Hot Off The Press: The Latest TV News and Information - Page 1050

Trump's EGO is SO BIG that it really doesn't matter WHAT anyone says about him or puts on TV or the internet about him... So long as he gets to see his face in the paper, online or on TV, his EGO is STROKED!

If someone could bottle his ego and use it as a glue, they could put Elmer's out of business!

DTV Notes
Telling the Never-Ending DTV Story
Finding New Ways to Cover the Transition Poses a Challenge to Newsroom Staffs
By Daisy Whitney, TV Week.com, March 9, 2009

Not only are stations around the country in the midst of shedding their analog signals forever, their news departments are tasked with creatively covering the drawn-out digital transition in their newscasts, too.

The massive shift from the analog world to the crisp clear digital one is a major news event, but the fact is it’s been under way for a few years now and will continue to play out until all stations flip the switch to digital on June 12. Finding innovative ways to cover the transition is increasingly a challenge.

CBS-owned Philadelphia station KYW-TV recently tried something different. It conducted a training session with local Boy Scout leaders to teach them how to hook up converter boxes, then covered that initiative as a news story in late February.

Scouts’ Honor

Philadelphia-area Boy Scout leaders will be assisting viewers who need help with going digital, particularly seniors and the disabled, explained Mike Nelson, spokesman for the 29-member CBS Television Stations group, which will flip the switch in June.

The entire group has extensively covered the transition and will continue to do so for the next few months. “All of our stations have been airing half-hour specials hosted by their local anchors and reporters,” he said, adding the stations “have been participating in soft analog shutoff tests to help viewers determine if all of their TVs are prepared for the transition to digital.”

Mr. Nelson said the CBS-owned stations have presented detailed stories about converter boxes—“who needs them, who doesn’t and how to install them”—and regular updates regarding the coupon program. Many stations also have assembled phone banks to answer viewer questions about the transition, he said.

San Francisco’s ABC-owned station KGO-TV, which will turn off its analog feed in June, has been producing “what you need to know” reports.

The station’s DTV coverage has been led by consumer reporter Michael Finney. “He’s done the stories explaining the transition and is the one who does the DTV tests that we’ve been running marketwide,” said Kevin Keeshan, the station’s news director. “We did three live tests prior to Feb. 17. We have three more live tests across three dayparts scheduled between now and June 12.”

NBC-owned KNTV in the San Francisco Bay Area has produced half-hour specials devoted to the digital transition, as have most stations in the Fox group.

The Fox station group has been including stories in its newscasts on how to hook up converter boxes, too. In addition, the group is leaning on the station’s local Web sites as resources for ongoing information and how-to content on the transition.

Broadly speaking, Fox-owned WNYW in New York has produced reports touting the benefits of switching to digital television from the station’s technology reporter Brett Larson, who also appeared on “The View” recently to discuss the transition. Sister station WWOR has run “do it yourself” pieces to show viewers how to outfit their TV sets for the digital transition.

More Information Online

On the Web, the Fox-owned New York stations feature more detail, such as the timeline of the transition, reasons for the DTV conversion, who will be affected, how to determine if you have a digital tuner, what to do if it is not ready for the conversion, how to obtain converter box coupons and what antenna is right for you. Visitors will find DTV answers in English and Spanish, links to manufacturers’ DTV sites, a countdown clock and a tutorial from Mr. Larson.

Even broadcasters that shut off their analog signals last month continue to produce reports on the transition. Fort Myers, Fla., CBS affiliate WINK-TV is still running stories on how to tune in the digital channels, said Greg Stetson, the station’s programming director. That follows months of coverage in advance of the original switch date, he said.

“Most stations went far above and beyond to lay out how it all works, and what to expect,” said Tom Petner, editor of the Web site TVSpy.com. “The question, of course, is how many people absorbed it all. Judging from what I can see in the local market, the transition so far has been pretty smooth.”

http://www.tvweek.com/news/2009/03/t...ing_dtv_st.php

DTV Notes
Mixed-Up Signals
Broadcasters Still Need to Inform Confused Consumers About DTV Any Way They Can
By Hillary Atkin Special to TelevisionWeek, TV Week.com, March 8, 2009

Despite the recent delay of the U.S. digital television transition from Feb. 17 until June 12, television stations across the country are still trying to answer consumers’ many questions, using their own airwaves and just about any other means available to them.

Questions persist about old TV sets, new antennas, coupons for converter boxes and what it all means for the viewing audience affected by the switchover from analog signals.

The Nielsen Co. estimates about 4.4% of homes, or nearly 5 million American households, aren’t ready for the change that will happen when stations turn off their analog signals and begin broadcasting solely in digital. (The Federal Communications Commission says about a third of the nation’s full-power stations have already gone all-digital.)

“We are really trying to give viewers as much information on how the transition impacts their lives and answer whatever questions they might have,” said Mark Ginther, news director of Seattle’s KING-TV, which has run many enterprise feature stories on the transition in the past year and a half.

Reporter Glenn Farley, who normally covers the aviation and technology industries at KING, has made the DTV transition his beat, contributing at least a dozen stories about it since 2007. The consumer unit also has done reports on purchasing new TV sets and how to properly dispose of old ones.

“We have transitioned from doing stories on the basic converter box to actually getting the signal,” Mr. Farley said. “Most of the stories moving forward will be focused in that direction.”

The Seattle market is what Mr. Farley calls “terrain-challenged,” because of the mountain ranges in the broadcast coverage area, making it difficult for some residents to receive a clear digital signal.

In a recent piece, he went out in the field in Olympia, Wash., with an antenna installer who measured the signal in various hilltop neighborhoods. In some areas, there was no signal at all, meaning residents there may have to erect taller towers or buy special antennas.

Beyond telecasting the DTV message, Mr. Farley and other KING staffers have participated in a number of public hearings on the transition, most organized by the city of Seattle in an effort to reach out to diverse populations, including those who don’t speak English.

In addition, the station has participated with other broadcasters in the market in synchronous digital signal testing during morning, evening and weekend newscasts—and then manning phone banks to answer viewer questions about the transition.

“The phones would just light up,” Mr. Farley said. “The response from viewers has gone up as the deadline approached. I don’t know how you could have missed this.”

“We’ve learned a lot ourselves,” Mr. Ginther said. “Portable radios that have TV sound on them won’t receive it after the conversion happens. In an emergency, if the cable or satellite goes out in severe weather, it may be important to have a converter box in the house.”

In the nation’s two largest markets, New York and Los Angeles, most of the major stations have been broadcasting a digital signal for 10 years now.

New York City stations recently mobilized to get out the word on the “official” transition under the aegis of the Metropolitan Television Alliance, a group formed after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks to coordinate efforts among broadcasters to replace facilities that were destroyed.

“We got seven local anchors of the 5 and 6 p.m. news to hold a press conference with Mayor Bloomberg to talk about how people could get coupons and what they had to do to prepare with the right kind of antenna in order to get covered by all the stations,” said Saul Shapiro, president of the Metropolitan Television Alliance.

“Having the mayor involved almost guarantees coverage. Also, because of his TV background with his own cable channel, he knew exactly what it was about and what it entailed,” Mr. Shapiro said. “He was the best advocate of the coming transition and simple things to prepare for.”

At KNBC-TV in Los Angeles, the primary focus of its news stories also has been making sure people knew what steps needed to be taken.

“The way people watched TV for years would change, and we have tried to give some clarity to the whole issue,” said Keith Esparros, KNBC’s assistant news director.

Mr. Esparros said there was a lot of viewer confusion between two informational Web sites, www.dtv.gov, run by the government, and www.dtv.com, which is a commercial site that sells products.

“Our goal is fairly simple. We didn’t want anyone to be without TV, with an uninterrupted stream of news, information and entertainment, from a public service or even a selfish point of view,” Mr. Esparros said.

KNBC also has done stories on disposing old television sets, from donating them to senior centers and other facilities to safely recycling them.

“We understand how difficult this transition is, and people may not understand the complexity,” said Mr. Esparros. “Changing the way millions of people watch TV is daunting. Even with the amount of PSAs on the newscast, and the live demos we’ve done, still hundreds of thousands didn’t get the message, which is part of the reason the current administration delayed the transition.”

http://www.tvweek.com/news/2009/03/mixedup_signals.php

DTV Notes
NBC Goes 'Nonstop' on Subchannel
Stations Try Various Genres to Fill Additional Channels on Digital Spectrum
By Daisy Whitney, TV Week.com, March 8, 2009

In the latest digital news programming initiative for local broadcasters, NBC’s flagship station WNBC-TV in New York is launching a 24-hour local information and lifestyle subchannel today.

The new subchannel, dubbed “New York Nonstop,” has the potential to reach 5.7 million digital homes in the New York area, NBC said.

Programming the digital spectrum has been an ongoing challenge for local stations, which, thanks to the demise of the analog signal, now own more television real estate than they know what to do with.

Several digital subchannels can be created in the bandwidth space previously used by analog channels, enabling stations to carry one or more types of programming or services on the same frequency.

While stations aren’t required to program the new subchannels, some are experimenting with niche programming fare, such as sports networks and movie channels, while others are choosing to run additional news on the digital tier since news is a low-cost programming option.

NBC said “New York Nonstop” will debut on subchannel 4.2, with advertisers on board sponsoring local entertainment, lifestyle, event and news coverage.

