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TV Review
‘Viral Video Showdown,’ cut to the quick
Syfy series squeezes into a half hour what should be an hour show
By Tom Conroy, Media Life Magazine - Oct. 29, 2012

"Project Runway" established the pattern for the many subsequent reality shows in which skilled people compete in a creative field: We meet the contestants. They get an assignment. Most important, they fulfill the assignment, in the process letting us learn about them and how they do what they do. And then they get judged.

Syfy's new reality show "Viral Video Showdown," in which two teams of video makers compete to make the best short online clip, demonstrates why such shows are usually an hour long. It follows the usual pattern, but since it's only a half hour, it compresses the important third step so much that we learn little about the teams' techniques and have no time to pick favorites. The clips are fun to watch, but it would be more fun and a lot quicker to search for "viral videos" on YouTube.

In the premiere episode, airing this Tuesday, Oct. 30, at 10:30 p.m., the two teams are asked to make a parody movie trailer. The have a choice of four topics (getting the mail, a picnic, a high school reunion and a first date) and four genres (horror, postapocalyptic, fantasy and science fiction). The teams have four days to plan, shoot and edit the clips and are given $4,000 to spend.

If it is later revealed that one of the producers of the show has obsessive-compulsive disorder, with a particular fixation on the number four, we won't be surprised.

One team, calling itself Final Cut King, consists of two guys currently enrolled in film school in California. They decide to make a trailer promoting a sci-fi movie about getting the mail.

The other is a big, loosely organized group of young Hollywood professionals who call themselves Half Day Today. Their trailer is for a horror movie about first dates.

The show's host, Kevin Pereira, formerly the host of G4's "Attack of the Show," has already used up crucial seconds introducing us to the three judges — a videogame expert and two Internet-video writer-director-performers — so we don't have much time left for the actual production.

We see the two teams brainstorm ideas. One woman on the Half Day Today team admits apologetically that they're going to "objectify" all three actresses in their video. "We know how we get hits," she says. "Boobs."

Then the Final Cut King guys start shooting a scene in someone's front lawn, with the actors dressed in makeshift spaceman costumes. They have a setback when a computer they're using for postproduction freezes.

When we see the Half Day team again, it's already day 4. We catch glimpses of them shooting the final scenes and gathering as a group to edit.

Most shows in this genre will have used this part of the episode to present little story arcs, complete with setbacks and triumphs. The moments we see on this show seem to have been selected at random.

The head of Final Cut King, a young man named Zach King, gets a fair amount of face time, coming across as a likable special-effects nerd. No one on the other team makes much of an impression. So we not only can't form an opinion about the teams' working methods; we also can't decide whom to root for based on personality.

Both of the finished videos are enjoyable. One is clearly superior, even though, as one judge points out, the editing is too rushed. Perhaps to maintain suspense, the judges are kind to both teams before announcing the winner.

Unfortunately, "Viral Video Showdown" doesn't justify even the short time we spend before we get to watch the clips. The show forgets that one of the reasons that viral videos get so many views is that we can see them immediately. Viewers won't click away from this show, but few will be inspired to click to it.

http://www.medialifemagazine.com/viral-video-showdown-cut-to-the-quick/

Critic's Notes
Bianculli's Best Bets
By David Bianculli, TVWorthWatching.com - Oct. 30, 2012

ELLEN DEGENERES: THE MARK TWAIN PRIZE
PBS, 8:00 p.m. ET
This salute to Ellen DeGeneres was taped a week ago Monday in Washingon, D.C., the same evening as the third and final presidential debate between Mitt Romney and President Barack Obama. Alluding to Romney’s one specific announced proposed budget cut, revealed during an earlier debate and aimed at eliminating federal funding for PBS, DeGeneres began her thank-yous by saying, to the network airing the awards ceremony, “Thanks to everyone at PBS. I’m so glad to be a part of your farewell season.” Let’s hope she was joking. Guests on hand to honor DeGeneres include Jane Lynch, Sean Hayes and Jimmy Kimmel. But while the comedienne deserves lots of credit for coming out, in and out of character, on her Ellen sitcom, might I just ask: How in the world has The Mark Twain Prize not yet been awarded to the Smothers Brothers? Check local listings.

