View Full Version : Hot Off The Press! The Latest Television News and Info
dad1153
12-24-06, 11:23 AM
Speaking of Friday Night Lights, apparently NBC is going to run a day-long marathon of all the episodes shown to date this upcoming Saturday from 9AM to 7PM on Bravo as well as three episodes this Wednesday on NBC. VCR/DVR Alert! :)
TV Notebook
Field of Dreams
Beloved 'Friday Night' Gets Second Chance on Wednesdays
By Paige Albinak, New York Post December 24, 2006
Even though "Friday Night Lights" has yet to attract a wide audience, critics have praised the NBC show's gritty ambience and the feeling it gives viewers that they are well-informed flies on every football player's wall.
Every scene of the show is shot on location in Austin, Texas (the show's fictitious town is Dillon, Texas). For example, the Dillon Panthers' football field is real.
"It was a very difficult to find a field to shoot in because it is now football season in Austin," says Jason Katims, one of the show's executive producers. "But we found one that was not being used and we were able to make a deal to use it for the show. We had to do major renovations to it -- new turf, new scoreboard, new lights, new stands."
The football field also came complete with a field house, coach's office, weight room and locker room, all of which are used as some of the show's main sets.
To make these authentic locations come to life, "Friday Night Lights" films with a documentary-style approach. Camera operators use hand-held cameras equipped with telescopic lenses which makes the all-important nighttime football games look like the real deal and allows the actors to turn in more realistic performances because they are focused on playing the game and not worrying about hitting their marks while shooting.
"Actors like this style of filmmaking because they don't have to do scenes over and over again just to get all the angles covered," says Sarah Aubrey, another executive producer. "As a result, I think the material stays very fresh and there's a real lack of preciousness about it. There's not someone constantly saying, 'Cut,' and then someone else showing up to fix the make up and the props."
In fact, the actors don't rehearse, says Katims. "The actors come on the set and start doing the scene. As the scene evolves and develops, they are free to change their blocking.
"We're not spoon-feeding the audience," Katims adds. "We don't always linger on a moment they way you often do in a television drama. We just put it out there and then let the audience decide what they think about something."
The cast has clearly taken to the show's improvisational style. Kyle Chandler (Coach Eric Taylor) and Connie Britton (Tami Taylor) sit at the show's center, throwing off sparks as one of prime time's sexiest husband-and-wife combos. Chandler infuses the confident Taylor with compassion, and Britton balances him with sass.
The rest of "Friday Night Light'"s cast is composed of gorgeous but largely untested kids. The show spends a lot of time with the teenagers both on and off the field, exploring what drives them to excel and what holds them back.
"We had a fantastic casting director named Linda Lowy, who also cast ABC's 'Grey's Anatomy,'" says Aubrey. "When you are working with raw talent, and especially kids, even if they do a good audition, they have to have depth so they have somewhere to go. Some people come in and kill an audition and they don't have more layers than that. Linda was very smart about [steering] us toward people who had that depth."
As the Panthers' star running back Brian "Smash" Williams, Carnegie Mellon graduate Gaius Charles, charms as the team's boastful spokesman who has something to hide. Scott Porter plays Jason Street, the one-time star quarterback who was paralyzed on the field after one bad tackle. Former Abercrombie and Fitch model Taylor Kitsch is Tim Riggins, the player with problems at home who's only started to live up to his on-field potential. And Zach Gilford is the struggling sophomore quarterback Matt Saracen, who suddenly finds himself center stage after Street's accident.
Unlike the film on which the show is based, "Friday Night Lights" focuses on the women as well.
"I was very interested in exploring the lives of the girls and the women who live in this place where high-school football hangs over them at every turn," says Aubrey.
The show's female cast members, including Minka Kelly as head cheerleader Lyla Garrity, Adrianne Palicki as bad-girl Tyra Collete and Aimee Teegarden as the Taylors' daughter, Julie – give the show much-needed emotional dimension. Lyla is dealing with the social consequences of her affair with Riggins after her boyfriend's accident, while Julie is defying her parents in order to date the timid Saracen.
Thus far, the show has not fared especially well in the ratings, but NBC has showed its faith in the series by picking up a full season and then moving away it from Fox's steamroller "American Idol," and into a new time period on Wednesdays at 8 p.m., starting Jan. 10. There's also a marathon airing on NBC and Bravo this week.
FRIDAY NIGHT LIGHTS
Wednesday, 8-11 p.m., NBC
Saturday, 9 a.m. – 7 p.m., Bravo
http://www.nypost.com/seven/12242006/tv/field_of_dreams_tv_paige_albiniak.htm
dad1153
12-24-06, 11:38 AM
HDTV Notebook
Signals unclear to hi-definition buyers
Prices down, sales up ... but headaches abound
By Michael Schneider Variety.com Dec. 24, 2006
U.S. consumers were high on high-def this holiday season, purchasing digital TVs (particularly plasma and LCD models) in record numbers. But that doesn't mean they understand how those pricy sets work.
"People know what 'digital' means, but they're being asked to remember all these obscure terms," says Matt Swanston, director of business analysis at the Consumer Electronics Assn. "They could learn so much more about HDTV."
Like how to actually watch HDTV on those HD sets. It's not as easy as you'd think.
"People understand why they want an HD or digital set, (but) relatively few understand everything that needs to happen from the source to their set," says Swanston, who notes that consumers are used to bringing home new electronics devices and simply plugging them in.
"Unlike the cell phone or DVD player, they tend to need more," he says. "Your CD player had everything on board. But a high-def display is dependent on external sources. And that's where consumer understanding drops off."
http://www.variety.com/index.asp?layout=print_story&articleid=VR1117956255&categoryid=14
I consider myself educated in high-definition from what I've learned here at AVS Forum as well as my experience working on television since 1996. But guess what? Even I have trouble keeping up with the terminology, meanings and how they translate into a pleasant HD viewing experience. And the CE's/studios expect that a nation of couch potatoes that were never able to make their VCR's stop flashing "12:00" embrace and understand HD? Ha! :rolleyes:
dad1153
12-24-06, 11:43 AM
TV Notebook
Who's shouting now?
The opinionated Fox News Channel is giving ground to increasingly noisy competitors
By Nick Madigan, Baltimore Sun December 24, 2006
Ever since Fox News Channel, founded in 1996, proved that news delivered with attitude, opinion and even belligerence could wipe the clock of just about any competitor, CNN - once the undisputed leader of the cable news pack - and a handful of smaller channels have been struggling to find a formula that brings in the same kind of numbers.
Now, CNN and the others appear to have found an answer. Virtually all the competitors are slashing at the Fox ratings lead by offering their own versions of noisy and opinionated news. CNN has been closing on Fox and the others, including MSNBC and CNBC, have on occasion closed on CNN. They're all doing it by delivering the news with a strong personal flair.
The most salient examples of the trend are Headline News's Glenn Beck, who is showing the fastest-rising ratings of anyone on cable news; Keith Olbermann, MSNBC's pugnacious but cerebral resident lefty; his colleague Chris Matthews, long an opponent of the Iraq war who was recently off the air because of illness but who remains very much in the mix; Nancy Grace, whose acerbic, finger-wagging style on Headline News is aimed primarily at miscreants and their lawyers; and, on CNBC, the manic money maven Jim Cramer, whose flailing arms and booming delivery is sheer entertainment for stock-market players who don't mind being shouted at.
The shift toward all-opinion, all-the-time is also working on CNN for Lou Dobbs, who never tires of pushing protectionist views that have won him fans as well as critics. The somewhat stodgy Dobbs unabashedly labels his show "news, debate and opinion."
The shakeout among the main cable news networks is all the more notable for the audience losses at Fox News Channel, which has suffered a 21 percent decline in total viewers when compared to the fourth quarter of 2005. Its biggest star, Bill O'Reilly, virtually invincible for much of the Bush administration's tenure, has also lost a significant number of viewers in the past year as the administration's fortunes have waned, its Iraq policy in shambles and its midterm electoral defeats conclusive.
Overall, though, O'Reilly remains the king of cable, ahead of CNN's Larry King and the target of almost relentless invective from MSNBC's Olbermann, who cheerfully describes O'Reilly as "the worst person in the world."
O'Reilly, quick to take offense from any challenge to his bedrock conservative views, is equally dismissive of Olbermann. Watching the two go after each other is a spectator sport.
A spokeswoman for Fox, Irena Briganti, refused to make available for comment any of the network's executives or on-air personalities, writing in an e-mail message that there was "no reason" for Fox to contribute to a story that would include CNN and MSNBC.
She wrote also that both networks remain "in a death struggle for second place" behind Fox.
"Fox is still No. 1 thanks to O'Reilly," said Brian Stelter, who covers the industry on his TVNewser.com blog. "Without him, it would still be very competitive between CNN and Fox. Maybe the upstarts are starting to act a little more like Fox did, when Fox was David to CNN's Goliath. But now that Fox is Goliath, MSNBC and Headline News are starting to throw stones - or pebbles, at least."
Stelter was particularly impressed with the rise of Dobbs on CNN, "to the point where he occasionally beats Brit Hume on Fox." On Dec. 11, Stelter said, Dobbs even came in ahead of his CNN colleague Larry King, who normally trounces everyone on cable news except O'Reilly.
"I'd be worried if I were Fox," said Stelter about the surge by Dobbs, Olbermann, Beck and others whose numbers have been showing signs of momentum.
For the past decade, since Fox News Channel began broadcasting, there was always a ratings formula that seemed to describe the war between CNN, FNC and their distant challengers.
"It was 1 Fox equals 2 CNN, and 1 CNN equals 2 MSNBC," Stelter said. "Now it's not so simple any more. About half the time, MSNBC is beating CNN in the demo."
By "the demo," Stelter means the 25-to-54 age demographic that advertisers covet, and whose viewing habits are therefore the most studied.
Those are some of the same people who tend to watch Comedy Central's fake-news king, Jon Stewart - along with his late-night cohort, Stephen Colbert - and consider them the oracles of what's wrong and hypocritical in both media and government.
Martin Kaplan, associate dean of the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California, said MSNBC's recent rise in audience numbers, largely because of Olbermann, is propelled by what he called "the Jon Stewart audience."
Olbermann's show, Countdown, is "informative, edgy and funny, and it respects its audience," said Kaplan, who found it remarkable that "Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert set a standard now."
Kaplan is distressed at the changes at Headline News, which, in the evenings, has become the op-ed page to CNN's hard-news shows.
"They used to be like the best AM radio news stations, in that you could turn them on at any time and get a fill of the headlines and hard news," Kaplan said of Headline News. "But now it's the same talking heads and ideologues and bullies as all the rest."
Kaplan was no kinder to CNN, where he appreciates only the midday feed from CNN International in London. "It's an hour of competently done international news done by professionals," he said.
Kaplan may have been on the mark with his criticism of the gravitas-free CNN anchor Tony Harris, who sometimes snickers his way through interviews. Kaplan said the network's morning shows "suffer from the same happy-talk disease that the broadcast networks have discovered is the key to ratings."
On the other hand, CNN's curmudgeonly Jack Cafferty is appealing because, Kaplan said, "he's become the truth teller, the guy who says, 'How dumb do they think we are?'
"It used to be more of a crank act," Kaplan said, referring to Cafferty. "But you get the sense now that there's more depth, a greater stake in the outcome. He's not just cynical. He's rooting for change."
On election night, CNN won the ratings race, concurrent with the Democratic gains in Congress.
