which have a numbered keypad, a red and a green light, and a rotary dial with marking ranging from double positive to double negative (i.e., ++ to --).

After a brief introduction, we're told that we're going to watch a pilot and that we should hold the device in our right hands and turn the dial with our lefts, showing whether our reaction to a scene is positive or negative (there are gray areas). If we hit a point where we'd ordinarily stop watching, we're supposed to press the red button.

Then we're shown a really, really awful pilot called I Spike, about a trio of beach volleyball players who are also undercover spies. No, really. Among the stars are a post-L.A. Law/pre-Veronica Mars Harry Hamlin and his wife, Lisa Rinna, way before her Dancing With the Stars days. Let's see, how can I put this? It makes She Spies (which, to be honest, I kind of enjoyed) look like King Lear.

After we sit through about 15 minutes of this cheese, it ends, and Dave Castler, ASI's CEO, tells us that this is one of the worst scores he's ever seen. True, this is a tough crowd, but then this thing didn't do well with the original test audience either, apparently. He then shows a graph showing the men's responses and the women's responses. The men give thumbs-down a little more slowly than the women, and there's a little spike during a fight scene in a women's prison. Yes, we're pigs.

Most of the rest is a little on the esoteric side, which is a nice way of saying I didn't take notes and the transcript isn't up yet. But Castler does tell us about the biggest testing misfire he can remember: Back in the early '70s, All in the Family tested so poorly that the producer were told they shouldn't air it. They actually used that feedback to shoot a second pilot, which got a much better response.

And the story behind I Spike? During a UPN party in summer 2000, before I was on the tour, New York Daily News critic (and Star-Telegram contributor) David Bianculli told an executive he couldn't believe there was anything worse than the shows UPN premiered that year. The executive said, oh, yes there were, and a few days after the tour, Dave got I Spike in the mail.

After the session, we're invited to wander around the plaza at the Television Hall of Fame. But there's a Starbucks across the street, and I've had no coffee this morning, so I skip walking around the statues so that I can wake up.

And that thing I said way back there about doing this as one long post? I must've been nuts. To be continued...

http://blogs.dfw.com/yelling_fire/2006/07/ya_had_a_long_d.html

TV Critics Summer Press Tour
Ya had a long day, part two

By Robert Philpot Fort Worth Star-Telegram in the Yelling Fire in a Crowded Theater blog

Noon: After a 45-minute bus ride from North Hollywood, we arrive at ABC Prospect Studios, where both The Shield and Grey's Anatomy are filmed. As we pull up, Grey's star Ellen Pompeo is outside, in her scrubs, on her cellphone. Other actors mill about, smoking, wearing scrubs.

But we go across the street, where, over lunch, we get a sneak peak of the season premiere of The Shield _ which probably won't air till January. Creator Shawn Ryan warns us that the episode includes some gruesome stuff near the end (he's right), so we should make sure we're finished eating by then. He also says the episode is dedicated to co-executive producer Scott Brazil, who died recently. Brazil, Ryan says, was the second person he hired to work on the show, after Ryan himself.

The Shield was my favorite show of the 2005-06 season. I've always liked it, but I've also thought that it too often relied on shock value to get your attention. This season, it approached classic tragedy, with a deeply flawed antihero losing a friend and alienating a family, another friend committing murder because of a misunderstanding, and an obsessed Internal Affairs detective bending rules to try to bring them all to justice _ and the show makes you root against him (I still can't believe Forest Whitaker didn't get an Emmy nomination).

The new episode is pretty intense, but it also has some moments that feel a little contrived, and the "gruesome" scene that Ryan warned us about seems to be a return to the betcha-didn't-think-we-could-do-that-on-television showboating that's such a staple of FX shows. There's also a lurid plot line that turns funny, then turns sad, and there's some really good work by Walton Goggins as guilt-ridden cop Shane. Luridness aside, the show hasn't lost a step.

1 p.m. or so: We have a Q&A with Ryan and several of the show's stars, including lead actor Michael Chiklis. A critic suggests that none of the show's cop characters are good cops, and CCH Pounder (Det. Claudette Wyms) and Catherine Dent (Officer Danielle Sofer) jump to their feet in defense of their characters. The critic disagrees, saying that Wyms has become a political tool and that Sofer became pregnant (actually, he used a colloquialism that might be within Star-Telegram standards, but I'm not taking any chances. "Bring it on!" Dent says, then sits down.

The actors are also asked if they feel some fragility about being on the show, since a major character (played by Kenneth Johnson, who's sitting with the critics) was killed off in the season finale (a lot of major characters were killed off in season finales this year, but this time it actually advanced the story). They say, yes, they do, and they think that adds to the intensity of their performances.

Can you tell I didn't take notes and this transcript isn't up, either?

Speaking of not taking notes, after the Q&A I have a casual (i.e., not tape-recorded) chat with Michael Jace, who plays Officer Julien Lowe, the gung-ho cop who may or may not have successfully used religion to suppress his maybe-or-maybe-not homosexuality. I ask him why he didn't stand up to say Julien was a good cop. He says something about complexity of the character, and how the writers focus on other things besides Julien's police work. I find this character (like most Shield characters) fascinating, because even though he might be gay, he isn't played broadly or flamingly, and even though he's definitely religious, his faith struggle isn't treated with condescension. He's a complex character, all right, but there are a lot of complex characters in The Shield's morally ambiguous world.

After talking to Jace, I follow a group over to the Shield set, the police-precinct office known as "The Barn." A scene is being filmed: Several extras walk in well-choreographed steps across the first floor of the Barn, looking busy, carrying papers, while Det. Steve Billings (David Marciano) walks into another room, where there may be dialogue being said that I can't hear. Between takes, other reporters and I walk around the upstairs portion of the set.

It's the little details of TV sets that I like. Details like an "outstanding service" plaque for Det. Dutch Wagenbach, one of the show's characters, hanging on a wall. Details like mug shots of felons, complete with reports on which prison they've been sentenced to. Details like folder on domestic violence on Wagenbach's desk. Another reporter and I walk into the interrogation room. There's a guy in there. "Are you a suspect?" I ask. "Yeah," he says, and doesn't elaborate. There's three guys hanging out in the "cage," the holding cell that's usually a lot more crowded. And there's a guy with a mohawk and another guy with a bunch of tattoos hanging out by the set entrance.

And we make our way to the next part of the visit, the Grey's Anatomy set. But that must wait till next time, and next time must wait till tomorrow, because typing at a laptop for nearly three hours is putting a strain on my back.

And the phone still smells like coffee.

http://blogs.dfw.com/yelling_fire/2006/07/ya_had_a_long_d_1.html

TV Critics Summer Press Tour
Ted and Jane, a funny couple

By Hal Boedeker Orlando Sentinel Television Critic his TV Guy blog July 21, 2006

ABC's "Help Me Help You" presents Ted Danson as a top-notch therapist coming unglued over his problems. The biggest is the end of his marriage -- which allows "Cheers" icon Danson to play opposite Jane Kaczmarek of "Malcolm in the Middle." Their TV marriage is the show's strongest asset, although Kaczmarek is signed on just as a guest star.

Danson knows how fortunate he is. "You don't even know she's being funny when you are working with her," he said. "She's just real. And then all of a sudden you go, 'Wow! That was funny.' I have a huge amount of respect for her."

The "Becker" star said he hoped Kaczmarek would appear in all 13 of the first 13 episodes -- a smart wish, because she could help this show go.

Danson described his new role as a happy medium between "Cheers" and "Becker." "I get to be the bartender -- the group therapist," he said. "But then I get to be the total idiot at the same time."

(Another problem for the therapist: He can't believe his daughter is dating her psychology professor.)

But as for the difficulity of roles ... "'Becker' was hard, actually, for me," Danson said. "Kind of fun, but hard. I like playing someone who desperately wants the world to like them. It's closer to home."

The show features Charlie Finn as a young patient. Finn is a dead ringer for Jason Ritter, who's starring in CBS' "The Class," a new sitcom. How often is Finn confused with Ritter?

"It happens socially a lot where people get us confused -- to my advantage," Finn said. "I actually go out to nightclubs and lie and tell them that I'm Jason Ritter. I still go home alone."

http://blogs.orlandosentinel.com/entertainment_tv_tvblog/2006/07/ted_and_jane_a_.html

TV Critics Summer Press Tour
Checking Out “Grey’s Anatomy”

By Susan Young Oakland Tribune in her “Unscripted” blog July 21, 2006

Nothing better than getting on the set of “Grey’s Anatomy” and immediately bumping into Ellen Pompeo (Meredith Grey), Patrick Dempsey (Derek “Dr. McDreamy” Shepherd) and Emmy nominee Sandra Oh (Cristina Yang).

So, Ellen, after having your way with the very married Dr. McDreamy in the season finale, just who else might you bed?

“No one is safe,” she says smiling wickedly. “All cute boys beware.”

(We’re still pushing for a return of Eric Dane, who played the guy who almost broke up McDreamy’s marriage. Although McDreamy seems to be doing just fine all on his own now.)

As for McDreamy, or rather Dempsey, he says that the two things fans always say to him are “My mother loves you” and “Who are you picking?”

They are referring, of course, to whether the good-in-bed doctor will choose Meredith or his wife, played by San Jose native Kate Walsh.

“Well, I can tell you that the triangle gets resolved rather quickly,” says Walsh, who looks as if she’s still part of the cast. Perhaps she gives McDreamy his come-uppance finally and she can get back to that dishy Eric Dane.

Seeming every bit as socially awkward as her straightforward character, Oh watched as the critics taking the tour of the set rushed her co-stars.

“No one is going to want to talk to me, are they?” she said, looking nervously at me.

No worries. It didn’t take long for folks to zone in on her.

Sitting in a remote spot on the set was Sara Ramirez, who plays Dr. Callie Torres on the show. She says she was picked to join the show after she was seen in the Broadway smash hit “Monty Python’s Spamalot.”

“They came to me, although I don’t know what about my over-the-top performance (as Lady of the Lake) said orthopedic surgeon to them,” says Ramirez, who won a Tony for her role.

http://www.ibabuzz.com/unscripted/2006/07/20/checking-out-greys-anatomy/

Washington Notebook
Senate Committee Funds CBP's DTV Transition

By John Eggerton Broadcasting & Cable 7/21/2006

The Senate Appropriations Committee Thursday approved a 2007 budget for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting that leaves intact money for the digital transition, the Ready to Learn initiative, and arguably most importantly, the two-year forward funding process.

That's according to CPB President Patricia Harrison, who said CPB was grateful for the money.
Forward funding is an attempt to insulate CPB from a politicized budget process, though even with that forward-funding the exercise has become something of a posterchild for politicized budget processes, with Republicans attempting to gut its appropriation, claiming government-subsidized liberal bias, and Democrats holding rallies to combat the cuts, which have mostly, ultimately, been restored.

Under the bill, CPB will get $400 million in 2009. In the nearer term, for 2007 it will get $36 million for system interconnection upgrages, $29.7 million for the digital converstion, and $24.2 million for Ready to Learn, which has been in the crosshairs--despite administration support for the program--ever since its Postcards From Buster series got some Washington knickers in a twist over its "two mommies" episode.

Buster is no longer funded under that program, which has refocused on more curriculum-centric early childhood education.

But CPB is not out of the woods. The House Appropriations Committee passed a CPB 2007 appropriation last month that does not fund either Ready To Learn or the DTV transition, or any forward funding for 2009. Like the Senate version, the House version awaits a floor vote, after which any differences in the bills must be reconciled in conference.

Harrison said she would continue to push for the funds as the process continues, likely well into September, or beyond.

http://www.broadcastingcable.com/index.asp?layout=articlePrint&articleID=CA6355274

TV Critics Summer Press Tour
Television's New Golden Age?

Critics cite an abundance of quality programming as proof
By Todd Longwell The Hollywood Reporter July 21, 2006

With the profusion of quality shows on the air, it's easy to see why publications as diverse as Entertainment Weekly, the Washington Times and the U.K.'s Guardian as well as various bloggers are so eager to declare a new golden age of television. But out of respect to Milton Berle, Paddy Chayefsky, Rod Serling and all of the other pioneers of the medium, it seems prudent to weigh all the evidence before making such a bold proclamation.

After all, numerous critics heralded a new golden age as far back as the '70s, when classic comedies including "The Mary Tyler Moore Show," "All in the Family" and "M*A*S*H" dominated the airwaves. In the '80s, the arrival of dramas like "Hill Street Blues," with its complex narrative structure, ushered in yet another golden age. Critics also made a compelling case in the '90s, citing such shows as "The Simpsons" (which debuted in December 1989), "Seinfeld" and "E.R."

Few would argue that the small screen is currently experiencing a renaissance. But is the term "golden age" being tossed around a little too lightly?

To get some perspective on the issue, The Hollywood Reporter turned to a group of people who earn their living reviewing television: Television Critics Assn. members Rick Kushman (Sacramento Bee), Rob Owen (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette), Matt Roush (TV Guide), Dave Walker (New Orleans Times-Picayune) and Diane Werts (Newsday). On the whole, they were supportive of the new golden age concept, though they didn't give it an unqualified endorsement.

"I think it's fair to say that TV is as good as it has ever ... oh, geez ... I don't want to make any blanket statements," Roush says. "But I think there is a sense that we're very lucky to have as many good shows on as we have right now. There is a variety of good programs, between great thrillers like (Fox's) '24' and supremely entertaining shows like (ABC's) 'Grey's Anatomy.' The original (CBS') 'CSI' is still great, and we have cult shows like 'Veronica Mars' (which has aired on UPN and will shift to CBS in the fall) and 'Gilmore Girls' (which has aired on WB Network and will shift to the CW in the fall) and guilty pleasures like (Bravo's) 'Project Runway.' I would watch many of these shows even if I wasn't paid to, and that's a testament to the quality of television right now."

Historically, critics have regarded the preponderance of reality programming as something akin to a resurgence of the black plague. But it's hard to deny the genre's power to move and entertain when the season finale of Fox's "American Idol" draws more votes than have been cast to date for a president in a U.S. election.

"Tom Jicha at the Florida Sun-Sentinel said that, in many ways, it's perfect television," Kushman says of "Idol." "It's got real people, heroes and villains and a continuing soap opera story line that also has resolution. If it's too kitsch for you and it's not cool enough, fine, but you can't argue that it isn't really good at what it's trying to do."

The original golden age of television -- generally considered to be the late '40s through the end of the '50s -- was rife with bathos-rich reality programming and game shows such as "Queen for a Day," "This Is Your Life" and "The $64,000 Question" but was otherwise relatively short on viewing options. There were only two major networks, NBC and CBS, and a pair of weaker also-rans, ABC and DuMont (which fizzled out in 1955). Today, with the maturation of cable and satellite television, there are literally hundreds of channels to choose from.

"It's not just the networks anymore. Everybody is shooting for the moon," Werts says. "If I had to pick the two best shows last year, I would probably say (Sci Fi Channel's) 'Battlestar Galactica' and (FX's) 'The Shield,' and those are basic cable, not HBO where they can throw money, cussing and sex at it. So, in that sense, it is a golden age because there's great TV everywhere."

It's not a simple equation of more channels creating more programming equals more good shows, however, according to the critics. The ever-expanding multichannel playing field has altered both the nature and the intensity of the networks' competition for viewers, improving the ratio of quality to crap in the process.

"The cable networks don't have to do great numbers. They just need to get on the map, and the way to get on the map is to provide something of distinct quality," Roush says. "So, we have all these different cable networks trying to create signature shows. I think that FX with 'The Shield' and 'Rescue Me' in particular right now are the equal of HBO and network TV in terms of ambition and quality. And the networks know -- having seen what happened with (ABC's) 'Lost' and 'Desperate Housewives,' which were very risky shows to put on the air -- that you've got to take risks to make some noise."

"It used to be that you'd slap together a detective and a car chase and a woman in a short skirt, and you had a 1970s crime drama," Kushman says. "You can't do that now. I just watched one or two that were sort of the 2006 version of that, and if nothing else, the production values are so much better."

To some extent, they have to be, according to Werts.

"You're trying to get people that are watching in (high-definition) and widescreen," she points out. "If you plunk down $4,000 for a TV set, by God, you want to see something that looks good on it. And I think the networks really understand now that what they make today is not just for today. Obviously, they want to get ratings this minute, but the studios that own the stuff want it to stand so they can sell it on DVD and iPods and computers and whatever else comes along. So, I think that they do try to make it a little more substantial, whether that's in terms of the story or the production values."

One the arguments against the idea that television is in the midst of another golden age is the lack of quality sitcoms, save for a few standouts such as NBC's "My Name Is Earl" and "The Office" and "Everybody Hates Chris," which has aired on UPN and will shift to the CW in the fall.

"It's in a weird position now where the shows that tend to get the best reviews tend to get the smallest audiences, and even the ones that are popular aren't culturally resonant," Roush says. "(CBS') 'Two and a Half Men' is funny, but it's not the kind of show people tend to write about as an emblem of our times the way they did with 'The Mary Tyler Moore Show' and 'All in the Family' or even 'Cheers' and 'Roseanne.'"

According to the Times-Picayune's Walker, some of television's best comedy can be found on dramas such as Fox's "House" and HBO's "Deadwood" and "The Sopranos."

"I think what may be happening is that people are pulling all of their comedy needs from shows like that, which also can be violent and gritty," Walker says. "I laugh all the way through 'Rescue Me.' It's not a comedy, but it very expertly incorporates comic moments in the drama, and that seems to be happening more than any other time that I can remember. I think there's a golden age of kind of a new genre, which is dramas that are more than just dramatic."

As much as critics are enjoying the riches of this golden era, sometimes it can seem like too much of a good thing.

"As a critic, the more TV there is, the more guilt there is that you can't watch all of it or even some of it," Owens admits. "It does make our jobs that more challenging. If there gets to be too much more of it, my head is going to explode."

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/thr/television/feature_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1002877096

TV Critics Summer Press Tour
Charlie Sheen Seeks $24M Payday

By Scott Collins Los Angeles Times Staff Writer in the Channel Island TV Industry blog July 20, 2006

Charlie Sheen got his Emmy nomination. Now he wants his reward.)

Every time I hear about how expensive/impossible it is to do HD, how mulitcasting is vital for broadcaster "survival," and when I almost start to believe the party line, an article like this comes along ...

Of course, the insiders and "experts" will now try to "educate" me about apples and oranges. ;) :D

Blah, blah, blah :)

Thursday’s network prime-time ratings are now at the top of RATINGS NEWS (the first post in this thread).

Overnights in the 18-49 Demo
NBC's 'Talent' cuts in on Fox's 'Dance'

By Toni Fitzgerald MediaLifeMagazine.com staff writer Jul 21, 2006

Fox’s “So You Think You Can Dance” still owns Thursday night but NBC’s “America’s Got Talent” is gaining.

One week after “Dance” dominated their first Thursday matchup, an extended version of “Talent’s” results show jumped significantly over last week while “Dance” fell. But Fox’s reality show still bested NBC in both adults 18-49 and total viewers.

“Talent” averaged a 2.6 adults 18-49 overnight rating for its one-hour episode at 9 p.m., 24 percent better than the 2.1 last week’s half hour results show earned at 9:30 p.m.

Meanwhile, Fox’s “Dance” dipped 11 percent week to week, from a 3.7 to a 3.3. NBC likely benefited from starting the show at the top of the hour, when people are more likely to switch the channel. It also had a slightly stronger lead-in last night, with “The Office” drawing a 1.8 compared with last week’s 1.6.

Yet “Dance” remains the No. 1 show on Thursday night, and by a long shot. The show even outdrew “Talent” by some 450,000 total viewers, averaging 8.8 million to the latter’s 8.35 million.

That reversed the trend on Wednesday night’s performance shows, when a two-hour “Talent” drew some 1.4 million more total viewers than a two-hour “Dance.”

“Dance,” the night’s top-rated show, boosted Fox to a share of the lead for the night, tied with CBS with a 2.5 rating and an 8 share among 18-49s. NBC was No. 3 with a 2.2/7, followed by Univision at 1.8/5, ABC at 1.7/5, Univision at 1.6, WB at 0.8/3 and UPN at 0.8/2.

At 8 p.m., CBS's "Big Brother 7: All-Stars" led at 2.6, even to last week, followed by NBC's reruns of "My Name Is Earl" and "The Office" at 2.0, Univision's "La Fea Mas Bella" at 1.9, Fox's pair of "That '70s Show" repeats at 1.7, ABC's "Master of Champions" down 0.1 from last week to 1.1, and the WB and UPN each at 0.9, for a "Smallville" repeat and reruns of "Everybody Hates Chris" and "Love, Inc."

At 9 p.m., Fox's "Dance" led at 3.3, followed by NBC's "Talent" results show and CBS's "CSI" each at 2.6. The No. 4 slot was shared by ABC's "Grey's Anatomy" and Univision's "Barrera de Amor" at 1.7, ahead of the WB's "Supernatural" repeat at 0.7 and UPN's "Eve" and "Cuts" reruns at 0.6.

At 10 p.m., CBS was No. 1 at 2.5 for a rerun of "Without a Trace," followed by ABC's "Primetime" at 2.3, NBC's "Windfall" at 2.0, up 0.2 from last week, and Univision's "Aqui y Ahora" at 1.2.