FREAKS
TCM, 9:15 p.m. ET
Tonight, in anticipation of Halloween, TCM presents a prime-time lineup that’s so good, it’s scary – and vice versa. The triple feature begins at 8 p.m. ET with 1927’s The Unknown, an early Lon Chaney film, also starring Joan Crawford, directed by Tod Browning. It concludes at 10:30 p.m. ET with 1946’s Bedlam, a moody Boris Karloff film sometimes known as Chamber of Horrors. But the evening’s centerpiece is another Browning movie, the 1932 cult masterpiece Freaks. How good is it? Well, I just showed it to my Film History and Appreciation class at Rowan University last week, and it’ll be on the midterm. Featured performers include many actual sideshow veterans, including Siamese twins Daisy and Violet Hilton and Josephine Joseph, billed as the half-woman, half-man.

FRONTLINE: “BIG SKY, BIG MONEY, AN INVESTIGATION WITH MARKETPLACE”
PBS, 9:30 p.m. ET
Kai Ryssdal, host of public radio’s Marketplace, reports on how the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision has played out in Montana, with local court challenges, alleged abuses by local political campaigns, and how the resultant state Senate race has escalated into a bitter contest that could well prove pivotal in each party’s hopes to control the U.S. Senate. Check local listings.

DON'T TRUST THE B---- IN APARTMENT 23
ABC, 9:31 p.m. ET
In this new Halloween episode, June (Dreama Walker) is even more paranoid than usual about her eccentric roommate Chloe (Krysten Ritter), who has a history of pulling elaborate pranks for the holiday. But this year, with Chloe adopting a law-and-order costume persona, there’s nothing to worry about, right? Yeah, right.

SONS OF ANARCHY
FX, 10:00 p.m. ET
Poor Jax (Charlie Hunnam) doesn’t know where to turn lately, what with the gunshot attacks, car crashes, and duplicitous gang members pointing the fingers at others. And since Clay (Ron Perlman) has falsely denied being behind the recent break-ins and beat-downs, Jax goes back to confront the next likely suspect, the deadly Pope (Harold Perrineau).

http://www.tvworthwatching.com/

Technology Notes
Unsurprisingly, Netflix Viewing Is Up Right Now
By Zach Dionne, Vulture.com (NY Magazine) - Oct. 29, 2012

Netflix reports its streaming on Sunday and Monday was up 20 percent in comparison to last week. And yes, major east coast cities — NYC, Boston, D.C. — are to thank. Gotta wonder if that press release just awkwardly acknowledged the circumstances that wrought this triumph or if Sandy got a direct shout-out.

And don't forget, a bunch of Vulture's Frankenstorm distraction viewing is available on Netflix. Let's remember what's important and keep those numbers high!

http://www.vulture.com/2012/10/netflix-viewing-is-up.html

Business Notes/Opinion
Prisoners of Cable
Why we can’t break free from our TV overlords
By Drek Thompson, The Atlantic - Oct. 29, 2012

On the Internet, news and entertainment famously want to be free. But in June, tens of thousands of people staged an online protest that was bizarre for its medium. They offered—begged, even—to pay an entertainment company for its content. Almost as strangely, the company told them: “No way.”

The Web site TakeMyMoneyHBO.com attracted more than 160,000 people in 48 hours, each one promising to pay HBO an average of $12 a month for its streaming app, HBO Go, which offers every episode of the channel’s original programming, plus movies, but is currently available only to cable subscribers. The cheeky site might seem insignificant, but it created a media firestorm around the question of cable TV’s future. Jeff Bewkes, the CEO of Time Warner, the media company that owns HBO, tried to dismiss the issue, saying, “The whole idea that there’s a lot of people out there that want to drop [cable] and just have a Netflix or an HBO—that’s not right.” And indeed, pay-TV services added 200,000 U.S. customers in 2011; HBO and Cinemax subscriptions grew by 7 million globally in the first half of this year.

The cable bundle is under increasing popular assault these days, at least as measured by Web diatribes and water-cooler complaints. Nobody likes to feel forced to buy more than they want, and cable television sticks us with eye-popping bills for hundreds of channels that we couldn’t possibly watch even if we wanted to. The argument behind TakeMyMoneyHBO.com and its ilk is that this massive bundle could be easily unraveled and sold à la carte, by channel or even by individual show, if we just broke free of cable’s monopoly. Alas, it isn’t so simple.

Your monthly TV bill—if you belong to one of the 83 percent of U.S. households that subscribes to a pay-TV service—is in fact three bundles nestled inside each other. Cable channels (such as TBS) are bundles of shows. Media companies (such as Time Warner, which owns TBS) offer bundles of channels that they refuse to sell one by one. Finally, pay-TV companies—which I’ll call cable companies for short, but which also include satellite companies like DirecTV and telcos like Verizon—bundle and sell the media companies’ offerings. When you pay $80 or so each month for cable, roughly half goes to the cable company to pay for the cost of building and maintaining the infrastructure to transport the content, and the other half goes to the media companies, which divvy it up among channels.