WNBC marquee talent Chuck Scarborough will anchor a 7 p.m. hourlong newscast on the digital channel that will be an expanded version of the half-hour news he anchors on the main station. The reformatted version for the digital subchannel will afford time for more in-depth interviews with newsmakers, NBC said.

Mr. Scarborough’s name recognition and following may help boost viewership in the early days.

“We’re branching out to multiple platforms, and we want to continue to evolve and grow our business and ensure we have long-term viability,” said Anna Carbonell, spokeswoman for the station. “We’re realigning ourselves around content because viewers have changed and they have different habits and we had to change.”

The launch also dovetails with a bigger push on the part of NBC to remake its stations into hyper-local destinations, whether on-air or on the Web.

In the face of declining viewership and shrinking ad dollars, NBC revamped its local Web sites late last year into culture, lifestyle and news destinations for their markets. “New York Nonstop” is emblematic of that broader philosophy at the station group.

Producers at WNBC will program specifically for “New York Nonstop,” which also will run news and weather every 15 minutes. “New York Nonstop” will lean on Web video creators, independent producers and filmmakers to help fill the space on the channel.

In addition, NBC will run programs from LX.tv, a local lifestyle content producer that NBC purchased a year ago for its New York-centric programs such as “1st Look New York” and “Open House NYC.”

Digital news channels are not new to NBC. The media company’s Los Angeles station, KNBC-TV, debuted one of the first news efforts for the digital tier three years ago with “News Raw,” a weekday program that gives KNBC viewers a look into the newsroom, complete with editorial meetings and the process of producing broadcast news.

The news service runs on digital channel 4.2 in Los Angeles and features viewer-submitted photos and videos, in-depth interviews with political figures and local bloggers, and live feeds of major press conferences in the city. “News Raw” is staffed by one reporter, who pulls double duty for the main channel.

Other broadcasters around the country also are firing up extensions of their news franchises to the digital sphere.

Chambers Communications-owned ABC affiliate KEZI-TV in Eugene, Ore., launched a 24-hour local news channel on its digital subchannel 9.2 in January. The new service is called “KEZI Nonstop News” and is billed as western Oregon’s only 24-hour local news channel.

KEZI launched the news channel as an alternative to the entertainment-centric digital subchannels some of its competitors introduced, the station said. The digital subchannel builds off of an initiative started last fall to offer 10 minutes of nonstop news and weather during evening and late news broadcasts, KEZI said.

News is also a familiar format for advertisers. While stations are getting their feet wet with selling ad space in subchannels, news can be a good fit because it’s a natural extension of a station’s brand.

But some stations aren’t focused on selling spots on their subchannels. KNBC isn’t selling ads in “News Raw” and doesn’t have any plans to do so, said Robert Long, VP and news director for KNBC.

“News Raw” is a research and development facility for the newsroom, he said. On for five hours each afternoon, “News Raw” yields material for the newscasts and the Web site and also gives KNBC a sandbox in which to try new things.

As an example, the main channel’s newscasts are now using “News Raw” host Mekahlo Medina’s tech tools, including Skype video and Webcams, for interviews, Mr. Long said.

“News is the only department that produces anything at most TV stations, so anything that gets on TV will probably come out of news,” Mr. Long said. “Clearly news departments had to find new distribution systems for their products. It wasn’t that people weren’t consuming news, but they were bypassing the traditional ways.”

It’s unclear how many people watch “News Raw” because digital subchannels aren’t rated by Nielsen.

Expect more news efforts on digital subchannels, said Tom Petner, editor of broadcast news Web site TVSpy.com. Many stations are aiming to create multimedia staffs who can work across platforms, including on digital channels and the Internet, he explained.

“You’re seeing within the larger groups an effort to reshape and reorganize staffs so they can take advantage of these new digital opportunities, including those new channels,” he said. “This is obviously not the best time for advertising or ad placement, but then again, you do have a certain economy of scale with your staff and there’s a huge opportunity to target your content, much like Cablevision does with their News12 operations through the metro New York area.”

Some local stations are programming their digital subchannels with sports. Most of the stations in the NBC-owned group run Olympic sports-centric channel Universal Sports on one of their subchannels.

In addition, many broadcasters have opted to run AccuWeather’s local weather channels on the digital tier. NBC previously offered a digital weather channel in WeatherPlus, but shut down that service late last year.

http://www.tvweek.com/news/2009/03/n...subchannel.php

DTV Notes
NTIA Whittles Coupon 'Queue' to 3.4 Million
Requests being processed at about 400,000 per weekday
By John Eggerton, Broadcasting & Cable, 3/9/2009 10:17:53 AM MT

The National Telecommunications & Information Administration no longer has a DTV-to-analog converter box coupon program waiting list, but that is partly only a semantic change.

According to an administration spokesman, NTIA no longer has a waiting list, with all those coupon requests moved to a "processing queue." That "queue" for applications for the $40 coupons is down to 3.4 million from the 4.2 million on it when it was still a waiting list last week--before OMB freed up the $650 million from the economic stimulus package to fund more coupons.

NTIA is getting those requests out of the queue at the rate of about 400,000 per weekday--applications are not being processed over the weekends. It says it will have the backlog cleared up in 2-3 weeks.

Although the law changing the DTV hard date and extending the coupon program changes the program to allow anyone with expired coupons to reapply, NTIA is not ready to process any of those requests yet. Any reapplications it receives before it is ready will not be put on a waiting list, or even in a queue, but will be rejected, said NTIA spokesman Bart Forbes.

He warned that even if the rule is published and the date change law is published in the Federal Register this week that does not mean NTIA is ready to start processing reapplication requests. One is a rulemaking, he said, the other is changing the systems to accept reapplications.

That is still a week or so away and NTIA says it will let everybody know when it is open for reapplication businesses.

Changing the DTV hard date from Feb. 17 to June 12 was driven in large part by the waiting list for coupons, which started building up in early January after NTIA ran into a funding ceiling due to an accounting problem.

http://www.broadcastingcable.com/art..._4_Million.php

Critic's Notes
CNBC Thrives as Hosts Deliver News With Attitude
By Brian Stelter and Tim Arango, The New York Times - March 9, 2009



Was last week the worst one in CNBC's 20-year history or the best?

The financial news network, a unit of NBC Universal, was savaged by The Daily Show in a viral video sensation. It was criticized for being too cozy with the corporations it covers. One of its stars, Jim Cramer, was ridiculed by the White House press secretary. And one of its reporters faced a new round of criticism for an on-air outburst about mortgage losers.

All the while, CNBC covered the incessant downward slide of the economy with special reports on particularly bad days for the markets. Mr. Cramer, the host of Mad Money, barely had time for his usual shuffleboard games at the Elk's Lodge near his home.

The lodge is a booyah-free zone, he said, using his trademark exclamation. I was not able to get away from the booyahs this week.

Whether the attention is positive or negative, it is certain that this tumultuous financial season is CNBC's reason for being. One month shy of its 20th anniversary, CNBC is being jokingly called the recession network within the halls of its headquarters in New Jersey.

After it achieved record ratings last fall, the network's audience remains above its annual average average. But CNBC's executives and hosts seem well aware that their ratings have traditionally stagnated in down times for the Dow. People do not want to come to a show each night and hear how poor they are, Mr. Cramer said.

But in a change from previous downturns, CNBC is now a place for politics, to borrow a phrase from its sister channel MSNBC. The network's journalists have been encouraged to speak their minds, making the line between reporter and commentator almost indistinguishable at times.

When they are all sitting around the table it's hard to tell a business pundit versus a reporter, said Tom Rosenstiel, the director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism.

For instance, Larry Kudlow, a conservative economist who is considering a run for the United States Senate, is the co-host of an 11 a.m. news hour. Three CNBC employees, who insisted on anonymity to discuss internal deliberations, said that the role of opinion on the channel had been a subject of frequent discussion.

With economic attention focused on Washington, the network is spending less time on bullish stock picks and more time assessing the government's actions.

In recent weeks some have perceived the network to be leading the campaign against President Obama's economic agenda. Mr. Cramer, who calls himself a lifelong Democrat, said last week that the administration's agenda was destroying the life savings of millions of Americans. One week earlier Mr. Kudlow declared that Mr. Obama was declaring war on investors, entrepreneurs, small businesses, large corporations, and private equity and venture capital funds.

Those investors and businessmen, of course, are CNBC's core audience. What some critics have characterized as a war on wealth could affect the network's brand because the moneyed class makes up much of its core audience.

Partisanship aside, this is CNBC's equivalent of a war. Just as the first cable news channel, CNN, rose to prominence during the gulf war in 1991, and another one, the Fox News Channel, became a ratings leader in the period before the Iraq war in 2002 and 2003, CNBC is on a war footing. Last Monday, when the Dow Jones industrial average and the Standard & Poor's 500-stock index reached 12-year lows, the network produced a special report from 8 to 11 p.m.

CNBC's moment in the spotlight has actually lasted nearly two years. An analysis of Nielsen ratings shows that the network's home audience started to surge in August 2007 as the upheaval began in the credit markets. They peaked in March 2008 when Bear Stearns was sold to JPMorgan Chase in a deal arranged by Washington.

After hitting a plateau that spring, the ratings soared last fall when other investment banks collapsed, setting records for the network.