Among households, CBS led for the night at a 5.8 rating and 10 share, ahead of Fox at 4.0/7, NBC and ABC each at 3.8/7, Univision at 1.9/3, WB at 1.4/2 and UPN at 1.2/2.

http://www.medialifemagazine.com/artman/publish/printer_6150.asp

TV Critics Summer Press Tour
Calista Flockhart wafts back to TV

By Diane Holloway Austin American-Statesman in her TV blog Thursday, July 20, 2006

Good news, “Ally McBeal” fans! Calista Flockhart has just a little bit of meat on her delicate bones. Not to say she’s even remotely average in weight, but the once skeletal waif now has actual arms and possibly even thighs. It was hard to tell with her little-girl dress and Minnie Mouse platform shoes.

http://www.austin360.com/blogs/content/shared-gen/blogs/austin/tvblog/

OMG! Ok, this funny, but do these crixs always have to go there? The hits just keep coming.

TV Critics Summer Press Tour
NBC Premiere Dates

By Rich Heldenfels in his Akron Beacon Journal TV blog

Here's the skinny, announced this morning. And think about what it says re NBC's fortunes that ''Deal or No Deal'' is the best lead-in it has for ''Studio 60's'' premiere. (''Deal,'' by the way, will air FOUR times the week of Sept. 18.

NFL coverage will in effect get three premieres: the Hall of Fame game from beautiful Canton on Aug. 6, then the regular-season kickoff on Sept. 7, then the first regular-season Sunday-night game on Sept. 10.

Entertainment show dates:

Sept. 18 -- ''Deal or No Deal'' (''special two-hour edition''), ''Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip.''

Sept. 19 -- ''Law & Order: Criminal Intent,'' ''Law & Order: SVU.''

Sept. 20 -- ''Biggest Loser,'' ''Kidnapped.''

Sept. 21 -- ''My Name Is Earl,'' ''The Office,'' ''Deal or No Deal,'' ''ER.''

Sept. 22 -- ''Law & Order.''

Sept. 25 -- ''Heroes.''

Oct. 3 -- ''Friday Night Lights.''

Oct. 4 -- ''Twenty Good Years.''

Oct. 11 -- ''30 Rock.''

Oct. 20 -- ''Crossing Jordan,'' ''Las Vegas.''

http://blogs.ohio.com/beacon_tv/

TV Critics Summer Press Tour
Obligatory post-Kevin Reilly blog posting

By Aaron Barnhart Kansas City Star in his blog “TV Barn” Friday, July 21, 2006

"Nobody's Watching" is coming back as webisodes. Anybody shocked by that? Madonna's doing a non-live concert special for NBC, and Kevin Reilly's head of movie development is developing ... one movie next season for NBC. Ricky and Stephen are writing a script for "The Office." Jason Katims is working on "footballsomething," aka "Friday Night Lights." "Last Comic Standing" is going to be on NBC in the summer "for years to come." Stop me if I'm giving you actual news...

The president of NBC Entertainment has made a point of being forthright with the press ... as forthright as one can be when you have as many trade secrets in your head as Kevin Reilly does.

Unfortunately, he is also an employee of GE, which means they make him read off a teleprompter positioned at the back of the room. (Halfway through his remarks, I just turned around and read that. He improvises well.)

It's a way of saying he's starchier than he needs to be. That said, I thought he answered my question about Jay Leno about as well as one could answer a question where extremely sensitive contract negotiations are going on. (In case you weren't noticing, or caring, Leno's not talking to the press.) I asked about possible seller's remorse in signing that deal that will have him leaving "Tonight" in 2009 and whether NBC is talking to him.

Short answer: Yes, and we're doing it because after the news got out all of Jay's friends began asking if he was retiring, would there be a next act, where would it be, etc.

Oh, and nobody else can talk to Jay for a couple more years. That's in reaction to Bill Carter's report in his book that ABC was interested in giving Jay the "Nightline" time slot. Maybe they're interested, but that's all they get to be for a while.

http://blogs.kansascity.com/tvbarn/2006/07/obligatory_post.html

TV Critics Summer Press Tour
Death March With Cocktails

Studio 60 Live Blog
By Tim Goodman San Francisco Chronicle in his TV blog “The Bastard Machine”

Aaron Sorkin has already delivered a great line about how his show, a backstage look at a show very similar to "Saturday Night Live," compares to the Tina Fey (of "SNL") series "30 Rock," which attempts the same in 30 less minutes.

"I'm going to take Tina's idea and add twice as many words to it."

Sorkin on the influence TV has on society: "I think it's bad crack in the school yard." Pause. "Why did I use that line?" And the room erupted. You may recall that Sorkin had some drug woes in the past.

So not only does it seem the man is back and sharp but he's also got a good sense of humor about himself.

The cast hasn't taken on single question yet. Because we're almost always more interested in the producers and writers than actors.

Whoops, there goes Timothy Busfield. And now Matthew Perry who says, "I think it's more like bad Vicodin in the school yard." And the crowd roars because, well, Perry has had his own woes and just took one for Sorkin. And now Bradley Whitford. You know, this is a pretty solid cast.

I understand that the Perry thing needed a bit of a set-up, but things fly pretty fast in these sessions so forget it. Just know it was funny. And by the way, the cast here today is Steven Weber, Nathan Corddry, Sarah Paulson, Amanda Peet and D.L. Hughley.

Sorkin says he's changed the way he's writing this show as compared to "The West Wing" - which should please NBC since his inability to delegate and need to write every word was one of the main reasons he was removed from "The West Wing," since the delays in the writing ended up costing lots and lots of money.

There have been stories about an alleged "backlash" against "Studio 60" but none of it makes much sense in the real world. The gist is that as one of the most talked about new series - probably because Sorkin was returning to network television - "Studio 60" had a high profile ripe for speculation. So? Exactly. But an early script did pop up on the internet as did, allegedly, some clips, and people in the blogosphere - known as non-pro in Variety speak - started to log in. But look, I've seen this pilot already some time ago and it was exactly what you'd expect from Sorkin. Smart, fast-paced, a bit inside baseball and of the highest quality. The acting performances are solid and the writing is great. What's not to like?

That doesn't mean it will work, of course. But much of the alleged "backlash" and a "backlash to the backlash" is Hollywood generated, a town that fixates on itself out of habit. And it can't be trusted. No matter what anyone says, the audience is always - always - the deciding factor on a series, not hype.

Great quote: "There's nothing you can do to make it easy that also won't make it bad." Sorkin on the difficult, grueling nature of making a TV series every week. As Whitford says, it's the equivalent of making 11 feature films in 9 months.

This much is clear just listening to Sorkin talk about his craft - he's great to have here. He's smart, knows the industry and is candid. Maybe too candid.

"I will give everyone in this room $100 if I can just get that quote out of the papers tomorrow," Sorkin said of the "crack" line. He then said, with honesty, that after all the preparation he did for this session, the fact that he said it almost immediately, "is just unbelievable."

By the way, this won't translate at all, but the session is great because all the actors are being both flippant and interesting and funny, and each one is trying to one up the other while also being self deprecating. It's kind of like the series itself.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/sfgate/indexn?blogid=24

TV Critics Summer Press Tour
Somebody's watching -- on NBC

From Maureen Ryan’s Chicago Tribune blog “The Watcher” July 21, 2006

“Nobody’s Watching,” the summer Internet sensation, is coming to NBC prime time.

At a summer convention of television critics in Pasadena, Calif., NBC Entertainment President Kevin Reilly announced that “Nobody’s Watching,” a rejected WB comedy pilot that became a YouTube.com phenomenon and was viewed more than 600,000 times, will become an experimental NBC hybrid program.

The network plans to air the show in prime time at some point this season, but Reilly noted that the show’s creator, “Scrubs” executive producer Bill Lawrence, is already shooting footage for brand-new “Nobody’s Watching” Webisodes, which will debut in September.

As the NBC press release notes, “the concept of ‘Nobody's Watching’ centers on Derek and Will, two young television addicts from Ohio who are frustrated with the dreadful state of television programming. As a result, they decide to become the subjects of a reality show when a major network gives them the opportunity to create their own sitcom. Unaware that the network executives are manipulating and recording their every word and move, the two continue their crusade to develop what they hope will be great television.”

“I have always been passionate about this project, but more importantly, I think this is just the first of many television shows to be rescued by the Internet and I think we will see more launched on the Internet in the future,” Lawrence said in a statement.

Reilly also announced that Andre Braugher will join “ER” for a six-episode arc, and John Stamos, who's had a recurring role as a paramedic, will join the cast of “ER.” John Mahoney, Sally Field and Paula Malcolmson from "Deadwood" will also guest on the long-running medical drama this season.

Here are some of the premiere dates that NBC announced Friday: “Deal or No Deal” will kick off with four episodes in a week starting Sept. 18; “Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip,” the highly anticipated Aaron Sorkin program debuts the same night; “Law & Order: Criminal Intent” and “Law & Order: SVU” return Sept. 19,; and “The Office,” “My Name Is Earl” and “ER” return Sept. 21. Many of NBC’s new shows don’t debut until October, including “Friday Night Lights” (Oct. 3), “Twenty Good Years” (Oct. 4) and “30 Rock,” another “Saturday Night Live” satire a la Sorkin’s “Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip,” appears Oct. 11.

Reilly also announced that “Last Comic Standing” and “America’s Got Talent” will be returning for new seasons, and Madonna will have a two-hour concert special on NBC in November.

One final NBC note: The network will re-air episodes of the charming USA Network detective show "Psych" on Aug. 7 and 14.

http://tempo.typepad.com/entertainment_tv/

BSG [Battlestar Galactica] is slated for HD-DVD and depending on actual dates and seasons released I may have to crank up the will power and forego watching SciFi Channel.

LOL! Yeah, good luck with that. :D

A(nother) Reminder
TV Critics Summer Tour

The nation’s TV critics summer tour rolls on in Pasadena CA this weekend. (Won't it ever end?)

More NBC stars will joust with the critics Saturday.

The Hot Off The Press thread will continue to have up-to-the-minute highlights of the TCA Tour throughout the weekend. So make sure to log on and check out the latest development a few times Saturday and Sunday.

TV Critics Summer Press Tour
Line of the tour

By Alan Sepinwall of the Newark Star-Ledger in the “All TV In Hollywood” blog

This is why they pay Matthew Perry the big bucks: because, during the session for NBC's much-anticipated "Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip," he got by far the biggest laugh of the press tour -- and at the expense of boss Aaron Sorkin.

Earlier in the session, Sorkin made a passing reference to superstition and used the phrase "it's like bad crack in the schoolyard," then quickly stopped himself and said, "Why did I use that word?" (In case you're an emigre from Venus, Sorkin has had a very public drug problem.)

A few minutes later, I asked Perry and co-star Bradley Whitford how it felt to be playing characters so closely modeled on Sorkin and producer/director Tommy Schlamme.

Sayeth Perry, who's had his own public drug issue, "It's mostly like bad Vicodin in the schoolyard."

Going for the trifecta

NBC's session with Brian Williams was a little too short and sober to inject the whole "what are you wearing?" issue into it, but in the interests of fairness, I gave him his crack at it in the Scrum afterwards. Like Charlie Gibson, he had already been briefed, and before I even got a couple of words out, he said, "A simple black cocktail dress. And that's my answer."

NBC's 'Watching'

In one of the cooler announcements of press tour, NBC has resurrected "Nobody's Watching," a comedy pilot that the WB didn't pick up a couple of years ago. The show, about two young TV fans hired to produce TV's next great sitcom while starring in a reality show about the process, was created by Bill Lawrence and a couple of his "Scrubs" writers, but was passed over by the WB in favor of the awful "Twins." With most busted pilots, that would be it. But then came YouTube.
Someone -- and everyone in both the Lawrence and NBC camps are denying it was them (NBC president Kevin Reilly even joked, "For once, our hands are totally clean") -- took the pilot and posted it in three segments to the popular viral video site.

Within a couple of months, nearly 400,000 people have watched at least the first of the three segments (though parts 2 & 3 retained about half that audience), TV critics like me were interviewing Lawrence about the chance that the new exposure could bring "Watching" back to life, and cable and network development executives were calling to see if they could buy it.

Since the pilot was produced by NBC/Universal, and since "Watching" star Paul Campbell had a holding deal with NBC, that network seemed to have the inside track. And this morning, Reilly was almost beaming as he announced that they had commissioned Lawrence, Garret Donovan and Neil Goldman to write six new scripts and begin producing a number of webisodes to keep the YouTube interest going. If the show goes to series, the plan would be to have the TV show and the web content feed off each other.

Lawrence, Campbell and co-star Tarran Killam will be here tomorrow, no doubt deservedly pleased with themselves.

http://www.nj.com/weblogs/tv/index.ssf?/mtlogs/njo_alan/archives/2006_07.html#163760

TV Critics Summer Press Tour
An Early Critique of What the Forthcoming Primetime Season Hath Wrought

By Ray Richmond The Hollywood Reporter in his blog “Past Deadline” July 21, 2006

A friend of mine who has access to all of the new network fall season pilots -- and whose opinion I greatly respect -- checked in with the following assessment of 18 of them. Interesting stuff. Food for thought, even.

30 Rock is good. Alec Baldwin is the reason to watch. Tina Fey holds her own and they're giving Tracy Morgan some funny stuff to do. However, the better show is...

Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip Great writing. Great cast. Not sure if anyone will care about either. But this is one that I will TiVo.

20 Good Years Doesn't even have 20 good minutes. There aren't 20 laughs. It won't run for 20 episodes. This is serious old school bad shitcom time. What a waste of John Lithgow and Jeffrey Tambor. Both deserve better.

Ugly Betty In short, no thanks. Two-dimensional characters in a world that I couldn't care less about.

Notes from the Underbelly Fairly well done. Nice writing, good cast. Jennifer Westfeldt is used well here. However the pilot holds little promise for a series to me. I doubt it will catch on.

The Knights of Prosperity Is one of the funniest pilots of the year. Donal Logue is great and I laughed out loud more than a few times. I don't know how they are going to sustain this, but I said the same of My Name is Earl and I'm still watching it. I will TiVo.

Help Me Help You Thoroughly unpleasant. I liked Ted Danson better on Becker, which I didn't care for at all.

Six Degrees This one intrigues me. Serendipity as a series feels like it could get old very quickly. It runs the risk of being precious yet I was really engaged by this pilot. Great cast and really well produced. I will watch a couple more when it launches.

The Class This is a show that will make it through a season or two before I decide whether I will watch it. It has no depth or originality but is well crafted nonetheless. I won't TiVo but if I catch myself watching it by accident, I won't flip away immediately.

Till Death There's a title that's just asking for it... and I think they'll get it. Brad Garrett's post-Raymond shitcom is just awful. Too bad, because I think he and Joely Fisher could be very funny together. It will appeal to an older audience than Fox wants and not a very discerning one.

Happy Hour Isn't as good as Till Death. A real contender for the worst comedy of the year. This and Help Me Help You will be fast cancellations, mark my words.

Men In Trees Sex & The City scribe Jenny Bicks creates a show about a relationship writer who discovers that she's got a lot to learn about relationships. Hmm, sounds a little like Carrie Bradshaw. But wait... it takes the urbanite character and drops her in the middle of a small Alaskan town. Hmm, that's a little like Northern Exposure. Take those elements and add in Anne Heche as your lead and you know what you've got? A show I won't be watching!

Big Day One wedding will play out over an entire season? After watching the unfunny pilot and all the forced Father of the Bride antics, I predict a quick annulment. It is noteworthy that ABC has abandoned its onetime bread-and-butter traditional multi-camera sitcoms hoping to bring audiences back to the half-hour comedy with these single-camera shows. An interesting strategy on the heels of Emily's Reasons Why Not and Jake in Progress, doncha think?

Heroes Humanity is progressing into the next stage of evolution as people all over the world are beginning to develop various super powers. It sounds a lot cooler than it is.

Jericho A post-apocalyptic vision of a small Colorado town starring Simon and Simon/Major Dad vet Gerald McRaney. It sounds a lot cooler than it is. And it doesn't even sound all that cool. Yeesh.

Shark James Woods as a high-priced defense lawyer who has a crisis of conscience and joins the DA's office. Next to the skilled legal writing that we've come to expect from David E. Kelly and the Law & Order shows, this simplistic offering didn't impress me at all. But it does have James Woods in the lead, so if they can get some better writing, it may be worth another look.

Smith Ray Liotta in a somewhat interesting heist drama. It's grittier and more progressive than most fare on the usually bland CBS. However so was EZ Streets. I didn't love it, but it felt like an admirable swing. I doubt I'll watch it. I doubt anyone else will either.

Justice What's the deal with these new legal dramas? Like CBS's Shark, this offering from Jerry Bruckheimer for Fox is a pedestrian attempt to profile a high-priced, high-achieving, high tech legal defense team. However they don't even have James Woods to prop them up. If I'm any judge, I find Justice guilty of the crimes of being dull and unoriginal.

http://www.pastdeadline.com/

TV Critics Summer Press Tour
Revenge of the bloggers, starring Brian Williams

By Bill Goodykoontz Arizona Republic TV Critic in his Critic’s Tour blog 07/21/2006 11:56:51

PASADENA, Calif. -- Nice little moment: Bloggers are blogging Brian Williams' NBC News session as Williams talks about his blog.

Love those hall-of-mirrors moments. Of course, we're blogging from a ballroom. He was talking about blogging on his Blackberry while reporting from Jeruselam.

Whatever the case, this is the TV Tour when the bloggers took over. Or, at least, made their presence felt. It's a good thing, I think, and not just because I've been doing it for what, in Internet terms, qualifies as a long time now. The TV Tour is an odd news event. Genuine news pops up here and is of course reported as such in the next day's paper. Other things qualify as interesting, but since they relate to shows that viewers won't see till September at the earliest, it's difficult to figure out how important they are in the moment.

Blogs answer that question. If you care a lot about the inner workings of TV, we're here for you, writing up what qualifies as breaking news in this crowd in what we hope is an entertaining, informative way. If you can wait till September to find out how much NBC executives care about the shots Aaron Sorkin takes at the network in Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, then that works, too.

If you have any doubt that blogging is not just the wave of the future but the medium of the moment, you should sit through sessions here and see the warm glow of the computer screens that light up the room. It's not a coming thing. It's here. It's been here. It's just more prominent now.

Williams is on board. He's been blogging for a while now.

"It's like having a daily deadline working at a local paper," he said. Hey, welcome to our world. "This was not a deadline I was looking to add to my day."

Life's tough all over; the multi-million dollar annual contract probably takes a little sting out of the work load. Still, it's good that he does it.

"I put it out there," he said, using it to sort of shine a light on how he makes decisions about his broadcast. "I also use it as a forum to say we screwed up last night and here's how, or to take responsibility for a bad decision."

A network star taking responsibility for mistakes? If you want evidence that it's a brave new world, there you have it.

http://www.azcentral.com/blogs/index.php?blog=5&blogtype=Entertainment

TV Critics Summer Press Tour
NBC's Reilly: Network's Ills To End

By Jim Benson Broadcasting & Cable 7/21/2006

Comparing his network’s travails to “sweating like pigs trying to get out of a stiff headwind,” NBC Entertainment President Kevin Reilly proclaimed Friday that NBC’s “ill-fated three-hour tour is about to come to an end.”

While steering clear of ratings predictions and brushing off most questions about the past, except for “the tricky transition” to his regime that he refers to as “ancient history,” Reilly told a Television Critics Assn. panel that NBC will not finish next season “mired in fourth.”

“I think our fall is going to look pretty potent,” he says, adding later, “I don’t feel we have all our eggs in that basket. We have six viable (new) shows that all could break out.”

But Reilly acknowledges that NBC could opt to bring back Deal or No Deal for a third appearance each week if a new show fails, saying it would be used on a “stunt basis” two to three times per week.

“We showed a tremendous amount of restraint as networks go by not putting this on over the summer,” he says, noting that if NBC had, Fox’s So You Think You Can Dance would have been in a “far off” second place.

Having been criticized for running the game show perhaps too frequently in the spring, Reilly says he makes “no apologies” given the amount of hours American Idol occupies on Fox.

The network’s focus now is on creating series with long-term potential rather than one-off TV movies. Reilly says NBC will reevaluate whether it will remain in the business next spring. For now, it has only one movie currently on tap for this coming season and a couple miniseries and movies in development for spring.

NBC recently entered into a development pact with director Spike Lee, who Reilly says has two drama ideas—one an ensemble set in New Orleans.

Under questioning on other subjects, Reilly says NBC didn’t take personally Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip creator Aaron Sorkin’s pointed potshots in the pilot about Donald Trump and eating worms—a sordid referenced to Fear Factor. Sorkin, Reilly notes, has “earned” having a tremendous amount of creative freedom.

Turning to the summer, Reilly made “no apologies” for Windfall, the drama that started off strong and then slipped into a “respectable place.” He says the network is looking at airing another drama next summer.

Reilly says he “wouldn’t be surprised” if the networks, which have traditionally stuck with light fare in the summer, go to more “heavy” programming in the warm months, comparable to what the cable networks have.