"Fox did not do well in the elections," said Diedtra Henderson, a reporter in the Washington bureau of The Boston Globe and an avid election-watcher. "CNN's numbers were huge. CNN even took out full-page ads in The New York Times saying they were No. 1. Fox couldn't deal with the reality of the news, and CNN benefited because it was seen as bipartisan. CNN called races faster, while Fox anchors were arguing with guests."
Jonathan Klein, president of CNN's U.S. operations, said it was "clear that Fox has lost the pulse of the country."
Klein, who ditched the amiable anchor Aaron Brown a year ago in favor of the hustle-and-bustle Anderson Cooper, said Fox finds itself a victim of its almost unwavering support for the Bush administration, no matter what the reality in Iraq or elsewhere.
"The war is going badly and it's made people turn away from flag-waving, sloganeering and spin and it's made the audience seek out answers," Klein said. "They want insight. The audience is increasingly on to the fact that Fox is giving people the administration party line."
Klein cited as an example FNC's use of the slogan "New Way Forward" to identify Bush administration policy in Iraq. The slogan, Klein said, happens to be the administration's own title for its policy.
Klein said there other kinks in Fox's armor. A year ago, he said, Greta Van Susteren's On the Record had a 52 share in the ratings, against Aaron Brown's anemic 17-share on CNN. Now, Van Susteren is down to a still-appreciable 39 share while Brown's replacement, Anderson Cooper, is at 31, and catching up.
At MSNBC, Dan Abrams, who was appointed general manager six months ago, said he was thrilled that the network has found its focus and has become "regularly competitive" with CNN. "There's no question that in a competitive landscape we are the story of cable news right now," said Abrams, a former legal correspondent for NBC News. "We have shot up to a place where we are competitive. There's no question that Keith Olbermann is on fire; he's beating Paula Zahn on CNN in the key demo almost every night. From Imus to dayside programming to Chris Matthews to Keith Olbermann to Joe Scarborough - everything is on fire now. CNN has a lot to be worried about. CNN is in real danger of becoming the news dinosaur."
Not necessarily. Although growing, MSNBC's numbers remain mostly in the shadows of the larger channels.
Wolf Blitzer, whose daily Situation Room has come to define CNN's new, high-tech approach to breaking news, would not be drawn into comparisons with Fox, MSNBC or anyone else. "I welcome the competition," he said. "It makes us all better. If I play tennis with someone whose game is better than mine, I play better. Bring it on - the more the merrier.
"My attitude is, if I give our viewers serious, important hard news, they will come. We've got a news environment now that's dominated by two subjects - Iraq and politics, and they're related. And they're two subjects I know well. They play to my strengths, and I think that's why viewers are watching us."
The viewers of CNN, Blitzer said, are "news junkies" who "want some value" and "don't want junk."
Beck, a longtime radio host who was brought into the Headline News fold only in May, has seen his ratings increase since then by 84 percent among the most-coveted viewers.
"Crazy, isn't it?" asked Beck. "It just goes to show you how low our standards are. Who thought cable news would be fun?"
Then, turning serious, Beck said audiences "are hungry for news in a different way."
"Wherever you get your news during the day - CNN.com or Drudge Report, say - it's usually on the Internet," he said. "By the time you get home at night, you're already up to speed. Now what you're looking for is, what does this mean? You're not necessarily looking for outrageous opinion; you're looking for perspective."
Beck, who had over a million viewers for a special on militant Islam in November, said he was trying to avoid the "self-righteous, pompous shtick" common to some of his competitors, as well as the tendency to "put people in little boxes, yelling at each other."
"That's pretty much the cable news formula that makes you want to blow your head off nightly."
Trying to explain his on-air appeal, the conservative Beck said it is "not a left versus right thing," but rather "right versus wrong."
"It's the attitude that you don't take yourself too seriously," he went on. "If you think I'm wrong, please stand in line. I'm serving number 46 right now."
Referring to a new French all-news channel, Beck could not resist taking a dig. "I hear," he said, "that they'll show the white flag 24 hours a day."
http://www.baltimoresun.com/entertainment/tv/bal-id.cable24dec24,0,3063116.story?coll=bal-artslife-tv
dad1153
12-24-06, 11:48 AM
Home Video Notebook
DVD-Isaster
Format Has Peaked - That's Bad News for Studios
By Peter Lauria, New York Post December 24, 2006
Bad news for movie studios this holiday season: Thanks to saturation and advances in technology, the DVD is dying.
Although movie revenues are expected to be up 5 percent and a strong slate of franchise films is set for release in '07, the most lucrative part of the movie business is flat-lining.
And a few developments last week threaten to not only accelerate its death but also to take a huge bite out of the movie studios' bottom lines next year.
According to Nielsen Media Research, DVD players overtook VCRs in U.S. households for the first time this year - they're now in some 92 million homes.
But Comcast, the nation's largest cable operator, is conducting experimental tests on releasing movies on-demand the same day they are released on DVD. If successful, the move could be extended to the company's entire 22 million-strong subscriber base. At the same time, big-box retailers Circuit City and Best Buy have reported year-over-year DVD sales declines in five of the last eight quarters.
Taken together, Pali Research analyst Richard Greenfield is predicting that 2007 will mark the first year that consumer spending on DVDs declines domestically, which, in turn, is going to put a serious strain on movie studio profits.
"We suspect the risk to 2007 film industry profits is increasingly to the downside," Greenfield wrote in a recent report.
As Greenfield notes, in the last year Paramount, Sony, Time Warner and Disney all made management changes in their home-entertainment divisions.
"It is hard for us to imagine all of these changes would have occurred if the DVD business was vibrant," Greenfield said. "Rather, they are likely a reflection that the movie business is beginning to face the reality that 2007 is going to be a tough year."
While the theatrical window generates the biggest grosses for movie studios, it is DVD sales that make the most money. That's because box office receipts are split evenly with movie theater operators while studios keep all the revenue from DVD sales.
According to Sanders, Morris, Harris analyst David Miller, revenue from DVD sales can be as much as a film's entire domestic box office gross.
Small wonder then that, as U.S. households transitioned from VCRs to DVDs, movie studios rushed to release every film they could on the newer technology.
But now that player penetration is saturated and consumers have mostly completed buying their favorite films on DVD, "only the best film product will continue to drive sales as the U.S. market faces slower growth prospects," said UBS Managing Director Aryeh Bourkoff.
Though the $23.4 billion expected to be collected on DVD sales next year trails only 2006 in dollar amount, the 1 percent spending decline that represents is a far cry from the double- and triple-digit growth experienced since 1999.
Greenfield thinks the studios best equipped to weather the precipitous decline at retail are Disney, Fox and Paramount, all of which had successful theatrical releases due out on DVD next year or are less reliant on catalog DVD sales for revenue.
"Warner Bros. appears particularly exposed as it has a tremendous library DVD business (that has driven profits), and its recent film releases have been notably weaker than in the past three to four years," Greenfield said.
He is also concerned about pure-play studios such as DreamWorks Animation and Lionsgate, "whose profits are almost completely reliant on DVD sales, whereas the larger studios have other businesses to offset weakening industry economics."
Weakening fundamentals are a key reason why the studios have openly embraced new distribution technologies like iTunes and why Comcast was able to convince the studios to let it test movies on-demand, day-and-date, with the DVD release.
But as Greenfield bluntly states, "While day-and-date movies on VOD helps the cable operators sell digital boxes, we find it very hard to believe that this is additive to movie studio profitability."
http://www.nypost.com/seven/12242006/business/dvd_isaster_business_peter_lauria.htm
dad1153
12-24-06, 11:56 AM
TV News
Dizzying Adventures on the Anchor Carousel
By Jacques Steinberg, The New York Times December 24, 2006
For those Americans who still make a habit of watching the network evening news — and there are more than 26 million of them each night — 2006 was the year the (new) Big 3 fully settled behind their anchor desks.
With Charles Gibson named sole successor to the late Peter Jennings on ABC (after the network’s brief experiment with a dual anchor format) and with Katie Couric given custody of Dan Rather’s old broadcast at CBS (following an interregnum presided over by Bob Schieffer), Brian Williams of NBC was presented with the stiffest, most sustained competition since he succeeded Tom Brokaw in December 2004.
The first round, as measured by the so-called November sweeps, went to Mr. Williams, whose broadcast held its position as the most-watched of the three, with an average nightly viewership of 9.6 million, according to Nielsen Media Research. ABC, with an average nightly audience of about 8.9 million, remained in second place, as it has for more than a decade. And Ms. Couric — despite arriving on a wave of marketing hype that would have cost CBS more than $10 million had it not owned the network on which her endless promotional spots were broadcast — lolled in third place, as Mr. Rather had for more than a decade, with 7.8 million viewers.
There may yet be a horse race, as was evident during the week of Dec. 4, when Mr. Gibson very nearly overtook Mr. Williams, according to Nielsen. (That week, Mr. Gibson actually won among viewers 25 to 54, the demographic category of greatest interest to advertisers.) Thus far, Ms. Couric’s “CBS Evening News” has posed little threat to her competitors — though it is early, just shy of four months into her run.
For a brief moment in June, three months before Ms. Couric’s debut, Mr. Rather briefly returned to the spotlight, if only to say goodbye. He had already relinquished his anchor chair in March 2005 in the aftermath of a reporting scandal, but he had remained a correspondent on “60 Minutes” — though, he argued, in name only. Ultimately, he and the network announced that they had agreed to part ways, and Mr. Rather — uninterested in retiring at age 75 — moved on to a new assignment, with a vastly smaller audience, on HDNet, a high-definition television channel owned by Mark Cuban, who also owns the Dallas Mavericks basketball team.
As has been the case over the last two years, though, the most palpable buzz in television news was arguably emanating from a half-hour news show that was more fake than real — in this instance, “The Colbert Report” on Comedy Central, a spinoff of Jon Stewart’s “Daily Show.” In the spring, the program’s host, Stephen Colbert, touched off a cyclone of postings on the Internet (pro and con) after ribbing President Bush at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner.
Speaking in character as a right-leaning Bill O’Reillyesque commentator, with the president sitting just a few feet away, Mr. Colbert needled the commander in chief over such sore subjects as the trajectory of the war in Iraq.
“Now, I know there’s some polls out there saying this man has a 32 percent approval rating,” Mr. Colbert said, foreshadowing the results of a midyear Congressional election that was just a few months away. “But guys like us, we don’t pay attention to the polls. We know that polls are just a collection of statistics that reflect what people are thinking ‘in reality.’
“And reality,” he added, “has a well-known liberal bias.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/24/arts/television/24stei.html?_r=1&ref=television&oref=slogin
dad1153
12-24-06, 12:15 PM
Critic's Notebook
Best of 2006: TV moments
The shows with the biggest buzz never happened
By Joanne Ostrow, Denver Post December 23, 2006
The biggest television moments of the year were those that never were: the O.J. Simpson "confession" interview on Fox, the Madonna "crucifixion" dance on NBC, the takeover of primetime by serialized dramas.
Just like the instant we all tossed out our old TVs and bought high-definition flat screens, they never happened.
Those figments of publicity offer a clue to the direction of popular culture in 2006: There are so many entertainment choices now, it's easier to get buzz than traction.
Katie Couric's jump to CBS produced more anticipation than long-term ratings. MTV's "Real World Denver" generated more blog excitement than actual viewership.