When you turn on your television, there is a 95 percent chance that the channel you tune in to will be owned by one of just seven media companies, such as News Corp (which owns Fox News Channel) or Viacom (which owns Comedy Central). The Big Seven use their oligopolistic power to drive a hard bargain. Cable providers that want to run Viacom’s popular networks, like Comedy Central, must also agree to buy its less popular channels, like MTV2. After dealing with all seven media companies, the cable providers are left with something millions of households will recognize: a bloated offering of channels at an arrestingly high price. The bundle isn’t something Comcast or DirecTV invented to make their customers hate them. It’s something that the largest media companies demand, in take-it-or-leave-it fashion.

But media companies are not the only players with a big stake in the current system. Channels, too, find it congenial to their interests. HBO is a perfect example: Weaned off its media company, Time Warner, HBO would see its costs skyrocket. It would have to build a streaming infrastructure and pay for its own marketing, customer service, and billing. More than 90 percent of HBO’s content is viewed on a television, versus 1 percent through HBO Go. The channel is not about to blow up its business model for that 1 percent.

The benefits of a stable cable bundle are felt all the way down to the show creators. YouTube is a decent outlet for cheap, straight-to-Internet shorts, but creating a full-fledged TV show is extraordinarily expensive and freakishly risky. Established channels provide advertising, branding, and initial attention, plus steady and predictable financing.

If your cable bundle is a Gordian knot, there are really only two ways to imagine it being undone. It might unravel slowly, if today’s younger and preternaturally distracted generations grow up not caring enough about high-production-value cable TV to pay for it. Or a giant might come along and play the role of Alexander the Great, cutting the cable bundle by creating a brand-new way to distribute content. This would take more than cleverness. It would take a lot of money.

Still, the techies and cordless cry out: “Where is our Alexander?”

* * * *

The gadget war among the largest U.S. tech companies started on computers, shifted to phones and tablets, and is moving, slowly but certainly, back toward that original home screen: the television. Some tech evangelists pray that a swashbuckling disrupter might radically transform how (and how much) we pay for TV—the way the Internet made newspapers effectively free, or the way Napster and Apple forced music labels to sell their songs à la carte for 99 cents a pop.

But more bad news awaits these hopefuls. The tech giants now eyeing television—Apple, Google, Microsoft—don’t care about à la carte programming as some philosophical ideal. They see the television as the next logical battleground in the fight for your attention and your money, and their plans do not intuitively lead to an anti-bundling strategy.

Take Apple, for example. The company already produces Apple TV, a device resembling a hockey puck that streams content from the Internet to your television. But some observers predict that the company is on the verge of offering something much bigger—a sleek screen that does to the TV market what the iPhone did to the cellphone market. The most fully imagined vision of this so-called iTV comes from a mammoth report issued in February by Jefferies, a global investment bank. In its most expansive form, iTV might offer live programming, a gaming platform, full Internet access, and apps like Netflix and a Skype “on steroids”—all combined with a voice-and-gesture interface that replaces our hideous remotes, and all deliverable to any Apple device.

A full-blown iTV would complete a hat trick of screen domination for Apple—phone, computer/tablet, and TV—and the ability to move video between devices might create a kind of “halo effect” that would make each product more alluring. But Apple is primarily a hardware company, and its profits lie primarily in selling you devices. To change the economics of television programming, Apple would need to take on the cable providers by striking deals with media companies, starting with the Big Seven. That’s just not happening. Instead, as The Wall Street Journal reported in August, Apple is working with cable providers to bring content to Apple TV and its potential successors, having long ago ditched the idea that it wanted to be in the business of haggling with Viacom over the right cost of the giant media company’s channels. Apple has realized that it doesn’t have to beat Comcast and Verizon to own your living room. It only has to join them.

With Apple’s TV project looking less than Alexandrian, some tech evangelists have transferred their excitement to Google, which announced in August that its new Fiber network will soon begin delivering ultra-fast Internet and TV to the residents of Kansas City. But Kansas City is just a pilot site, and as James McQuivey, an analyst at Forrester Research, explains, “In a strange way, what they’re promising isn’t disruptive at all.” Google isn’t changing the TV game. It’s simply building a super-fast Internet network—in one medium-size market—and adding a traditional cable bundle to make its offer competitive for residents who already get their Internet and TV from Time Warner Cable. Even if this project proves a spectacular success, taking it nationwide could cost between $100 billion and $200 billion.