In the first two months of 2009, CNBC averaged 282,000 home viewers at any given time, up from 264,000 in the same period in 2008 and 233,000 in the same period in 2007. CNBC's chief competitors, Bloomberg and the Fox Business Network, are not publicly rated by Nielsen. CNBC says the Nielsen ratings undercounts its audience, as they do not measure out-of-home viewership on trading floors and offices. (CNBC and The New York Times have a content sharing agreement.)

Asked in a telephone interview about CNBC's time in the spotlight Friday, the network's president, Mark Hoffman, said it was a unique time for the organization.

It has certainly received a lot more notoriety, and along with that a lot more audience, he said.

He acknowledged that the notoriety has both benefits and liabilities. Twice in the last month, the White House has chastised CNBC's personalities, first after the reporter Rick Santelli energetically expressed his opposition to Mr. Obama's housing plans on the floor of the Chicago Board of Trade. CNBC eagerly promoted the segment and conservatives seized on it, holding tea party protests across the country.

Robert Gibbs, the White House press secretary, dismissed Mr. Santelli's arguments and offered him a decaffeinated cup of coffee. Later, the Today show co-host Matt Lauer clashed with Mr. Santelli over the assertion that Mr. Gibbs had threatened the reporter.

CNBC came up at Mr. Gibbs's briefing again last week after Mr. Cramer accused Mr. Obama of causing the greatest wealth destruction I have seen by a president. Mr. Gibbs said that if you turn on a certain program, it's geared to a very small audience, no offense to my good friends or friend at CNBC.

Still, the headlines about CNBC are a testament to its relevance. On Wednesday, Jon Stewart, the host of The Daily Show on Comedy Central, spent eight minutes skewering CNBC after Mr. Santelli backed out of an interview on the show. Mr. Stewart played video clips from the network of faulty predictions about the economic crisis.

If I had only followed CNBC's advice, I'd have a million dollars today, Mr. Stewart said, provided that I'd started with $100 million.

Mr. Stewart echoed the criticism that CNBC suffered after the dot-com bubble of the 1990s, namely that the network had acted as a booster for the markets.

When the CNBC anchor Erin Burnett appeared on Real Time With Bill Maher on HBO on Friday, Mr. Maher raised a similar issue. This is the channel that Wall Street watches all day, Mr. Maher said. I think this is more than a channel; I think it affects what happens on Wall Street. Why didn't anybody there predict what was going to happen?

Ms. Burnett said that the dot-com bubble was predicted, too. It's easy to say a bubble.' You don't know when it's going to burst, she said, adding that the questions of timing and magnitude were missed by many financial experts.

Separately, in a telephone interview Friday, the Squawk Box co-host Joe Kernen said of the market turmoil, Ask yourself whether you really think it's CNBC that caused it, or was it the housing bubble that caused it? I think we know what caused it.

CNBC is a boon to NBC Universal's bottom line; it has posted record profits for at least the last three years, and Mr. Hoffman says the first quarter of 2009 has been very strong for the network.

Mr. Cramer acknowledged he might have a harder time holding onto viewers in a bear market. To attract viewers he said he would continue to make Mad Money entertaining, and that means more predictions, even when they can be used against him by comedians like Mr. Stewart later.

If I get gun-shy, then I'm not going to be relevant, he said.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/09/bu...html?ref=media

Nielsen Overnights (18-49)
Trump slump: 'Celebrity Apprentice' dips
NBC show falls 18 percent from last week's premiere
By Diego Vasquez, Media Life Magazine - March 9, 2009

Facing an original Desperate Housewives proved tougher for Donald Trump as week two of Celebrity Apprentice slumped compared to last week's premiere.

Apprentice averaged a 3.1 adults 18-49 rating from 9 to 11 p.m., according to Nielsen overnights, off 18 percent from last week's 3.8.

Last week Trump's NBC reality show did not have to face Housewives, which was on a one-week layoff for a Brothers & Sisters movie.

Housewives averaged a 4.6 rating at 9 p.m., easily the night's top-rated show, with Apprentice finishing fourth in the timeslot with a 3.1.

Apprentice revived to a 3.4 at 10 p.m., though it still trailed ABC with a 3.5 for Sisters. NBC points out that its 3.1 rating was still 35 percent above the network's nonsports average in the timeslot this season.

As a reminder, all ratings are based on live-plus-same-day DVR playback. Seven-day DVR data won't be available for several weeks. Twenty-eight percent of Nielsen households have DVRs.

ABC was first for the night among 18-49s with a 3.3 average overnight rating and a 9 share. CBS was second at 2.6/7, NBC third at 2.4/7, Fox fourth at 2.3/6, Univision fifth at 1.2/3 and CW sixth at 0.2/1.

CBS started the night in the lead with a 2.2 rating at 7 p.m. for 60 Minutes, with ABC second with a 2.0 for America's Funniest Home Videos. NBC was third with a 1.3 for Saturday Night Live Just Game Show Parodies, Fox fourth with a 1.2 for Hole in the Wall, Univision fifth with a 0.8 for the end of a Mexican league soccer game and CW sixth with a 0.2 for a Jericho rerun.

At 8 p.m. CBS led again with a 3.0 for The Amazing Race, while ABC remained second with a 2.9 for Extreme Makeover: Home Edition. Fox was third with a 2.6 for The Simpsons (2.8) and King of the Hill (2.4), NBC fourth with a 2.1 for Saturday Night Live Just Commercials, Univision fifth with a 1.3 for the first half of Nuestra Belleza Latina and CW sixth with a 0.2 for the first hour of the movie Easy Money.

ABC took the lead at 9 p.m. with a 4.6 for Housewives, while Fox moved to second with a 3.2 for Family Guy (3.7) and American Dad (2.7). CBS was third with a 3.0 for Cold Case, NBC fourth with a 2.8 for Apprentice, Univision fifth with a 1.7 for more Latina and CW sixth with a 0.2 for the end of its movie.

At 10 p.m. ABC was first with a 3.5 for Brothers & Sisters, followed by NBC with a 3.4 for more Apprentice. CBS was third with a 2.3 for The Unit and Univision fourth with a 1.2 for Quién Tiene la Razón: Edición Especial.

Among households, CBS led the night with a 7.0 average overnight rating and a 12 share. ABC was second at 6.5/11, NBC third at 3.9/6, Fox fourth at 2.8/5, Univision fifth at 1.5/2 and CW sixth at 0.6/1.

http://www.medialifemagazine.com/art...entice_dip.asp

Nielsen Notes
Fallon tops first week; U2 doesn't boost Letterman
From James Hibberd's The Hollywood Reporter 'Live Feed' Blog - March 9, 2009

Jimmy Fallon did better than most expected during his first week driving a late-night talk show.

After starting strong on Monday (2.3 metered-market household rating), the newbie NBC "Late Night" host slipped Tuesday (2.0) and Wednesday (1.8). But then he popped back up for Thursday (2.0) and Friday (1.9). Fallon won his time period every night of the week with a strong 2.0 average. Overall the NBC show was up 12% compared to its season-to-date average under Conan O'Brien.

Over on CBS, U2 got a lot of headlines out of its weeklong visit to Late Show," but the five-night music-guest stint didn't do much for Letterman's ratings.

Though the "Late Show" had a couple higher-than-usual nights, overall the week averaged a 3.1 metered-market household rating, which is on par with the show's weekly season-to-date average. The exposure presumably helped U2, which is on track to score its seventh No. 1 album with its new release, No Line on the Horizon (dark, dense and better with every listen).

http://www.thrfeed.com/2009/03/fallo...etterman-.html

TV Notes
'Bachelor' castoff readies to dance
From Verne Gay, Newsday - March 9, 2009

Who needs a bachelor?

Melissa Rycroft - dumped by Jason Mesnick on the post-finale of "The Bachelor" and just like that, one of TV's most famous jilted lovers - will join "Dancing With the Stars" tonight for the eighth season.

People magazine first reported the last minute replacement, although ABC pointedly, and tellingly, declined to deny it.

A spokeswoman said yesterday, "ABC isn't commenting, but all will be revealed on Monday's show."

Holly Madison, former girlfriend of Hugh Hefner, is also expected to join the show.

Is Rycroft a surprise? Maybe for anyone unschooled in the ways of TV. She became an insta-mega-celebrity last week after Mesnick rejected her for Molly Malaney (who had been earlier rejected - don't ask ... please).

Then, with almost eerie convenience, "Access Hollywood" co-anchor Nancy O'Dell - booked to appear on "DWTS" - dropped out due to a reported injury, along with Jewel. Suddenly there were two openings, and just like that, they've been filled.

Rycroft, 25, is a former Dallas Cowboys cheerleader, and - through last week's "Bachelor" reunion show, anyway - the love of Mesnick's life, "forever." Alas, he changed his mind.

Madison stars in an E! reality show called "The Girls Next Door."

http://www.newsday.com/entertainment...tory?track=rss

Critic's Review
'Castle' (ABC)
Nathan Fillion and Stana Katic play a mystery writer and a cop working together on cases in the new ABC show
By Mary McNamara, Los Angeles Times - March 9, 2009

The detective tale is like yellow cake -- at some level everyone likes it, and with a little imagination you can do pretty much anything with it.