Meredith Vieira's ascent to "Today" and Dan Rather's sidestep to the mini-audience of HDNet were momentary blips. Charles Gibson got the ABC anchor chair, Rosie O'Donnell got the adoration on "The View." Nearly everyone, including Bob Dylan, got a show on satellite radio.
While CBS's "Survivor" made waves by dividing the tribes by race and ethnicity, in the end that development played out as no big deal.
The excitement around serial dramas, hailed as a turning point or even a new golden age for scripted TV, fizzled as "Kidnapped," "Smith," "Vanished," "The Nine" and "Six Degrees" failed to make it through the season. "Lost" slipped in both writing and ratings.
As scripted storytelling faltered, the Hollywood guilds campaigned to get union wages and benefits for writers of reality shows. (You didn't think all those reality shows magically developed plot structure, did you?)
The newly constituted CW fared well enough, rising from the ashes of the WB and UPN. The on-the-cheap telenovelas of MyNetworkTV were universally panned by critics and ignored by audiences.
On the plus side, "Heroes" and "Ugly Betty" proved it's still possible to construct an offbeat hit, as long as the stories are taut, the casting excellent, the direction clever and the timeslot tolerable. Two high potential underachievers, "Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip" and "Friday Night Lights," got reprieves from NBC. ("Lights" will move to Wednesdays in January to get out of the way of "American Idol.")
And the year's one TV catchphrase - "Save the Cheerleader, Save the World" - wisely was retired by "Heroes" before it got old.
The welcome return of Aaron Sorkin, the reunion of Meredith and McDreamy and a first-rate season of "The Wire" gave reason to cheer; the ratings behemoth "Dancing with the Stars" and the ascendancy of cheap-to-produce game shows ("Deal or No Deal," "1 vs. 100," "Show Me the Money," "Identity") gave reason to fear.
The industry clambered aboard the streaming-video bandwagon.
As hits and videoclips migrated to iTunes and YouTube, the way decisions are made at the networks changed abruptly. Now podcasts get Nielsen ratings too. The popularity of NBC's "The Office" on iTunes reportedly kept that show alive.
In 2006, TV stopped worrying and learned to love its digital future.
http://www.denverpost.com/entertainment/ci_4881614
Cable TV Notebook
Cable turns tables
Networks seek to broaden horizons with originals
By Denise Martin Variety.com December 24, 2006
There's an old showbiz axiom that says stick to what you do best. But in 2007, cablers are adhering to another showbiz truism: Nobody ever succeeded by playing it safe.
In an ever-expanding universe, cablers are working on new shows that fulfill the triple goals of a network: a show that becomes must-see viewing, brands the network and spreads its success to the net's companion shows.
And cablers in 2007 will offer skeins that are very different from their usual fare. This could prove a tough sell, though, if auds struggle to match interchangeable shows with their ill-defined networks.
The male-skewing Comedy Central is starting a rare female-anchored show -- starring Sarah Silverman, no less.
Showtime is making a rare foray into historical drama. FX is working on its first family drama. And HBO is offering a show that's ... well, hard to describe.
While off-network series and theatrical movies are a cable staple, they're not the only way to get huge numbers. Look at TNT behemoth "The Closer," an original drama that grabs more viewers than almost everything on the CW.
The number of scripted one-hours has been growing in recent years, but things are about to get much more dramatic in 2007.
USA, Sci Fi Channel, FX, ABC Family and TNT have at least one hit drama apiece -- and each will unveil at least one more next year. (As FX can attest, a second or third hit skein can help cement a brand.)
Meanwhile, AMC, A&E, Lifetime, Spike TV and even MTV will throw down new contenders.
Indeed, cable has grown a crop of its own must-see TV that will return in the following months: a new (final?) season of "The Sopranos" on HBO, hardy faves "The Daily Show" and "The Colbert Report" on Comedy Central and no less than two "Flavor of Love" spinoffs ("I Love New York" and "Charm School"). And, of course, reality standbys such as cooking, home design and documentary programs will dominate the dial.
But cable excels when it shifts. A major change in 2007, in the wake of "The Closer's" success, will be the rollout of more femme-centered dramas.
Lifetime will unspool the Mark Gordon-produced "Army Wives," about spouses on a military base; Courteney Cox will play a she-devil editor on FX's tabloid drama "Dirt"; FX alum Glenn Close will return to the net to star in a courtroom thriller; and Holly Hunter will join Kyra Sedgwick as one of TNT's badge-wielding women in "Grace."
A cable power list of seven for '07 (in alphabetical order):
AMC's "Mad Men": What is an original weekly series doing on movie network AMC? Who knows? But chances are "Mad Men" will be worth sampling. It comes from Matthew Weiner, an exec producer on "The Sopranos," who says that the 1960s Madison Avenue-set story will revolve around a creative director for a ad agency hawking everything from cigarettes to political candidates. "There's certainly nothing like it on TV," he says.
Net execs say the project falls into its goal of programming that will flow into and out of classic pics like "The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit" and "The Apartment."
Comedy Central's "The Sarah Silverman Program": Laff net is hoping Silverman will work some magic on female auds when her show premieres. Not since the ill-fated "Wanda Does It" has the channel -- home to male-skewing "South Park" and "Drawn Together" -- attempted a female-anchored series.
Silverman's "Program" is the sort of sketch show that finds its star holding court with God, wreaking havoc in a wheelchair marathon and sending a homeless Vietnam vet into hysterics -- all to the strum of song. That is to say, it's the sort of sketch show only Silverman would attempt.
FX's "The Riches": Eddie Izzard and Minnie Driver portray married con artists who take up the identity of well-to-do suburbanites, the Riches. In the cabler's first "family show," Izzard stars as Wayne Malloy, a father questioning the marginal life his family leads, while Driver will play his wife, Dahlia, newly sprung from prison and battling a drug habit.
FX excels at antihero tales. But unlike high-concept gambits "Over There" and "Dirt," "The Riches" scales things down to family-size intimacy. It's not unlike the familial angst that blew "Sopranos" into a king-sized hit.
HBO's "John From Cincinnati": Little is known about the tone of David Milch's new surf drama about a dysfunctional family. HBO says it's not a "surf noir," the description of the Kem Nunn novels that inspired the series. And insiders say the show even sports elements of the supernatural.
Whatever the case, Milch's script, co-written with Nunn, got HBO brass so hot and bothered that they quickly cut short Milch's acclaimed Shakespearean oater "Deadwood" so he could get started on "John." Show stars Bruce Greenwood as patriarch of the Yost clan and a former surfing star. Cast includes Rebecca De Mornay, Brian Van Holt, Greyson Fletcher, Austin Nichols and Matt Winston.
MTV's "I'm From Rolling Stone": It's no "Almost Famous." But for fans of MTV, this reality series, in which aspiring writers duke it out "Apprentice"-style for a paying gig at Rolling Stone magazine, features the best of the guilty-pleasure-inducing spats of "The Real World" and the fierce competition that's made shows like "America's Next Top Model" and "Project Runway" addictive viewing.
Skein will send six eager twentysomethings through a gantlet of reporting challenges and deadlines. Show even features music mag magnate Jann Wenner to do some "Trump"-esque ousting.
Showtime's "The Tudors": You might think Showtime was a little late to the game, with its historical period piece arriving a full year after HBO debuted its ancient-times sudser "Rome." But whereas HBO's Caesar series was a true soap opera with plenty of intrigue among countless characters, Showtime's take on the early years of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn is a focused endeavor mixing a high sex-and-betrayal quotient with performances from notable A-list thesps Jonathan Rhys Meyers (who shook his way to a Golden Globe for his portrayal of Elvis in the 2005 CBS mini), Sam Neill and Jeremy Northam.
Another reason to be hopeful: Showtime's got plenty of street cred these days, having earned high marks among crix for series "Weeds," "Brotherhood" and "Dexter."
TNT's "Grace": Holly Hunter will step up to the plate playing a complex protagonist in the upcoming skein "Grace." Thesp portrays an Oklahoma City cop turned cynical and jaded after her sister is killed in the 1995 bombing. She's visited by a petulant angel who offers -- or forces her into -- a chance at redemption.
TNT is shaping up to be the FX for women. While FX has made its name on testosterone shows like "The Shield" and "Rescue Me," Turner net has been beating the competition with "The Closer."
And execs swear "Grace" will not be the second coming of "Touched By an Angel."
http://www.variety.com/index.asp?layout=print_story&articleid=VR1117956258&categoryid=14
HDTVChallenged
12-24-06, 12:26 PM
Home Video Notebook
DVD-Isaster
Format Has Peaked - That's Bad News for Studios
By Peter Lauria, New York Post December 24, 2006
Bad news for movie studios this holiday season: Thanks to saturation and advances in technology, the DVD is dying.
Yes ... I suspect that there are a good number of folks (including me) who have stopped buying DVD's due to the increased availability of HD programming *and* anticipation of a working, "affordable" HD-DVD (a/o BD) format. ... The calm before the storm perhaps?
dad1153
12-24-06, 12:30 PM
Critic’s Notebook
'Heroes' good, 'Lost' bad
By Doug Elfman, Chicago Sun-Times December 24, 2006
All year, TV critics have discussed the cinema-ification of TV. Some series really do look as good as movies, and a few are better than whole crops of films.
Certainly, "Heroes," "24" and "Dexter" fall into that category. In a year when some movie insiders say it's been a bad year for film, these are the shows that made 2006 a good year for great TV.
But before I get to my top 10 list for the year, I'd like to address which acclaimed shows do not make my list.
-First, "The Sopranos." It's well-shot and finely acted. It blissfully allows scenes to roll without music. But it was a bad year for the gangster soap. Many fans didn't like the dream sequences; I did. Others didn't like the gay mobster bit; I did. I really enjoyed Carmela (Edie Falco) traveling overseas and getting perspective. But everything else just fell flat, like the trash-can war or whatever that was.
-You also won't see "Lost" on this list, because it will be on my worst-of-the-year list. It is gorgeously photographed and admirably acted. But the scripts totally reek, and the writers treat viewers like chumps who don't deserve better. More on that at a later date.
-And as much as I respect HBO's "The Wire," I disagree with loads of critics who view it as a masterpiece. Yes, the pacing is even-keeled. Yes, it's bravely gritty and realistically paced. But the continuity is a mess, and too often nothing happens to advance character development or story lines. I stand by my review. It's very good. Not great.
Now, on with the good shows.
1.- "Veronica Mars": "Veronica Mars" kept me stuck to my couch every week during the second season that wrapped up around summer, but not the current, slightly disappointing third season. When the third season started, the mystery show got a new opening sequence (terrible) and the writers slightly narrowed the plots into fewer mysteries and characters (what a shame).
Last summer, creator Rob Thomas said he'd been convinced by reaction or possibly by network people that the second season was too thick with subplots and suspects. I think his conviction is off base, to say the least. That second season may have been confusing at times, if you didn't watch every week. But it was witty, surreal and post-noir in a way that sucked me in. It was so much fun.
2.- "24" It made me watch it every week, unpoint, instead of DVR-ing it and catching it later. I remember Roger Ebert once saying he doesn't use hackneyed phrases referring to the physical effects of a movie on him, unless that effect actually happened. Like, tingles up the spine. I try to follow that rule.
So believe me when I say watching "24" made my heart race on many occasions this year, as special agent Jack ran around Los Angeles, torturing terrorist suspects and stopping the mass murder of a city. Everything about "24" works. The characters, the acting, the plots, the pacing, even the music. Starting Jan. 15, we'll see if the next season can live up to the rapid, intense drama of this year.