Finally, there is Microsoft, whose ambitions to build a cable competitor (by using the Xbox to sling video streamed through the Internet to your TV) hit a wall in January when, like Apple, it concluded that after dealing with the media companies, signing up customers, and streaming the content, it would have no advantage over Big Cable in price or service. Instead, Microsoft is simply working with the cable companies: Xbox Live, Microsoft’s Internet-enabled gaming console, offers a kaleidoscope of content that includes TV-on-demand from Comcast, plus HBO GO, Hulu, live baseball from MLB.tv, and an array of apps and video games. This all-aboard strategy may in fact pose dangers to cable in the long run: one of Big Cable’s challenges will be keeping audiences’ attention from flitting to other forms of video entertainment, and Xbox Live lets you very easily toggle from one form of entertainment to another, all on the big screen in your den. But you get the option of first-run, premium TV only if you buy a cable bundle.

Other challengers may emerge. Netflix, for instance, is now producing original content—like the David Fincher and Kevin Spacey project House of Cards and a new season of Arrested Development—and will be providing it directly to subscribers of the streaming service. But Netflix plans just five such shows—and it won’t be selling them à la carte. What’s more, it has found these shows very expensive to underwrite. House of Cards alone reportedly sold for $100 million, nearly half of what Netflix paid to secure the rights to dozens of older CBS shows such as Cheers and Frasier; Netflix’s profit margins, meanwhile, have been declining. Ultimately, if many deep-pocketed companies were willing to bankroll a large number of good shows and sell them individually, the oligopoly of existing media companies would be threatened, and the bundle might be broken. But there’s little sign that this day is coming anytime soon.

* * * *

Cable’s proposition to consumers is simple: if you want the new, good TV shows, you need the bundle. Straight-to-Web television, like YouTube’s Premium Channels, is free, but the vast majority of it isn’t very good. Netflix and Hulu have deep reservoirs of great content, but the vast majority of it is old—traditional media companies would never give a cable competitor a sweetheart deal on new TV shows, for fear of killing their cash cow.

The problem, of course, is that TV entertainment is getting more expensive every year. Asked to name his most pressing business concern, Marcien Jenckes, the senior vice president of video services at Comcast Cable, didn’t hesitate: “The rising cost of programming.” Consider that in 2011, ESPN agreed to pay the NFL almost $2 billion a year for the rights to Monday Night Football—a 73 percent increase over their previous deal, reached in 2006. To make back the money, ESPN’s parent company, Disney, will demand higher fees from Comcast, which will turn around and ask some 22 million subscribers to pay more each month.

At some point, consumers may decide, en masse, that they won’t be force-fed anymore. But that hasn’t happened yet. The HBO Go campaign was just the latest revolutionary yelp of the “cord cutters”—those who’ve canceled their cable subscriptions to rely on video streamed over the Internet via Hulu or Netflix. One report estimated that more than 2.5 million people canceled their cable subscriptions between 2008 and 2011. But despite hard times, total pay-TV subscriptions held steady at about 104 million.

In the past few years, a Cambrian explosion of video and gaming content has created a new world of distraction for audiences on their computers, phones, and tablets. But plenty of families apparently like what they’re getting for $80 a month, compared with the alternatives. In fact, when Time Warner Cable offered a cheaper package of channels called “TV Essentials,” the company reported that most new customers opted for a more expensive package in order to get desired channels like ESPN.

Maybe these families are just being economical. Compared with onetime mass-entertainment purchases, $80 is a lot of money. But in a four-person household where each member watches three to four hours of TV a day—the national average—that comes out to only about 20 cents per hour of entertainment. That value is six times better than a magazine you buy off a stand and read for four hours. It’s 20 times better than a two-and-a-half-hour movie watched in a theater. If you bought the Xbox game Madden NFL 2013 in September, you would have to play it for two hours every day until the Super Bowl to get the same per-hour value. As a monthly fee, cable feels like a rip-off. But as hourly entertainment, it’s not.