Which is why the mystery section of almost every bookstore is among its largest and why television is inevitably chockablock with detective skeins of one form or another. Lately, we've been tipping toward Nick and Nora-meet-Sherlock Holmes. On shows including "The Mentalist," "Bones," "Lie to Me," "Eleventh Hour," "Life" and even "Fringe" you have the sleuth with something extra (He used to be a fake psychic! She's a forensic archaeologist! He's a cop who went to jail!) teamed up with a more standard-issue model, usually, though not always, of the opposite sex (on "Numb3rs," the cop and the math whiz are brothers).

Onto this crowded playing field comes Castle, an ABC murder mystery series that is both of the genre and about the genre. Meet Richard Castle (Nathan Fillion), a bestselling mystery writer-playboy who has just killed off his lucrative detective because he was bored. But not for long! When real crime scenes begin resembling the murders in some of Castle's books, the firm-jawed yet lovely NYPD detective Kate Beckett (Stana Katic) comes to call.

For some reason she doesn't bother to suspect Castle, she just wants his help, though not nearly as much help as he wants to give her. His years as a mystery writer have given him many insights into the criminal mind -- and if he runs out, he can turn to his poker buddies, real-life mystery writers James Patterson and Stephen Cannell.

More important, of course, is his burgeoning relationship with Beckett. Turns out she's sense to his sensibility, flint to his tinder, and when they solve the crime it's no big surprise that he manages to pull a few strings so he can shadow her as research for his next blockbuster character -- a tough but gorgeous female detective.

Having a mystery writer solve mysteries is nothing new -- Jessica Fletcher (Angela Lansbury) and Ellery Queen did it for years (a moment of silence, please, for the late great Jim Hutton, whose wingtips can never be filled). Nor is the sparks-a-flyin' mismatch, which is as ubiquitous as chocolate frosting. But new and fancy don't always mean better, and at the end of the day who's going to say no to a nice piece of cake?

Written by Andrew Marlowe ("Air Force One"), "Castle" has more than a few high-quality ingredients. Fillion, well-known to Joss Whedon fans from "Firefly," has long been in search of a show that would showcase his talents ("Drive" wasn't it). Here he is just as charming, handsome and banter-friendly as the role requires, with the added benefit of being a bit more baritone and less, well, vest-wearing than some of his current competition.

Castle may have his demons, but he also has an actual, if over-rich, home life. He's single father to a refreshingly smart but non-precocious teenage daughter (Molly Quinn) and lives with his former-actress mother, who could be unbearably annoying except she's played by Susan Sullivan, may her "Falcon Crest" mojo never falter.

Katic was last seen in a surprisingly good turn as a vampire in the most recent "Librarian" TV film, and her Beckett is an attractively streamlined version of a familiar character. Yes, she is buttoned down and irritated by Castle's presence as required, but she, and Marlowe, have decided to go with self-possessed coolness over arch put-downs and sarcasm, and God bless them for that.

The problem is that in the pilot and an early episode, the crimes are nowhere as compelling as the characters. For a show like "Castle" that dares to launch a more classic version into an already saturated and tarted-up market, the murders have to be as complicated and compelling as the push-me-pull-you glances between the main characters, and so far, they just aren't.

http://www.latimes.com/entertainment...,3920853.story

TV Notes
A Matrix of News Winners Buoys NBC
By Bill Carter, The New York Times - March 9, 2009

NBC's Today show has the longest winning streak in television history: every week for 13 years, and counting. Now the evening newscast competition seems to be swinging NBC's way as well.

The NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams, which until last fall had been in a tight race with the ABC newscast led by Charles Gibson, has finished first for 20 consecutive weeks, with about 9.5 million viewers, roughly a million more than ABC. (The CBS Evening News With Katie Couric trails the pack with two million to three million fewer viewers than NBC's program.)

The bookend winning streaks morning and evening augmented by NBC's continuing success on Sundays with Meet the Press, provide the network with a strong claim to leadership in network news though ABC News argues that the lead in evening newscasts is cyclical.

But NBC's surge in the evening has been strong enough for the news division president, Steve Capus, to suggest that NBC is positioned to be the first network to expand to a full-hour newscast. (He did not set any timetable for that move.)

Even though overall network audiences have eroded significantly, the evening newscasts have remained relatively stable. In the first eight weeks of 2009, the three programs drew a combined average of about 25.5 million viewers, versus about 26.9 million in 2006.

NBC is also winning one more competition perhaps the biggest one just as convincingly: Its news division is making a pile of money, while its competitors are making much less, or none at all. NBC's success in news is definitely an advantage, said Deana Myers, a senior media analyst for SNL Kagan. It's their strong point. It balances their weakness in prime time.

Official figures are not disclosed, but a senior NBC executive estimated that NBC News, consisting of the broadcast news division, the all-news cable channel MSNBC and a much-viewed Web site, MSNBC.com, supplied about 13 percent of the overall profit of its parent company, NBC Universal.

In January, NBC Universal announced a yearly profit of $3.1 billion. That would put the NBC News contribution at over $400 million.

CBS and ABC, meanwhile, both say they make money in news, though not anywhere near NBC levels. With coverage costs rising and advertising revenue shrinking, all the news divisions face long-term economic questions, but NBC seems best positioned to ride out the tempest.

Jeff Zucker, the NBC Universal chief executive, identified NBC's financial plan for news under the broad umbrella of efficiencies of scale.

The scales are tipped in NBC's favor, mainly because of assets neither of its rivals possess: moneymaking, information-based cable channels.

They have a definite advantage in reach with cable, Ms. Myers said.

Telemundo, NBC's Spanish-language channel, generates coverage from Hispanic perspectives including the immigration debate which often turn up on Nightly News. The Weather Channel provides coverage of meteorological events. CNBC, the company's business news cable channel, provides financial reporting to Today and to Mr. Williams's newscast.

Then there is MSNBC. Mr. Williams said in an interview that the ability to jump onto that all-news channel with a breaking story or interview adds huge value to our newscast because that material can be synthesized for use on the broadcast network.

Since making a commitment two years ago to opinion programming from the left side of the political spectrum, MSNBC's ratings have surged. The channel just had its best February ever, averaging 471,000 viewers a day, up from 341,000 in February 2007.

MSNBC now pulls in a bigger percentage of the news profits than the network news department, said the senior executive who provided information on NBC's finances. The margin was not disclosed.

CNBC, the Weather Channel and Telemundo are not counted in the news profits. But with those outlets added, the percentage of contribution to NBC Universal's profits climbs to 25 percent or about $775 million.

Mr. Zucker said, One of the hallmarks of the company is how we integrate our assets.

NBC's consistent victories in news, Mr. Capus said, help us as we go out into the marketplace and in a marketplace that can be a scary place to be these days.

Television ad sales have been battered; many sponsors have exercised options to pull out of long-term commitments to buy commercials. It's becoming a week-to-week enterprise, Mr. Capus said.

Peggy Green, vice chairwoman of Zenith Media, a media-buying firm, said NBC had reason to feel less daunted than its competitors. If you are only able to buy one brand, you're going to buy the one that's No. 1, she said. Some of her clients, including Toyota and Ocean Spray, have made special commercial arrangements with NBC News programs like Today.

Jon Banner, executive producer of ABC's World News, said ratings are cyclical and emphasized that ABC's newscast has been first on many big stories. I wouldn't be breaking out the Champagne if I were them, he said.

He argued that Mr. Gibson had recently cut into NBC's margin. Two weeks ago, ABC did climb back to within about 900,000 viewers (8.4 million, to 9.3 million for NBC). But the week before, the margin was 1.5 million, and in the last 14 weeks the deficit has averaged more than a million viewers.

Mr. Banner acknowledged that NBC's cable properties have been very helpful to them.

Other ABC executives gave another reason for Mr. Williams's rise: his hosting of Saturday Night Live. Mr. Williams had a reputation for stiffness and formality that belied his nature. The SNL role, as well as spots on other late-night shows, seemed to open him to wider acceptance.

Mr. Williams said he relished the late-night visits. I get it out of my system, he said. I get along with these guys. It's sword-fighting time.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/09/bu...html?ref=media

Critic's Review
'Castle' (ABC)
'Castle' Lacks A King, a Queen -- And Chemistry
By Tom Shales, Washington Post - March 9, 2009

"Wildly famous mystery novelist Richard Castle (Nathan Fillion) is bored with his own success," says ABC publicity for the new crime series "Castle." Bored with his success? Poor bay-beee. As it happens, he won't be the only one. Viewers who stumble into this misbegotten "Moonlighting" imitation will likely be bored, too, but not because of too much success.

"Moonlighting" was quite the seminal, pivotal hit in the '80s -- or so it would appear, since it still inspires copycats 20 years after it left ABC. Then again, it was hardly the first crime caper to feature a spatty, chatty couple; the "Thin Man" movies probably did it best. "Castle" does it half-heartedly, with the two principal characters exchanging flat patter and bottom-of-the-barrel banter.

Owing a little something also to "Murder, She Wrote," "Castle" presents us with a middle-aged novelist hero who forces himself on the New York Police Department so he can hook up with feisty, flinty Detective Kate Beckett, played by Stana Katic, and come up with more ideas for novels.