In late night, Reilly says NBC wants to remain in business with Tonight show host Jay Leno after he turns over the reins to Conan O’Brien in 2009. NBC has first contractual rights to him over the next few years.

NBC has been heavily into putting its shows on iPods and other digital platforms to battle audience fragmentation, but Reilly says he still thinks it is relevant for networks to program their schedules with audience flow from one hour to the next in mind.

Reilly expresses doubts that viewers will “program their lives. They still want to see what is on.” Yet he says NBC is “not in denial” about fragmentation and is looking at new initiatives in “raising the way people relate” to its individual shows.

Shifting from new to old programming, Reilly acknowledged that Saturday Night Live had a weak ratings season but that there will be a “tightening of the cast” next season, making it a “new show for a new generation.”

Among the announcements:

• NBC has picked up new cycles of the popular new reality series America’s Got Talent, which will return midseason at 8 p .m. Sundays after football ends, and Last Comic Standing, which will come back next June. Reilly says he expects it to become “an event for years to come.”

• Madonna will perform in concert for NBC in November. The appearance, from her “Confessions” tour, will be filmed and edited to make it appropriate for TV, according to Reilly.

• Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant, the creators of the BBC’s The Office, will write a script for NBC’s American version.

• John Stamos will join the cast of ER.

• Nissan will be the single sponsor for the premiere of Heroes.

http://www.broadcastingcable.com/index.asp?layout=articlePrint&articleID=CA6355431

Sports On TV
A Correction

A few days ago I posted a TV Week story saying that all ESPN Thursday night NCAA football games would be broadcast in HD this year – and letter boxed in SD.

Now ESPN says the games won’t be letter boxed after all. The all-sports network cites “technical difficulties”.

So….never mind.

TV Critics Summer Press Tour
All politics is local

By Joanna Weiss The Boston Globe TV Writer in the Globe’s “Viewer Discretion” blog July 21, 2006

I’m here for a brief visit to the Television Critics Association Press Tour, a biannual Hollywood tradition, and even as a jetlagged neophyte, I’m finding clarity.

I wondered, going into this, how much a TV industry confab was going to look like a political event, which I know a little more about.

It turns out that, yes, there are some similarities between today’s marathon NBC presentation and, say, a presidential debate in New Hampshire.

Both involve a bunch of jaded reporters lined up at tables with their laptops, herded around by some twenty-something intern types, trying to turn spin into a story.

Among the differences: I think, for better or worse, more people care about TV.

Here’s a partial breakdown of what else I've found. I’ll update as necessary.

Youthfulness: Same
NBC Entertainment President Kevin Reilly takes the stage and looks to be about 16. He’s got the easy confidence of the student government president, and the hair gel to match. The eternally youthful rule the world. If you’ve ever seen a 40-something Republican aide with tortoise-shell glasses, you know what I mean.

Showmanship: Different
The thing about those Republican campaign aides – and the Democratic ones, too – is that they don’t have a lot of money to work with. This is not the case for NBC. So the network has built a giant stage lit from above and below. Reilly makes a grand entrance from behind a giant silver peacock. The only thing missing is the smoke machine.

Attempts at comedy: Same
Your average political stump speech starts with a joke that charms the crowd and makes the press corps reach for antacid, particularly after they’ve heard it for the 43rd time. Here, at least you only have to hear the joke once. Reilly starts off his presentation with a little stand-up bit, something along the lines of “I just flew back from two weeks sailing in Mexico and boy are my arms tired.” It’s supposed to be a metaphor for NBC’s awful performance in recent seasons -- sailing into headwinds, etc., etc. – but the reporters are rolling their eyes.

Kindness of press corps: Different
To some extent, reporters are all watchdogs, but political reporters get especially righteous about their tried-and-true adversarial relationship with the power structure – particularly after they’ve heard the same platitude in the same stump speech for said 43rd time. Here, there are a few hardball questions to be had, but there are softballs that would get a self-respecting reporter laughed straight out of the Granite State. My favorite from this morning: “Is this development season really good, and if so why?” That’s like asking John Kerry, “Can you tell us about your military background and why it will make you a great president?” Reilly looks really pleased.

http://www.boston.com/ae/tv/blog/

Note: Andre Braugher fans (and you know who you are) check the final paragraph.

TV Critics Summer Press Tour
NBC's State of the Network Address

By Kevin D. Thompson Palm Beach Post Television Writer in his blog July 21, 2006

When network presidents address TV critics at press tour, it’s a lot like the State of the Union address. Only there’s no rousing applause.

Today is NBC’s turn to put on its big happy face as it promotes its new fall shows. No network needs a big season more than NBC. Finishing fourth last season, the network is far from its glory days when Thursday night was “must-see” and such comedies as Frasier, Seinfeld and Cheers made NBC the No. 1 network.

Using a sailing analogy, Kevin Reilly, president of NBC Entertainment, this morning admitted the network has been “sweating like pigs trying to get out of the stiff headwind.” But he believes NBC’s “ill-fated tour is about to come to an end.”

I must say, Reilly could be right.

NBC has one of the season’s most promising new schedules. In Aaron Sorkin’s Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, NBC has one of the most buzzed-about shows. The pilot, by the way, is excellent.

And so is Heroes, a new X-Men-like drama about a group of ordinary people who discover they have superpowers. Alec Baldwin is a hoot as a network exec in 30 Rock, a comedy about the behind-the-scenes doings at a Saturday Night Live-like sketch show created by SNL’s Tina Fey. Meanwhile, John Lithgow and Jeffrey Tambor make a fine odd couple in the comedy Twenty Good Years and Kidnapped, a new whodunit drama about, well, a high profile kidnapping starring Dana Delaney and Delroy Lindo, looks interesting.

While Reilly said he didn’t want to make any “hard predictions” about the upcoming season, he did promise that NBC “will not be mired in fourth week after week.”

And he did promise that The Apprentice, whose ratings have cooled recently, will come back with some “juice” when the show moves to a new night (Sunday) and a new location (Los Angeles) in January.

As for some of NBC's additional programming moves, here’s what Reilly mentioned.

Deal of No Deal returns: The hit game show will be back on Sept. 18 with a two-hour premiere and will air four nights that week. “The show was unbelievably resilient during the spring,” Reilly said.

Madonna in concert: The Material Girl’s London concert will be taped and air in November. Since Madonna’s concerts can be a bit raunchy, Reilly said the network would decide which numbers would make the final cut.

ER getting more guest-stars: Andre Braugher will join the cast for six episodes and Sally Field will be back as Abby’s mom.

http://www.palmbeachpost.com/blogs/content/shared-blogs/palmbeach/thompson/entries/2006/07/tv_press_tour_n.html

TV Critics Summer Press Tour
The Triumph of ''Nobody's Watching''!

By Rich Heldenfels in his Akron Beacon Journal TV blog

Score one for YouTube: NBC is going to make webisodes and develop new TV scripts for ''Nobody's Watching,'' the Bill Lawrence-backed comedy originally planned for The WB. The hope is to start it as a prime-time series later in the 2006-07 season.

As I mentioned in this blog (see the late-June post ''Hurry...'') and in the Beacon Journal, The WB did not pick up the series but the pilot ended up on YouTube, where it gained a lot of fans, with almost 400,000 views of the first part of the pilot as of this morning. Based on that buzz, Lawrence began talking to reporters, including me, and the show once again caught the networks' attention. Which is good news, because the pilot -- about two guys from Ohio given a chance to make their own TV comedy -- was hilarious.

The webisodes should start within a month, says NBC Entertainment President Kevin Reilly. The guys from the show are already out and about in Hollywood, Reilly said, and may pop up at all sorts of show-biz events in the days ahead.

http://blogs.ohio.com/beacon_tv/

The Business of TV
Murdoch Fuels DirecTV-Dish Rumor

By Linda Moss Multichannel.com 7/21/2006

It would be a “very painful” process for DirecTV to negotiate a deal to acquire rival EchoStar Communications, according to News Corp. chairman Rupert Murdoch.

Murdoch, whose company owns 38% of DirecTV, helped to add fuel to the rumors of a DirecTV-EchoStar merger when he was asked about a possible deal Thursday during an appearance on PBS’ The Charlie Rose Show.

“Well, we’d have to get through the negotiating stage [with EchoStar], which would be very painful,” Murdoch said, joking that it would be painful “maybe” for both him and EchoStar chairman Charlie Ergen, whom he described as a “good friend.”

This week, EchoStar’s stock hit 52-week highs -- including one during Friday-morning trading, when it was at $33.53 per share -- following a Los Angeles Times story that said the buzz at Allen & Co.’s media conference was that Murdoch was working on a deal to buy EchoStar to combine it with DirecTV.

Ergen tried to buy DirecTV several years ago, but in 2002, the Federal Communications Commission and the Department of Justice effectively put the kibosh on that deal. Shortly thereafter, News Corp. acquired its stake in DirecTV. But Murdoch said he thinks the regulatory environment for such a merger has changed since 2002.

“I think today it is different -- the broadband coming, the revolution, there are many more alternatives, ways of getting pictures and information, that I think it would be much harder for the government to turn it down today,” Murdoch said. “But as I say, we’d have to get through a negotiation with Charlie. Then there would be the question of who would run it.”

Murdoch also reiterated comments he’s made previously -- that DirecTV is negotiating with potential partners about delivering a wireless-broadband product.

“The technology doesn’t seem to be a problem -- it’s getting the frequencies,” he said.

http://www.multichannel.com/index.asp?layout=articlePrint&articleid=CA6355428

LOL! Yeah, good luck with that. :D
Really, who am I kidding, like I'm really going to wait. :p

TV Critics Summer Press Tour
NBC's Reilly predicts smoother sailing for net

By Andrew Wallenstein The Hollywood Reporter

PASADENA -- The S.S. NBC is charting course for calmer waters.

Comparing his network to a sailboat, NBC Entertainment president Kevin Reilly predicted at the peacock's opening session Friday at the Television Critics Assn. press tour that the tide will turn this fall after floating adrift in the ratings in previous seasons. "We've been sweating like pigs trying to get out of a stiff headwind," Reilly said. "But I gotta tell you: I feel a shift in the winds coming and I think our ill-fated three-hour tour is about to come to an end."


Captain Reilly announced he has invited back some of his summer shipmates as well, disclosing orders of new cycles of unscripted series "America's Got Talent" and "Last Comic Standing." As was previously announced, "Talent" will return in January while "Comic" will come back next June.

NBC is also making good in its pledge for year-round development, reviving discarded comedy project "Nobody's Watching" after the pilot mysteriously popped up on viral-video website YouTube and began generating buzz. "Watching" is from "Scrubs" creator Bill Lawrence and NBC Universal Television Studio.

In an unusual departure from standard operating procedure, "Watching" will resume production immediately in the form of webisodes, but will also yield half-hour scripts in anticipation of getting a primetime slot later this season.

"It's great to have someone of Bill's caliber jumping into it," Reilly said. "Win, lose or draw, these are the kind of things we've got to try."

NBC is welcoming back one of its former stars to "ER," with "Homicide: Life on the Street" star Andre Braugher signing on for a six-episode arc.

In addition, NBC has signed pop star Madonna to a primetime concert showcase in November, "Madonna: The Confessions Tour Live."

Reilly outlined his basic fall strategy as the expected influx of viewers that will come with the addition of the NFL on Sunday nights circulating around a stronger schedule he touted for having no single weak link among the new series. In addition, the network should field a stronger midseason lineup to contend with Fox's "American Idol" with more returning favorites including "Scrubs," "The Apprentice" and "Medium."

"Our ratings will definitely be better," Reilly said. "We will not be mired in fourth week after week. We will be a challenger in many time periods."

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/thr/television/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1002877632

The Business of TV
Murdoch Fuels DirecTV-Dish Rumor

By Linda Moss Multichannel.com 7/21/2006





Ergen tried to buy DirecTV several years ago, but in 2002, the Federal Communications Commission and the Department of Justice effectively put the kibosh on that deal. Shortly thereafter, News Corp. acquired its stake in DirecTV. But Murdoch said he thinks the regulatory environment for such a merger has changed since 2002.


Just saw a site the other day that spelled out the supposedly real reasons Echostar failed in their bid for DirecTV. Basically it boiled down to Echostar not playing the Washington game right and throwing enough money around, more than any issues with the FCC and Justice. Basically they didn't get the right people and spend enough. I'll see if I can find it again, pretty interesting. It also talks about how DirecTV has the Washington game pretty much figured out.

It was a pretty open secret that NewsCorp spent lots for lobbying to get the deal killed.

And then waltzed in and got control of DirecTV for a lot less than Charlie had agreed to pay.

It was a pretty open secret that NewsCorp spent lots for lobbying to get the deal killed.

And then waltzed in and got control of DirecTV for a lot less than Charlie had agreed to pay.
Yes, it really didn't have anything to do with with objections from the FCC and Justice, it had everything to do with who you bought and how much you paid. A lesson in US Govt. :p

Yes, it really didn't have anything to do with with objections from the FCC and Justice, it had everything to do with who you bought and how much you paid. A lesson in US Govt. :p

I agree. I have worked in government at various levels for the past 5 years and getting to the "right" people will always win out over any valid arguments. Unless the constituents are coming down hard on the politican/city or county executive. Or it's reelection time. Fred was right about Newcorp knowing how to play the game b/c they had enough people on the ground doing what it took to get a deal done. In places where I have worked, you'll see 10 people from one firm at a session or council meeting before it starts. There's strength in numbers.

TV Notebook
'Top Model' Writers Go on Strike

Dispute With CW Centers on Representation by Writers Guild
By Michele Greppi TVWeek.com July 21, 2006

The dozen writers who craft the reality in "America's Next Top Model" went on strike Friday because The CW, which plans to use "Model" to kick off its premiere season Sept 20, have denied the writers' request for representation by the Writers Guild of America West.

Among those joining the writers demonstrating outside the "Model" production offices on South Sepulveda Boulevard in Los Angeles were WGAW officers and board members and California Assemblyman Paul Koretz, according to guild spokesman Gabriel Scott.

Mr. Scott said "Model's" writers, like those on other reality shows, have signed cards authorizing the guild to represent them. "They want a contract that affords them the same provisions the Writers Guild members get," he said. The issues are lack of portable pension and health benefits, minimum pay standards, writing credits and residuals, Mr. Scott said.

A spokesman for The CW declined to comment. Production has not begun yet on the upcoming season of "Top Model."

Executive producer Ken Mok issued a statement Thursday afternoon, when the writers' walk-out seemed likely, saying:

"We have advised the WGA that we feel the process established under the National Labor Relations Act is the appropriate process to be followed if employees wish to be represented by a union. The process permits an impartial government agency, the National Labor Relations Board, to conduct a secret ballot election so that all affected employees have an individual right to express their preference as to whether or not they want to elect a union.

"However, for some reason, the WGA is seeking to circumvent the protections provided to employees by these procedures and is trying to pressure us into recognizing it without a federally supervised secret ballot election. We once again ask that the WGA follow the procedures provided by law. If, after doing so, the NLRB decides that the WGA is the exclusive representative of our employees, we would be happy to sit down and negotiate with them."

http://www.tvweek.com/news.cms?newsId=10407

TV Critics Summer Press Tour
Kevin Reilly plays master and commander as NBC resets its course

By Melanie McFarland Seattle Post-Intelligencer TV Critic in her TV blog July 21, 2006

NBC has a tradition of stiffly choreographed executive sessions. The head man in charge of programming - Kevin Reilly these days - walks back and forth onstage in an attempt to seem casual as he reads his lines off a large television screen behind us. We're walking, we're talking, we're walking ... and let's open it up for questions.

This fine art of pacing was perfected by Jeff Zucker, the former wunderkind who is now a good deal balder, richer and more nervous, having been named the head of NBC Universal Television Group.

Reilly, meanwhile, comes across as a nice guy who came over from FX to save this ship. You'll have to forgive us for the nautical metaphors to follow, because Reilly tried to relate to us as the morning began by likening NBC's fortunes to a recent vacation he spent sailing the azure seas in Mexico. (Could have been worse; in the past, Reilly has likened NBC's experiences to a colonic.)

"Ah, he really is one of the people!" I said to myself, nibbling on the breadcrusts NBC threw to the Press Tour pigeons for breakfast.

Anyhoo, Reilly talked a lot of hitting headwinds and navigating choppy waters, perhaps hoping we'd paint him as wily and wiry Capt. Jack Sparrow instead of "Master and Commander's" besieged and fat Russell Crowe. The reality puts Reilly and NBC somewhere in between the two.

NBC has been hating it in fourth place for a while now, which is what happens when you try to repair an old vessel with meringue and Popsicle sticks. It might sail at first, but with continued exposure you figure out that whatever doesn't dissolve right away quickly erodes as the year goes on. With the exception of "My Name is Earl" and "The Office," nothing that's been on NBC for the past two years seemed built to last. (And yes, I haven't forgotten "Deal or No Deal," which seems destined to burn out like ABC ruined "Who Wants To Be a Millionaire.")

Looking at its fall 2006-2007 slate, though, it as if the old girl's fixed herself up and gone nuts with the pilates. She's looking all right these days.

Speaking of which, in November it's bringing a two-hour special presentation from Madonna's "The Confessions Tour" to the network. Reilly dropped this on us by flashing a photo of Madge leaned back, polyester-wrapped basket shoved forward. Handy, because that reminded us to ask if the network would remove any FCC inappropriate footage from the broadcast, which will be previously recorded in London. He assured us that precautions will indeed be taken so as to prevent Boobmania II, but her numbers will not be shredded.

It's also worth noticing that Reilly acknowledged the idea of Must-See Thursdays is deader than "Surface," aka "that fish show," as someone referred to it. "My Name is Earl," "The Office," and "ER" will remain there, all premiering on Sept. 21, but they're no longer forces to be reckoned with. "Deal or No Deal" has been thrown into the 9 o'clock to get a piece of the "Grey's Anatomy"/"CSI" battle.

And that was the surest acknowledgment that NBC is no longer dominant. "Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip" was announced with trumpets and dancing virgins as Thursday night's anchor when the upfronts began. But it was moved back to Mondays at 10 after ABC slammed "Grey's" in the same slot. "Studio" premieres on Sept. 18, marking the debut of the Peacock's fall season.

"We moved it because it was a war zone," Reilly admitted, saying that in initially throwing it into the Thursday night right, "We gave it the coronation ... but you have to be practical.

Elsewhere in NBC's territory ...

• In an extension of its YouTube.com partnership, NBC is putting development muscle behind "Nobody's Watching," Bill Lawrence's ("Scrubs") comedy that was supposed to premiere on The WB, which had to go off and die on him and creative partners Garrett Donovan and Neil Goldman. Instead, "Nobody's Watching" has found traction at the video clip-sharing Web site, downloaded more than 600,000 since it went up, so NBC is producing additional Webisodes. Smart of NBC to join YouTube instead of trying to beat it. Only about six or seven months ago, NBC clamped down on YouTube for circulating its "SNL" Digital Short "Lazy Sunday."

• NBC is also being kind enough to give Netflix subscribers the opportunity to see the pilots of "Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip" and "Kidnapped" more than a month before they debut. Those will be available beginning August 5, and the deal ends Sept. 17, a day before "Studio's" premiere. That way Netflixers can get the word out early, and often, that these series might be a touch overrated.

http://blog.seattlepi.nwsource.com/print.asp?entryID=105214

TV Critics Summer Press Tour
''Law & Order'' Shakeups

By Rich Heldenfels in his Akron Beacon Journal TV blog July 21, 2006

''Law & Order'' impresario Dick Wolf is here today, which gave me a chance to clear up some cast departures that you folks have been asking about.

Annie Parisse (''L&O'') asked out because she was becoming frustrated over having to turn down movie roles. Wolf called her ''one of the role models of how to leave a show.'' Alana De La Garza (''CSI: Miami'') will be a new ADA on the show.

Jamey Sheridan (''Criminal Intent''), as I've reported before, wanted to spend more time in California, where his family is. Eric Bogosian will succeed him.

Courtney B. Vance (''Criminal Intent'') was at the end of his contract and the writers felt they had done all they could with his character. Nona Gaye -- actress and daughter of Marvin Gaye -- is coming in as a new ADA.

Annabella Sciorra (''CI'') left by mutual agreement with the show, Wolf said, without elaboration. Julianne Nicholson (from Wolf's ''Conviction'') will play the new partner for Chris Noth.

As for speculation that Sam Waterston is leaving the original ''L&O,'' Wolf called it ''totally, totally fallacious. ... Sam is back for all 22 episodes this year.''

And, in case you missed it, Connie Nielsen will fill in for Mariska Hargita

http://blogs.ohio.com/beacon_tv/

I am always looking for “Battlestar Galactica” items because I know so many of you love the show. So here is a great read from one of my favorite critics, Maureen Ryan:

TV Critics Summer Press Tour
A few 'Battlestar' bits before I go on vacation

From Maureen Ryan’s Chicago Tribune blog “The Watcher” July 21, 2006

Without any clever preamble (I'm about to get on a plane and leave the country for two weeks, and boy, do I need the break), here’s my last bit of TCA reporting for you. I spoke last night with Bradley Thompson, one of the writers on “Battlestar Galactica,” and got a few interesting tidbits for fans of the show, which returns in October.