The knottiness of the cable bundle is discouraging news for many consumers, who are surely thinking, If music was so easy to disrupt, why is video so hard? Well, for many reasons—downloading a single song is much easier than live-streaming an event to your computer; the demise of the music industry has taught every content owner to cling ferociously to rights. But ultimately, one reason trumps all others. Television is good entertainment because it is produced in painstaking, costly fashion—and as much as we hate our cable bills, someone has to pay for that. Indeed, it’s no accident that as pay-TV has proliferated, and costs have risen, we’ve also entered a golden age of television. Twenty years ago, who could have even imagined something as lush as Game of Thrones, as stylish as Mad Men, or as morally fraught as Breaking Bad?

As for the cord cutters, they should be thanking those families whose monthly cable bills enable the production of the shows they love to watch on Netflix or Hulu. Today’s pay-TV subscribers are in effect subsidizing the cord-cutter experience by paying top dollar for first-run programming, while the Cordless soak up the offerings more cheaply in later windows. Without cable, there wouldn’t be HBO Go. There might not even be HBO. Great TV only seems cheap to the Internet’s enfants terribles because media companies insist on charging for it elsewhere—and more than 100 million households still think the price is worth paying.

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/11/prisoners-of-cable/309109/?single_page=true

Local companies bought remaining tickets. Game will be on NFL Network and on KFMB-8.

TV Notes/Opinion
TV production in New York stays dark, but Kimmel's live!
By Lynette Rice, EW.com's 'Inside TV' Blog - Oct. 30, 2012

As expected, the myriad of TV shows that film in New York will remain dark today in the storm’s devastating aftermath. Affected shows show include The Good Wife, Person of Interest, 30 Rock, Smash, Special Victims Unit, Celebrity Apprentice and 666 Park Avenue, among many others.

Early ratings results from Nielsen have also been delayed until further notice. That means we’ll have to wait to see how well Dancing with the Stars fared opposite all that Sandy coverage on The Weather Channel. (Those ratings coming later today).

But here’s a piece of good news. Jimmy Kimmel Live! will broadcast an original show tonight from The Harvey Theater at BAM – Brooklyn Academy of Music. Howard Stern and Tracy Morgan will appear, as well as musical guest Sharon Jones and the Dap Kings.

http://insidetv.ew.com/2012/10/30/tv-production-in-new-york-stays-dark-but-kimmels-live/

TV Sports/Critic's Notes
Lost Cause
By Will Leitch, SportsonEarth.com Blog - Oct. 29, 2012

Those who despair about what many believe ESPN has become -- “relentless bulls---, 100 percent authentic, 24 hours a day” as Deadspin’s Tommy Craggs memorably put it -- can take some solace is knowing that the network can, in fact, change. And I don’t mean change through outsourcing, like with the “30 for 30” documentaries and everyone’s tacit agreement to pretend Grantland is somehow owned by somebody else. I mean in the actual coverage of live mainstream events: Sometimes they actually hear us.

In 2006, ESPN received among the worst press it had ever received -- this was about four months before Deadspin launched -- during the World Cup in Germany. In an attempt to “crossover” the sport of soccer, the network used a lot of its usual tricks during coverage (obvious statistical graphics, garish in-game advertising displays, explaining soccer only in relation to other, more “popular” American sports, “human interest” stories that distract from the actual game we’re trying to watch) and, most notoriously, hired Dave O’Brien as its lead broadcaster. O’Brien openly admitted he had never followed soccer until just a few months earlier -- his experience with it was limited to briefly dabbling in it in high school and his 11-year-old daughter’s youth league -- and this was something he took considerable pride in. O’Brien’s view was that if you didn’t like his broadcasting, it’s because you liked soccer too much.

“There’s kind of a petulant little clique of soccer fans. There’s not many of them, but they’re mean-spirited. … And they’re not really the audience we want to reach anyway,” O’Brien told USA TODAY back then. “Soccer hasn’t been presented well to guys like me who played it in high school and are raising daughters on travel teams. Should I spend even 15 seconds describing what the Bundesliga is? Should I explain what FIFA is? My 11-year-old daughter doesn’t know. If I do that, the clique will say I don’t know soccer. But we’re putting on a TV product, not a soccer clinic.”

This is ESPN at its worst. It’s not just the notion that every sporting event must be dumbed down to the point that only 11-year-old girls who don’t follow sports at all can understand (the “Today” show-ification of sports). It’s the sneering, dismissive, you true fans don’t matter, all that matters is RATINGS of it all. As ESPN has grown so massive in the last decade, the goal of the network has not been to cater to its core audience, but to simply grow itself, regardless of product. The aim is not to inform or to entertain; the goal is to self-sustain. This does not make ESPN evil or sinister or anything like that; it just makes it like any other corporation, one in which what the most loyal customers want is not just irrelevant to the bottom line, but actually counterproductive to it. You see this most vividly today on the broadcast of “Monday Night Football” -- the network’s most high-profile program, and therefore most important -- whose coverage most often resembles a Bleacher Report headline with explanation points and occasional telestration.