Shame on anyone who takes the easy road and says of Katic's performance, "I can't Stana." (Pause for uproarious laughter.) In fact, there might be a substantial young actress under the cliched character Katic has been forced to play -- another brittle and bitter career woman who traded in her femininity for a job. In real life, this doesn't have to happen, but in TV shows, a woman with a career still tends to be portrayed as a woman with big fat chips on both her padded shoulders.

Fillion, meanwhile, plays novelist Castle as a good-hearted, wisecracking puppy dog, romping around Detective Beckett in vain efforts to loosen her up and, in time, warm her up, no doubt hoping for a little romance. But as of tonight's premiere, the sparks fizzle and flop to the ground, soggy and damp and barely identifiable.

Wouldn't you know, a serial killer is the first culprit for the oddball crime-fighting team; serial killers are about 20 times as common on prime time as they are in the daily news. And of course he's a bit of a psycho, too, leaving his first victim -- a shapely young woman, surprise, surprise -- naked except for strategically strewn red rose petals and a large yellow sunflower plopped down on her face.

A later victim, introduced in a bid to sustain viewer interest, is found floating in a swimming pool with an embedded knife acting as a kind of mast, sticking straight up. Inevitably, a corrupt and perverse old billionaire is also involved in the mayhem, and though Castle keeps coming up with good clues, impulsive Beckett keeps trying to shove him out of the spotlight.

"Why are you here?" she asks him when they meet at a crime scene. "Why are you still here?" she asks him later, in an office he's demolishing. When not solving crimes that he can rip off for his next novel, Castle plays poker with a group of guys who include real-life mystery writer Stephen J. Cannell, creator of "The Rockford Files." He's obviously slumming here.

Maybe the show is trying to be fashionably "retro" while seeming merely old hat, the little trick that "Mad Men" gets away with on cable. There's much less going on in "Castle" than there is in "Mad Men," however, and by the time Beckett complains that "there is no story," many viewers will have wearily figured that out for themselves. "There's always a story; you just have to find it," Castle says at one point -- but too little about "Castle" makes you want to hang in there and keep looking.

Castle (one hour) premieres tonight at 10 on Channel 7.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...030802050.html

The Business of Television
HBO Opens Syndie Sales
'Entourage', 'Curb Your Enthusiasm' for 2010
By Melissa Grego, Broadcasting & Cable - March 9, 2009

HBO has a question for cable networks and stations about three comedies, including Entourage: Is that something you might be interested in?

By the end of March, the pay-TV network will be in the marketplace selling syndication runs for Entourage, Curb Your Enthusiasm and Sex and the City.

Executives have already held meetings with buyers about the off-HBO runs of Entourage and Curb. By the end of this month, they will start making formal sales presentations, says Scott Carlin, HBO president of domestic distribution. Carlin's team is also talking to stations about the second broadcast syndication cycle for Sex and the City.

Sex and the City was the first series HBO sold into syndication, and was done so in a then-unusual windowing between cable network TBS and local stations. TBS got the show exclusively for 18 months, during which time the basic cabler had rights to run two episodes in primetime, then repeat them the next day. Then the broadcast window opened up, allowing stations to strip the comedy.

The TBS deal continues through 2012, but the broadcast portion of the first cycle concludes in September. Carlin says SATC station incumbent Tribune is among the broadcasting groups he is talking to about cycle two.

In SATC's first cycle, sold on a cash-plus-barter basis, TBS paid around $750,000 per episode, and stations' cash license fees totaled about $300,000 per episode, according to estimates.

But the marketplace is a drastically different one today, with stations struggling and the ad market depressed as well.

Given stations' challengesparticularly the Tribune Co., which filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection late last yearHBO will not rule out a barter-only deal for SATC. Estimates place the barter advertising earned for the show in its first cycle at $1.5 million per episode.

Since Carlin started HBO's syndie department in 2002, his group has sold hundreds of hours of programming, but it's been years since they've been out with a big comedy series.

Everything has its own life and time, Carlin says. We think now is a pretty interesting time to begin having some conversations with people about these shows.

Many people in the industry expected HBO to take Entourage out sooner in its life cycle, when it was at the height of its buzz. But a combination of factors meant holding off. Long before Tribune, one of the most important station buyers, filed for Chapter 11, it was experiencing corporate issues that made buying complicated. And then there was the WGA strike.

The writers' strike pushed everyone off traditional timeliness and set us back a little bit, Carlin says. Now we have a good sense of what the future looks like, how many episodes, when we can deliver.

Entourage is about to go into production on season six, set to debut this summer. Once completed, there will be 78 episodes. No seasons have been ordered beyond that. Curb is in production on its season seven, bringing that show to 70 episodes.

We certainly have the minimum threshold to make these shows viable in the marketplace, Carlin says.

While HBO will be out selling these shows relatively late in their runs, most shows that go into syndication have more episodes guaranteed by the time a syndicator trots them out. This could work to HBO's advantage. In this economy, the smaller number of episodes translates to a more manageable investment if a buyer is paying a per-episode cash license fee.

But the aspect of these shows Carlin expects to be most important to buyers is the fact that they are established programs with virtually no advertising in them. He says previous deals prove it is a huge sales benefit to be able to sell the first opportunity to associate a brand with an HBO show.

Both Entourage and Curb will likely be made available to run in syndication starting sometime next year.

Terms and windows will be determined based on buyers' needs and availability and the best offer. There is no fixed template, Carlin says. We'll adapt to the best opportunity.

Paige Albiniak contributed to this story

http://www.broadcastingcable.com/art...ndie_Sales.php

Critic's Review
'Castle' (ABC)
By Alan Sepinwall, Newark Star-Ledger - March 9, 2009

"Are you here to annoy me?" NYPD cop Kate Beckett (Stana Katic) wearily asks her unofficial new partner, mystery novelist Rick Castle.

"I'm here for the story," Castle (Nathan Fillion) tells her.

Castle first hooks up with Beckett to solve a trio of murders based on his books, then decides to use her as inspiration for a new series of novels. As a man in his profession might be, he's obsessed with finding a good story. Time and time again through the two episodes of ABC's new mystery series "Castle" that I've seen, Castle complains that Kate's latest theory of the crime doesn't make for an interesting story, or is pleased when a new development makes the story more interesting for him.

Yet "Castle" the show doesn't seem all that interested in finding the most interesting, or unique, ways to tell its stories. It's an amalgamation of a half-dozen other crime shows (at a minimum) and, at times, is so packed with cliches that my wife (watching the pilot alongside me) began reciting Stana Katic's dialogue five seconds in advance with uncanny accuracy. At one point, after Castle complained that a solution came too easily, my wife and were in stereo as they declared, "This isn't one of your books, Castle!"

(A TV critic's marriage occasionally leads to scenes like this, I suppose.)

Not that we were exactly unhappy watching it. "Castle," for all its predictability -- and its unfortunately timed resemblance to hits like "The Mentalist" -- isn't without its charms, chief among them Nathan Fillion.

Like "The Mentalist," and NBC's "Life," and "Law & Order: Criminal Intent," "Castle" deals with an overgrown adolescent male who's an outsider in the law-enforcement community, but who has an uncanny knack for noticing clues the more traditional detectives miss. And like the characters on all those shows, he has a straight-laced female partner who alternates between being annoyed at her partner's lack of manners and non-linear thinking, and being impressed at what he picked up on while she thought he was just goofing around.

There are differences, but they're a matter of degree, not kind. Like Simon Baker's character on "The Mentalist," Castle has the ability to make huge deductive leaps based on his observation of small details -- in tonight's pilot episode, he diagnoses a man with terminal cancer entirely on seeing the man stand near a recent photo of himself -- but the show doesn't make that into its visual signature. (Fillion's not much on squinting.) Castle is rich and friends with the mayor, and therefore has resources the average cops don't, but he's not quite as rich as Damian Lewis on "Life." Where the other shows of this type keep the male/female partnership largely or entirely platonic, Castle makes clear from the start that he'd like nothing better than to get into his partner's pantsuit, while Beckett -- a closet fan of Castle's books -- frequently has to stifle her own attraction to the big, obnoxious lug.

That kind of love/hate relationship (see also "Cheers," "Moonlighting," "Cupid," even "Bones" to an extent) only works if the two co-stars have chemistry together, and Fillion and Katic certainly have that.

After the space Western "Firefly" and auto-racing thriller "Drive," this is Fillion's third shot as a series lead, in addition to supporting work on shows like "Desperate Housewives" and "Two Guys, a Girl, and a Pizza Place." Playing Rick Castle doesn't allow him to show off much of the rugged, Steve McQueen-style machismo that made him so appealing in some previous roles, but it makes up for that by focusing on his comic chops and breezy charm. Castle is so deliberately juvenile and irritating that the show would be unwatchable with a lot of actors in the role, but Fillion's so amusing, and endearing, that you can see why even Beckett likes him, much as she doesn't want to admit it.

It also helps that the writers have surrounded him with a pair of good family foils: Susan Sullivan from "Dharma & Greg" as Castle's boozy actress mom (who is herself borrowed from many other shows, most recently Jessica Walter on "90210") and Molly Quinn as the level-headed teen daughter Castle raised while writing his books. They humanize him, and show how much of the way he behaves around Beckett is an act to get a rise out of her.