There’s some semi-spoiler-y info here, but don’t fret -- I’ll warn you when that stuff is coming. And trust me, I will have plenty more "Battlestar Galactica" coverage when the show returns fall.

One final "Galactica" note before we get down to business: The second half of Season 2 comes out on DVD Sept. 19, and it features an exclusive extended version of "Pegasus."

Anyhow, here goes:

• The first outing of the third season will be a 2-hour episode. Early in the season, there will be two linked episodes as well; episode 3 will end with a “to be continued."

• Thompson and his writing partner, David Weddle, produced 10 2-minute “Battlestar Galactica” Webisodes which could debut online as early as August (when Sci Fi confirms a date on their debut, I’ll let you know). Those Webisodes will concern the birth of the resistance movement on New Caprica (as you’ll recall from the show’s breathtaking finale, the Cylons, after leaving the human survivors alone on New Caprica for months, invaded the planet and took over).

Weddle says the Webisodes will give viewers more information about why certain resistance fighters take certain actions fairly early in Season 3. You don’t need to have seen the Webisodes to enjoy Season 3, but it sounds like you’ll have much more backstory on the resistance fighters if you do happen to see the Web stories. “You find out why they do what they do,” Thompson said.

We’ll meet two new characters in the Webisodes, which take place a few months after the Cylon invasion, and they’ll also star Tigh, Cally and her baby, Tyrol and other characters we already know.

Thompson said he and Weddle didn’t really view the Webisodes as 10 totally discrete stories, but more “a half-hour episode broken into 10 chunks.”

• Jane Espenson, one of television’s best and most versatile writers (she has a great blog too), is writing an episode called “The Passage.” It’s episode nine of Season 3. “We had a freelance slot,” and Espenson got the call, Thompson said. Just some of the shows that Espenson has worked on: “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” “Angel,” “Firefly,” “Gilmore Girls” and “Star Trek: Deep Space Nine” (where Weddle and Thompson were staff writers). So, yeah. I have a strong feeling that her episode is going to rock.

Anyhow, Espenson’s episode arose when the show brought in Dr. Kevin Grazier, a scientist from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, who talked about how one would navigate through space; how one would figure out how to get from one point in the universe to, for example, Earth.

• I asked Thompson about Adama’s actions in the finale -- had he let the fleet protecting New Caprica dwindle because he was just tired, because so many folks wanted to head down to the planet and he couldn’t stop them, or because he really thought the Cylons weren’t coming back? “That will be addressed,” he said.

• I also asked about the return of the Cylons. I’d thought that in the finale, Brother Cavil (Dean Stockwell’s character) had said or at least implied that the Cylons were going to leave the humans alone. But Thompson pointed out, quite rightly, that Cavil had only said, “We have other plans.” Hmmmmm.

• Part of the reason Billy died in Season 2 is because the actor got a pilot and things got complicated as far as getting him for certain days/episodes. “To his credit, [Paul Campbell, who played Billy] did a terrific job,” in the episode in which he bit the bullet.

This is the semi-spoiler-y stuff (everything in quotes is from Thompson):

• The Cylons “will have a bigger presence” in Season 3. And “we’ll learn something new about them.”

• “People will die. They always do,” he said. When I asked about the strong rumors about a high-profile character’s death, Thompson just gave me an enigmatic grin. He wouldn’t elaborate on who dies and how, but he did say that when the writers sketched out the third season, there were a lot more deaths. Regarding character deaths, some actors “don’t know how closely they missed it.”

• Baltar is more or less New Caprica’s Marshal Petain in the new episodes. Did Baltar know the Cylons were coming? “That’s a good question, isn’t it?” He asked what I thought. I honestly don’t know. I’d guess he didn’t know, but boy, would it be interesting if he did.

• In the third season, we will meet someone from Adama’s past.

• Though the third season will begin months after the Cylons begin their occupation of New Caprica, there will be some flashbacks of the “lost time” between the end of the finale and the start of the third season. One of those flashbacks will involve what Adama and Roslin were up to once the Cylons arrived.

• We’ll find out why Kara "Starbuck" Thrace and Lee "Apollo" Adama were really, really grumpy with each other in the finale.

http://featuresblogs.chicagotribune.com/entertainment_tv/2006/07/a_few_battlesta.html#more

TV Critics Summer Press Tour
Looking ahead to Season 6 of "The Shield"

From Maureen Ryan’s Chicago Tribune blog “The Watcher” July 21, 2006

As the Television Critics Association tour trundles on, few dozen television writers were whisked to the set of “The Shield” Thursday for an on-set lunch. We got to gobble catered food while watching the first episode of Season 6, then we talked to the show’s writers and actors after the meal, and some of us took a tour of the set of the Barn, the show’s fictional police station.

Not a bad field trip, as these things go.

Some other folks went to “Grey’s Anatomy” for another set visit as well, and I did swing by there for a bit, but personally, I could have spent all day in the Barn (which is as magnificently dirty and mucked-up as it looks on the show).

I won't say much about that first episode of the next season, except to point you to my colleague Diane Werts take on it here: "[T]his relentless tour de force isn't just firing on all 8 cylinders, it's blasting on 12," Werts said. (There's more on the "Shield" set visit here, and, by the way, for more TCA coverage from my colleagues, troll the blogs listed at tvcritics.org.)

Here are a few nuggets of news gleaned from the set visit (and there are some mild spoilers, but they are on the jump of this item, so don’t click through if you don’t want to know):

• At the press event, “Shield” creator Shawn Ryan paid tribute to a “Shield” director, Scott Brazil: “You’ll see at the end of this episode, the episode is dedicated to Scott Brazil, who we lost tragically to ALS during the filming of this episode. He was employee number two on this show, the first person I hired. He was our executive producer and, you know, our best director for four seasons. And when you eventually write about the season, I hope that you’ll remember to mention him, because he had such a huge creative impact on the show, and was really involved in the early episodes of this season before he passed away.”

• In Season 6, Frank Darabont will direct the sixth episode, which creator Shawn Ryan calls “among the best three or four episodes we’ve ever done.” Paris Barclay, director of “House’s” “Three Stories” as well as a couple of prior “Shield” episodes, will also direct an episode.

• Walton Goggins, who plays Shane Vendrell, said that he was pretty shattered when he got the script for the Season 5 finale, in which his character killed Lem. “I had a real problem with it for about an hour,” he told critics. But both he and Michael Chiklis said they realized pretty quickly that the way that finale was written made artistic sense.

• There are no hard feelings from actor Kenneth Johnson, who played Lem. He turned up at the press event and was trading hugs with the entire cast. He’s also, don’t forget, going to be back on “Cold Case” this season.

• In the first couple of episodes of Season 6, Forest Whitaker is back as Vic Mackey’s nemesis, and let’s just say he’s still extraordinarily obsessed with bringing down Vic Mackey.

• Goggins has some extraordinarily intense scenes in the first episode of the season.

• There’s also a scene of almost unimaginable gore. I won't say what it's about, but it's bloody.

• Franka Potente from “Run, Lola, Run” is in the final three episodes of Season 6.

• A new cop, played by Australian actor Alex O’Loughlin, joins the Strike Team. I also heard that the uniformed cop Julien Lowe joins the Strike Team as well. These sound like possibly conflicting things, but I heard both on good authority, but I'll do some more "Shield" digging when I return from my vacation far, far away.

• One result of O’Loughlin joining the cast: David Rees Snell was asked to shave his trademark beard (there was a concern, he said, that he and the Aussie actor looked a bit alike). So Snell shaved his beard about the middle of Season 6. “After five seasons, where was the payoff? Where was the big scene” about Ronnie shaving his beard, Snell said with a laugh. After five seasons of the beard, Snell said, Ronnie’s new cleanshaven look was barely mentioned in passing by other characters.

http://tempo.typepad.com/entertainment_tv/

Cable TV Notebook
T-Mobile Pulls Ads From FX

Shows Too Racy, Advertiser Decides
By Jon Lafayette and Ira Teinowitz TVWeek.com July 21, 2006

T-Mobile pulled its advertising from the FX cable channel after the cell-phone company's president said he personally watched the network's programs, including "Rescue Me," and decided they were too edgy.

In a letter to the American Family Association, which has targeted advertisers as part of a "Fed-Up with FX Network" campaign, T-Mobile President and CEO Robert Dotson said the company has a policy not to support programming that is "sexually gratuitous and explicit, racist, hateful or excessively violent."

After viewing the FX programs, he found "some of the choices we have made are clearly inconsistent with who we are and what we stand for" as a provider of phone services to young people and families.

Having pulled all advertising from FX, T-Mobile will conduct a review of its advertising standards to ensure they're consistent with the brand, Mr. Dotson said. T-Mobile's response to the American Family Association reflects the influence that morality advocates can exert on advertisers and the ripple effect that can have on TV networks.

As part of its campaign to convince T-Mobile to stop advertising on "Rescue Me," the American Family Association noted that the show's July 11 episode include two rape scenes, a graphic discussion about women's breasts and a lengthy scene involving pornographic magazines and videos. The program contained a total of 109 strong profanities, or one every 33 seconds.

A spokesman for FX confirmed that T-Mobile this week had pulled its advertising. Ratings for "Rescue Me" are up this season and it is one of the most critically acclaimed shows on television, the spokesman said, adding that the show airs after 10 p.m. and that 90 percent of its viewers are age 18 or older.

The network's marketing has made it clear that the series contains adult material, the spokesman said.

http://www.tvweek.com/news.cms?newsId=10409

TV Critics Summer Press Tour
Lost: The no-win scenario

By Alan Sepinwall Newark Star-Ledger Wednesday, July 19, 2006

"Lost" will premiere on Oct. 4, air six weeks in a row, then make way for 13 straight episodes of "Day Break," a "Groundhog Day"-esque thriller with Taye Diggs as a cop who lives the same bad day over and over. When "Day Break" wraps its run, "Lost" will come back for the rest of the season.


I wonder what kind of bind ABC would be in if "Day Break" turns out to be a ratings bomb after say, two or three weeks ("Lost isn't on? Change the channel!") and the network decides to cancel it. What do they do to fill in the time - reruns of "SuperNanny", "Extreme Makeover: Home Edition"?

Offer not valid in San Diego and Las Vegas where Cox still doesn't have a carriage agreenment for CSTV or the MWC RSN.

You didn't read all of it. The games may ALSO show up on OLN (nee Versus) and that channel IS available in San Diego (on both Cox AND Time-Warner!)

Cable TV Notebook
They Might Collar Ernie in the Bert Passion Killing

By Christopher Lisotta TVWeek.com in the “Critical Eye” TV Press Tour blog Friday, July 21st, 2006

Dick Wolf, creator of the “Law & Order” franchise, took critics by surprise when he announced at his Press Tour session that there will be another “L&O” series debuting Aug. 14.

A video clip introduced “Law & Order: Special Letters Unit,” a parody attaching Wolf’s brand to the PBS children’s series “Sesame Street.”

Mirroring “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit,” there was a purple-pink Mariska Hargitay monster, an orange Chris Meloni monster—named “Maloney”—and a green monster that completely embodied Richard Belzer, all on the hunt for a missing “M.”

“This is the ultimate cultural accolade,” Wolf said, noting he’s already gotten a similar cultural nod from Mad magazine.

“I feel like a tobacco executive, hopefully hooking 4- and 5- and 6-year-olds,” he said.

Wolf also called rumors that Sam Waterston was leaving the “Law & Order” mother ship “totally salacious.”

And the never-shy Wolf took on ABC Entertainment President Steve McPherson, who earlier in the week complained of this year’s Emmy nomination process, which shut out “Lost” and “Desperate Housewives” in many key categories.

“I massively disagree with Steve McPherson’s assessment,” Wolf said, lauding “SVU’s” Meloni and his first lead actor nomination after seven years on the show. The new system “opens up a closed process,” Wolf said. “The proof is in the pudding.”

One critic asked why seemingly every actor who appears on Broadway has appeared on one of the “Law & Order” shows, at least according to their credits in the playbills.

“I’ve long said if you go to the theatre and they do not have a ‘Law & Order’ credit, they’ve just gotten off the bus or they are really bad.”

http://blogs.tvweek.com/?cat=5

Cable TV Notebook
20 Loud Years

By Christopher Lisotta TVWeek.com in the “Critical Eye” TV Press Tour blog Friday, July 21st, 2006

John Lithgow, who is starring in the NBC comedy “Twenty Good Years” with Jeffrey Tambor, knows he’s a loud talker.

At his show’s Press Tour session Friday afternoon, Lithgow copped to the full-throated delivery of his lines, which seems to be more suitable for reaching the back row of a 3,000-seat theater than for a TV pilot.

Lithgow said he’s just giving his directors more to work with when they assemble the show.

”You’re right, I have to be modulated constantly, but at least there’s a lot to work with,” he said.

Executive Producer Tom Werner said he “couldn’t be happier” to be in a pod deal with Warner Bros. Television, which is a big change from his past life as a principal in the now-shuttered independent studio the Carsey-Werner Company, which in its heyday produced “Roseanne,” “Grace Under Fire,” “That 70’s Show” and Mr. Lithgow’s own “Third Rock From the Sun.”

He called Warner Bros. Television President Peter Roth and his executives “great partners,” and gave every indication he was happy to be no longer running his own shop.

“It has been a blissful relationship,” he said.

http://blogs.tvweek.com/?cat=5

Aaron Barnhart posted earlier today about the BCBeat folks and their weird posts from the TCA.
I’d go a lot further and call them unprofessional, amateurish and clearly not the kind of blogs a supposedly respectable and information-driven trade publication should be responsible for. Perhaps for a glossy supermarket brag – although then they would have to be written with more style.
But judge for yourself. Isn’t it nice and ever-so-classy that he gets his jollies making fun of Shannon Doherty?
Here is the latest from Ben Grossman:

Cable TV Notebook
Would Someone Else Have A Meltdown, Please?

By Ben Grossman of Broadcasting & Cable at bcbeat.com July 21 2006

Let me take another minute to thank God for Shannen Doherty’s meltdown during Oxygen’s TCA presentation a few months ago, or whenever TCA started.

See, when Anne Heche comes out and makes fun of her crazies, or Aaron Sorkin jokes about crack and late scripts as he just did during the Studio 60 panel, that just takes all the fun out of it.

So it seems as if Doherty will be one of the few who buckles under predictable questioning about sordid pasts, thanks to her breaking down when people asked her about her always-rosy disposition over the years.

Unlucky.

http://broadcastingcable.com/blog/1380000138.html

Satellite TV Notebook
Dish DNS going dark soon?

The legal battle over Dish supplying Distant Network Signals has been going on since the 1990s. Dish has lost at every level. Back in 2003 a Federal District Judge ordered Dish to turn off the DNS signals it was providing to ineligible subscribers.

In May of this year, 11th Circuit Court in Atlanta unanimously affirmed that decision. It use unusually harsh language when it said that “"As if the magnitude of its ineligible subscriber base were insufficiently disconcerting, we have found no indication that EchoStar was ever interested in complying with the (Satellite Home Viewer Improvement) Act. We seem to have discerned a pattern and practice of violating the act in every way imaginable."

But now apparently Dish is facing the prospect of actually having to turn off all its DNBS subscribers. That is what the Federal Court ordered, since it found about half of the Dish DNS subs were illegal.

And Charlie Ergen is pleading his case in a sort of expected way: he is the aggrieved little guy and the government is out to get him and take away the freedom of his subscribers.

According to Scott Greczkowski, a member here who runs the satguys site and is very well connected to Dish higher ups, Dish Network retailers will be getting the following email from Charlie Ergen on Monday:

“As you may have already heard, a group of network broadcasters are trying to force DISH Network to stop delivering distant network channels to our customers.

Distant network channels are the ABC, NBC, CBS and FOX broadcast channels customers get from us by satellite that originate outside their community. For example, if customers live in rural Texas and purchase New York, Los Angeles, Denver or other network channels from us, they are at serious risk of being shut off. This would NOT affect or upset in any way our ability to offer local network channels to local markets, and the good news is that we offer local channels by satellite to over 96% of the United States. Nor would it affect any other programming we offer.

The problem is a court case that has been going on for eight years. We strongly believe consumers have the right to choose their TV viewing experience, and should be allowed to watch televised news and other information originating outside their hometown. They are free to choose to read The New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, or any other newspaper regardless of where in the United States they live. These same choices should be available for TV news. Unfortunately, the broadcasters were able to get a special interest law passed that prohibits this, except in very limited circumstances. And now the broadcasters are trying to take even that limited choice away from our customers.

We fought hard for years to allow our customers the choice to receive televised news and other information originating outside their hometown.
This is particularly important in times of national or local emergency.
During Hurricane Katrina, when local channels went off the air, DISH Network provided distant network channels to relief stations, police and fire stations, military installations and thousands of displaced families. Similarly, after 9/11, DISH Network supplied distant network channels crucial to relief efforts.

While we have reached reasonable settlements with hundreds of stations over the years, a small group of broadcasters continues to stonewall – to the detriment of our customers. A recent court decision clearly favors the self-interests of these broadcasters over protecting the rights of hundreds of thousands of consumers who choose to receive their network channels by satellite. Unfortunately, broadcaster special interests used their big money to preserve a law that takes away customers’ freedom of choice.

You can help stop this by immediately going to www.savemychannels.com, which will assist you in contacting and emailing your Congressmen and asking them to fight for our subscribers’ rights to keep their distant network channels.

Our goal is to avoid disruption to our customers who currently receive distant networks, and we continue to try to reach fair settlements with the broadcasters and to lobby members of Congress. If necessary, we will take our case all the way up to the Supreme Court.

We will continue to keep you informed of significant developments. In the meantime, please go to www.savemychannels.com today to help our customers save their distant channels.”
http://www.satelliteguys.us/showthread.php?t=71879
There is a very simple solution. Had Dish only sold DNS to subscribers legally eligible for the service, there would be no problem. His competition has never been sued for illegally providing DNS signals.

I am a big fan of Charlie. I really am. But in this case, he has been caught knowingly, flagrantly and continually violating the law.

Face it, people are sent to jail for stealing a few dollars worth of items.

His simplistic argument is like saying "we strongly believe that people should be able to drive Porsches and so we have stolen a few thousand and if you want a Porsche come get the keys from us."

Charlie has been effectively stealing network signals for close of a decade. Now it may finally be time to pay the piper.

TV Critics Summer Press Tour
The Life of Reilly Not Looking So Bad Now

By Ray Richmond The Hollywood Reporter in his blog “Past Deadline” July 21, 2006

NBC Entertainment chief Kevin Reilly, his eyes sparkling and the demeanor confident to the point of brash, met with the gathered critical multitudes Friday morning in Pasadena and spoke of how great it is now to be the heavy underdog anymore. The peacock's fortunes are looking up in primetime, there's now a genuine nucleus in place on which to build...and after three years away, Aaron Sorkin is returning to the NBC fold from whence he came.

Life is practically looking grand for a guy who had spent so much time trying to plug holes the past few years that the callouses on his fingers were thought to have become permanent. But this is a sinking ship no more, Reilly assured all. And he picked up the sailing analogy and ran with it, noting that his beleagured but rebounding network was looking as if it might find its way back to the mainland after all.

"I'm not going to make any hard predictions about what our ratings will be or what our rating will be next season," he said at the outset. "But I will commit to this: our ratings will definitely be better. We will not be mired in fouth week after week...And most importantly, I believe we have new series that will emerge as amongst the best on television."

I actually hope Reilly is right. I admit it: I'm rooting for the guy. He speaks his mind, stands by his guns and comes across as a real dude, not a corporate bean counter-cum-propagandist. He's not as smooth as a Brandon Tartikoff (no one was), but he has charisma and -- as we're starting to see -- pretty sound gut instincts.

What that means for the long haul remains unclear. But Reilly, after some treacherous waters and lean times, is correct that probably he's withstood the worst of it and now has the beginning of a success cycle to look forward to. He rolled the dice on stuff that no one else thought had much of a prayer ("The Office," "My Name Is Earl," "Deal Or No Deal") and is seeing the rewards of having faith in one's convictions and sticking by a show -- like "The Office" -- when the ratings dictated otherwise. Reilly didn't flinch and overreact for an old-fashioned reason: he liked the show. He now may wind up with the Emmy winners for top comedy and lead actor as a result.

Reilly also handled the assembled media mass with greater dexterity and charm than usual -- not that he's ever a stuffed short, but he's now clearly feeling his oats. And you could sense from both the vibe and the questions in the room that until and unless he does something stupid that causes the press to turn, he's got the critics on his side. Talk about a change of pace.

http://www.pastdeadline.com/

TV Critics Summer Press Tour
From Viral to Series

By Roger Catlin Hartford Courant TV Critic in his “TV Eye” blog July 21, 2006

The circuitous route to network TV found another odd path Friday as NBC Entertainment President Kevin Reilly announced the network will begin to develop “Nobody’s Watching.”

The pilot about a couple of TV watchers in Ohio who want to break in the industry through a reality show was first developed as a pilot for The WB in 2005 but went unseen until creator Bill Lawrence of “Scrubs” decided to stream it on the internet through YouTube.com, where it has been downloaded more than 600,000 times in recent weeks.