3.- "Heroes": This could have been the cheesiest thing on TV. A drama about superpeople who awaken to their new powers? Doesn't sound especially interesting. But it is fantastic. There was the time when the cheerleader awakened from being dead and autopsied to find her body all cut up; she healed herself and ran away. There was the politician who suddenly, shockingly flew into the sky.
And Hiro, the time traveler, gets all the best lines, like "Save the cheerleader, save the world." He and his friend saw a painting of the future, where Hiro battles a dragon with a sword. His friend fretted. As usual, Hiro wasn't worried.
"I have to find that sword," he said.
One of the great things is the way the writers juggle plots, as in novels, with long prequel flashbacks, or short bursts of visions of the future. And then a character will die without warning, to keep us on our toes. What a blast.
4.- "Dexter": On Showtime, this show comes in at No. 4 on this list, but it's the series -- about a serial killer who kills only murderers -- that could, over the long haul, become the most classic series now on TV. It's filled with extremely entertaining contradictions. It's gruesome, yet the cinematography is luscious and lovingly filmed. Dexter is an emotionless creep, yet he's very charming, like a child.
And on a side note, the opening sequence is the best on TV. It's got closeups of Dexter, the killer, starting his day, squeezing the death out of an orange, and pulling his shoestrings tightly as if they were around someone's neck. If you don't have Showtime, do yourself a favor and rent "Dexter" or buy it whenever it hits DVD.
5.- "Family Guy": This is the series that makes me laugh the most. It's just the craziest, quickest comedy on now. I don't even watch "The Simpsons" much anymore. "Family Guy" is better. Way better.
6.- "Countdown with Keith Olbermann": It's a live-action, news and commentary version of "The Daily Show." It's funny, political (left-leaning but willing to take shots at dumb things that happen leftward, too) and smart. Olbermann and his staff ridicule Bill O'Reilly and others at Fox News, and give progressives their only place to see sociopolitical entertainment like this, other than Comedy Central.
7.- "30 Rock": "30 Rock" is very close to "Family Guy" in the laughs department, thanks to funny writing and the funniest person on TV, Alec Baldwin, who plays Jack, the boss of Liz Lemon (Tina Fey's). Here's just one funny bit. An actress Lemon works with had a bunch of face peels and stuff that gave her giant lips and red skin. The actress said she looked 10 years younger. Lemon said, "Even younger. You look like a fetus." Brilliant.
8.- "South Park": An old standyby, this continues to be relevant and funny, even if America has moved on from "South Park" fever, or whatever that was, once. I don't always agree with the social statements, but I don't care, because the show is so good.
9.- "The Loop": Here's the dark horse on this list. It is very funny. It is very, very stupid. It is the most underrated show on TV. Off the air since the end of its first season on Fox and still awaiting the start of its second, it's about a bunch of drunk people out of college, working awful jobs in Chicago and making fun of each other relentlessly. I usually don't sign up for that sort of show or movie. But "The Loop" is greatly written, directed and acted.
10.- "Nip/Tuck": "Nip/Tuck" had another good year of drawing bizarre, tormented characters who are good, bad and ugly. It's a soap opera for twisted fans of intelligent, demented people who are still true to life on various levels.
http://www.suntimes.com/entertainment/elfman/184486,SHO-Sunday-year24-TV.article
Saturday’s fast national over night prime-time ratings – and Media Week Analyst Marc Berman’s view of what they mean -- have been posted just under the HD Football listings near the top of Ratings News the first post in this thread.
dad1153
12-24-06, 12:43 PM
Have a safe and happy weekend everybody! I watched six movies in a row all day Saturday (Blood Diamonds, Letters From Iwo Jima, Rocky Balboa, The Departed, The Queen and Curse of the Golden Flower) which is easy to do in New York City where all the movie theaters are only a short walk or subway ride away. :D
Happy weekend to you, too, dad.
(And get some visine for those blood-shot eyes.)
As a native New Yorker, I understand your pride in the city.
But folks in the hinterlands have theaters which show sometimes more than a dozen different movies at once -- no subway, no walking -- except across the mezzanine to the new theater.
TV Notebook
Trump gets fired up, pumps `Apprentice'
By Phil Rosenthal Chicago Tribune Media Columnist Published December 24, 2006
On a conference call with reporters in May 2003, NBC executive Jeff Zucker was describing the concept of Donald Trump's "The Apprentice" seven months before the show's debut when someone interrupted with the question everyone had in mind:
"How much of a prize is a job with Donald Trump?"
Well, Zucker said, there was a six-figure salary, too.
For a few hot moments, "The Apprentice" was a big deal, and renowned New York developer Trump became an even bolder bold-faced name. His was a different kind of reality show, a program on which smart, accomplished viewers who wouldn't go near the cutthroat islands of "Survivor" or the virtual Skinner box of "Big Brother" actually could imagine themselves as fired-up competitors.
With its latest cycle set to begin next month, the program, no longer shiny and new, has the earmarks of having become a fixer-upper. The first go-round averaged more than 20 million viewers. The one that ended in June averaged less than 11 million.
NBC already has given the go-ahead for a seventh run, but that doesn't mean Trump and executive producer Mark Burnett, the man behind the resilient platinum standard for reality shows, "Survivor," are wrong to worry that their golden goose is laying ordinary eggs.
Their response, however, has not been that of business people confident in the quality of what they're peddling. Rather, they're acting as though the bottom has dropped out.
TV critics I know and respect tell me that from what they've seen of the latest version--relocated to sunny Southern California, the better to get beauties and beefcakes in their swimsuits--the show has been cheapened.
The humiliation of the worst reality shows has been embraced, with challenge losers not just at risk of going home but forced to camp outside the mansion where winners luxuriate.
Whatever patina of legitimacy this supposedly long-form job interview once had seems gone, and one can't help but detect a whiff of desperation.
Maybe that's why we've been getting so much of Trump lately in full-throated sales mode. You would think a billionaire--he's suing the author of a book that called him merely a millionaire for defamation--would be less concerned with what people say or how a TV show that should be a hobby fares.
But when your name is your brand, you tend to come out swinging. Trump speaks loudly and wields a big stick. Hard to believe that, unlike so much on "The Apprentice," there's no product tie-in. Louisville Slugger, maybe?
Rosie O'Donnell of ABC's "The View" last week was bluntly critical of him opportunistically injecting himself into a controversy at the Miss USA Pageant, though he owns the pageant, so it's his business. Suddenly, Trump was everywhere, giving those of us who don't work for him a hint of how much fun he is when he's ticked off.
"I'm worth billions of dollars, and I have to listen to this fat slob?" Trump said in one or more of the umpteen interviews he did to vent against O'Donnell, talk about Miss USA and, not coincidentally, tout "The Apprentice."
(An aside: For my money, Trump's Miss USA Pageant is missing a tremendous opportunity in not using this blow-up concerning unladylike behavior to reinvent itself as a beauty contest for the 21st Century. These things are utterly anachronistic in an era of Paris, Britney and Lindsay. Who cares how contestants would solve world hunger? Ask if it's harder to get out of a speeding ticket or into a hot club.)
The old "You're fired!" Trump often seemed a caricature, but he was a fun caricature. Now, not so much.
What he should have said to Rosie and about "improvements" for "The Apprentice," is what he said about Miss USA: We all say and do things we regret.
In October 2002, F. David Radler--then my boss and publisher of the Chicago Sun-Times, which sold its site to Trump for a tower now under construction--was honored by Israel's Weizmann Institute of Science. Trump was keynote speaker at the gala dinner.
"When David says something, you can bank on it," Trump said, according to the Sun-Times report at the time. "His word is his bond."
Radler has since pleaded guilty and will cooperate with federal prosecutors going after ex-pal Conrad Black and associates for allegedly looting the paper's parent company.
Working for him was no prize either.
http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/columnists/chi-0612240194dec24,1,2652498.column?coll=chi-ent_tv-hed
TV Notebook
Hallmark Channel: Movie-ing on up
By Aaron Barnhart Kansas City Star in his blog “TV Barn”
Various dramas have swirled around Hallmark Channel, and I'm not talking about “The Christmas Card” and “Single Santa Seeks Mrs. Claus.”
There has been turmoil in the executive suites of the cable network named for Hallmark Cards, which owns it through a separate publicly-traded company, Crown Media Holdings. Mired in debt, the channel was put on, later taken off, the auction block. Some industry people have wondered out loud if there will even be a Hallmark Channel a few years from now.
On the other hand, Hallmark Channel just finished the biggest quarter in its history, with a prime-time Nielsen rating higher than that of all other cable networks save four -- higher than Fox News, Lifetime, Nick at Nite, and much higher than Bravo, a channel we go on about endlessly in these pages.
With a new chief executive, Henry Schleiff, on board at Hallmark Channel, I phoned him last week to ask what viewers can expect to see in 2007 on the air.
Sometimes it seems the TV business is one great big revolving door. Schleiff arrived from Court TV, which he ran for seven years and is credited with putting on the map through savvy marketing and edgy crime-themed programs (like the recent James Ellroy showpiece, “Murder by the Book”).
But Hallmark, as Schleiff noted, isn't Court TV. It's already well known and well liked. It's become one of the most popular channels in the cable universe. But it's not getting its due and that has hampered the growth of the channel, which was once known as Odyssey (and before that, the Faith and Values Network) before Hallmark bought a controlling interest in 2001.
“We have to do a better job, frankly, of getting the word out that we're the home of entertaining, great, fun, family-friendly movies,” said Schleiff.
To that end, the 10 p.m. reruns of “M*A*S*H” are no more. The classic sitcom will still air on Hallmark during the day, but the prime-time rights are going to TV Land. On New Year's Day there will even be a handoff, as Hallmark airs “M*A*S*H” from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. in the episodes' original, unshortened form, with TV Land taking over at 7.
From now on, said Schleiff (pictured), evenings on Hallmark will be “movie-movie, followed by a movie.” This week, for instance, begins with holiday movies, including a repeat of “The Christmas Card,” starring Ed Asner, at 6 p.m. Monday (all times CT). Then the rest of the week is Western-themed: “The Outsider” at 8 p.m. Tuesday, Confederate revenge fantasy “The Outlaw Josey Wales” at 8 p.m. Thursday and the channel's premiere of “Wyatt Earp,” the 1994 film starring Kevin Costner, at 6 p.m. Saturday.
Schleiff isn't interested in developing sitcoms or dramas. Some celebrity-hosted nonfiction is in the works. Overall, said Schleiff, Hallmark Channel isn't broken, and its financial distress doesn't reflect the quality of programs airing on the channel. (Parent company Crown Media, which is owned mostly by Hallmark Cards, recently sold off its film library to Robert Halmi Sr. and Robert Halmi Jr. to pay down debt.)
Still, you get the sense Hallmark Channel is settling for a little less than the very best when it's putting a 30-year-old movie like “Josey Wales” on in prime time.
Compare that with Bravo, which now produces tons of new programming that connects with a younger audience, the kind of viewers that TV (and newspaper) advertisers want to reach. They are the tastemakers and trendsetters and if there's one thing Hallmark Channel fare isn't, it's trendy.
That may be one reason why Hallmark Channel doesn't get the same respect as other top-rated cable channels. And Aretha, you can spell respect M-O-N-E-Y. Cable operators pay for the privilege of carrying most basic cable channels. They have been Scroogelike to Hallmark Channel. It earns a small fraction of the subscriber fees for Fox News, even though Hallmark has a comparable audience. Even tiny C-SPAN, according to one study, wrings more money out of cable operators than Hallmark.