Katic has the more thankless role, as the actress in this scenario inevitably does, but the necessary sparks fly when she and Fillion are on screen together swapping barbs, and hopefully as time goes on, she'll get more to do than play kindergarten teacher to Castle. How much you like the series will depend almost entirely on how you enjoy watching these two spar; for me, that was enough.

One recurring element of the series has Castle in a poker game with real-life best-sellers James Patterson and Stephen J. Cannnell. Before he turned to books, Cannell used to make shows exactly like this one -- not deep or groundbreaking, but reliable, well-cast entertainment.

From what little we see/hear of Castle's writing, he's not a great artist, but a good mover of product. He writes series where the characters have names like Derek Storm and Nikki Heat, and even he seems to recognize that his audience reads them as comfort food. So maybe it's appropriate that "Castle" feels like so many other current series. It's the sort of show that Castle himself might have written if Cannell ever helped him break into the TV business.

"Castle" (Tonight at 10 p.m. on Channel 7) A best-selling mystery novelist (Nathan Fillion) is recruited by the NYPD to solve a series of murders based on his books in a new series co-starring Stana Katic.

http://www.nj.com/entertainment/tv/i...ll_on_tv.htmll

Nielsen Overnights
CBS, ABC split Sunday victories;
"Desperate Housewives" is tops
From Hal Boedeker's Orlando Sentinel 'TV Guy' Blog - March 9, 2009

ABC's "Desperate Housewives" attracted the most viewers Sunday night, but it was a close race for Wisteria Lane.

CBS had the most viewers in prime time and edged Disney-owned ABC. But ABC was the clear favorite in the 18-to-49 age group. CBS outpaced NBC and Fox for second in that count.

"Desperate Housewives" was another memorable showcase for Emmy-winner Felicity Huffman, who as Lynette had a memorable fight with her husband. "DH" averaged 13.5 million viewers. At 9, CBS' "Cold Case" was close behind with 12.6 million. NBC's "Celebrity Apprentice" pulled in 7.6 million and dispatched Scott Hamilton. Fox's "Family Guy" amused 7.2 million, and the audience slipped to 5.3 million for "American Dad."

In other time slots ... At 7 p.m., CBS' "60 Minutes" was the clear winner with 13.1 million. "America's Funniest Homes Videos" was a distant second with 7 million.

At 8, CBS' "Amazing Race" amazed 10.2 million. "Extreme Makeover: Home Edition" pulled 9.4 million to ABC.

At 10, "Brothers & Sisters" was the favorite with 10.5 million. (Patricia Wettig and Sally Field were in top form a very dramatic hour.) CBS' "Unit" enlisted 9.4 million.

For the night, CBS averaged 11.3 million in prime time. ABC was second with 10.1 million. Here's how other broadcasters fared: NBC with 6.1 million, Fox with 4.8 million and The CW with 822,000.

http://blogs.orlandosentinel.com/ent...s-is-tops.html

Critic's Notes
Crime Solvers With Chemistry, Waiting (and Waiting)
for Sparks to Ignite
By Felicia R. Lee, The New York Times

The minute the two get together in the room, we know where this is going. Or not.

“You’ve got quite a rap sheet for a best-selling author,” Detective Kate Beckett says, slapping a thick file on the table. She mentions dropped charges for disorderly conduct and resisting arrest. Richard Castle, the author, fires back: “What can I say? The mayor’s a fan. But if it makes you feel any better, I’d be happy to let you spank me.”

In “Castle,” a new drama having its premiere on Monday night on ABC, Castle (Nathan Fillion) is a flirty, famous crime novelist who is paired with Beckett (Stana Katic), a no-nonsense New York City Police Department type, to nab a killer whose crimes are based on scenes from Castle’s books. It’s the newest twist on a television recipe that was popularized in the 1980s by the hit detective show “Moonlighting”: an oil-and-water male-female duo crack cases amid dollops of unresolved sexual tension — let’s call it UST for short — and witty banter. They complement each other professionally but resist the attraction for various reasons.

This formula has plenty of company on television these days. The crime drama “Bones,” on Fox, has a by-the-book anthropologist helping her loosey-goosey F.B.I. agent partner solve homicides. The police procedural “Life,” on NBC, has a serene, Zen-practicing Los Angeles detective helping his tense, moody partner solve homicides. “The Mentalist,” on CBS, has a self-confessed fraud of a former television psychic helping his by-the-book partner solve homicides, too.

And “Lie to Me,” a new Fox drama, features subtle hints of attraction between the lead scientist and his more intuitive (and married) psychologist partner, who belong to a team of deception experts.

Beginning on Saturday on BBC America, the series “Ashes to Ashes” has the politically insensitive Chief Inspector Gene Hunt (Philip Glenister) and the psychological profiler Alex Drake (Keeley Hawes), who was transported from 2008, desiring and resenting each other in a police precinct in 1981 London.

“The holy grail in TV, especially in detective shows, is man-woman pairings,” said Gary Glasberg, the co-executive producer of “The Mentalist,” which had an impressive ratings debut in September and regularly appears in Nielsen’s Top 10. It pairs Patrick Jane (Simon Baker) with Senior Agent Teresa Lisbon (Robin Tunney) at the California Bureau of Investigation. She’s earnest, he’s cocky, and they need each other professionally and possibly personally as well.

“When you can get that kind of chemistry between people, you can access a coveted female demographic that isn’t otherwise interested in detective shows,” Mr. Glasberg said, pointing to “Moonlighting.” “That’s the one everyone is trying to duplicate.”

But is duplication a creative cop-out? “There are no new stories, there are only new characters,” said Andrew Marlowe, an executive producer of “Castle.” “We have really new characters.”

UST works as a storytelling device because it allows character development in plot-driven shows, writers and producers said.

“Moonlighting,” broadcast on ABC from 1985 to 1989, created sparks between Bruce Willis, as David Addison, and Cybill Shepherd, as Maddie Hayes, detectives at the Blue Moon Detective Agency. The series itself owed something to “Remington Steele,” an NBC show that ran from 1982 to 1987. In that story line Laura Holt (Stephanie Zimbalist) was a private detective who used Remington Steele (Pierce Brosnan), a former con man, to play her fictitious — and playful — male boss to fool the public back in those more sexist times.

Science fiction was injected into the mix with “The X Files,” on Fox from 1993 to 2002. F.B.I. agents Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson) and Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) investigated paranormal phenomena and resisted normal attraction for many seasons.

Kevin Reilly, president of entertainment at Fox, called UST “an age-old drama tool” that adds character and spice to procedurals. One challenge is to calibrate the chemistry so that viewers don’t get too much or too little romance, he said, even as some fans root for a clean break, a wedding or a tryst.

“The audience has an unwritten pact with these shows,” Mr. Reilly said. “It’s not too close and not too far. Drama is tension, and, ultimately, this is about tension.”

“Bones,” which began in 2005, might be the current reigning champion for stretching out that tension. Dr. Temperance Brennan (Emily Deschanel) and her partner, F.B.I. Special Agent Seeley Booth (David Boreanaz), examine dead bodies for clues and verbally pick at each other.

But just as in real life, a television relationship has to keep moving or die, said Hart Hanson, the creator and an executive producer of “Bones.” Brennan and Booth kissed a little longer than necessary under the mistletoe in December, and Mr. Hanson promises that eventually they “will be naked, in bed, and sex will be involved.”

Still, Mr. Hanson said, “Once you remove that unresolved sexual tension, what do you replace it with?”

In “Moonlighting” the detectives eventually had sex, but Maddie married someone else (though the marriage was annulled). By the end of “The X Files” Scully and Mulder were a couple.

Glenn Gordon Caron, the creator of “Moonlighting” who also worked on “Remington Steele,” said television executives keep putting men and women together and then pushing them apart because “they’re chasing something they know works.”

“On some level,” he added, “either in our fantasy lives or in our real lives, we work with people we’re attracted to.”

With “Moonlighting,” he said, he just wanted to see actors and a story he liked. But Mr. Caron, who is also the creator and executive producer of the NBC drama “Medium” (about a married, crime-solving psychic), graciously gave the credit for plumbing UST in a drama to another writer.

“It’s all derived from ‘The Taming of the Shrew,’ ” he said. “There are two people who hate each other but are meant to be together.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/07/ar...ref=television

TV Notes
On The Air Tonight
Monday Network Prime-Time Programming Options

(Reminder: If you are recording these programs, check your network listings for precise start/end times. For PBS, please double check your local listings.)

ABC:
8:00pm Dancing With the Stars (season 8 premiere, 2 hours) HD
10:02pm Castle (series premiere) HD

CBS:
8:00pm The Big Bang Theory HD
8:30pm How I Met Your Mother HD
9:00pm Two and a Half Men HD
9:31pm Rules of Engagement HD
10:00pm CSI: Miami HD

NBC:
8:00pm Chuck HD
9:00pm Heroes HD
10:00pm Medium HD

Fox:
8:00pm House HD
9:00pm 24 HD

The CW:
8:00pm Gossip Girl (R) HD
9:00pm One Tree Hill (R) HD

MNT:
8:00pm Masters of Illusion HD
9:00pm Magic's Biggest Secrets Finally Revealed (R) HD

http://pifeedback.com/eve/forums/a/t...62/m/862109391

The Business of Television
Canada rejects cutback on U.S. series buys
CRTC looking at homegrown TV expenditures
By Etan Vlessing, The Hollywood Reporter - March 9, 2009

TORONTO -- The Canadian government has rejected a proposal by the country's TV regulator to curb domestic broadcasters' spending on U.S. series.