But ESPN can change, and 2010 proves it. The network’s coverage of the 2010 World Cup in South Africa was universally praised, and it’s because the network learned the lessons of 2006. Gone was O’Brien; gone were the constant analogies to “American” sports; gone were the “this defender has overcome poverty and having six toes on his left foot and just three on his right” soft-focus pieces. The focus was entirely on the sport itself, covered by men and women who understood the game, delivered no-frills to the game’s most devoted fans. People loved it, not just as soccer fans, but fans of sports in general. ESPN was actually covering a sporting event as a sporting event, not as a cavalcade of synergistic branding opportunities. And, not for nothing (and not that this should necessarily be the end-all, be-all), the ratings were through the roof.

Watching the 2010 World Cup on ESPN gave you hope not only for soccer in this country, but in fact ESPN itself. Maybe it would embrace the love it received for its coverage and start to expand it to other sports, tell us the story simply as it is, unadorned with solipsistic incantations, free of obsessiveness over invented storylines to “drive mainstream narratives.” Maybe it would learn from its 2010 World Cup successes.

This weekend, the story broke that NBC had outbid Fox and ESPN to carry English Premier League matches for the next three years. This was a reminder that last year, Fox had outbid ESPN to show the 2018 and 2022 World Cups. Which means that 2014 will be the last year that ESPN shows the World Cup, the one sporting event it shows the way it should be shown.

It’s possible that Bill Simmons and Jalen Rose, the new additions on ESPN’s NBA studio crew, will make that program watchable in the same way TNT’s “Inside the NBA” is. (That’s obviously the goal.) But if not, watching the 2014 World Cup is gonna be like reading “Flowers for Algernon.” I passed your floor on the way up, and now I'm passing it on the way down. I don't think I'll be taking this elevator again.

* * * *

I’m pretty optimistic about Simmons and Rose on the NBA broadcast, all told, as long as the mustache doesn’t return. Thoughts, concerns, grousing, future column ideas? Remember, this column is meant as a valve, a release, for when you’re yelling at your television during games, or, after reading a particular column, you’re pounding your fists into your computer. Obviously, I’ll need your help to do that. Anything you want me to write about, let me know, through email or Twitter. I am at your beck and call.

http://www.sportsonearth.com/article/40118566/

NOOOOOOOOO. The show I said would be gone in two weeks gets a WHOLE SEASON? What they say is true: There is no accounting for taste. On the other hand, I was with some industry types, recently, and one of them said, "It's got Jamie Gertz in it. Don't worry. It WILL fail."

Now to find some Dijon to go on this crow...

TV Notes
'Freaks', 'Ghosts' and 'Zombies' are all over network and cable channels this Halloween
By David Hinckley, New York Daily News - Oct. 30, 2012

If you wonder why Shannon Woodward’s Sabrina is dressed as a garden gnome on Tuesday night’s “Raising Hope” (Fox, 8 p.m.), it’s only so she won’t feel out of place.

Half of television seems to dress up for Halloween these days. A once-incidental holiday has become almost a mandatory occasion for special episodes of series shows, while cable channels poke around to find exactly how they can get in on the fun.

So it’s not just Zooey Deschanel getting big black eyes and painting pumpkins Tuesday on “New Girl” (Fox, 8:30 p.m.). “The B in Apartment 23” on ABC has a “Love and Monsters” episode Tuesday night.

And the opening scene of Wednesday night’s “CSI” (CBS, 10 p.m.) has the corpse-of-the-week discovered by two girls en route to a Halloween party.

At first, they think the corpse is just wearing a realistic costume.

The movie channels, of course, have always used Halloween to break out the scare fare.

AMC will show the “Friday the 13th” series all day Tuesday, 9:45 a.m.-midnight, then the “Halloween” series Wednesday, 9:45 a.m.-midnight.

TCM goes more retro, starting at 8 p.m. Tuesday with the silent classic “The Unknown” and then the 1932 “Freaks.”

TCM keeps it up through Wednesday with faves like “White Zombie” at 5:15 p.m. and “Frankenstein” with Boris Karloff at 8 p.m.

And yes, this was scheduled before anyone had even invented the word “Frankenstorm.”