Without that extra income to supplement his advertising revenue, Schleiff knows he can't spend money on production and promotion. “We've got some work to do on the license fees,” he said.
That will be a challenge. Hallmark is a rare “indie” in the cable business, in that it's not owned by a media conglomerate, which would give it all kinds of leverage in negotiating rates. But Schleiff is betting that family-friendliness will give him enough leverage.
“Cable operators are under increasing scrutiny” from the government indecency police, said Schleiff, who notes that “salacious” fare like FX's “Nip/Tuck” have ignited angry e-mail campaigns. To the beleaguered cable provider, Hallmark can provide a shield from the more controversial fare on other channels.
“We're one of the few major networks that the family can sit down and not worry about,” said Schleiff. “I think that kind of predictability is a good thing.”
http://blogs.kansascity.com/tvbarn/2006/12/hallmark_channe.html#more
Critic’s Notebook
Last Gasps
What popped and flopped since dawn of 2006
By Charlie McCollum San Jose Mercury News Sun, Dec. 24, 2006
It was the year of YouTube, some inconvenient truths, ``American Idol'' and O.J. Simpson back on the loose. The still-defiant Dixie Chicks returned. Two wily veterans of the music wars came up with unexpected masterpieces.
The year saw the final words from Lemony Snicket, the death of a film master, a visit from a guy named Borat and the passing of one of TV's finest series. Katie Couric flew high, Mel Gibson had his ups and downs, Tower Records vanished and ``High School Musical'' became a cultural phenomenon. These are some of the moments that defined our popular culture in 2006:
Top pop of the year
There were other Web sites for viral videos, but the ultimate -- a sort of TiVo for the nation -- was YouTube. It resurrected dead TV shows (``Nobody's Watching''), revived interest in others (``Saturday Night Live''), helped jump-start careers (Stephen Colbert), damaged careers (Michael Richards), altered political races (the U.S. Senate campaign in Virginia) and created its own iconic figures and cultural controversies (Lonelygirl15, the Chinese Backstreet Boys). In the end, the popular site was gobbled by Google (for a snappy $1.65 billion) and could end up losing its guerrilla cache. But for one year, it loomed large on the cultural landscape.
January
America gets `Musical' When ``High School Musical'' debuted on the Disney Channel, almost no one over the age of 18 noticed. But millions of teens and 'tweens tuned in to the energetic, feel-good TV movie, turning Disney into the hottest cable channel, the movie's soundtrack into the top-selling album of the year and the cast into bona fide stars. Now, there is a concert version playing arenas, stage productions in dozens of cities across the country and a sequel in the works.
Million little lies Author James Frey seemed to have it all: His book, ``A Million Little Pieces,'' had received good reviews, became a No. 1 non-fiction bestseller and was blessed by none other than Oprah Winfrey. The only problem: Much of his inspirational memoir of drug addiction, crime, rehab and redemption never happened. When he appeared on ``The Oprah Winfrey Show'' to explain himself, the chagrined hostess treated him to a public pillorying.
April
Courting Katie For months, there had been rumors that Katie Couric, the star of NBC's ``Today Show,'' would take over the anchor desk on ``The CBS Evening News,'' becoming the first woman to solo anchor a network evening newscast. Rumor became reality April 5 when Couric signed a three-year, $45 million deal to sit in the chair once occupied by Walter Cronkite and Dan Rather. So far, Couric hasn't been a big boost to the newscast's ratings, but it takes a while.
Mining Americana It sounded like one of those little projects that Bruce Springsteen fits in between big rock albums. But ``We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions'' was much more than that, with Springsteen injecting his rock energy and sense of showmanship into traditional folk songs popularized by Pete Seeger. Not only was the album a rousing success, but a ``Seeger Sessions'' tour -- with an eclectic and largely acoustic pickup group, rather than the E Street Band -- was a rare, must-see musical event.
May
An `Idol' moment You could pick any of a number of moments from the past season of ``American Idol'' to make a point about its transcendent popularity and the way it dominated network TV. With no disrespect intended toward winner Taylor Hicks, we'll go with the night in May when odds-on favorite Chris Daughtry got voted off, stunning the judges, Daughtry himself and seemingly much of the country. That his departure was talked about for weeks is a measure of just what a hold ``Idol'' had on America.
Return of the Chicks Three years after they talked smack about President Bush and the war in Iraq -- and incurred the wrath of country music stations, right-wing talk show hosts and much of their fan base -- a totally unrepentant Dixie Chicks finally came out with a new album, ``Taking the Long Way,'' and hit the road for a national concert tour. While concerts in some red state cities were canceled for lack of ticket sales, the Chicks did big business elsewhere. The album hit No. 1 on the charts and earned the group five Grammy nominations.
Out of office Officially, ``The West Wing'' didn't end its influential seven-season run until May. But that the seventh year of the White House drama would become its last was almost inevitable from the day John Spencer, who played presidential adviser Leo McGarry, died in December 2005. Spencer's death made it difficult for the show to continue and slumping ratings ultimately made it impossible.
Warming signs Who would have thought a documentary on a subject like global warming with an Al Gore lecture as its centerpiece would become a big hit at the box office? ``An Inconvenient Truth'' did just that, doing big business at the multiplex and becoming one of the year's most talked-about films. If Gore had been half as engaging on the campaign trail as he is in the film and during his appearances to promote ``Truth,'' he might not have lost the presidential election six years ago.
July
The other football Of all the sporting events this past year, just one had a cultural impact -- and it was one that went far beyond the confines of America. Soccer's World Cup gripped millions around the globe and, on a previously unseen level, made addicts out of Americans who previously had been lukewarm on the sport. There was a nice touch of diversity to the scenes of Americans from various backgrounds crowding local bars in the early morning hours to cheer on their teams. Plus one of the year's indelible images was France's Zinedine Zidane ramming his head into the chest of Italy's Marco Materazzi in the Cup final. It was the head-butt heard 'round the world.
Mel to pay It was a bad year -- make that a very bad year -- for Mel Gibson. In late July, the actor-director-icon got pulled over in his Lexus by a L.A. County deputy sheriff. His blood level was a snappy 0.12 percent, but that was only part of the problem. After the stop, Gibson launched into an anti-Semitic, profanity-laced tirade that got leaked to the press. Not even good reviews of his new ``Apocalypto,'' a stint in rehab and a skillfully executed effort at spin control could undo the damage.
August
Master of mystery Hard to believe but four decades into his career, Bob Dylan came up with one of his finest albums. Simple-sounding but complex in its emotions and ideas, ``Modern Times'' mixed jazz, blues, old-time rock and folk with Dylan-esque takes on God, politics and American culture. One track, ``Workingman's Blues #2,'' may be, when all is said and done, one of the most powerful songs the Artful Dodger ever penned.
October
`The End' game It may never have reached the lofty heights of ``Harry Potter,'' but the 13 books about the adventures of the Baudelaire kids written by Lemony Snicket (a.k.a. Daniel Handler) won over a generation of young readers (and more than a few adults). In October, the series finally came to ``The End,'' satisfyingly resolving its long-running mysteries and making its final points about peer pressure and facing your fears.
November
Is Borat! Sure, Sacha Baron Cohen's ``Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan'' -- now that's a film title -- is tasteless, offensive and, at times, just plain mean-spirited. But the faux documentary about a Kazakhstan reporter running amok in the United States also was hilarious, insightful and politically influential. It also struck a chord with moviegoers, bringing in more than $120 million at the box office. Even people who hadn't seen it talked about it.
An American original: Robert Altman did not go silently into that good night. To the very end, the 81-year-old was making films and planning to make films. And when he died Nov. 20, he left behind an imposing legacy of movies (``Nashville,'' ``MASH,'' ``McCabe and Mrs. Miller,'' ``The Player'') and television work (``Combat!'') that influenced and shaped a generation of younger filmmakers.
Game day In another era, fans would go into a frenzy over pop singers and movie stars, swarming theaters for a glimpse of their faves. These days, it's the latest technology that attracts the mobs, and at the start of the holiday shopping season, nothing was hotter than Sony's PlayStation 3 and Nintendo's new Wii. People lined up for hours to grab one of the new game systems, and entrepreneurs were reselling PlayStations online for double the retail price. Some shifty folks robbed buyers of their systems as they left the store. Now, that's the holiday spirit.
December
Towering inferno A moment of silence, please, for the passing of Tower Records. The record store chain was more than just a company. For a generation in the days before downloads and iPods, it was a place to hang out and talk about music, as well as to buy the latest albums and singles. But battered by the pressures of the growing Web economy, the chain filed for Chapter 11 and was sold to a liquidation company for $134.3 million. With that, Tower stores across the country started shutting their doors, ending an era.
THE HOT LIST
Gnarls Barkley One of the hottest albums of the year (``St. Elsewhere''), and the most addictive song (``Crazy'').
Abigail Breslin Finally, from the star of ``Little Miss Sunshine,'' Dakota Fanning gets some competition for Hot Young Actress.
`Civil War' A blockbuster series from Marvel Comics that pitted half the superheroes in the Marvel Universe against the others in a bloody battle over civil liberties and the nature of freedom.
Stephen Colbert ``The Colbert Report'' on Comedy Central is hot stuff, and the comedian's controversial appearance at the White House Correspondents' Dinner in April was an instant online classic.
Daniel Craig A blond James Bond? No way, they said. But Craig got the last laugh when ``Casino Royale'' pulled in more than $120 million in its first three weeks and got some of the best reviews in the history of the Bond franchise.
Miley Cyrus The daughter of the immortal Billy Ray Cyrus, she's the star of ``Hannah Montana'' and pulls in more than 2 million viewers on the Disney Channel. Plus her debut album opened at No. 1 -- against new releases by Fergie, Janet Jackson and Diddy.
Fashion world ``The Devil Wears Prada'' was the surprise film hit of the summer, ``Ugly Betty'' entranced TV viewers and ``Project Runway'' was television's most addictive reality show. Make it work, people.
America Ferrera At the age of 22, Ferrera scored big as Betty Suarez, the fashion-impaired but utterly winning young woman trying to make it in the New York fashion world in ``Ugly Betty.'' It's a classy, nuanced performance by a talented newcomer.
Jennifer Hudson She didn't win ``American Idol,'' and she was dissed by Simon Cowell, but her performance as Effie White in the film version of ``Dreamgirls'' is a winner.
Helen Mirren An Emmy for ``Elizabeth I,'' a sure Oscar nomination for ``The Queen'' and a final blaze of glory as Jane Tennison in ``Prime Suspect.'' Nice year.
`Heroes' The NBC show came out of absolutely nowhere to be the hottest and most-talked-about new series of the fall.
Rachael Ray Four shows on the Food Network, a new magazine, dozens of cookbooks and the hottest new daytime show since ``Dr. Phil.'' Plus, when you're loved and hated with equal passion, you've had an impact.
Martin Scorsese The crafty film director had his biggest hit in years by returning to the mean streets with ``The Departed.''
Meredith Vieira In the ``Today''/``View''/``CBS Evening News'' shuffle, Katie Couric and Rosie O'Donnell got all the attention. Vieira stepped into a tough job on ``The Today Show'' and handled it with class and style.
THE NOT HOT LIST
Kevin (KFed) Federline Yo, dude, the meal ticket has left the building!