Federal Heritage Minister James Moore said Monday that Ottawa should not impose conditions or quotas on how Canadian broadcasters buy U.S. programming.

"(Canadian) broadcasters have their own business model," Moore said. "They keep their business models going forward as best they can. Far be it for me to second-guess how to run a broadcast network and programming."

His comments follow a CRTC proposal to use upcoming license renewal hearings to consider whether expenditures on homegrown TV shows should match those for American fare.

Domestic broadcasters contend that they require the profits generated by airing U.S. series to subsidize the production of expensive homegrown dramas. Canadian indie producers, unions and guilds favor the CRTC's proposal for a so-called 1:1 ratio on Canadian and non-Canadian program expenditures as a welcome measure to promote homegrown series production.

Moore said his job is to encourage the production of homegrown programming, a role that on Monday saw him move to merge the Canadian Television Fund and the Canadian New Media Fund into a rebranded CAN$310 million ($241 million) Canada Media Fund.

The CTF, the main source of government subsidies for Canadian indie producers of primetime TV shows, will be reformed to create more homegrown content available to Canadians over more digital platforms and to be sold internationally.

Ottawa also will allow Canadian broadcasters to make their own TV series in-house as well as commission series from indie producers.

The federal minister made his announcement on the Toronto set of the CBS and CTV police drama "Flashpoint," a Canadian-U.S. network partnership Moore wants to see more of.

"Flashpoint" is an example of a Canadian success story. It debuted at No. 1 in the U.S. and in Canada. It's a TV show on CBS and CTV and it streams on line," he said.

As Canadian and U.S. networks reduce their programming budgets to deal with falling ad revenue, they have increasingly partnered on new drama production that is shot in Canada and taps into local and federal government money like CTF subsidies and tax credits.

In addition to "Flashpoint," CBS also will co-produce "The Bridge," another CTV police drama, while NBC picked up "The Listener," a police-medical drama from Canadian producer Shaftesbury Films.

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/hr/...80fa747852185e

Nielsen Overnights (Cable)
'Breaking Bad' Breaks Better With Nielsen
AMC Original Series Improves With Ratings, Males 18-49 With Second-Season Debut
By Mike Reynolds, Multichannel News - March 9, 2009

The second season premiere of Breaking Bad broke better than its first.

AMC's series -- featuring Emmy award-winner Bryan Cranston as a middle-aged high school chemistry teacher stricken with inoperable lung cancer who transfers his periodic table knowledge into skills as the top crystal meth chef in Albuquerque -- averaged a 1.2 household rating and 1.7 million viewers in its return last night, according to Nielsen Media Research data.

The March 8 numbers marked a 33% increase over the 0.9 average for the first season's seven premieres (the writers strike trimmed a pair of installments from its rookie run) and a 31% jump from 1.3 million viewer average.

Breaking Bad 's debut garnered a 1.2 household rating.

AMC officials were also pleased with the show's performance with adults 18 to 49, which grew 36% to 929,000 of those watchers, versus season one's 682,000 average, and its 46% amelioration with men of that age -- 613,000 Sunday night, compared with 410,000.

By way of contrast, Mad Men, the retro advertising series that became the first basic-cable show to capture the Emmy for best drama, skews more female.

Hence, original series are drawing new audiences to AMC, as the network's roster of theatricals typically attracts adults 25 to 54.

http://www.multichannel.com/article/...th_Nielsen.php

TV Notes
Defeating the DVR to Promote Shows
Fox Borrows Page From Advertisers’ Pod-Busting Book
By Josef Adalian, TV Week

Fox’s on-air promotions team has quietly opened a new front in TV’s ongoing war against digital video recorders.

With little fanfare, the network in recent weeks has started sprinkling its commercial breaks with what it’s calling “TiVo-busters”—spots designed to be effective even when viewers use a DVR to fast-forward through advertising.

In addition, the network has been using the commercial breaks during “American Idol” to test out its commercial “podbusters,” original content interspersed throughout sponsorship breaks that’s designed to get viewers to pay attention to advertising. It’s the latest iteration of the podbusting strategy Fox has employed in other shows.

[CLICK ON LINK BELOW FOR CLIP OF FOX PROMO]

Podbusters aren’t new: Networks from NBC to BBC America have tested them. Their use on TV’s most-watched show, however, could take the concept to a new level.

As for the TiVo-buster promotions, the first campaign is a 10-second tune-in spot for new drama “Lie to Me” that plays with graphics and motion in a bid to make an impression on viewers no matter how they watch TV.

A viewer watching Fox in real time would see “Lie” lead Tim Roth leaning in toward the camera in slow motion. There’s intense music and audio of Mr. Roth saying, “I know when you’re lying.”

Those viewers who scan past the ad while holding down the fast-forward button on their DVRs obviously won’t hear the audio. But the spot’s key elements—a single shot of Mr. Roth and a large graphical representation of the show’s logo that stays on-screen throughout—were designed so they’re noticeable even when viewed during a fast-forward sprint.

“No matter what speed you’re watching it, you get motion and you get copy,” said Joe Earley, Fox’s executive VP in charge of marketing. “The point of the creative is not to stop you [from fast-forwarding]. It’s to convey the tune-in message and the show information no matter what mode you’re in.”

Mr. Earley said designing so-called “TiVo-buster” promos is challenging, since DVRs don’t all move at the same speed. The fast-forward function on DirecTV’s recorder might move more quickly than a Time Warner Cable DVR or the TiVo-brand machine.

In the case of “Lie to Me,” Fox found footage from the show that lent itself to the slow, single-shot format needed to work at any speed.

Other TiVo-busting promos are under consideration. But because these types of ads don’t allow for as much creativity as regular spots, Mr. Earley said he didn’t expect the network to make frequent use of the concept.

“We would only do it when it works,” he said. “This is not something you can do on every show or every day, nor would we want to.”

Mr. Earley has more ambitious plans for commercial-break podbusters, both during “Idol” and in other shows.

The first “Idol” podbusters began showing up in late February, when host Ryan Seacrest urged viewers to stay tuned during an upcoming break for exclusive footage from the show’s audition rounds. About midway through the break, Fox showed viewers exactly that.

Unlike the TiVo-buster promotions, the podbusters are designed to get viewers to stop fast-forwarding during a commercial break, or keep them from pressing the fast-forward button at all.

“We’re doing a lot of things to make our air as interesting as possible,” Mr. Earley said. “We want viewers to be entertained not only by the (series) content, but by the promos and these other experiments we’re doing to give them show-related content during breaks. The hope is that you don’t need to check out what’s on another channel or hit fast-forward because you’re always being entertained.”

In the case of the “Idol” podbusters, Fox took promotional time normally used to hype another series on the network to instead give viewers “more content from the show they already like,” Mr. Earley explained. Eventually, he said, the network hopes audiences will pick up on the fact that Fox has made the entire viewing experience—not just individual series—more enjoyable.

Mr. Earley’s team is currently in the planning stages on podbusters featuring original content from “Bones,” “Hell’s Kitchen” and at least one more show. For now, Madison Avenue isn’t involved in these experimental podbusters, though Mr. Earley wouldn’t mind if that changed.

“We would love to eventually find a partner who would want to sponsor this content,” he said, cautioning that any such deals would be struck by Fox’s sales division and not marketing.

Another way Fox is trying to make its promos feel more like original content is by launching a new series of image spots featuring the network’s stars in more relaxed moments.

“Entertaining you is our business. How we do it is the fun part,” a graphic message during one ad reads. “So Real. So Fun. So Fox.”

Fox’s promotions team worked closely with the network’s public relations team to identify moments during photo shoots and breaks from filming that showed off actors’ softer side. A spot for “Bones,” for example, features Emily Deschanel dazed and confused after an intense kiss from co-star David Boreanaz.

The goal is to bring viewers behind the scenes on Fox shows, giving audiences a peek into the lives of the people involved in the making of their favorite programs.

“We want to be more accessible to our viewers,” Mr. Earley said. “We’re the network for younger viewers. We want to be real.”

http://www.tvweek.com/news/2009/03/d..._promote_s.php

Chicago Tribune's Maureen Ryan previews this Thursday's TV Guide dual covers/story of the series finale of "Battlestar Galactica": http://featuresblogs.chicagotribune....ding.html#more Tons of quotes from the cast plus RDM teases 'the ending' but spoilerific if you haven't been watching over the past few weeks.

Since I'm STILL using only Windows Media Center as a "DVR," I don't have any experience with how their FF works, but in WMC, you have the SKIP button, which simply JUMPS in 30-second increments, so you don't see ANYTHING during the jump. I have no idea if any of the DVRs available via TIVO or DirecTV or DISH have a similar feature, but when using WMC, I generally know commercial breaks are 4-5 minutes long, so I hit that button 8-10 times, until I either see the beginning of the show comng back from commercials, OR it's actually back INTO the show (which happens more often)... However, one of the FEW THINGS Microsoft actually designed RIGHT was that WMC SKIP and BACK feature, because the BACK feature goes back only 8 seconds, so if I accidentally SKIP INTO the show, I simply hit BACK until I'm into the end of the last commercial, then just let the last few seconds play (NEVER more than 7 seconds before I'm back to the show).