ABC is sticking with a more modern tradition, showing “It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown,” Wednesday night at 8.

HGTV also keeps the pumpkin theme, breaking out “Pumpkin Wars” Wednesday at 9 p.m.

The Food Network has its own take on things like pumpkins, with four hours of Halloween-themed shows Wednesday night, including “Zombie Wedding,” “Science Gone Wrong” and “Evil Clowns.”

On a less scary note, Syfy is doing a “Ghost Hunters” marathon.

http://www.nydailynews.com/entertainment/tv-movies/halloween-shows-tv-year-article-1.1194297

I know you work on radio, but can you put video of this online somewhere for us to watch?

I know jamie gertz she was the stall girl on a seinfeld ep....she couldnt spare a square.

More football musings.

November 11 is the beginning of the flex scheduling for NBC Sunday Night Football.

I can see two games as candidates for flexing:
Week 13 - Eagles@Cowboys - both may be out of the playoff picture by then.
Week 16 - Chargers@Jets - do I even need to say anything?

FYI, I looked at http://www.the506.com/nflmaps to get the info.

Not all of Jami Gertz's series tank.  Sure, "Sibs" lasted maybe eight episodes, but "Square Pegs" finished a season and "Still Standing" lasted four seasons (IIRC) and continues in syndicated reruns.

And that's just the S's.
 

Doesn't each network get to protect one of their games each week, except 17? If so in week 13 FOX would protect MIN @ GB, and CBS would protect PIT @ BAL. I'm not seeing much else compelling for NBC to flex into (and Chicago has already been scheduled to play 5 primetime games, not sure they're allowed to pickup that game).

In week 16 there are several games I'd chose over SD @ NYJ.

In weeks 11-16 they each can protect only 5 games so 1 week has to be left unprotected.
+ a team can play 6 primetime games.

Oddly enough, that show (Neighbors) has grown on me (like an alien fungus.)

Now I'm afraid to give my opinion of Reba's new show, "Malibu Country"

MONDAY's fast affiliate overnight prime-time ratings -and what they mean- have been posted on Analyst Marc Berman's Media Insight's Blog

Business Notes
'Star Wars' Returns
‘Episode 7′ Slated For 2015 And More Movies Planned As Disney Buys Lucasfilm
By the Deadline.com Team - Oct. 30, 2012

Disney has just confirmed that it has agreed to acquire George Lucas‘ Lucasfilm Ltd, and that includes rights to the Star Wars franchise that will now continue on. The companies have targeted a 2015 release for Star Wars: Episode 7, with Episode 8 and Episode 9 to follow as the the long-term plan is to release a new feature every two or three years. “The last Star Wars movie release was 2005’s Revenge Of The Sith – and we believe there’s substantial pent-up demand”, Disney said. The deal also includes rights to the Indiana Jones franchise.

The stock and cash transaction is worth an estimated $4.05 billion, and the companies have scheduled a conference call in a half-hour to discuss the deal, which was approved by the Disney board and Lucas, the sole Lucasfilm shareholder.

As for the new Star Wars installments, the companies said Lucasfilm’s Kathleen Kennedy would be executive producer on Episode 7 and any more Star Wars movies, and Lucas would serve as creative consultant. There was no indication about where the story would pick up, though technically in the franchise’s chronology it would follow Star Wars: Episode 6 — Return Of The Jedi, the third film in the initial trilogy that came out in 1983.

As part of the deal, Kennedy will become president of Lucasfilm, reporting to Walt Disney Studios chairman Alan Horn. Kennedy, who was made Lucasfilm co-chairman June 1 as heir apparent to Lucas, will also serve as the brand manager for Star Wars, whose feature films have earned a total of $4.4 billion in global box to date. And that doesn’t even take into account the franchise’s massive merchandising clout that Disney CFO Jay Rasulo said will generate in 2012 close to the $215 million in consumer product revenue Marvel had when Disney bought that comics business in 2009.

Disney has built its business under chairman and CEO Bob Iger around such major acquisitions as Marvel, Pixar, ABC and ESPN.

“Lucasfilm reflects the extraordinary passion, vision, and storytelling of its founder, George Lucas,” Iger said in a release announcing the deal. “This transaction combines a world-class portfolio of content including Star Wars, one of the greatest family entertainment franchises of all time, with Disney’s unique and unparalleled creativity across multiple platforms, businesses, and markets to generate sustained growth and drive significant long-term value.”