The ensuing buzz led NBC to order new, smaller webisodes for its internet site as it begins to develop scripts for a broadcast version of the show to start sometime this season.

“It’s a unique development path,” Reilly allowed. But the route may well make a future episode in the way the show “blurs fact and fiction.”

The announcement came in an executive session kicking off two days of NBC’s turn at the TV writers’ press tour in which the network will largely promote its fall schedule. Using a labored nautical metaphor, Reilly said the network has been “sweating like pigs trying to get out of this stiff headwind.”

The NBC fall season kicks off Sept. 19 with the premiere of “Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip” following a two hour “Deal or No Deal.”

Most of the premieres will occur that week with “Law & Order: Criminal Intent” and “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit” on Sept. 19; “The Biggest Loser” and the new “Kidnapped” Sept. 20; “My Name is Earl,” “The Office,” “Deal or No Deal,” and “ER” on Sept. 21; and “Law & Order” Sept. 22.

Other new shows will premiere later with the dramas “Heroes” Sept. 25 and “Friday Night Lights” Oct. 3; and the comedies “Twenty Good Years” Oct. 4 and “30 Rock” Oct. 11.

“Crossing Jordan” and “Las Vegas” start their new seasons Oct. 20.

Premiere week will also feature a saturation of their game show hit “Deal or No Deal” four times that week, Monday Tuesday Wednesday and Friday before settling in on a regular Monday/Thursday schedule.

In other announcements, Reilly announced new seasons for the summer hits “America’s Got Talent” and “Last Comic Standing”; the former coming midseason, the latter next summer.

Also, a two hour concert special from Madonna comes in November, taken from a tour stop at London’s Wembley Stadium.

In other news, British show originators Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant will return to write an episode this season for “The Office,” which will feature a number of directors.

Sally Field, Andre Braugher, John Stamos and John Mahoney will put in appearances this year on “ER.”

The only movie NBC plans on making this year, Reilly said, has John Goodman starring in “The Year Without Christmas.”

http://blogs.courant.com/roger_catlin_tv_eye/2006/07/from_viral_to_s.html#more

TV Critics Summer Press Tour
Aaron Sorkin, thinking out loud

By Bill Goodykoontz Arizona Republic TV Critic in his Critic’s Tour blog 07/21/2006

Once upon a time Aaron Sorkin, who went on to fame and eventual misfortune as the creator of The West Wing, made a show about the inner workings of television.

Sports Night lasted two seasons and deserved five or six more. It was brilliant TV, with the kind of knowing, rapid-fire conversations Sorkin would employ later in The West Wing.

Now he's back, with what looks like another really good show about ... the inner workings of television.

It's called Stuido 60 on the Sunset Strip, and it's one of two (?!) NBC shows about what goes on behind the scenes at a Saturday Night Live-type show. The other, 30 Rock, was created by Tina Fey, who is the actual head writer for Saturday Night Live. "My intention is to take Tina's ideas," the famously loquacious Sorkin said, "use twice as many words and turn them into our show."

If you laughed at that, then maybe you'll watch Studio 60. If anyone is smart enough to translate this kind of stuff for general consumption, it's Sorkin. He's got a top-flight cast, which includes Matthew Perry, Bradley Whitford, Amanda Peete, D.L. Hughley and Steven Weber, and the session for the show was fantastic -- smart, funny, all that. Just like the show.

And also somewhat hard to translate.

For instance, here's Sorkin on the power of bad reality television:

"I do think that television is a terribly influential part of this country, and that when things that are very mean-spirited and voyeuristic go on TV, I think it's bad crack in the school yard."

Oops.

"Why did I use that word?" he moaned. "Everything was fine."


If you know that Sorkin has battled all sorts of addictions, this was really funny. Obviously everyone in the room, including his cast, did know, and laughed uproariously. But does having to explain it kill the humor? I don't know.

A while later, someone asked Perry a completely unrelated question, to which he replied:

"I think it's mostly like bad Vicodin in the school yard."

Now, if you knew that Perry had a well-publicized battle with the drug, this was out-and-out hilarious. Again, everyone in the room did, and the laughter was even louder.

(Later, when Weber answered a question by saying, "It's like Excedrin and old-fashioned cloth diapers in the schoolyard," the joke was running a little thin. Still, pretty funny.)

This is the kind of humor critics love. But we know the back stories. Will audiences know enough to care? I hope so, judging from the pilot. And The West Wing didn't dumb down politics; either you were on board or you weren't. The first few seasons, millions were, so maybe it'll happen again.

As for the crack about crack....

"Seriously, I will go person to person, giving each $100 if we can just get the crack quote out of the papers tomorrow," Sorkin said. "It's an expression that I meant nothing by. And with all the mental preparation I did for that panel, that I was actually able to say that is beyond belief. It really is."

It's also what makes him a great TV writer.

"I think the last thing you want to do to Aaron Sorkin is edit him," Timothy Busfield, who also stars in Studio 60, said, and he's absolutely right. He was talking about writing scripts, but it works for press sessions, as well. Keep your hundred bucks.

http://www.azcentral.com/blogs/index.php?blog=5&title=aaron_sorkin_thinking_out_loud&more=1&c=1&tb=1&pb=1

TV Critics Summer Press Tour
The Word from No. 1

By Roger Catlin Hartford Courant TV Critic in his “TV Eye” blog July 21, 2006

Brian Williams appearance before TV writers at the summer press tour Friday made it a trifecta.

Rarely have all three anchors appeared before writers at the same session. It only showed how the competition is heating up among them, with incoming CBS anchor Katie Couric stopping in last week, and newly installed ABC anchor Charlie Gibson speaking via satellite from the Middle East earlier this week.

Williams, for his part, wouldn’t acknowledge his role in the promotion, preferring to concentrate on the quality of his newscast.

“My work I hope and the work of ‘NBC Nightly News’ is what speaks for itself every day,” Williams said.

But, he added, “All this talk about competition in this time slot can only be good. It keeps us on our game.”

Williams wouldn't even accept the notion that he is suddenly the network anchor with the most experience.

“A good friend of mine said after Dan [Rather] left and after we lost Peter [Jennings] that to say you are the veteran of the nightly newscasts is like saying the Empire State is the tallest building in the New York skyline,” Williams said. “It’s factually true but for all the wrong reasons.”

http://blogs.courant.com/roger_catlin_tv_eye/2006/07/the_word_from_n.html

TV Critics Summer Press Tour
Did I say that?

By Tom Jicha Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinal TV and Radio Writer

Aaron Sorkin is a master wordsmith. He wrote A Few Good Men at 28, followed it with An American President and Malice, then moved into TV with Sportsnight, a gem of a show never fully appreciated (probably because of the title), and The West Wing, which could become the most honored drama ever if it wins a fifth Emmy on Aug. 27.

But even the most literate have their slips of tongue. Sorkin had one of those moments Friday while promoting his new NBC series Studio 60 From the Sunset Strip. The premiere of the drama set behind the scenes of a Saturday Night Live-like show features a Howard Beale style rant against TV, zeroing in on abominations such as Fear Factor, which force glory-seekers to eat worms.

Despite this, Sorkin said he doesn’t believe TV is evil, that at its best it is influential and beneficial. However, at its worst, when it turns mean-spirited, “It’s like bad crack in a school yard.” He immediately wished he had a rewind button.

“Why did I use that word?” he said making no attempt to conceal his embarrassment. During his West Wing days, Sorkin was famously arrested at Burbank Airport for trying to board a plan with funny mushrooms and other controlled substances.

The line and Sorkin’s attempt to recoup got a huge laugh but the damage had been done and the tone of the meeting had been set. Ex-Friend Matthew Perry picked up on it when he got a chance to talk about the show. “It’s like bad Vicodin in the schoolyard.” Perry also has had well-covered substance abuse issues.

Finally, Sorkin tried bribery. “I will give each of you $100 if you get that quote out of the paper.”

No sale.

MORE SLIPSY: NBC anchor Brian Williams knows exactly how Sorkin felt. He recalled a similar moment of his own while covering the events surrounding George W. Bush’s inauguration.

Williams said he opened his report with, “The inaugural balls are in full swing.” As soon as the words left his lips, Williams said, he knew his choice of terms would be open to interpretations he had not intended.

His appearance on the press tour underlined the priority the network news divisions are putting on countering the avalanche of publicity Katie Couric has been getting as she prepares to take over the CBS Evening News on Sept. 5.

Earlier in the week, ABC staged a satellite conference from Cyrpus to give Charlie Gibson an opportunity to generate publicity with the nation’s TV writers.

Williams was in the Middle East, where like Gibson he was covering the conflict between Israel and Hezbollah, as late as Wednesday. He was back in New York on Thursday, then flew cross-country to be at the press tour Friday morning.

Nevertheless, he tried to downplay the competition, saying the publicity Couric has been getting has brought extra attention to all the network newscasts.

On the job less than two years, Williams already is the veteran network anchor. However, referencing the untimely death of Peter Jennings and implosion of Dan Rather, Williams quoted a friend, who told him, “To say you are the veteran of the three is like saying the Empire State Building is the tallest building on the New York skyline. It’s for all the wrong reasons.”

GUARDIAN OF THE ENVIRONMENT: Holier than thou posturing and the mounting of moral high horses are regular occurances on the press tour.

A scene in the new CBS series Men in Trees has Anne Heche, as an author, who has been jilted by her fiancée while on a book tour to Alaska, throwing her wedding dress off a cliff to demonstrate closure to the relationship.

The show’s press conference wasn’t five minutes old when a writer, in an extremely hostile tone, demanded to know, “How long is that wedding dress going to be in the Alaskan landscape?”

Not that it matters, but the tree-hugger didn’t even have his facts straight. The show is being filmed near Vancouver, Canada.


http://blogs.sun-sentinel.com/tv/2006/07/did_i_say_that.html

TV Critics Summer Press Tour
Aaron Sorkin cracks up critics

By Susan Young Oakland Tribune in her “Unscripted” blog

You just know that before Sorkin took the stage in front of a room filled with close to 200 critics, his handlers laid down a few rules that started out with “no drug talk” and ended with “really, no drug talk.”

Sorkin was at the summer TV critics press tour to talk about his new series, “Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip,” a fictionalized look at the backstage works at “Saturday Night Live.” The large ensemble cast includes Bradley Whitford and Timothy Busfield from “The West Wing” and Matthew Perry from a little sitcom called “Friends.”

The critical darling’s acclaimed work includes the film “A Few Good Men” and series “Sports Night” and “The West Wing.” But he became a late-night talk show punch line after his much-publicized arrest at the Burbank airport for possession of cocaine, mushrooms and marijuana in 2001.

In the first few moments of “Studio 60″ opens with a “Network” rant by the producer about how bad television has become, and cites shows that resemble such NBC fare as “Fear Factor” and Donald Trump’s “The Apprentice.”

So Sorkin was asked about using this show and how he felt about the state of network TV.

“I do think that television is terribly influential part of this country and when things that are very mean-spirited and voyeuristic go on TV,” Sorkin said. “I think it’s bad crack in the schoolyard.” Sorkin immediately tried to turn into the incredible shrinking man, going through a wide array of crimson tones.

“Why did I use that word?” he said.

Later, Perry was asked what it was like playing a character that is based on both Sorkin and his creative partner Thomas Schlamme.

“I think it’s more like bad Vicodin in the schoolyard,” quipped Perry, who had a little scandal in 1997 about being in the early stages of dependency on Vicodin.

The stage, and audience, erupted into laughter as Sorkin tried slinking even lower in the chair, rubbing his forehead like a magic lantern that might transport him elsewhere.

“I never wished I had a drug problem,” said Whitford, who plays Perry’s character’s partner on the show.

Until now, perhaps.

Finally, when cast member Steven Weber started talking about aspirin and cloth diapers on the schoolyard, it was more than Sorkin could take.

“I’ll pay $100 to everyone in the room if I can just get that quote out of the papers tomorrow,” Sorkin begged.

No such luck.

http://www.ibabuzz.com/unscripted/2006/07/21/aaron-sorkin-cracks-up-critics/

The New TV Season
It's an invasion of the serial thrillers

By Paul Brownfield Los Angeles Times TV critic July 23, 2006

"THE NINE," a new fall drama on ABC, is "Lost" without the plane crash and the island but with the same "Rashomon"-like revisiting of a cataclysmic event.

In this case, it's a 52-hour hostage ordeal at a downtown bank that forges a bond among nine people. There is also, this fall, a season-long kidnapping ordeal (NBC's "Kidnapping"), not to be confused with the disappearance of a senator's wife (Fox's "Vanished," which is possibly a kidnapping).

If I may be so bold, "The Nine" seems the most promising of the new fall neo-nonlinear-thrillers-with-multiple-points-of-view-that-also-revolve-around-relationships-and-come-with-a-cryptic-and/or-pithy-show-title.

That's "serialized drama" for short, the next new thing in TV, the genre of the moment — the word "serialized" meant to convey a series whose layered plot contrivances and multirelational characters — "24" and "Lost" are the two most popular examples — require a deeper, and thus more loyal, commitment from the viewer.

To use a different metaphor, you can't hop on and off these shows; there's only one train to resolution, and it's an express. As a genre name, the "serialized drama" lacks a certain correlation to established lexicon, at least going by the general definition of "serial" as "a literary or dramatic work published or produced in installments."

By that definition, nearly all of TV (forgetting for a moment the phrase "literary or dramatic work") is serialized, from "American Idol" to "The Price Is Right." Nobody called "The West Wing" or "NYPD Blue" serialized dramas, even though it helped to know, respectively, that President Josiah Bartlet had been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis or that Andy Sipowicz was an alcoholic. True, those shows also regenerated themselves each week, tossing up fresh crises and resolving them within the hour — the traditional, more amnesiac role of a TV drama.

As TV-industry speak, "serialized drama" — like dramedy, flawed character and Ryan Seacrest — has taken on a momentum of its own. It means your show is a puzzle piece, an enigma wrapped around a riddle; in short, it's a long story, and nobody has time to get you caught up.

Which is really the juicy implication of "serialized drama," as network executives and the media throw it out: As much as it's about sucking viewers in, it's equally about making those who fail to watch feel left out.

HBO, largely via "The Sopranos," has been excellent at engendering abandonment issues, both among subscribers waiting for returning series and nonsubscribers completely out of the loop. So now the broadcast networks, which operate in the paradox of a more constrained but higher-volume business, are trying to induce a similar, vague panic.

It makes sense, this shift in the broadcast network business toward inclusion-exclusion, for it reflects the explosion of entertainment options available to people nowadays, amid an increasing sense that broadcast television, to thrive as in days of old, has to engender a deeper intimacy with its distracted viewership.

Maybe that's why I experienced so many of the pilots, at first blush, as features — glossy, big-bang events that look extremely good. There's a lot at the buffet, and it's probably a shame; all this narrative drive — less so, character complexity — suddenly visiting the small screen.

Though the vogue in serials last season was sci-fi, this year's crop seems more to ape psychological thrillers of recent vintage, like "Memento" or "The Usual Suspects."

You might be willing to follow the kidnapping of a socialite couple's son (NBC's "Kidnapped") for a season, but will you have the capacity also to become embroiled in the season-long disappearance of the senator's vanished wife on Fox's "Vanished")? Will either of them make it long enough to get to the episode with the ransom note?

In this context, the "serialized drama" is really a fancied-up phrase for whodunit or what-is-it, or how-can-we-stop it, which is hardly surprising in the age of the war on terror. None of the new dramas are serialized stories about, say, love and marriage, such as Ingmar Bergman's classic "Scenes From a Marriage," which started as a six-episode series on Swedish TV, complete with Bergman himself providing voice-overs catching viewers up on the story (Hint: It didn't involve a hatch, a plot to assassinate the president, or a prison break).

"In general, a TV miniseries, broadcast over several nights, has the tendency to intersect with and form a more quotidian relationship to viewers' lives," the essayist and novelist Phillip Lopate wrote in an essay comparing the series to the edited-down film version. "Its characters become members of the family, and their resilience over time, regardless of the incessant crises thrown them by the script, induces a more good-humored, forgiving atmosphere."

Time is not a luxury for the networks; even miniseries have fallen by the wayside, largely because they're expensive and might tank in the ratings on Night 1 and have little resale value.

But no one yanks a mini once it's on. Serialized dramas are different — the network promises you essentially an extended miniseries, a season-long mystery hurtling toward a stunning conclusion, only to provide none when the show is canceled for poor ratings.

At least one of the new shows, for instance, NBC's "Friday Night Lights," based on the nonfiction book and film of the same name, will evidently follow a high school football team through an entire season (where it goes from there, or even if it gets there, is another issue).

That bait-and-switch was a hot topic at this week's Television Critics Assn. tour in Pasadena, where during news conferences network executives were repeatedly asked whether they risked alienating viewers long-term by aborting shows (and thus intricate story lines) in midstream.

"I don't think audiences make a decision to commit to a show, one way or the other, based on it being serialized or not," said Nina Tassler, president of CBS Entertainment, whose network has two new series that fall under that rubrick, "Jericho" (Kansas town confronts mushroom cloud) and "Smith" (crack band of high-stakes thieves pulls off robberies).

The reporters guffawed, harrumphed, pressed her further. What about the poor fans of canceled serials, such as last year's Fox show "Reunion"? Or CBS' own "Threshold"? Or ABC's "Invasion"? They never got an answer to the riddle.

By Tuesday, when it was ABC's turn, some producers were distancing themselves from the tag.

"I wouldn't call this a serial, if by serial you mean you have to watch it every week to know what's going on," Stuart Zicherman, executive producer of ABC's "Six Degrees," said of his show, which comes from producers of "Lost" (!). The summary tag of "Six Degrees" goes: "Six very different New Yorkers go about their lives without realizing the impact they're having on one another."

Sounds an awful lot like what TV means by serialized.

And yet, some of the panic is unwarranted. A newcomer could probably tune in to the third season of "Lost" and not be that far behind. They crashed, they survived, they found a hatch.

If you miss the pilot of "The Nine," will you be able to tune in Week 2? Of course. And then again, of course not. "The Nine" is about a 52-hour hostage-taking at a bank, although you don't experience the actual event in the pilot so much as the fateful beforehand and the rippling aftermath. From nine points of view. Going back and forth and back again in time.

http://www.calendarlive.com/tv/cl-ca-drama23jul23,0,5708404,print.story?coll=cl-tvent

The New TV Season
NBC hopes new shows steer clear of rough waters

NFL games in lineup give network more promise than last season
By Joanne Weintraub Milwaukee Journal Sentinel TV critic Posted: July 21, 2006

Pasadena, Calif. - Promising "a shift in the winds" at NBC, which finished last season in an embarrassing fourth place in viewers, NBC entertainment chief Kevin Reilly on Friday unveiled the network's fall schedule in a session with critics here.

The Peacock people have the NFL this year, which should be good for at least a Sunday-night tailwind.

The preseason Hall of Fame Game in Canton, Ohio, pitting Oakland against Philadelphia, is first up at 7 p.m. Aug. 6. The regular season kicks off at 7 p.m. Thursday, Sept. 7, with Miami at Pittsburgh, and continues Sunday, Sept. 10, with Indianapolis at New York.

The rest of the NBC season premieres are:

Monday, Sept. 18: "Deal or No Deal," 7 p.m.; "Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip" (new drama with Matthew Perry and Bradley Whitford), 9 p.m.

Tuesday, Sept. 19: "Law & Order: Criminal Intent," 8 p.m.; "Law & Order: Special Victims Unit," 9 p.m.

Wednesday, Sept. 20: "The Biggest Loser," 7 p.m.; "Kidnapped" (new drama with Dana Delany), 9 p.m.

Thursday, Sept. 21: "My Name Is Earl," 7 p.m.; "The Office," 7:30 p.m.; "Deal or No Deal" (new Thursday edition), 8 p.m.; "ER," 9 p.m.

Friday, Sept. 22: "Law & Order," 9 p.m.

Monday, Sept. 25: "Heroes" (new drama with Greg Grunberg and Milo Ventimiglia), 8 p.m.

Tuesday, Oct. 3: "Friday Night Lights" (new drama with Kyle Chandler), 7 p.m.

Wednesday, Oct. 4: "Twenty Good Years" (new comedy with John Lithgow and Jeffrey Tambor), 7 p.m.

Wednesday, Oct. 11: "30 Rock" (new comedy with Tina Fey and Tracy Morgan), 7:30 p.m.

Friday, Oct. 20: "Crossing Jordan," 7 p.m.; "Las Vegas," 8 p.m.

"Scrubs" will be back at midseason - that is, after one of the above shows gets the hook and a time slot opens up.

Also on tap from "Scrubs" creator Bill Lawrence is "Nobody's Watching," a comedy that has gotten lots of fan buzz from those who've seen it in its online form on YouTube.com in the last few weeks.

Calling the evolution of the new comedy a "unique development path," Reilly said he had signed a deal with Lawrence to continue to develop new "webisodes," as the online segments are called.

At the same time, he added, "we're going to develop new scripts with the intention of producing an on-air prime time series for NBC later this season."

Reilly also announced that "America's Got Talent," NBC's instant summer hit with Simon Cowell, would be back with a new edition in January.

"Last Comic Standing," another summer success, will return next June.