As I said, that's one of the VERY FEW THINGS Microsoft has done (and I really don't think THEY did it -- they simply LICENSED the technology from someone else) that really works WELL.
Jeff

P.S. HOWEVER, since most of what I record via my basic-cable input to my TV Tuner in my computer has pretty poor quality these days (likely because for reasons I don't understand the basic cable channels ALL have low quality any more -- on ALL my TVs, as well), I USUALLY end up going to Hulu.com or CBS.com or whatever to watch them, anyway... For instance, I recorded "The Unit" last night while I was watching one of the shows on HBO or Showtime. I checked to see the quality (and get the episode name) a few minutes ago. Sure enough, it was poor, so I simply went to CBS.com and watched it there. There were a total of maybe 5 minutes of commercials for the entire show -- vs. the 15-20 minutes we endure if watching "live," and I can put up with that. The quality WAS NOT as good as a "live" HD broadcast, but was DEFINITELY better than what WMC had recorded.

I'll DEFINITELY buy the copy with the two hot chicks and the goofy guy on the cover!
Jeff

How many NBC affiliates carry the Wheel/Jeopardy package? Doesn't seem like they'd be interested in an hour of news from 6:30 to 7:30. But I suspect this would be targeted at the NBC affiliates who carry Access Hollywood and would love to cut their syndication budget by dropping whatever else they air in the 7pm hour.

And to think, whenever we read an article about Katie Couric's failed efforts, the reporter feels compelled to talk of the impending death of the evening newscast.

Hmmmmph. As if our local CBS affiliate didn't think having local news from 5-6:30 p.m. was ENOUGH. They NOW also have yet ANOTHER local broadcast from 7-7:30 p.m. AFTER the CBS Evening News!

I always thought 30 minutes of local news was enough and have LONG been ready for an HOUR of national news, BUT it's also LONG been my understanding that the biggest impediment to networks expanding to an hour-long news broadcast WAS resistance from local affiliates who see that time-period as a highly-lucrative time for LOCAL advertising dollars... Apparently, local stations have determined there is a HUGE audience for ALL THE LOCAL NEWS they can broadcast, and therefore a HUGE advertising sales potential for the same... Of course any time a viewer questions this -- OR the break-ins with "weather alerts" during primetime programs to tell you there's a thunderstorm 100 miles away (ALWAYS sponsored by SOMEONE), they respond that this is ALL DONE "in the public interest," because they're not ABOUT to admit that it's REALLY all about advertising dollar$!

I commend NBC on this idea, but I'm quite dubious as to how many local stations will give up that extra half-hour to network programming. I think it would truly REQUIRE a LARGE protest from local viewers in each market to get many to go for it.
Jeff

directv has that 30skip feature also....but yea that last skip always seems to take u a few seconds into the show so i just use the FF3x which when u then stop at the show takes u back some time so u see the show from the point after the commercial break & u miss nothing.

For better or worse, that is no longer the case.

TV Sports
Don't tell the boss, CBS website again puts NCAA games on demand
By Michael McCarthy, USA Today - March 9, 2009

CBSSports.com's NCAA March Madness on Demand, and its popular "Boss Button," return with live streaming of opening round games on Thursday, March 19.

Ever year, CBS helpfully provides millions of at-work viewers with a Boss Button that will show a fake spreadsheet if a nosy supervisor is looking over their shoulder. There were a record 2.5 million-plus clicks on the button in 2008. This year, it will be brought to you by its first official sponsor: Comcast.

Given the millions of jobs lost during the recession, Jason Kint, general manager of CBSSports.com, wouldn't be surprised if some worried supervisors reach for the button themselves.

"I bet you a lot of bosses will click it too," Kint says.

Kint's asked frequently if killjoy employers block the free service. Some do that on their own. But he says no companies have ever inquired with CBS on how to block it (although there's information about it on the March Madness on Demand website). That could change during the worst economic climate in decades.

"Even in a tough market we can all use a little break from the grind of the current economy," Kint says. "I'm hopeful that will continue. And people will look at March Madness on Demand as a positive."

Kint estimates the number of unique viewers in 2009 will rise 50% to 7.2 million. In 2008, the number of unique viewers grew 164% to 4.8 million. The total hours of live video/audio consumed grew 81% last year to 5 million hours.

Does March Madness on Demand cannibalize CBS' TV audiences? The network says no. Not surprisingly, the service gets its biggest audience for the Thursday-Friday first round games when many viewers are at work. The numbers then fall steadily while CBS' TV audiences take off.

Barkley starts jail sentence

TNT basketball analyst Charles Barkley began serving his three-day jail sentence for DUI in Arizona on Saturday. Barkley is serving his time in Maricopa County's "Tent City" jail.

Top quotes

Dale Earnhardt Jr. to crew chief Tony Eury Jr. during Fox's telecast of the Kobalt Tools 500 on Sunday: "If my wheel comes off and I hit the fence real hard, I get to whack every one of you with a hammer. Is that a deal?"… ESPN's Michael Wilbon during Friday's Pardon the Interruption on Shaquille O'Neal ripping Stan Van Gundy as a "master of panic" and Chris Bosh as the "RuPaul" of big men: "It's easy to see (Shaq) as a funny, funny guy, I do. Unless you're the guy he's clowning on."

NHL fighting code

NHL enforcers follow their own code of honor when it comes to fighting. There was an example of sportsmanship during NBC's telecast of the New York Rangers vs. Boston Bruins on Sunday.

During a scrap between the Rangers' Colton Orr and the Bruins' Shawn Thornton, Orr's sweater rode up over his head. Rather than continuing to punch his blinded opponent, Thornton gestured for the linesman to break them up.

"That's part of the (fighting) code right there," said NBC's Pierre McGuire. "Good for Shawn Thornton."

Survivor guilt

Excellent piece by ESPN's Kelly Naqi on Sunday's Outside the Lines about sole survivor Nick Schuyler — and the challenge he might face from survivor guilt after losing friends and NFL players Marquis Cooper and Corey Smith and former South Florida player Will Bleakley in a Gulf of Mexico boating accident.

Schuyler's friend Scott Miller told Naqi in an interview: "I can't imagine what he's going through mentally right now. I mean, he's got to explain to three families why he made it — and they didn't."

No mas

Is there a mercy rule on promotional ads for ABC's new cop show Castle? I'll make you a deal ESPN: I'll watch Monday night's premiere, if you stop running those show promos over and over. You know the ads. Rick Castle (Nathan Fillion) is the wisecracking novelist enlisted by the New York Police Department. Detective Kate Beckett (Stana Katic) is the tough cop. He asks if she ever gets wild. She chews her lip and asks: "You know I'm wearing a gun, don't you?" Sure, the two Disney networks have to cross-promote. But I feel like I've seen the first episode already.

http://www.usatoday.com/sports/colum...mccarthy_N.htm

The Business of Television
N.Y. film, TV industry making tax credit appeal
Asking lawmakers for inclusion of funds in budget outlines
By Georg Szalai, The Hollywood Reporter - March 9, 2009

NEW YORK -- Members of the New York film and TV sector are planning to raise further awareness and lock up lawmaker support in Albany on Wednesday for new funding for the state's production tax credits.

Unions, such as the Teamsters, along with the NY Production Alliance and its members will press for inclusion of funds in the state budget outlines that are expected from the State Assembly and Senate any time now.

This year, the state had announced that the funds for its 30% film and TV tax incentives have been used up. Since Gov. David Paterson's budget draft lacked a renewal, the industry has been lobbying state lawmakers with a letter writing campaign and other methods. The Paterson, senate and assembly budget proposals must be reconciled, so NYPA and others are working on getting their ideas into at least one of the budget outlines.

For Wednesday, NYPA and other industry reps are set to meet with lawmakers in Albany. Union and NYPA reps also will press their points in a noon press conference at the State Capitol. The Albany outing had originally been planned for earlier this month, but the effort was upended by heavy snowfall.

NYPA executive director John Johnston told The Hollywood Reporter that he feels "there is an air of intensity" about the budget process in Albany, but he couldn't say when all proposals or a final budget would be finished. The state has an April 1 target date for the final budget bill, but decisions could well come later, some say.

Douglas Steiner, chairman of Steiner Studios, who was a driving force in getting the tax program launched in 2004, said it is key to restart the NYincentives by late April to avoid losing out on the TV season.

He has spent a lot of time in Albany as of late, saying he is "cautiously optimistic" as he has "found strong support" among legislators. "I think it is only a question of how quickly and in what form we will (get a renewal)," he told THR.

The incentives could be continued without changes and simply get new funding. But legislators could also change the way they work. For example, some have proposed reducing the tax credits percentage from 30%, while NYPA has proposed a continuation of the incentives without the current caps. "The credits have created jobs and tax revenue for the state," Johnston said. "They work, and the industry needs (planning security), so we are asking there be no caps."

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/hr/...29359239d34cfb

Interesting, this contradicts what I heard—that there was a problem obtaining permits and the rally was not happening. Hopefully it’s still on. If it’s, I’ll be there with bells and whistles.

edit:

It is on.

There will be a massive rally in Albany Wednesday. State troopers will escort a mile long convoy of film and television industry vehicles into the center of the capital. At around noon, there will be a gathering of industry speakers at the corner of Washington and Swann addressing the public.