`Gilmore Girls' Rarely has a very good TV series fallen so far so fast -- and really irritated its fans in the process.
Nancy Grace Lord High Executioner of CNN's Headline News -- and the most toxic presence in TV news.
Star Jones Reynolds The diva departed ``The View'' amid much uproar. Probably never to be seen or heard from again.
Michael Richards Chalk up the racist rant in a L.A. comedy club to the `` `Seinfeld' curse'' -- or some much deeper problems.
O.J. Simpson Do we really need to explain?
`Snakes On A Plane' The Internet can giveth (big advance hype) and the Internet can taketh away (bad word-of-mouth equals box office bomb).
Wesley Snipes Those federal tax charges are just a really big misunderstanding.
Britney Spears Dumped KFed (good move), picked up Paris Hilton (bad move), flashed the paparazzi and became an instant Web classic (really bad move).
Howard Stern Discovered what happens when your radio act is no longer free for the listening. Not quite reduced to a blip on the radar screen, but getting there.
Kaavya Viswanathan The 19-year-old author of ``How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life'' was the Next Bright Young Literary Thing -- until it turned out she lifted all the good stuff from Megan McCafferty's ``Sloppy Firsts.''
Yahoo Was supposed to be the force in original Web-based entertainment. Didn't happen.
http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/entertainment/columnists/charlie_mccollum/16311669.htm?template=contentModules/printstory.jsp
VisionOn
12-24-06, 06:26 PM
TV Notebook
Field of Dreams
Beloved 'Friday Night' Gets Second Chance on Wednesdays
By Paige Albinak, New York Post December 24, 2006
The rest of "Friday Night Light'"s cast is composed of gorgeous but largely untested kids. The show spends a lot of time with the teenagers both on and off the field, exploring what drives them to excel and what holds them back
After finally catching up with the episodes i recorded, I have to say that the cast is universally great on FNL. The unknown kid actors are especially impressive considering the roles they have to play.
I wish this show was on HBO, where the gritty look and serious tone would be less problematic and hoping it stays on the air from week to week is less of a concern. I just cannot see the typical network audience wanting to sit down to this at 8pm on any week day, when other types of shows in this time slot are largely thoughtless fluff.
Critic’s Notebook
Best of 2006: TV moments
The shows with the biggest buzz never happened
By Joanne Ostrow Denver Post TV Critic
The biggest television moments of the year were those that never were: the O.J. Simpson "confession" interview on Fox, the Madonna "crucifixion" dance on NBC, the takeover of primetime by serialized dramas.
Just like the instant we all tossed out our old TVs and bought high-definition flat screens, they never happened.
Those figments of publicity offer a clue to the direction of popular culture in 2006: There are so many entertainment choices now, it's easier to get buzz than traction.
Katie Couric's jump to CBS produced more anticipation than long-term ratings. MTV's "Real World Denver" generated more blog excitement than actual viewership.
Meredith Vieira's ascent to "Today" and Dan Rather's sidestep to the mini-audience of HDNet were momentary blips. Charles Gibson got the ABC anchor chair, Rosie O'Donnell got the adoration on "The View." Nearly everyone, including Bob Dylan, got a show on satellite radio.
While CBS's "Survivor" made waves by dividing the tribes by race and ethnicity, in the end that development played out as no big deal.
The excitement around serial dramas, hailed as a turning point or even a new golden age for scripted TV, fizzled as "Kidnapped," "Smith," "Vanished," "The Nine" and "Six Degrees" failed to make it through the season. "Lost" slipped in both writing and ratings.
As scripted storytelling faltered, the Hollywood guilds campaigned to get union wages and benefits for writers of reality shows. (You didn't think all those reality shows magically developed plot structure, did you?)
The newly constituted CW fared well enough, rising from the ashes of the WB and UPN. The on-the-cheap telenovelas of MyNetworkTV were universally panned by critics and ignored by audiences.
On the plus side, "Heroes" and "Ugly Betty" proved it's still possible to construct an offbeat hit, as long as the stories are taut, the casting excellent, the direction clever and the timeslot tolerable. Two high potential underachievers, "Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip" and "Friday Night Lights," got reprieves from NBC. ("Lights" will move to Wednesdays in January to get out of the way of "American Idol.")
And the year's one TV catchphrase - "Save the Cheerleader, Save the World" - wisely was retired by "Heroes" before it got old.
The welcome return of Aaron Sorkin, the reunion of Meredith and McDreamy and a first-rate season of "The Wire" gave reason to cheer; the ratings behemoth "Dancing with the Stars" and the ascendancy of cheap-to-produce game shows ("Deal or No Deal," "1 vs. 100," "Show Me the Money," "Identity") gave reason to fear.
The industry clambered aboard the streaming-video bandwagon.
As hits and videoclips migrated to iTunes and YouTube, the way decisions are made at the networks changed abruptly. Now podcasts get Nielsen ratings too. The popularity of NBC's "The Office" on iTunes reportedly kept that show alive.
In 2006, TV stopped worrying and learned to love its digital future.
http://www.denverpost.com/ostrow
dad1153
12-24-06, 07:40 PM
Critic’s Notebook
Best of 2006: TV moments
The shows with the biggest buzz never happened
By Joanne Ostrow Denver Post TV Critic
Uhh, check post #19548 on this same page! :rolleyes:
RussTC3
12-25-06, 12:05 AM
Merry Christmas (Happy Holidays) everyone!!! :)
Cable TV Notebook
Comedy writers aren't laughing about 'Studio 60'
Some in the biz openly disdain the series set at a late-night sketch show.
By Deborah Netburn Los Angeles Times Staff Writer December 25, 2006
It is generally accepted that doctors hate shows about doctors, lawyers hate shows about lawyers, and so on.
So perhaps it's the order of things that many comedic writers appear to hate Aaron Sorkin's "Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip," the dramatic series about a "Saturday Night Live"-like comedy show. But is it natural for them to take such pleasure in it?
Take Ken Levine, a seasoned writer who has worked on "Frasier," "Cheers" and "The Simpsons." His blog, By Ken Levine, has become the hub of an online community of viewers who loathe "Studio 60," thanks to his running commentary on the first several episodes.
"After watching Episode 2 of 'Studio 60' I must let you in on a little secret. People in television, trust me, are not that smart," he wrote. "And they keep talking about how unbelievably talented that Harriet [Sarah Paulson] is. Have you seen evidence of it yet? I haven't. But then again, I'm not that smart."
One week later he was less forgiving, writing, " 'Studio 60' is like the Rand Corporation Think Tank doing a late night sketch show." (Sorkin could not comment on this article because he was on vacation.)
After its debut this past fall, many pop culture commentators were quick to predict the NBC show's imminent cancellation as it steadily lost viewers. But as "Studio 60" enjoys a midseason break over the holidays, with a full-season pickup and the confidence of its broadcaster, for now it looks like there will be plenty of opportunities for comedy writers to continue to riff on their anger to anyone who will listen.
Amelie Gillette, a blogger for the Onion-affiliated A.V. Club website, composed a recent post called "Aaron Sorkin Thinks You're Stupid." In it, she wrote: "So did anyone else watch 'Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip' on Monday? Did anyone else wait a day to write about it so their boiling anger could slow down to a more manageable simmer?"
The love-to-hate feeling is fun for some, profitable for others.
A few months ago, the Los Angeles sketch comedy troupe Employee of the Month put on a show called "Employee of the Month Celebrates the Comedy of Studio 60."
The tag line was serpentinely Sorkin-esque: "A sketch comedy show about a sketch comedy show in a drama about sketch comedy."
Troupe member Megan Lynn said the idea for an evening of sketch devoted entirely to "Studio 60" came about because nobody in the group could talk about anything else for weeks. "Honestly, we were just wasting so much rehearsal time complaining about the show," she said. "We thought, 'We can't shut up about this, other people talk about this, let's put a show together.' "
Lynn has a lot to say about what she thinks "Studio 60" gets wrong, but most important, she doesn't think the sketches are funny. And if the sketches aren't funny, then the entire premise of the show is undermined, since "Studio 60" is a show about the making of the funniest sketch show on television.
The original plan for "Employee of the Month Celebrates the Comedy of Studio 60" was to put on sketches that are referenced as being successful in the show, if not necessarily seen. "We wanted to see if they hold up as comedy sketches, knowing that they wouldn't," said Lynn.
So they put on a commedia dell'arte sketch that was said to have "killed" on "Studio 60's" show within a show, as well as "Nicolas Cage: Couples Counselor," in which an actor played a hyper, desperate Cage as a relationship expert, and the fake game show Science Schmience, based on the premise that religious people won't accept scientific evidence that explains the natural world.
Because Employee of the Month didn't want to make its audience sit through sketches they didn't think were particularly funny, they also had a backstage theme running with references from the show — Matthew Perry's character with a baseball bat, Nate Corddry's character talking about his brother being deployed in Afghanistan and Amanda Peet's character — a network president who got an inordinate amount of media attention because of a DUI eight years in the past — drunk and desperate for friends.
"We realized there was so much we wanted to make fun of," said Lynn.
Sorkin's "West Wing" was meticulously researched and seen as largely accurate about life in Washington: Did the auteur producer-writer raise the bar so high for himself that "Studio 60" is unfairly scrutinized? Is this segment of viewers in Hollywood simply too aware of what "Studio 60" gets wrong to enjoy the show?
One comedy show runner, who asked that her name be withheld, said: "The New Orleans crisis or the war has never touched my life in television."
"They never laugh," Levine said of the show's characters. "We laugh all the time. It is the one saving grace of the job."
"The fact that they don't seem to know how a sketch comedy show like 'SNL' is written, that needs to be remedied," said Joe Reid, who recaps "Studio 60" each week for Television Without Pity. "It doesn't seem authentic at all."
Gillette said Sorkin's approach to comedy just seems off. "He wants to get big ideas across and change people's minds," she said. "No comedians work that way. They go for the laughs first and the lesson second."
In contrast, all of these nitpicking writers and comedians seem to like "30 Rock," the Tina Fey sitcom on NBC that is also about the making of a "Saturday Night Live"-esque show.
"Even though it's essentially a cartoon, '30 Rock' is still a more realistic look at what behind-the-scenes life on 'SNL' is like," said Levine. "And it's worth watching just for Alec Baldwin."
Lynn said, " '30 Rock' isn't offensive at all.... When they do sketches, they're not thinly veiled opportunities for political commentary, they're goofy, 'SNL'-like sketches, which is appropriate for the show."
But a former "Saturday Night Live" employee, now a screenwriter and director who has stopped watching "Studio 60" and "30 Rock," said both shows gloss over everything that happens at the real late-night comedy show. "That place is so dark, they could never show what actually happens there," he said.
http://www.calendarlive.com/tv/cl-et-studio25dec25,0,2144239,print.story?coll=cl-tv-features
TV Notebook
Sizzling a Year Ago, but Now Pfffft ...
By Bill Carter The New York Times December 25, 2006
The telenovela, the steamy low-budget soap opera genre that has become the staple of television programming in Spanish-speaking countries, lives on its sudden bursts of uncontrollable — and loudly acted — passion.
Maybe that was what was burning in the hearts of network executives in New York about this time last year when, seemingly out of the blue, many of them announced a rush to begin developing a new form of programming for the summer: the American telenovela.
“It’s right to characterize what we were all caught up in last year as telenovela fever,” said Katherine Pope, the executive vice president of NBC Entertainment.