Opening NBC's two days of presentations to critics here, Reilly started out with an anecdote about a Mexican sailing jaunt he'd just taken. It became clear very soon that he was setting his sails for a programming metaphor - and sure enough, one blew right in.

Sometimes, he said, the winds are with you and the sun is out and you speed right along. And then, he said, "the wind dies, (and) you start working twice as hard. You sweat like a pig, and yet you can't get the thing moving.

"That's what it's been like the last couple of seasons at NBC. We've been sweating like pigs trying to get out of the stiff headwind. But it started to look for a long time like we were maybe not going to find our way back to the mainland.

"But I've got to tell you, I feel a shift in the winds coming."

At this point, Reilly tacked sharply and went for a "Gilligan's Island" theme.

"I think," he said, as the roomful of critics waited in less-than-rapt silence, "our ill-fated 'three-hour tour' is about to come to an end."

Translation for landlubbers: Last season, NBC had "Surface," "E-Ring," "Heist" and several other expensive shows that went nowhere.

This year, they've got "Studio 60" from "West Wing" creator Aaron Sorkin, "30 Rock" with the very popular Fey, the Lithgow and Tambor comedy and other promising items.

Then again, "Heist" and "Surface" looked promising last year, too.

http://www.jsonline.com/story/index.aspx?id=475027&format=print

TV Critics Summer Press Tour
Television's New Golden Age?

Critics cite an abundance of quality programming as proof
By Todd Longwell The Hollywood Reporter July 21, 2006

...cult shows like 'Veronica Mars' (which has aired on UPN and will shift to CBS in the fall)...

Did I miss something? Is Veronica Mars going to CBS rather then the CW or is this a mistake by the Hollywood Reporter? I did some searching, and other then this article, the only other sign I could see that this might be true is this website on cbs.com: http://www.cbs.com/primetime/veronica_mars/. I noticed the videos on the right side of the page were all for Ghost Whisperer, which is what was originally scheduled for Fridays at 8pm.

Fred, if you already posted a news item about this, my apologies. Thanks for all the work you do here keeping us up-to-date!

--Andrew

Good eye, Andrew.
I didn't notice it, but the HR got it wrong.
VM is a CW girl starting this fall.

Just saw a site the other day that spelled out the supposedly real reasons Echostar failed in their bid for DirecTV. Basically it boiled down to Echostar not playing the Washington game right and throwing enough money around, more than any issues with the FCC and Justice. Basically they didn't get the right people and spend enough. I'll see if I can find it again, pretty interesting. It also talks about how DirecTV has the Washington game pretty much figured out.
Found it, the below is a few paragraphs from the article, link to full article below.

When insiders discuss Ergen's failure, they don't cite antitrust laws — after all, laws are made to be massaged. They cite his lack of lobbying strategy, his choice of allies on the Hill and how he missed the opportunity to make nice with enemies such as the National Association of Broadcasters, before he announced his plans.

The EchoStar story is a textbook case of what not to do in this town. After interviews with two dozen Washington lobbyists and lawyers, on all sides of the issues and with different party affiliations, a consensus becomes evident regarding what a media company must do to game the system in the capital.

First: Don't be cheap (either in money or prestige) with your Washington office. Second: Your government relations director should be a company executive, a part of your management team, not just another person in your general counsel division. Third: Be proactive; make sure your rep knows how to recognize a policy initiative, and when to salute it. Even if you're only paying lip service, pay it fast, don't wait to be dunned for the bill. Fourth: On a major policy or merger initiative, lay the groundwork first with allies and, when possible, co-opt your enemies. Fifth: Listen to your lobbyist. Sixth: Don't be a stranger — and don't come to Washington just to ask for something. As the Bible says, “'Tis more blessed to give than to receive.”

http://www.broadband-pbimedia.com/cgi/cw/show_mag.cgi?pub=cw&mon=012003&file=importance_earnest.inc
CableWorld

Obituary
Jack Warden, 85

Prolific Film, TV Actor

By Valerie J. Nelson Los Angeles Times Staff Writer July 22, 2006

Jack Warden, the gravel-voiced character actor and two-time Oscar nominee who appeared in nearly 100 feature films, has died. He was 85.

Warden, who won an Emmy award for his portrayal of crusty football coach George Halas in the 1971 television movie "Brian's Song," died Wednesday at a New York City hospital, Sidney Pazoff, his Los Angeles-based business manager, said Friday.

Pazoff said Warden, who was living in Manhattan, had been in failing health for several months. The cause of death was not given.

Warden first made his mark in the movies in 1957 as the sports-obsessed juror in "12 Angry Men." He received Academy Award nominations for his supporting work in two Warren Beatty vehicles, "Shampoo" (1975) and "Heaven Can Wait" (1978).

His small-screen resume was just as deep, with featured roles in a dozen series and appearances in about 100 shows and made-for-TV movies that stretched back to television's golden age and included "Mr. Peepers" (1952-55) on NBC, "N.Y.P.D." on ABC (1967-69), "Jigsaw John" (1976) on NBC and "Crazy Like a Fox" (1984-86) on CBS.

From the moment Warden broke through on Broadway in 1955 in Arthur Miller's "A View From the Bridge," he said, he never stopped working.

"I still panic sometimes when it comes down to 20 minutes between jobs," Warden told the Los Angeles Herald Examiner in 1984. "I love what I'm doing…."

The gruff yet often engaging characters he became known for could have been lifted from his rough-and-tumble early life.

At 17, the redhead from Newark, N.J., was a ranked professional middleweight boxer who billed himself as Johnny Costello — the last name was his mother's — and reportedly once fought on the same card at Madison Square Garden as another future actor, Charles Durning.

Warden often said he got kicked out of high school for boxing professionally, so he joined the Navy and served in China patrolling the Yangtze River.

He came home in 1941, shoveled coal on tugboats on New York's East River and a year later joined the merchant marine.

His romance with the sea ended, he said, while he worked in the engine room of a freighter that was repeatedly attacked by German bombs. Every explosion sounded like a direct hit.

After the vessel made it to port, he demanded a job above deck. When the merchant marine wouldn't comply, Warden said, he went across the street and joined the Army's 101st Airborne Division as a paratrooper.

"I figured anything was better than being trapped in the boiler room of a sinking ship," Warden said in 1984.

During a practice jump while preparing for the Normandy invasion, his chute failed to fully open. His broken leg required a steel plate and a lengthy hospital stay that had an unexpected side benefit.

A friend suggested that he read plays, and among the first Warden tackled was Clifford Odets' "Waiting for Lefty." He identified with the play's striking cabdrivers and the way the story was told.

"That year in the hospital was the turning point in my life," Warden told the Herald Examiner. "After eight months of that diet, I thought I was an actor and headed straight for New York."

It was 1945, and a series of jobs — bouncer at a dime-a-dance hall, shirt salesman, dockworker, roofer and semipro football player — would come first.

"Warden's done it all," Jack Ging, an actor and friend, told TV Guide in 1979. "He's the kind of guy that Spencer Tracy played."

While working as a lifeguard in 1946 at a hotel pool in New York, Warden met Margo Jones, manager of the well-regarded Alley Theatre in Dallas. She asked him to join the company, and he spent five years there.

He debuted on television in 1950 in "The Philco TV Playhouse" production of "Ann Rutledge" on NBC and began appearing regularly in drama anthologies that often aired live.

He found live television exciting — the next best thing to the stage.

With a bit of bluster, he captured a Broadway role in 1955 that became the springboard of his career.

Weeks went by as playwright Miller, who had cast approval for "A View From a Bridge," kept calling back Warden and others for readings. Finally, Warden improvised a scene as Marco, the Italian immigrant.

"That's it! That's exactly what I want!" Miller exclaimed, according to a 1966 TV Guide article.

The actor also had roles in a handful of other Broadway productions, beginning with Odets' "Golden Boy" in 1952 and including "The Man in the Glass Booth" in 1969.

Warden worked mainly, and steadily, in television and film through the 1990s, often playing the heavy in movies before inhabiting more comedic roles.

He was the scruffy outlaw in "The Man Who Loved Cat Dancing" (1973), the cab-driving father in "The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz" (1974), the hard-nosed city editor in "All the President's Men" (1976) and Paul Newman's friend and conscience in "The Verdict" (1982).

Warden played a rich husband in "Shampoo" opposite Beatty, Lee Grant and Julie Christie, and in "Heaven Can Wait" he was a trainer for the Los Angeles Rams. One of his final film credits was in another football movie, "The Replacements."

"Brian's Song," the television movie that earned him an Emmy, was the story of the bond that develops between Chicago Bear teammates Gale Sayers and Brian Piccolo, when Piccolo learns he is dying.

When he played the suicidal judge in " … And Justice for All" (1979), Warden reportedly asked the makeup artist to sharpen the angle of his eyebrows so he would appear more deranged.

The New York Times called Warden a "fine farceur" as twin salesmen in "Used Cars" (1980) and said he played Ryan O'Neal's father "hilariously" in "So Fine" (1981).

After he portrayed a U.S. president influenced by an unlikely political insider played by Peter Sellers in the black comedy "Being There" (1979), Warden recalled how President Carter told him, over lunch at the White House, how much he liked the performance.

"He thought I'd made the president very human," Warden told The Times in 1980.

The actor wasn't as enamored of the performance but said he was rarely satisfied with his work.

His versatility appealed to the creators of NBC's "The Wackiest Ship in the Army" (1965-66), and he was cast as the show's star.

"Warden can play intense melodrama, yet he plays farce with infallible timing," said Danny Arnold, who told TV Guide that he wrote the part of the gruff and cynical major on "Wackiest" with Warden in mind.

In 1979, the actor made a reported $40,000 a week to star in "The Bad News Bears" on CBS but said he would rather take the bus to the studio than drive.

Warden was a complex man, several friends from his heyday in TV have said, who used his lightning-quick humor to entertain — and keep the world at a distance.

Yet he kept a Greenwich Village apartment as a permanent residence, partly for friends to stay in. And the late actor Rod Steiger once pronounced him "one of the few human beings I know who still understands what friendship and honor mean."

Warden was born John Lebzelter on Sept. 18, 1920. He married Vanda Dupre, a 27-year-old French actress, in 1958. Comedian Red Buttons, who died last week at 87, was best man at the Las Vegas wedding.

"I'm teaching her how to water-ski and fish. She's teaching me French and cooking. It's a great basis for a marriage," Warden joked in 1959.

Within a few years, the couple had a son, Christopher, and had moved from Laurel Canyon to the Malibu Colony. Nearby was a tennis court that Warden owned with Steiger. By the mid-1970s, Warden and his wife had separated, but they never divorced, according to Pazoff.

The actor said one of the benefits of making "Crazy Like a Fox" in the mid-1980s was that he got to see more of his son, then a student at UC Berkeley, because the show often filmed in San Francisco.

Besides his estranged wife, Warden is survived by his companion, Marucha Hinds; his son; and two grandchildren.

http://www.calendarlive.com/tv/cl-me-warden22jul22,0,121820,print.story?coll=cl-tvent

Commentary
Lessons From USDTV’s Demise

By John M. Higgins Broadcasting & Cable 7/24/2006

The recent bankruptcy filing by USDTV, the broadcast startup that hoped to sell a package of cable channels, hurts just a handful of major station groups that were backing the wireless venture. But the company’s troubles underscore a question facing all TV-station owners: Is there any way to make money from the all-new capacity created by the switch to digital broadcasting?

The conversion to digital gives every station in the country a tremendous expansion of capacity. In the same amount of spectrum occupied by a conventional analog signal, a broadcaster can fit a high-definition feed of its main station and still have space to create three additional channels. A station that chooses not to broadcast an HD signal can create up to five additional channels.

In one sense, this is a tremendous windfall in an industry that faces slim growth prospects in its core business. Think of it as a government grant of ritzy beachfront real estate given exclusively to people who already live in the neighborhood.

The downside is that creating that much new property out of thin air produces a glut. Digital puts more TV real estate on the market than there are immediate viewers or advertising dollars to support it.

“Unless broadcasters create a viable economic model, the industry may have spent billions upgrading stations without any obvious return on investment. If that’s true, it may a classic case of “be careful what you ask for, you might just get it!,” says Bear, Stearns & Co. media analyst Victor Miller.

Broadcasters and their networks have laid out a variety of plans to fill up that new capacity. NBC and its affiliates are creating local weather channels. Sinclair Broadcasting is filling a digital-only channel with older entertainment programming at its flagship Baltimore station. Ion Media, formerly known as Paxson, has partnered with producers of children’s programming to create a national kids network anchored by its own stations that will instantly get clearance in 60% of the country.

A new music-video channel, The Tube, has signed up enough stations to clear 74% of the country.

LIN TV’s new CEO, Vince Sadusky says the new capacity is “a blank piece of paper” for the whole industry. Just as it took LIN several years to solidify a Web strategy, Sadusky plans to experiment with several niche approaches in various markets: “Anybody who says they’ve got the answer is lying.”

Some ideas are more promising than others, but the primary driver behind all of those multicast plans is keeping programming costs ultra low. Why? The audience is limited. Between the 15 million or so owners of digital TVs and subscribers to digital cable, just one-third of consumers can watch broadcasters’ new channels.

The audience problem will be resolved when the TV industry’s conversion to digital is complete in February 2009.

Before it filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy, USDTV was envisioned as a major solution for the dilemma. The company employed clever technology to aggregate the spare capacity of several local TV stations to create a mini wireless cable system.

Subscribers with a special set-top box could see a dozen or so cable channels—such as ESPN and Fox News—plus all the local digital-broadcast services, even if they didn’t have a high-priced digital TV set. Priced at just $19.99 monthly plus the one-time purchase of a $99 set-top box, the package was geared to low-end video users turned off by the cost of cable.

The main incentive for stations was payments both to lease their spectrum and for the consent to retransmit their programming as part of the USDTV package. They wouldn’t even have to go through the effort of programming their new channels, just hand the spectrum off.

The prospect was tantalizing enough for USDTV CEO Steve Lindsley to secure backing from major broadcasters Fox Television Station, Hearst-Argyle Television and LIN TV, which invested $26 million last September. Unfortunately, USDTV’s business plan was less clever than its technology.

I estimate that launching USDTV in the top 30 markets—as was initially planned—would have cost the company around $700 million.

Signing up new customers is difficult and expensive, in part because USDTV has lost around $100 on every $99 box sold. Chasing low-end customers means many don’t pay their bills. Many subscribers that did were simply dissatisfied with the range of programming. USDTV says customer churn averaged 4% monthly. That means that the company could expect to lose half its subscriber base annually.

Investors might buy the scraps of USDTV, but the mini-wireless-cable idea is probably as dead as similar ones that telcos pushed in the mid 1990s and lost hundreds of millions of dollars on.

USDTV could help some programmers trying to exploit the digital broadcast space.

Mike Ruggiero, president of broadcast consulting firm All TV Group, is behind distribution of The Tube and Motor Trend TV and says that some broadcasters were hesitating to commit to digital programming in hopes of hooking up with USDTV. “They’ll be more willing to talk now,” he says.

But don’t expect a lightning strike to ignite the digital broadcast world. “There’s not going to be any home runs here,” Ruggiero says. “It will be a cumulative revenue stream made up of e-commerce, advertising and interactive opportunities.”

As usual in television, the strongest programming—not the most clever use of the spectrum—will win the day.

http://www.broadcastingcable.com/index.asp?layout=articlePrint&articleID=CA6355397

The Business of TV
Wall Street Sizes Up a Satellite Merger

By Linda Moss Multichannel.com 7/24/2006
(Mike Farrell and Ted Hearn contributed to this story. )

Rupert Murdoch thinks DirecTV Inc. would pass regulatory muster if it tried to acquire satellite-TV rival EchoStar Communications Corp. — but Wall Street and industry analysts aren’t convinced a deal could really happen.

EchoStar’s stock price hit several 52-week highs last week — including last Friday morning, when it was at $33.53 — following a Los Angeles Times story that said the buzz at Allen & Co.’s media conference was that News Corp. chairman Murdoch was working on a deal to buy EchoStar to combine it with DirecTV.

Murdoch, whose News Corp. owns 38% of DirecTV, added fuel to the fire when he was asked about a possible merger last Thursday during an appearance on PBS’s The Charlie Rose Show.

'PAINFUL’ TALKS

“Well, we’d have to get through the negotiating stage [with EchoStar], which would be very painful,” Murdoch said, joking that it would be painful “maybe” for both him and EchoStar chairman Charlie Ergen, who he described as a “good friend.”

During the interview, Rose pointed out to Murdoch that Ergen’s 2002 bid to buy DirecTV (when it was controlled by General Motors Co.) was effectively scotched by the Federal Communications Commission and the Department of Justice. “After a little lobbying,” Murdoch said, alluding to his reported efforts to scuttle EchoStar’s bid for DirecTV, which then permitted News Corp. to get a stake in the satellite company. Rose then asked if Murdoch was taking credit “for derailing” EchoStar’s deal.

“No. It was clearly, in those times, very doubtful legally,” Murdoch said. “I think today it is different — the broadband coming, the revolution, there are many more alternatives, ways of getting pictures and information, that I think it would be much harder for the government to turn it down today. But as I say, we’d have to get through a negotiation with Charlie. Then there would be the question of who would run it.”

At least one Wall Street analyst said a DirecTV purchase of EchoStar, which would result in a satellite giant with roughly 27 million subscribers, would create enough cost efficiencies to permit the combined company to forge ahead with a wireless-broadband offering.

Without a broadband play, DirecTV and EchoStar’s Dish Network can’t match cable’s successful triple-play bundle of video, voice and high-speed data service.

Murdoch is already making an aggressive move to offer broadband in Great Britain. Just last week, his British Sky Broadcasting Group PLC unveiled plans to offer free broadband service to current customers. It expects to spend $720 million over the next three years to launch the offering.

BROADBAND NEEDED

“I firmly believe DirecTV, just like BSkyB announced this week, needs a broadband solution,” Pali Research analyst Rich Greenfield said. “The world is moving to an [Internet Protocol] platform, and neither DirecTV nor Dish have a broadband platform. Long term, they need to provide a broadband platform, and I believe that a merger would provide significant cost savings to allow them to pursue an aggressive wireless-broadband strategy.”

Greenfield said he didn’t believe a DirecTV-EchoStar deal was “imminent,” though, seeing it more as a possibility in 2007.

Murdoch also reiterated to Rose comments he made previously about DirecTV negotiating with potential partners to deliver a wireless-broadband product.

“The technology doesn’t seem to be a problem, it’s getting the frequencies,” Murdoch said.

Combining DirecTV and EchoStar would save billions of dollars a year through economies of scale and eliminated redundancies, in part by eliminating satellites and obtaining more leverage in programming deals.

Citigroup analyst Jason Bazinet upgraded EchoStar to “buy” from “sell,” with a $39 price target, after estimating a merger could yield cost synergies of up to $3 billion a year.

Officials at DirecTV, News Corp. and EchoStar declined to comment last week.

At least one lawmaker and some analysts argued, like Murdoch, that the media landscape has changed enough in the past four years, with phone companies getting into the video business, that a monster DBS merger could squeak through federal regulators this time.

In vetoing the EchoStar-DirecTV deal in 2002, the FCC cited lack of video competition in rural markets after such a merger. Ultimately, News Corp. stepped in and bought the DirecTV control stake.

BOUCHER ON BOARD

Rep. Rick Boucher (D-Va.), who represents rural Virginia and has been active on satellite issues since the 1980s, favored the last attempt to combine EchoStar and DirecTV.

“I frankly thought at that time the merger was not inappropriate.” Boucher said. “Now you’ve got telephone companies on the verge of becoming multichannel video providers, and so the market will grow even more competitive and that would strengthen the case for anti-trust approval should a merger come about.”

Many on Wall Street agree with Boucher.

“The government would probably be less disinclined to approve it than they were three or four years ago, because you have so much consolidation in the telecom sector and ostensibly, you’re getting more video competition from the telcos,” said Matthew Harrigan, an analyst at Janco Partners. “But it still wouldn’t be a lay-up in Washington.”

The American Cable Association, a lobbying group for small operators, would oppose what it said would essentially be “combining an industry” today.

“The merger of DirecTV and EchoStar would be, frankly, even more harmful in the marketplace, because then you would have one unified competitor in even a better position to dictate terms and prices and have nationwide distribution upon which to place its programming,” ACA president Matt Polka said.

Several analysts didn’t give strong odds to a potential DirecTV-EchoStar merger overcoming regulatory hurdles.

“As soon as the telcos really become a competitive force, then there’s a significant possibility that this can happen,” said Jimmy Schaeffler, senior analyst for The Carmel Group. “But until that time, I don’t see that happening. It’s just too close on the heels of the EchoStar-DirecTV merger, which was turned down 5-0 by the FCC at the time, and against which the DOJ filed.”

Oppenheimer & Co. analyst Tom Eagan was also skeptical.

“We’re not quite sure if the congressional perspective had changed enough to this time around allow a deal to go through,” he said.

FOX NEWS FACTOR

A new DirecTV-EchoStar merger might be even less palatable to Washington because News Corp. owns programming and a DBS merger would grant it a huge U.S. distribution platform, raising “the 900-pound gorilla issue of vertical integration,” according to Craig Moffett, an analyst with Sanford C. Bernstein & Co.

Moffett also questioned whether Democrats would want Murdoch and Fox News chief Roger Ailes to have the largest distribution platform in the country. “That said, a merger certainly can’t be ruled out,” he wrote.

While a deal would create efficiencies that save money for DirecTV and EchoStar, there are obstacles above and beyond Washington.

Wachovia Securities LLC analyst Jeffrey Wlodarczak pointed out that the “takeout price” in any deal would be an issue because “we would suspect that Ergen would want at the very least $40 per Dish share.”


DBS POWERS The two satellite giants at a glance:
DirecTV:
Subscribers: 15.4 million*
2005 Revenue: $13.2 billion
2005 Net Income: $335.9 million
Market Capitalization: $21.4 billion
EchoStar Communications:
Subscribers: 12.3 million*
2005 Revenue: $8.4 billion
2005 Net Income: $317.5 million
Market Capitalization: $6.9 billion
* As of March 31, 2006
Source: Company reports and Nasdaq.com

http://www.multichannel.com/index.asp?layout=articlePrint&articleid=CA6355545

TV Notebook
Men, Signing Off

As More Women Become TV Anchors and Reporters, Males Exit the Newsroom
By Paul Farhi Washington Post Staff Writer Sunday, July 23, 2006; N01

As the news director of WTTG-Fox5, Katherine Green gets stacks of tapes and résumés from reporters and anchors who want to work in her newsroom. Some applicants are young and green, some older and seasoned. But the most common characteristic is: Most are women.

By Green's estimate, women applicants outnumber men about 3 to 1. Bill Lord, Green's counterpart at WJLA (Channel 7), sees much the same ratio, and he says the percentage of women has increased year by year.

"It's actually more difficult now to find a strong male anchor than a strong female," Green says. "Why? I'm not really sure I can answer that."

People in the TV news business have been wondering the same thing.

When women made their first strides into television newsrooms some four decades ago, their presence was something of a shock to the male establishment (a period of change humorously portrayed in "The Mary Tyler Moore Show" and more recently in the Will Ferrell film "Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy"). But nowadays, the gender roles are reversed. Women make up the majority of anchors and TV reporters and have many key behind-the-scenes jobs. And, as Lord and Green have found, that trend is increasing.

And men? Outside of a few traditionally male bastions -- the sports guy, the weathercaster, the boss -- men are disappearing from TV newsrooms.

Perhaps the most visible symbol of the ascendancy of women is Katie Couric, who in September will become the lead anchor of CBS News -- the first woman to hold such a job without a male co-anchor at a traditional broadcast network. But the trend is apparent across the country, in cities large and small. Although the male-female anchor pair is still the industry standard, two-female setups aren't unusual in local markets. Wendy Rieger and Susan Kidd co-anchor the 5 p.m. news on WRC, and women deliver the news solo on various newscasts throughout the week. Viewers rarely see men paired as anchors, or even going it alone -- the norm a generation ago.

Women reached statistical parity with men on the anchor desk in the early 1990s, and their ranks have been climbing since. The number of female anchors reached a record high last year, accounting for 57 percent of the positions in a nationwide survey conducted by the Radio and Television News Directors Association. Just as impressive are the gains in the rest of the newsroom. Women account for more than half of TV reporters (58 percent) and such middle managers as executive producers (55 percent), news producers (66 percent) and news writers (56 percent).

At the bottom of the career ladder are even more women: Almost two-thirds of bachelor's degrees in journalism and mass communications were awarded to women in 2004, according to research by Lee Becker of the University of Georgia. These days, when educators like Becker or Craig Allen of Arizona State University look over their broadcast journalism classes, they often don't see a single male student looking back.

"Young men are just not interested," says Allen, who runs the broadcast news program at ASU's Walter Cronkite School of Journalism. "There's been almost an evacuation of men from this field."

News managers look on these numbers with a mixture of pride and mild alarm. Pride because decades of equal-opportunity employment rules, inclusive hiring policies and viewer acceptance of diversity have opened up what had once been a preserve of men, and primarily white men. But concern, too, since the male exodus threatens the traditional anchor model, in which a male-female duo is sitting at the head of a symbolic nuclear family. There is also some debate about whether the "feminization" of the newsroom has led to a more female-oriented news agenda.

"We're not at the four- or five-alarm stage yet, but I do think the trends are very concerning," says Jerry Gumbert, chief executive of Audience Research & Development, a Fort Worth-based consulting firm. "There's a growing sense in newsrooms that good men are becoming harder to find, and that we're becoming too female-heavy."

So where have all the guys gone?

Many observers suggest that their departure reflects the transformation of TV news from a "glamour" business to a low-wage, no-growth field with limited career potential. With TV stations laboring under the same financial pressures as others in the mainstream media, men might be discouraged by television news and might be finding better opportunities elsewhere.

Although the rewards of making it to the top of the business remain great -- anchors make millions of dollars and reporters typically make more than $200,000 a year at the network level -- there isn't that much room at the top.

Fox News Channel, the top-rated all-news cable network, for example, employs fewer than 100 anchors and reporters. The biggest local station in Washington, WJLA -- whose newsroom is combined with cable's NewsChannel 8 -- has just 43 reporters, sportscasters, weather people and anchors.

Employment in the business, at all levels and positions, amounts to only about 25,000, says Bob Papper, a Ball State University professor who conducts the RTNDA's surveys.

As a result, newcomers tend to start their careers in small markets, at less-than-modest salaries. The median annual salary for a reporter working in the smallest third of TV markets is $20,000, according to the RTNDA.

From there, it can take years to climb to a larger and better-paying station. The heady days of the '80s and '90s -- when all-news cable stations were blossoming and broadcast stations were expanding their newscasts to more hours of the day -- appear to be over. For a young person, Papper concludes, "you could make the argument that it's [more lucrative] to go into the military than it is to go into TV news."

Given such conditions, Papper theorizes that women have a natural advantage over men on TV: "If you take the typical 22-year-old woman, dress her up and put makeup on her, she looks like an adult. With a 22-year-old guy, you can do just about anything and he still looks like he's going through puberty." As a result, a woman "can get a better job on the air and advance more quickly than a man," who may get discouraged and leave the business entirely.

A more important question might be whether any of this has changed what viewers see on the screen. That is, has the influx of women in the TV news workforce changed the news itself?

Although cause and effect are hard to separate, there's no doubt that the news looks much different today compared with how it did before women were a factor in producing the news.

"When I look back 30 years or so, to when my career began, there was so much more emphasis on officialdom and official process," says Barbara Cochran, former head of the CBS News Washington bureau. "Ninety-nine percent of the people we covered were men, and white men at that."

Nowadays, says Cochran, who is president of RTNDA, the canvas is much bigger, partly because of the influence of women: "We don't just do process stories. We do stories that tell you more about what it's like to live in our society. Having women bring their experience into play has made a big difference."

When Andrew Tyndall, who publishes a newsletter that tracks network news, recently compared "CBS Evening News" broadcasts from November 1968 and November 1998, he found striking differences. In the earlier era, he says, the subjects tended to be limited to government, politics and the Vietnam War, and it was unusual for a woman to be a news source (a report about the Catholic Church's policy on contraception, for instance, quoted only men).

By the late 1990s, subjects that had all but been ignored years earlier -- abortion, child care, sexual discrimination in the workplace -- were part of the serious news agenda, he said. Women also regularly reported the news, and were often interviewed on it.

Tyndall found something even more remarkable when he looked at the brief tenure of Elizabeth Vargas as the lead anchor of ABC's "World News Tonight" (Vargas went solo during this period after newsman Bob Woodruff sustained serious injuries in Iraq three weeks after being named co-anchor). The hallmark of the Vargas era, he said, was an increased emphasis on "sex and family" issues, those presumably with a strong appeal to women. In March and April, for example, ABC devoted more time to stories about contraception, abortion, autism, prenatal development, childbirth, postpartum depression and child pornography than CBS and NBC's nightly newscasts combined, Tyndall found. Since being replaced by Charles Gibson, the number of such "family" stories has tailed off on "World News Tonight."

In a somewhat ironic coda, Vargas stepped down as co-anchor in late May, citing her pregnancy and family responsibilities.

Nevertheless, Gumbert, the consultant, worries that anchor chairs and reporting ranks might become so female-dominated that male viewers will be alienated. "I think it's going to be problematic," he says. "The average viewer wants balance, both in the kinds of stories that are reported and who appears on camera. They want to see a reflection of their community. Once that balance gets pushed too far in one direction, then the editorial decision-making will change significantly, too. It can't help not to, because what interests men and women is different."

That day, however, might not be right around the corner. Despite women's gains, men still overwhelmingly are in charge of stations' news operations. Almost 80 percent of news directors and 68 percent of assistant news directors were men, according to RTNDA's most recent figures.

But that seems destined to change, too, the more women dominate the middle-management tier from which top executives usually are hired. Women already head newsrooms in several major cities, including two Washington stations -- Green at WTTG and Vickie Burns at WRC.

After eight years on the job, Green is the city's longest-tenured news director. She arrived here after a typical journey through the ranks, working first as a reporter and then as a producer in Jacksonville, Miami, Tampa and New York before becoming news director for a Baltimore station. Her move to Washington -- the eighth-largest TV market in the country -- was facilitated by Laureen Ong, WTTG's former general manager.

"It might sound a little crazy," Green says, "but a woman may be a sharper judge of [news] content than a man. When you're a female manager, you're required to have the skill sets of both a man and a woman. As a woman growing up in a male-dominated business, you have to develop traits like aggression and competitiveness. But a woman has traits that a man might not develop. So she may be a little more sensitive in certain situations."

That, however, is not an argument for going it alone, she says: "There are times when I'm very glad there are lots of men in the room. It takes a community of brains to make the right decisions."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/07/21/AR2006072100295_pf.html

TV Critics Summer Press Tour
Looks like smoother waters the for S.S. Peacock

By Melanie McFarland Seattle Post-Intelligencer TV Critic Saturday, July 22, 2006

NBC has a tradition of stiffly choreographed executive sessions. The head man in charge of programming -- Kevin Reilly these days -- walks back and forth onstage in an attempt to seem casual as he reads his lines off a large television screen behind us. We're walking, we're talking, we're walking ... and let's open it up for questions.

Reilly comes across as a nice guy who came over from FX to save this ship. You'll have to forgive us for the nautical metaphors to follow, because Reilly tried to relate to us by likening NBC's fortunes to a recent vacation he spent sailing in Mexico. (Could have been worse; in the past, Reilly has likened NBC's experiences to a colonic.)

Reilly talked a lot of hitting headwinds and navigating choppy waters, perhaps hoping we'd paint him as wily and wiry Capt. Jack Sparrow instead of "Master and Commander's" besieged and fat Russell Crowe. The reality puts Reilly and NBC somewhere in between the two.

In November it's bringing a two-hour special presentation from Madonna's "The Confessions Tour" to the network.

Reilly dropped this on us by flashing a photo of Madge leaning back, polyester-wrapped basket shoved forward. Handy, because that reminded us to ask if the network would remove any FCC-inappropriate footage from the broadcast. He assured us that precautions will indeed be taken so as to prevent Boobmania II, but her numbers will not be shredded.

It's also worth noticing that Reilly acknowledged the idea of Must-See Thursdays is deader than "Surface," aka "that fish show," as someone referred to it. "My Name Is Earl," "The Office" and "ER" will remain there, all premiering Sept. 21, but they're no longer dominant forces. "Deal or No Deal" has been thrown into the 9 o'clock to get a piece of the "Grey's Anatomy"-vs.-"CSI" battle.

And that was the sourest acknowledgment that NBC is no longer dominant. "Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip" was announced with trumpets and dancing virgins as Thursday night's anchor when the upfronts began. But it was moved back to Mondays at 10 after ABC slammed "Grey's" in the same slot. "Studio" premieres Sept. 18, marking the debut of NBC's fall season.

"We moved it because it was a war zone," Reilly admitted, saying that in initially throwing it into the Thursday night fight, "We gave it the coronation ... but you have to be practical."

Sorkin and 'Studio 60'

For a time, nobody could mention Aaron Sorkin's name without bringing to mind his 2001 arrest in an airport, when authorities caught him with magic mushrooms, pot and crack rocks. Fairly mind-blowing for people hooked on "The West Wing," which he and Thomas Schlamme created, but less mentally explosive than ingesting a party kit like that.

Sorkin and Schlamme later left "West Wing," and Sorkin pretty much lay low until this season, which teams them for "Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip." The drama lays bare the politics involved in producing a network TV series, one bearing a strong resemblance to "Saturday Night Live."

At this point I'm sure the sensitive souls among you are wondering why I dared to begin with Sorkin's shame. Have I no sympathy? Well, that's debatable. Thing is, I wouldn't have bothered except for the fact that he brought it up first.

At one point in "Studio 60's" pilot, a character rants about the degeneration of TV into a medium that celebrates backstabbers and people eating worms, features that happen to be the lifeblood of two NBC series, "The Apprentice" and "Fear Factor." Sorkin responded that he'd never seen those shows, but he can guess what they're about.

"They're also two shows which vocationally I'm going to have a problem with because they're unscripted, but that's probably not what you're talking about," he said. "I do think that television is a terribly influential part of this country and that when things that are very mean-spirited and voyeuristic go on TV, I think it's bad crack in the school yard." (Emphasis mine.)

As soon as he uttered that, he added, "Why did I use that word?" From there a great deal of the discussion became drug-addled, as Matt Perry, former painkiller addict, piped in, "I think it's mostly like bad Vicodin in the school yard." Then Steven Weber offered, "It's like Excedrin and old-fashioned cloth diapers in the schoolyard."

"Studio 60's" outward cameraderie did serve an important purpose: Clearly this cast works tremendously well together. Watch the pilot, and you'll see a crew of people whose timing and chemistry are tight, and who are working with some outstanding writing.

Other NBC stuff

COLOR=red][B] • [/COLOR][/B In an extension of its YouTube.com partnership, NBC is putting development muscle behind "Nobody's Watching," Bill Lawrence's ("Scrubs") comedy that was supposed to premiere on The WB, which had to go off and die on him. Instead, "Nobody's Watching" has found traction at the video-clip-sharing Web site, downloaded more than 600,000 times since it went up, so NBC is producing additional Webisodes. Smart of NBC to join YouTube instead of trying to beat it. Only about six or seven months ago, NBC clamped down on YouTube for circulating its "SNL" digital short "Lazy Sunday."

COLOR=red][B] • [/COLOR][/B NBC also is being kind enough to give Netflix subscribers the opportunity to see the pilots of "Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip" and "Kidnapped" more than a month before they debut. Those will be available beginning Aug. 5, and the deal ends Sept. 17, a day before "Studio's" premiere.

COLOR=red][B] • [/COLOR][/B Other premiere dates on new programs: "Kidnapped" gets here Sept. 20. "Heroes" arrives Sept. 25. "Friday Night Lights" comes around Oct. 3; "Twenty Good Years" starts Oct. 4; and "30 Rock" will be with us Oct. 11.

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/printer2/index.asp?ploc=t&refer=http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/tv/278457_tv22.html

TV Critics Summer Press Tour
Death March With Cocktails

NBC: Nothing But Cocktails
By Tim Goodman San Francisco Chronicle in his TV blog “The Bastard Machine”

Oh, we kid. We kid out loud. Today was a good day and it's been a while since I said that. Out loud. I like a lot of the NBC "product," as people in the business say all the time even though they should know better.

It's good product.

It may not be "hit" product, but still, it at least gets your blood flowing and that's a new thing of late for NBC. Of course, I'm still dead set against "Twenty Good Years" or "20 Good Years" (I've seen it both ways and no matter how you spell it, the show is lousy.) It stars John Lithgow and Jeffrey Tambor. Honestly, it takes a lot of work to mess up that duo. But it has been accomplished. Now, the whole of America may embrace this series unto its lowbrow bosom, but the fact remains - it sucks.

Nevertheless, I'm still excited that NBC is in the hotel. In addition to the good product, the network got NFL football back. I like networks that have football. Football is America, period.

Though it didn't have a big late night party (that's tomorrow, with details to follow), NBC did have a party in the bar with all of its executives and all of its NFL talent, including Al Michaels, John Madden, Bob Costas, Cris Collingsworth, Andrea Kremer, Jerome Bettis, Sterling Sharpe and NBC Sports & Olympics guru Dick Ebersol.

That's a good party. It was a tight fit in the hotel bar, but it was a lot of fun. Brian Williams was there, too. Keith Olbermann is in the hotel and we're having breakfast with him on Saturday, but he didn't show up at the party because, apparently, he got stuck on a runway in New York where it's raining.

We barely know there's a war going on in the Middle East (a dangerous conflict? a significant bickering in the global neighborhood?) so we REALLY aren't keeping up on weather, but that's what Olbermann's publicist said. And, like a lot of publicists here, she's extraordinarily lovely, so whatever she said we took as the gospel truth. Besides, I like Olbermann a lot. Great show. Misunderstood visionary. The whole thing. But mostly he's good about returning e-mails in a timely manner and though I haven't tapped into his brain on this, my guess is he'd have some good advice on Fantasy Baseball.

Conan O'Brien is here tomorrow, but he wasn't at the party, though he might have showed up in the bar later. Who knows. My kids are here, so I'm distracted from a whole lot of nonsense. Yes, the family has been here a few days (this qualifies as that part of a previous blog posting where I talk about where the line is drawn on personal information). Anyway, earlier in the evening the young snappers of the Goodman clan met Kevin Reilly and his wife in the hallway. Reilly is the entertainment president of NBC. He was very sweet to the snappers, a point my daughter even noted. A kind gesture, but it's not going to change my mind about "Twenty Good Years." Still, I've been rooting for Reilly to succeed on the network level ever since he jumped over from FX. This could be the season it happens, after less than stellar previous attempts at the Peacock.

See? Who said I'm mean? There's love all around.

When you're stuck in the hotel here, you meet a lot of people in the hallways, out in the garden, in the lobby, etc. Oh, yeah, and in the bar. Earlier in the day Jeff Zucker, Reilly's boss and a man very high in the NBC pantheon came over for a chat in the foyer of one of the main ballrooms. It was big of him considering we haven't always agreed on things in the past and there have been, how to say this - frosty? - relations. But he was professional. I doubt he'd take me to a Dodger game, but it's a step in the right direction (and my guess is neither one of us like the Dodgers. Clearly I don't - but I am going to the game Monday night).

It was a day of such interactions. I met a number of people who said they liked The Bastard Machine or - gasp! - the newspaper column. That was nice of them. I reconnected with people (publicists, etc.) I hadn't seen in a few tours. One publicist, who shall go nameless, asked what I had blogged that day and if any of it was mean. (At NBC, that's the default assumption...which may change this season.) Barely being able to remember my own room number at this point in the tour, I thought back on the day - Reilly, "Studio 60," virtual ether silence on "Twenty Good Years" - and said, no, I don't think so. All positive. Less than five minutes later a good friend and fellow critic found me at the party and said he laughed WHEN I MADE THAT ANN CURRY JOKE. "You made fun of Ann Curry?" asked a DIFFERENT publicist, who then decided to tell the woman who had asked me the original question about blogging and meanness and who happens to be - wait for it - Ann Curry's publicist.

It always happens this way. There's never escape from unkind words.

Said publicist pointed at me from across the room. But it was crowded and I was trying to chat with Costas (I was interrupted), then I made a move toward Madden (but then I was interrupted again - pretty tight fit in the bar - by a fellow critic who pointed out that they were rolling fresh cigars on the terrace.) So, to answer your potential questions, no, I didn't end up talking with Costas, Madden or Michaels. I brushed by The Bus, and he's a lot smaller than you'd expect. (Big enough to beat your ass, but not big enough to seem like a punishing running back, for comparison sake.) I ended up on the bar terrace (go figure) and there was Ebersol. I patted my chest looking for my digital tape recorder (everybody here seems to have one). Oh, that's right, I don't. Note to self: Order from Amazon and bill The Chronicle. I fumbled for my notebook and pen. Also not there. Did I have my room key at least? My head screwed on? Check and check. Fresh out of choices, I sauntered up to the Cuban man rolling cigars. Now, THERE's a good source to have.

Like I said, it's good to have NBC in the hotel. Fox is here soon, and things ought to go right to hell when that happens.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/sfgate/indexn?blogid=24

TV Critics Summer Press Tour
In the Reporter’s Scrum with Kevin Reilly

By Christopher Lisotta TVWeek.com in the “Critical Eye” TV Press Tour blog Saturday, July 22nd, 2006

NBC Entertainment President Kevin Reilly had a large but relatively relaxed post-executive reporter’s scrum Friday morning at press tour, and offered up some additional information to the assembled crowd.

Some of the fun facts included:

“Tonight Show” host Jay Leno may be stepping down in 2009, but he will still be working for NBC.

“We have a couple of ideas,” Reilly said. “It’s way premature.”

But Reilly ruled out one genre for Leno.

“Jay’s not interested in the specials business,” he said, noting that the network is “full speed ahead” on Conan O’Brien taking over when Jay steps down.

NBC is producing more “Dateline: Internet Crimes” specials, which were a big ratings hit this past season, he said.
“We’ve ordered 13 of them,” Reilly said. “They are not going to all air in the fall. We’re going to pepper them in on Friday nights.”