The ardor has apparently cooled. In the 12 months since news reports revealed that CBS was working on as many as seven scripts for telenovelas, that ABC had invested in as many as 45 existing telenovela storylines, and NBC was jumping in to adapt telenovelas already produced by Telemundo, the Spanish-language network that NBC owns, not much more has been said — or done. Not a single telenovela project has been put into production by any of those networks.
The networks’ intense interest in the telenovela genre was sparked by the need to find alternative, inexpensive programming in the summer to replace the round of repeats. Telenovelas are made cheaply in Spanish-speaking countries, for only a fraction of the $2 million to $3 million an episode that network dramas cost.
Once into development, however, financial realities began to set in. The networks discovered they would only alienate their viewers if they tried to make the shows of distinctly lesser quality than their regular shows. They also discovered that the production schedules required to grind out so many episodes in such a short time would be daunting. Most telenovelas shoot as many as 40 pages of script in a day; the conventional network drama seldom does more than about 15 (each page equals about one minute of screen time).
“The economics still have to be figured out,” Ms. Pope conceded.
ABC, has of course, added a new hit prime-time series called “Ugly Betty,” which is based on one of the most popular telenovelas ever produced. But nobody, certainly not its executive producer, Ben Silverman, considers the American “Betty” a true telenovela as the genre is commonly understood — that is, a stylized short-run series with a definitive ending, about 13 weeks long, broadcast in several episodes a week.
“We originally conceived the show as a true telenovela,” Mr. Silverman said, “but it got shifted by ABC to a regular hourlong drama series.” He added that the expensive look of the “Betty” series, which is set in the glamorous world of New York couture magazines, could never have been fashioned on the budget of a real telenovela.
“We could never have shot in New York,” Mr. Silverman said. “We could never have gotten a star like America Ferrara,” he added, referring to the actress in the title role.
Though versions of “Ugly Betty” have played as straight telenovelas around the world, in countries as far flung as Germany, India and Israel, the ABC adaptation is a regular highly produced, episodic network series.
If you want to see what an American version of a telenovela looks like, you would have to have tuned in this fall to one of the stations on the mini-network called MyNetworkTV (MNT), a collection of television stations (including Channel 9 in New York), mainly owned by the News Corporation. The stations were orphaned last winter when their old network, UPN, combined with its competitor, the WB, to form the CW network.
Not that many people have tuned in. MNT has so far tried four telenovelas, including one, “Fashion House,” starring the former sirens Bo Derek and Morgan Fairchild (complete with catfight between them), and another, the current “Wicked Wicked Games,” starring Tatum O’Neal.
Running two episodes at a time five nights a week, the network has thus far made little noise with any of its telenovelas. Ratings for MNT’s telenovelas in the 18- to 49-year-old audience, the primary market for most broadcasters, have been negligible. They have been scoring about half a national rating point — or less — which translates to about 650,000 viewers in that group (compared with 8 million to 10 million viewers for a hit show in the same period).
“Obviously we’re not pleased with the ratings,” said Paul Buccieri, senior vice president of Twentieth Television, the production studio that supplies programming to MNT. (The studio is mainly the syndication arm for the Fox Broadcasting Company.) But Mr. Buccieri emphasized that the ratings have not diminished that network’s conviction that telenovelas would work with American audiences.
“We’re still definitely enthusiastic about the genre,” he said.
MNT’s experience has contributed to the slackening of interest among the big networks. Program executives at one network confirmed that the low ratings for MNT’s telenovelas put a chill on their own plans. Mr. Buccieri said that MyNetworkTV has learned many lessons in trying to make the form work, including adding cost-saving techniques like hand-held cameras. MNT has two more telenovelas in production to fill the gap when the current ones leave off.
Longer term, there are questions about whether the network can stay committed to giving up all its prime-time hours to the genre if the ratings do not improve. Reality shows and game shows would be considerably cheaper.
Still, if MNT connects on even one telenovela, it may reinvigorate the passion for them among the major networks.
Executives at ABC, CBS and NBC all said they still have some telenovela projects in development. Mr. Silverman, who continues to option rights to telenovelas made in Latin America, remains a firm believer. “I think someone should give it a shot,” he said.
Ms. Pope said NBC would almost surely stay in the telenovela game, for several reasons, beginning with its association with Telemundo. NBC owns the rights to all the telenovelas that play on that network (and that is almost the only kind of programming Telemundo does). If NBC did commit to a telenovela, it would shoot it in Miami, where Telemundo is based, finding economies by using that network’s studio and sets.
And then there is the interest of Jeff Zucker, the chief executive of NBC Universal Television. Ms. Pope said, “I personally believe we will definitely make a telenovela. Jeff grew up in Miami, he’s seen the form and he’s very dedicated to it.”
She added that many advertisers have also expressed interest in the genre and had indicated a willingness to sponsor a telenovela if a network decided to produce one.
“Ultimately, we are the best-positioned network to get one done quickly,” Ms. Pope said.
But not very quickly. “I’m not sure when you’ll see one,” she said. “It’s really unlikely anyone will make one as soon as next summer.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/25/business/media/25telenovela.html?_r=1&oref=slogin&ref=business&pagewanted=print
TV Notebook
Past, present and … future?
Are Carson Daly and Ryan Seacrest engaged in a fizzy rivalry to replace you-know-who?
By Scott Collins Los Angeles Times staff writer December 25, 2006
Carson Daly and Ryan Seacrest are roughly the same age (early 30s), have similar job descriptions (broadcasters/emcees-turned-producers with a pop-music bent) and even favor the same fashionably laid-back, I-didn't-shave-this-morning look. But Daly dismisses any notion that the pair is engaged in a fizzy rivalry to replace you-know-who.
"Dick Clark is a huge inspiration for the huge success he's achieved," Daly said in a recent interview. "But that's where I stop. The world is changing. I'm young; I have my own thoughts as a producer. I'm not trying to keep his tradition. I'm trying to do my own."
So, there you go: It's purely coincidental that Daly and Seacrest will be back Sunday night for their second annual New Year's Eve programming duel, which threatens to become an annual rite as the 77-year-old Clark — another broadcaster-turned-producer who made his name breaking pop-music acts in TV — continues his recovery from a 2004 stroke.
Clark, of course, has repackaged the Times Square madness for the homebound masses nearly every Dec. 31 since 1972, when he was considered the youthful interloper horning in on the turf of Guy Lombardo, the bandleader who popularized "Auld Lang Syne."
This year, Seacrest, Clark's heir apparent as well as Simon Cowell's sparring partner on "American Idol," will again do the heavy lifting in the booth for "Dick Clark's New Year's Rockin' Eve 2007," ABC's 3 1/2-hour extravaganza starting at 10 p.m. The chief competition will consist of "NBC's New Year's Eve With Carson Daly, Presented by Chevrolet," which starts at 11:30 p.m. ("Presented by Chevrolet?" That could furnish Alec Baldwin's unctuous GE executive with a nifty little scene on an upcoming episode of "30 Rock.")
Last year's "Rockin' Eve" was Clark's first national TV appearance since the stroke, which he admitted to viewers had left him "in bad shape": "My speech is not perfect, but I'm getting there," he added.
Newspaper and blog opinion was divided on the wisdom of having the former "American Bandstand" host crop up on the show when he was visibly unsteady and sometimes difficult to understand; for perhaps the first time in his career, the preternaturally youthful Clark couldn't beat time. But his condition seemed to have improved a bit when he turned up for a short tribute at the Emmys in August, and he's saved himself at least a small role again on this year's "Rockin' Eve."
"He is the most comfortable and at ease when doing these shows," Seacrest explained in an interview. "These shows are like kids to him, his babies." (Seacrest speaks of "Rockin' Eve" with the pride of a scion taking over the family business: "It's a heritage operation," he said.)
But really, why all this TV succession drama on New Year's Eve? Can't the networks just take the night off? Aren't there too few sober people planted on their sofas for television execs to bother with, anyway?
To answer the last two: no and no.
Broadcasters started tussling for exclusive rights to the nation's No. 1 party night almost as soon as the medium was invented. Lombardo's radio telecasts from New York, which started in 1929, proved so popular that an unusual agreement was struck for CBS to broadcast the first part up until midnight, when NBC would take over.
The holiday's importance has since grown along with the media industry, which seldom misses an opportunity these days to lock down viewer loyalty. Last year's ratings make it depressingly clear that when the last night of the year rolls around, many of us still have nothing better to do than ... yes, watch more TV.
The one-hour block of "Rockin' Eve" that started at 11:35 p.m. last year averaged 20.1 million total viewers, according to Nielsen Media Research — a large audience by any yardstick, and gargantuan by the standards of late-night TV. Daly's show, clearly the underdog, averaged 7.3 million viewers during the same period. That's still impressive when you remember that NBC's No. 1 rated "Tonight Show With Jay Leno" typically averages about 5 million.
Planting the flag on New Year's "really brands a network," said Tim Brooks, a TV historian and executive vice president of research at Lifetime Entertainment. "It helps promote and drive people to other programs. It's one of the things that makes networks special to people." And you can't get any cheaper programming-wise than training live cameras on drunk revelers at 44th Street and Broadway. Times Square on New Year's Eve might be the original reality show.
"Rockin' Eve" essentially consists of two parts: musical performances, some taped in advance, and the dropping of the ball, which viewers see live in the Eastern and Central time zones. The producers put a premium on big "gets"; last year Mariah Carey, the queen of mainstream pop, was the headline attraction. Sunday's roster includes the Carey-esque diva Christina Aguilera, country pop group Rascal Flatts and hip-hop queen Fergie. "It's a little bit of a circus," said Larry Klein, the program's executive producer.
Someday, Seacrest will presumably take over the franchise completely. But he's aware that at the moment the fancy car he drives is borrowed rather than bought. Of Clark, he said: "He and I have a great relationship. Whatever he wants to do, whether he wants to do more or less than last year, I'll do it."
Daly, former host of MTV's "TRL" and current host of NBC's late-night talkfest "Last Call," is going after a cooler, hipper vibe on his New Year's Eve show, which is decidedly not a heritage operation. The tunes will come from alternative rockers like Panic! at the Disco and OK Go, acts probably found on far fewer iPods than Fergie. The Daly camp doesn't take long to cast some college-rock aspersions at "Rockin' Eve:" "I mean, how many times have I heard Fergie sing 'Superlicious' or whatever she sings?" said David Friedman, Daly's executive producer. (Daly's cool cred isn't totally intact, though: Shortly before last year's show, the gossip blog Defamer leaked a transcript of NBC's script and then, for good measure, ripped Daly and Seacrest as "arguably talent-free.")
But the more important goal, Daly said, is to cover the Times Square party as a unique live story. So NBC will deliberately tone down the music to focus more on the crowds, the confetti, the insanity of it all. "There's this huge event happening that night," Daly said. "Why take eyeballs away from that?"
Of course, Daly has some way to go before his program poses a serious ratings threat to "Rockin' Eve." But he's willing to take the long view. After all, the odds at one time looked pretty bad for Dick Clark's assault on Fort Lombardo.
"It's about us staking a claim," Daly said, "and trying to build a tradition."
http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/tv/cl-et-channel25dec25,1,2594227,print.story?coll=la-headlines-entnews
dad1153
12-25-06, 05:33 AM
Godfather of Soul James Brown has passed away on Christmas Day: http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/arts/AP-Obit-Brown.html?hp&ex=1167109200&en=7b2c52eb394d9620&ei=5094&partner=homepage. Very upsetting to lose such a legend, one that shined on any TV appearance he did (even if it was in late night comedy shows via his arrest mug) as well as concerts and such.