The child predator element of the show may be uncomfortable for some, but the program is effective, Reilly said.

“They have a few ideas to broaden it out,” he said. “The mechanics of that particular segment, the Internet predator, has been so well executed. It is a show that you feel like it is salacious by nature, but if you watch the show, it is incredibly compelling television.”

The recent “Nobody’s Watching” pilot phenomenon on online video sharing site YouTube is likely to be a model going forward in terms of developing new on-air series, Reilly said.

“I want to increase our relationship with the online audience,” he said, “and create more of an ongoing dialogue. I could absolutely see a place where we are sending for a group of loyal viewers who have established themselves in the NBC online club, so to speak…where we are sending them our pilots and letting them weigh in before setting the network schedule, and I think that would be healthy.”

http://blogs.tvweek.com/?cat=5

The Business of TV
Wall Street Sizes Up a Satellite Merger

By Linda Moss Multichannel.com 7/24/2006
(Mike Farrell and Ted Hearn contributed to this story. )

Rupert Murdoch thinks DirecTV Inc. would pass regulatory muster if it tried to acquire satellite-TV rival EchoStar Communications Corp. — but Wall Street and industry analysts aren’t convinced a deal could really happen.

FOX NEWS FACTOR

A new DirecTV-EchoStar merger might be even less palatable to Washington because News Corp. owns programming and a DBS merger would grant it a huge U.S. distribution platform, raising “the 900-pound gorilla issue of vertical integration,” according to Craig Moffett, an analyst with Sanford C. Bernstein & Co.

Moffett also questioned whether Democrats would want Murdoch and Fox News chief Roger Ailes to have the largest distribution platform in the country. “That said, a merger certainly can’t be ruled out,” he wrote.

http://www.multichannel.com/index.asp?layout=articlePrint&articleid=CA6355545

Interesting. The New York Daily News published a story on Thursday about how Murdoch hosted a fund-raiser breakfast for NY Democratic Senator Hillary Clinton at NewsCorp headquarters, on the same building that houses the liberal-bashing Fox News Channel (http://www.nydailynews.com/07-18-2006/news/story/435981p-367343c.html). Murdoch then walked over to a fund raiser for AZ Republican Senator John McCain. The man sure knows how to curry favors with the potential future leaders of the US that will yield appointments to key government posts (FCC, etc.) overlooking his media businesses.

But Murdoch should be careful because those that use the sword can also be slayed by it. He may wine and dine Hillary but the Democratic base (whom Hillary is taking for granted as she moves toward the middle) is rabid at Fox News. If Democrats take over Congress this upcoming elections (a very real possibility given Bush's low approval ratings and general dissatisfaction with some key Republican issues) their senior representatives will control/chair the committees that will look into this regulation. There are many ways the Dems could table, delay or just plain kill Murdoch's bid to acquire Dish to retaliate for Fox News' relentless bashing of Hillary and the Dems.

TV Critics Summer Press Tour
Dick Wolf talks about "Law" and his re-order

By Melanie McFarland Seattle Post-Intelligencer TV Critic in her TV blog

Dick Wolf took the stage Friday afternoon and tried to make nice before talking about the changes in the "Law & Order" franchise. Another edition would be premiering in August, he said.

With that, the lights dimmed and a signature voice introduced "Law & Order: Special Letters Unit," in which Muppet detectives hunted down the letter M. Wolf went on to explain that "Sesame Street" would be plowing through all 26 letters of the alphabet using this format, then joked about getting 4-, 5-, and 6-year-olds hooked on the brand.

Except it wasn't really a joke, if you know Dick Wolf. Wolf is an executive producer who speaks the language of revenue and proliferation instead of storylines; he leaves that up to the cogs in the "Law & Order" machine we know as writers and actors.

Following the oh-so-cute Muppet segment, Wolf starting throwing out percentages: 52 percent of TNT's schedule is "Law & Order." "SVU" takes up 43 percent of USA's, with "Criminal Intent" filling another 25 percent. "Intent" is also the highest-rated series on Bravo. The format is at work on French and Russian television; in France, Vince D'Onofrio's character is being played by Vincent Perez, which is just not fair.

Viewers don't care about that. Instead, what they'll notice when the series returns (Sept. 22) is that Milena Govich will be the first female detective on "Law & Order." (Thank you, Mariska Hargitay, for paving that path.) Henceforth, please refer to Govich as Detective Nina Cassady. If she's lucky she'll make it to Wolf's goal of 21 seasons. First, Wolf's team must halt "L & O's" audience erosion, which stands a chance of accelerating with its move from Fridays at 10 p.m.

Alana De La Garza also joins "Law & Order: Original Flavor" as the new assistant district attorney, Connie Rubirosa, replacing Mercer Island-native Annie Parisse, who played the late great A.D.A. Alexandra Borgia.

"She is the role model of how to leave a show," Wolf said, explaining that Parisse came to producers months in advance, explaining that she was tired of seeing film roles pass her by and asked to leave. She was even OK with having her character get an early, violent retirement because it gave her and the series an emotionally driven finale.

Annie, we miss ya.

Meanwhile on "Law & Order: SVU," (premiering Sept. 19) while Hargitay is on maternity leave, Connie Nielsen ("Gladiator") will step in for six episodes, playing warrants detective Dani Beck. She'll probably be asked to return.

Finally, Julianne Nicholson crawled out of the wreckage of "Conviction" to win the role of Detective Megan Wheeler on "Criminal Intent," which moves to Tuesdays at 9 (also starting on Sept. 19). One might wonder if viewers will buy such a quick transition from one Wolf show to another, until one takes into account that a) Nicholson now sports a pixie cut that makes her look like a young Shirley MacLaine; and b) c'mon, did anyone care that deeply about "Conviction"? Nope.

Also joining the cast: Eric Bogosian, set to play Capt. Denny Ross.

http://blog.seattlepi.nwsource.com/print.asp?entryID=105225

TV Critics Summer Press Tour
Marc Cherry: Telling it like it is

By Alan Sepinwall Newark Star-Ledger

God bless Marc Cherry.

It's not that I'm an enormous fan of "Desperate Housewives" or anything. It's just that, after two weeks of suffering through the lies and half-truths that come so naturally to everyone else who works in television, it's a welcome change to talk with a man who usually tells it like it is.

If Cherry isn't the last honest man in show business, he's close. After a long stretch of unemployment that found him living with and borrowing money from his mother, he created "Housewives," and that quick reversal from has-been to mogul made him unafraid to speak his mind.

So when I arrived early at ABC's press tour party and spotted Cherry sitting at a table with veteran sitcom writers Joe Keenan ("Frasier") and Jeff Greenstein ("Friends," "Will & Grace"), I quickly grabbed a seat along with a half-dozen other critics, because we all knew how candid Cherry would be about the creative problems on this past season of "Housewives."

A critic asked him if he wanted to offer a post-mortem on the season.

"Or I could just answer questions," Cherry replied. "Which would be less painful?"

He put the blame on several decisions and outside events. First, "I didn't know I was creating a hit," so he wrapped up too many storylines at the end of season one, which meant he had to start from scratch on season two -- and just as he was trying to figure out what the new stories would be, he was told that he'd be doing two additional episodes and would need to begin writing much sooner than planned.

"The biggest problem I had last year was, I was writing too much on the fly. Did a little of that the first season, but clearly got away with it."

Then he made two choices that clearly backfired: to make season two's mystery (the arrival of the Applewhite family) somewhat separate from the four main characters, and to keep the big four apart most of the time.

"I put the mystery story further away from the women, because I was trying to be different. But, as it turned out, it was just impossible to get the audience involved without the women's lives intrinsically bound up in it. And that was just one of those, 'Well, you learn.' And I learned the hard way."

As for the separate lives problem, "It's such a production nightmare when all the women get together -- not because the women don't get along, they get along beautifully -- but when you have a four-women scene, it's close-up, close-up, close-up, close-up. And those scenes take so long to shoot that I was trying to help production expedite things ... I was really trying to make production a little bit easier, and we heard from the fans pretty early on."

While insisting that several of last season's episodes were very strong (Mike and Susan's kiss, Bree watching George the pharmacist die), Cherry recognized all the problems and has worked to fix them.

"I only took a week's vacation, which on the one hand killed me, but on the other was fantastic, because these guys (Keenan and Greenstein, who are new to the writing staff) came in, and we have so much of a stronger look at the whole year. Just in terms of walking into a season, I really feel I know what we're doing."

Spoilers follow, so beware.

The first five minutes of season three will jump us ahead about six months in story time. Mike will still be in a coma (as a courtesy, Jamie Denton came to the first script read-through, and Cherry joked, "Jamie, can you tone it down?"), and Susan will befriend a man (guest star Dougray Scott) whose wife is also in a coma ("They become coma buddies").

"Xiao-Mei is going to be eight months pregnant, and Carlos and Gabrielle will be dealing with the imminent arrival of the baby, and an increasingly bitter divorce that we're having a lot of fun with.

"Bree will be married to Kyle MacLachlan in the second episode," which will be the centerpiece of season three's mystery, "and she'll be dealing with questions of, 'Who am I married to?' And we have a very funny thing where she's going to find out what Andrew's been doing since he's been gone. And Andrew's backstory is pretty funny -- and, of course, completely appalling to Bree.

"Lynnette will be dealing with the ramifications of having a new member of the family, Nora... She's at her breaking point with that relationship and we're going to follow what she's going to do to try to get that woman out of their lives.

"And Edie has a sexy, troublemaking young nephew who comes to live with her. And in the second episode, in an homage to Nicollette Sheridan, we're going to meet the nephew as he's shirtless, polishing his motorcycle. Something about nudity and automotive things go hand in hand with that family."

Found

Speaking of chatty ABC producers, "Lost" showrunner Carlton Cuse was as forthcoming as he could be about the upcoming season (more spoilers ahead).

Among the details: The focus will be on The Others, Desmond isn't dead, Michael and Walt will be back at some point in the series (if not this year), and it will be "an action-adventure year, more romance, more character-oriented, less mythologically oriented."

Oh, and he and fellow producer Damon Lindelof know what the four-toed foot is, but he wouldn't say.

http://www.nj.com/columns/ledger/alltv/index.ssf?/base/columns-0/1153495515153820.xml&coll=1

Wondering what is ahead at Saturday’s TCA?
Here is the schedule – and what we’ll be hearing about later in the day -- courtesy of one critic:

TV Critics Summer Press Tour
The Saturday plan

By Robert Philpot Fort Worth Star-Telegram in the Yelling Fire in a Crowded Theater blog

The Saturday plan includes staying inside as much as possible, as my wakeup call informs me that it will be 104 today. Glad to see the back-home forecast calls for a cool 92 degrees.

8:30 a.m.: Breakfast and Q&A with Keith Olbermann, the only well-known person besides Kevin Smith to ever e-mail me to take issue with something I wrote _ in what was more a case of bad syntax than factual error, I lumped Olbermann in with Bill O'Reilly, and you know how they feel about each other.

9:45 a.m.: "Football Night in America" session, which I may attend or I may skip to find some writing time. We'll see.

10:45 a.m.: Heroes, which has some buzz.

11:30 a.m.: Deal or No Deal session. Huge show, but this might also be writing time.

2 p.m.: 30 Rock, the other NBC series that goes behind the scenes of a late-night sketch show. Also has some buzz.

2:45 p.m.: Friday Night Lights, which I'm required to attend because it's set and filmed in Texas,

3:30 p.m.: The 58th Annual Primetime Emmy Awards, (the promo for the awards, not the show) which I'm attending only because Conan O'Brien will be there.

4:15 p.m.: Kidnapped. Also has some buzz. Great cast, too.

6 p.m.: The NBC party, which promises "Texas-style BBQ," apparently in honor of Friday Night Lights.

http://blogs.dfw.com/yelling_fire/

Re: Murdoch Merger Mania

while the purchase of Adelphia by Time Warner was before regulators during the last several months did anyone in Washington, DC even whisper “the 900-pound gorilla issue of vertical integration?”

if the Democrats could swallow the union busting tactics of Time Warner Cable is it that far a stretch to approve combining DirecTV with Dish?

what about fast tracking AT&T's acquisition of BellSouth so they could make a competing bid?

the more the merrier.

Friday’s network prime-time ratings are now at the top of RATINGS NEWS (the first post in this thread).

TV Critics Summer Press Tour
NBC: Day 2

By Peter Ames Carlin The (Portland) Oregonian in his “Greetings From the TCA”: blog Saturday, July 22, 2006

So I'm at the Ritz-Carlton gym yesterday, mid-dayish, in the midst of my daily 1,000 sit-ups (slight exaggeration) and from over at the elliptical trainers I can hear these guys chatting, breathily, as they sweat and gasp their way through a workout. The one guy is talking about golf, and his inability to break 100 even though he parred the first five holes, and then the last one, too. "So imagine what happened in the INTERVENING twelve holes!" he declaimed, laughing.

That voice. I know that voice. His back is to me, so I can't quite see who it is. But that voice.

Then they're talking about how they talk about golf. Like, what do you say about someone if you've never even heard of him before? Oh, I get it now. Bob Costas. And a couple of other NBC announcers. And then, moments later, here comes Dick Ebersol, who approves heartily of his boys sweating and gasping on the equipment. He's like a coach. They're happy he saw them there. It's an interesting micro-moment, and I'm glad I was there. More glad than I was 20 minutes later running in the blazing hot California sunshine with my pal who is a champion-calibre masters runner, and chats gailly while my vision goes red and my dead relatives stroll into view.

Info on the afternoon sessions is somewhere below.

The day's events ended with a cocktail party in the bar, brought to us largely by the NBC sports guys (including Costas, no longer quite so sweaty, but his hair is so oddly dark now he looks a little more cosmetically mediated than I bet he's intending) and the usual NBC execu-bots. And so there were snacks and drinks and outside on the patio a little Cuban guy was rolling enormous Cuban cigars, which were beloved by so many people you couldn't step outside without being asphyxiated by a dense cloud of smoke. What is it about the sight of a man smoking a huge, thick cigar that puts me in mind of latent feelings a lot of manly guys don't like to admit to having?

Dan Abrams, anchor-turned-chief-exec-of-MSNBC: very buff. Doesn't seem quite so aggravated as he always does on the air.

Jeff Zucker: Short, bald, intense. But we already knew that.

This morning's first session was a breakfast with MSNBC's Keith Olbermann. He rips on BIll O'Reilly, as ever. But he basically IS Bill O'Reilly, or at least a negative image of him. He's magnetic, smart, occasionally funny, sometimes less than funny, always conscious of himself. He tries hard, but can't quite keep his self-regard in line.

More later.

http://www.oregonlive.com/oregonian/weblog/index.ssf?/mtlogs/olive_theoregonianblog/archives/2006_07.html#164020

The TV Column
Aaron Sorkin's Crack About Television

By Lisa de Moraes Washington Post Staff WriterSaturday, July 22, 2006; C01

PASADENA, Calif., July 21 "Television is a terribly influential part of this country, and when things that are very mean-spirited and voyeuristic go on TV, I think it's bad crack in the schoolyard," Aaron Sorkin told a couple hundred thunderstruck critics at Summer TV Press Tour 2006 at the Ritz-Carlton Huntington.

[Dramatic pause.]

"Why did I use that word? -- everything was fine!" the much-ballyhooed writer asked rhetorically while critics in the section of the ballroom known as Power-Strip Village began madly throwing the quote up on their blogs.

Sorkin, you'll recall, was allowed to enter a drug-treatment program in lieu of serving time after his arrest in 2001 at the Burbank airport for possession of cocaine and hallucinogenic mushrooms -- aka Hollywood snacks.

Speaking of crack, Sorkin's comment acted like a drug on the critics, who were stumbling toward the end of their second week on the tour -- a sort of Bataan Death March With Scrambled Eggs.

Which is why Sorkin was just wasting his breath when, a few minutes later, he offered every critic in the room a hundred bucks if they would not use the quote in coverage of the Q&A session to promote his new NBC series, "Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip." The show is a wicked send-up of an "SNL"-esque late-night series on a network that smells a lot like NBC.

Critics' high did not end there: One astute reporter asked Matthew Perry and Bradley Whitford, who play Aaron Sorkin and his longtime professional partner, Tommy Schlamme, on "Studio 60," to comment on the fact that their characters bear more than passing resemblance to Aaron Sorkin and Tommy Schlamme.

"It's like bad Vicodin in a schoolyard," Perry responded.

Manic blogging.

Perry, you'll remember, also entered rehab in 2001 for what his reps then called "early stages of chemical dependency," or an addiction to Vicodin after wisdom-tooth problems and injuries from a watercraft accident.

And you thought creativity was dead in Hollywood.

"Great -- thanks! I'll follow that. I've never wished I had had a drug problem," Whitford cracked.

Manic blogging.

And, just when you thought it couldn't get any trippier, Sarah Paulson, whose Harriet Hayes character on the new show is based on "West Wing-er" Kristin Chenoweth, and Amanda Peet, whose Jordan McDeere is a thinly veiled portrait of ex-NBC exec Jamie "formerly McDermott" Tarses, told critics they're not basing their characters on any living person.

(Paulson said, "I'm not basing my character on any living person"; Peet contributed, "Me, neither -- next!" Peet also can be quoted as having contributed "Me, too!" when Perry, asked why he returned to series TV so quickly after "Friends," said it was because of how good Sorkin's writing was "and how bad 'The Whole Ten Yards' was.")

Sorkin jumped in and confirmed that Peet's character had sprung from Jamie Tarses, "of whom I'm a big fan" because when she was ABC programming chief she put on his "Sports Night." Tarses is a paid consultant on the series, Sorkin added.

But he said it would be a "red herring" to examine the show "like the cover of 'Abbey Road' to see what's real and what's being done in code."

Peet became chattier when recounting for critics -- by way of sucking up to Sorkin -- how she'd insisted her manager rush over a copy of the pilot script. Sorkin lapped it up.

Then, to demonstrate what a challenge it is for her to play a really smart woman on the series, she said after reading the pilot she wasn't sure she wanted to do it. So she asked her fiance, David Benioff -- the guy who wrote the screenplay for "Troy" -- to read it. She says he told her to "follow the writing" -- yes, that old cliche.

But, just in case you think she had the corner on Stupid Pills, Sorkin said he was confident NBC would not try to censor the show, which nicks the network repeatedly in the first episode, because when NBC and CBS were in a bidding war on the project, he made the network chiefs give the pilot script to their standards departments for notes. And, golly, each network reported back it would have no problem airing the pilot as is at 9 or 10 p.m.

Sorkin was notoriously taken off his biggest TV hit, NBC's "West Wing," after its fourth season; lateness of scripts, almost all of which he wrote, was cited as the cause in news reports.

Asked about it during the Q&A, Sorkin paraphrased David Mamet -- who is doing "The Unit" for CBS these days -- who recently said writing a play or a movie is like running a marathon, but doing a one-hour TV series is like "running until you die."

This time around, Sorkin says, he's been writing scripts since January, so he'll be "able to bank some scripts; hopefully, that will at least prolong a little bit of time before the wheels come off the wagon."

Manic blogging.

Sorkin said he always regretted that the lateness of "The West Wing" scripts meant the cast and director Schlamme did not get a chance to do their best with the material.

"It was like Excedrin and old-fashioned cloth diapers in the schoolyard," said Steven Weber, who plays the head of the network on "Studio 60."

"First of all, welcome to the panel, Steven," Sorkin said. Turning to critics, he added, "And, seriously, I'll give you each one hundred dollars if we can just get the crack quote out. It's just an expression; I didn't mean anything by it."

Manic blogging.

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NBC Universal has cut a deal with NBC Universal to make Webisodes of the comedy series "Nobody's Watching" for the NBC Universal Web site after the pilot, which was made in 2005 for the now-defunct WB network but was not picked up, somehow got put up on YouTube (with which NBC Universal has since brokered an output deal) and was downloaded about 600,000 times, according to NBC Universal.

Isn't viral vertical integration wonderful?

If successful, NBC will take the scripts that are being developed and turn it into a series for NBC's prime time.

In a news release, NBC Entertainment chief Kevin Reilly said, "This comedy pilot has generated a life of its own, and we are intrigued by its potential to develop into a series." At Summer TV Press Tour 2006 Friday, Reilly swore NBC didn't put the failed pilot up on YouTube.

"I think this is just the first of many television shows to be rescued by the Internet," added Executive Producer Bill Lawrence, who also does NBC's "Scrubs" and who critics here are betting was the one who slapped this sucker on YouTube, once they'd ruled out Reilly.

"Nobody's Watching" is about two slackers from Ohio who think TV sitcoms bite and come to Hollywood and a network gives them the chance to create their own sitcom, which they think is "awesome!" The network records their every movement for a reality TV series.

Now about those downloads, which NBC put at 600,000 though the YouTube site shows about 400,000 views, not downloads, per segment over the four weeks it's been up. (The pilot appears on YouTube in three segments.)

For comparison's sake, since the Associated Press wrote earlier this week that Jaclyn Smith, who sells clothing at Kmart, is expanding into home furnishings, her Web site has jumped from about 10,000 hits a day to nearly 80,000.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/07/21/AR2006072101741_pf.html