:( :( :(
dad1153
12-25-06, 05:49 AM
TV Notebook
No slowing down for this globe-trotter
By Gail Shister, Philadelphia Enquirer December 24, 2006
Tom Brokaw doesn't feel old enough to be a hall of famer.
"I don't think you think of yourself as being of that age," says NBC's Brokaw, 66, who recently was inducted into the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences' Hall of Fame in L.A.
"You have to stop and calibrate your years in this business. (He has 44.) It doesn't make me feel old. For our generation, there's something called `the new old.' It means at 66, you play at about 52 or 53."
And if you're Tom Brokaw, you climb mountains in Tibet and go whitewater rafting in Chile. Without messing up a strand of your perfect anchor hair.
"Tom Brokaw Reports: In the Shadow of the American Dream" (8 p.m. Tuesday), about illegal immigration, is his sixth hour-long documentary since passing the "NBC Nightly News" baton to Brian Williams two years ago.
Brokaw reports from historically white Aspen and Vail, Colo., where an influx of Hispanics, mostly from Mexico, have taken construction jobs and filled the local schools, churches and clinics.
To Brokaw, America's "computer narcosis" is fueling the flood of illegals, making us soft and disdainful of hard physical work.
"Americans lead such `virtual' lives, we're not living real lives," he says. "We don't see anything in the popular culture celebrating hard work. It's all about flash and making big bucks on Wall Street."
Brokaw's biggest surprise: "There are very good jobs American kids don't want to take - $15- to $16-an-hour summer construction jobs I would have killed for in high school. They don't want to work that hard or do grunt work. They want computer work."
Americans have gotten flabby "by spending all our time riffing through Google and other Web sites. To what end? You're not going to solve the world's problems by hitting the delete button. You're not going to solve Islamic rage by clicking `help' on the toolbar."
Back to the Hall of Fame, where Brokaw's fellow inductees included famed director James Burrows ("Cheers"), daytime yakker Regis Philbin, and actor William Shatner. Exiled CBS anchor Dan Rather was inducted in 2004; ABC's late Peter Jennings has yet to make the cut.
"I'm not a big awards person," Brokaw says. "This one, I suppose, is kind of a capstone, particularly since it was awarded in California, where my network career began (at NBC-owned KNBC in L.A.) and (former NBC chairman) Grant Tinker was in the audience."
Even with his vigorous lifestyle and circle of younger friends, Brokaw insists he's in no danger of becoming hip. His three grown daughters are, though, and they give tips to the old man, he says.
"When I was a young man, I thought 66-year-olds dressed differently," Brokaw muses. "Now I dress like my kids. I wear running shorts. I wear jeans a lot. I stay younger because the culture is more accessible, in a way."
Despite repeated efforts to cut back his globe-trotting schedule, he shows no signs of slowing down.
Two weeks ago, the "Greatest Generation" author was keynote speaker at the 65th-
anniversary ceremonies at Pearl Harbor. This week, he'll be inducted into another Hall of Fame - at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism at Arizona State University.
Next month, Brokaw and his wife, Meredith, will track gorillas in Rwanda. In July, he'll be in Alaska to report on global warming.
"I don't think about being 66 now," he says. "But sometimes, I wake up with a start and think, `God, 66, I can't believe it."
IN THE SHADOW OF THE AMERICAN DREAM
What: Tom Brokaw looks at the debate over immigration and its impact on the economy.
Where: NBC (Channel 4).
When: 8 p.m. Tuesday.
http://www.dailynews.com/tv/ci_4896148
dad1153
12-25-06, 09:52 AM
(Reality) TV Notebook
Rural mothers are learning lines for TV
In depressed areas of the Midwest and South, stay-at-home workers happily transcribe reality show footage
By P.J. Huffstutter, Los Angeles Times December 25, 2006
SWEET SPRINGS, MO. — When Marsha Snider tried to find a job earlier this year near this rural town of 1,550, she vied with hundreds of unemployed factory workers in the region — all hungry for a way to help their families make ends meet.
But a few months ago, the mother of six found opportunity in an unexpected place: Hollywood.
Now, she sits in front of her computer and spends her days transcribing thousands of hours of raw videotape footage filmed by the producers of reality TV shows — noting every verbal gaffe, random profanity and blush-inducing act.
The producers then use Snider's transcriptions as a way of sifting a mountain of location footage, and begin to piece together the show's story line.
"I never used to watch those shows. Now I'm hooked because I see all the behind-the-scenes stuff," said Snider, 37. "I never thought I'd say this, but Hollywood actually has helped ensure that my husband and I can make our mortgage payments, and buy Christmas gifts this year."
She's not alone. Snider is now one of 60 housewives and stay-at-home moms, mostly in economically depressed regions in the Midwest and the South, who work for Teresis Media Management Inc.
The Santa Ana technology firm was founded by Keri DeWitt, who grew up in this part of Missouri, about an hour east of Kansas City.
When she started her company in 2003, DeWitt initially chose the same path of other U.S. companies eager for cheap labor and contracted with a firm in India to handle the work.
After all, she said, bigger technology corporations have relied on a global workforce for decades; and recent advances in telecommunications have made it possible for smaller firms and start-up businesses like Teresis to do the same.
But she said she soon realized that outsourcing such transcription work, which relies heavily on accuracy and often comes with tight deadlines, was a mind-boggling chore that didn't end up saving her money in the end.
"I'd get back transcriptions that left out great gaps in conversation, or the workers simply couldn't understand the American colloquialisms and slang, such as 'back in the day' or 'y'all,' " DeWitt said. "If they didn't know the name of a town, they'd spell it out phonetically. And if someone had a thick accent — a Bronx accent, or a Southern accent, or a hard Northeastern accent — they simply couldn't do the work."
Trying to figure out a solution, DeWitt talked to friends and family in her hometown of Marshall, Mo. She learned that there was a dearth of jobs, particularly for mothers who wanted to work from home.
When DeWitt was growing up, her own mother worked two jobs: a day shift in a convenience store and a night shift at a fabric-dye factory. In 1989, her mother fell asleep while driving home from the factory job and was killed when she hit another car head-on.
"I knew that there were a lot of women back home in the same financial situation; people who used to be really solid middle class are having to stretch to survive," DeWitt said. "I thought that if this had been available to my mom, she wouldn't have had to work those crazy hours. So if I could send these jobs to India, why couldn't I send them back to my hometown?"
Last winter, DeWitt began recruiting staff with the help of the Central Missouri Technology and Skills Training Center in Marshall.
The requirements were simple: Workers needed to have high-speed Internet access, a computer and an electronic foot pedal to pause the footage when they needed a break.
And in the hyper-competitive world of reality TV, each Telesis worker must sign a nondisclosure agreement, barring them from discussing with others what they see.
Many of these firms are small and specialize in shows broadcast on cable channels, DeWitt said. LMNO Productions, which has tapped Telesis' transcribers to work on shows such as "Lance Armstrong: Running for Life" for the Learning Channel, will send the footage to the Orange County firm.
The rural transcribers then log into Telesis' secure database and download the footage onto their own computers. The video slowly plays back across the top of their monitor. Then, editing software allows the transcribers to type notes on each movement they see on the screen.
Though each tape is different, many are 30 minutes to an hour long; the transcribers usually have two days to finish a single tape.
"There's a difference between someone understanding American dialects and someone who understands English," said Jeff Rice, senior vice president of post-production for Encino-based LMNO.
"If you have an editor that's trying to find that one moment where a person said a particular word, and you have 1,000 hours of tape to search, you want to make sure the transcribers understand our accents well enough to spell words correctly."
In March, DeWitt hired fewer than a dozen women.
As the number of production companies and reality shows grew, so did the number of jobs in Missouri — as did word of the work. Earlier this year, one of Snider's closest friends, Crystal Stauch, 28, joined up. So did Stauch's mom, Carolyn Pearson, 52.
"Sometimes, it's completely boring: a shot of a building, or a bunch of feet walking back and forth in front of the camera," Stauch said. "Though sometimes it's shocking what you can hear and see: People smoking drugs, or talk about a person's gay partner, or a lot of profanity. When it gets really bad like that, I just note that it's bad language and move on."
Most of Telesis' workers hail from Missouri, and many of them are in the same situation as Snider. Her husband was laid off this year when his company, a small manufacturer of horse trailers, went out of business.
It took several months for him to land a new job, so "having this financial buffer made the difference between being able to pay the bills and having enough money to buy our eldest daughter her high school class ring," Snider said.
By many standards, the pay is modest.
Transcribers are paid 7 cents a line, so the more footage they wade through and the faster they type, the higher their pay. Pearson estimates that she's pulling in $8 an hour.
"I'm old and I'm slow," said Pearson, who also holds down a full-time job with a multicounty employment agency. "Then again, I'm only using this as extra income to pay down my medical bills."
Stauch and Snider say they're pleased to be averaging $15 an hour — taking home as much as $2,000 a month.
In a town where the median household income is about $34,000, and the median price of a house is just a bit more than $47,000, "people here consider that huge money," Snider said. "No, the job doesn't come with benefits. No, there's no retirement. But at least this work is fun and gives us a flexible work schedule. Besides, what are our other options?"
http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/tv/la-na-transcribers25dec25,1,3915271.story?coll=la-entnews-tv
dad1153
12-25-06, 10:10 AM
If you're like me (perish the thought!) then you've wondered what those kids from the YouTube clip screaming when they get a videogame system for Christmas (which has been shown on the likes of 'Regis & Kelly,' 'The Tonight Show' and 'Jimmy Kimmel Live') think now that the clip has taken a life of its own as a TV commercial. Alas, my Christmas prayers have been answered! :rolleyes:
TV Advertising
Yes! YouTube kids living the scream
By Peter Kadushin, New York Daily News December 25, 2006
They are the kids you either love or hate - pajama-clad siblings maniacally tearing open gifts on Christmas morning in a recent BMW commercial.
The home video - which was shot eight years ago and discovered on YouTube.com - features 9-year-old Brandon Kuzma shredding gold wrapping paper with his 6-year-old sister, Rachel.
"Nintendo 64! Oh, my god!" Brandon screeches, followed by ear-splitting cheers from Rachel. Then the two blond-haired kids pump their fists in the air, shrieking, "Yes! Yes! Yes!"
Thanks to the ubiquitous ad, the Kuzma kids have found a notoriety they never could have imagined when doting dad Tom trained his video camera on them in 1998.
"We film the family all the time, and we could have never imagined one of the tapes being so popular online," said mom Lori Kuzma.
"It was just like any other Christmas - they just had a stronger reaction," she added.
Brandon, who is now a 17-year-old high school student, put the video on his Web site to share with friends and family, and it wound up on YouTube, the superpopular Internet video clearinghouse.
The next thing they knew, they were stars. Within months, the clip had racked up millions of views - and drawn the attention of advertising execs.
"I had no idea this would happen," said Brandon.
"I thought I would put it on my site, and we could all laugh about it. I was confused when I saw it on YouTube, and when I found out BMW wanted to use it for a commercial, I was just shocked," he added.
The luxury-car company bought the rights to the footage for an undisclosed sum, and has been running the ad nationally since Nov. 21.
"The commercial is so awesome," said Rachel, now 14 and in eighth grade. "I just can't believe it