Disney is paying approximately half of the consideration in cash and issuing approximately 40 million shares at closing based on Disney’s stock price on October 26. Lucasfilm is 100% owned by Lucasfilm chairman and founder Lucas.

“For the past 35 years, one of my greatest pleasures has been to see Star Wars passed from one generation to the next,” said Lucas. “It’s now time for me to pass Star Wars on to a new generation of filmmakers. I’ve always believed that Star Wars could live beyond me, and I thought it was important to set up the transition during my lifetime. I’m confident that with Lucasfilm under the leadership of Kathleen Kennedy, and having a new home within the Disney organization, Star Wars will certainly live on and flourish for many generations to come. Disney’s reach and experience give Lucasfilm the opportunity to blaze new trails in film, television, interactive media, theme parks, live entertainment, and consumer products.”

Lucasfilm’s businesses include live-action film production, consumer products, animation, visual effects, and audio postproduction. Disney also acquires the technologies from the San Francisco-based company, which operates under the names Lucasfilm Ltd., LucasArts, Industrial Light + Magic, and Skywalker Sound.

http://www.deadline.com/2012/10/disney-acquires-lucasfilm-star-wars-creator/

TechnTV Notes
NBC Sets Premiere Dates for '1600 Penn,' Eva Longoria Series
By Tim Kenneally, TheWrap.com - Oct. 30, 2012

NBC announced midseason premiere dates Tuesday for three new series, including the Bill Pullman presidential comedy "1600 Penn" and the new Eva Longoria relationship series "Ready for Love."

The network also announced the premiere date for the drama "Deception," which was formerly known as "Infamous."

Also read: "Community" Returning to Old Timeslot in February

In addition to the series premieres, the network announced return dates for several shows, including the on-the-bubble comedy "Community," which will return to its previous Thursday night timeslot.

"Deception," a dark family mystery starring Meagan Good and Victor Garber, premieres on Monday, Jan. 7 at 10 p.m. It will follow "The Biggest Loser," which starts its new season with a two-night premiere on Jan. 6 and 7.

"1600 Penn," starring Bill Pullman as the president in a comedy about the First Family, premieres Thursday, Jan. 10 at 9:30. The series, which also stars Jenna Elfman and Josh Gad, was co-created by "Modern Family" director Jason Winer. It will join a slightly altered Thursday lineup.

"Parks and Recreation" moves to 8:30 on Jan. 17, and "Community," returns to 8 p.m. on Feb. 7.

"Ready for Love," a reality show executive produced by former "Desperate Housewives" star Eva Longoria, will premiere Sunday, March 31 at 8 p.m.

Below are return dates for NBC's returning series:

“The Voice”: March 25 and 26

“Revolution”: March 25

"The Biggest Loser": Jan. 6 and 7

“Smash”: Feb. 5

“Community”: Feb. 7

“The Celebrity Apprentice: All-Star Edition”: March 3

“Betty White’s Off Their Rockers”: Jan. 8

http://www.thewrap.com/tv/article/nbc-sets-premiere-dates-1600-penn-eva-longoria-series-62776

Nielsen Notes (Cable)
Another ratings record for 'Dexter,' 'Homeland'
By Lynette Rice, EW.com's 'Inside TV' Blog - Oct. 30, 2012

There’s a party over at Showtime! For the first time in the premium network’s history, two of its shows — Dexter and Homeland — each lured more than two million viewers on Sunday.

Dexter’s fifth episode averaged 2.28 million viewers at 9 p.m., its highest-rated episode since the season premiere (2.40 million) and up 5 percent versus the previous week. For the night, the series attracted a total 2.81 million viewers, the biggest total night since the season premiere (2.93 million).

Homeland, in comparison, drew its biggest audience ever of 2.07 million viewers, up 19 percent versus last week. The total night delivered 2.29 million viewers, its highest-rated night of the series.

http://insidetv.ew.com/2012/10/30/another-ratings-record-for-dexter-homeland/

See we always said there were still star wars eps 7-9....to all the peeps that said no --- na na na na na.

Yes, Dcowboy7, we were correct all along.  There was an announcement of eventual episodes 5, 6, 1, 2, 3, 7, 8, and 9 right after the film now known as episode 4 hit it big.

Also the good viewing order (to not spoil the luke/vader thing) still remains the same even with the new adds:
ep 4, 5, 1, 2, 3, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10+....sweet.

Critic's Notes
How Hurricane Sandy Brought Back the Old David Letterman
By Jesse David Fox, Vukture.com (New York Magazine) - Oct. 30, 2012

Yesterday afternoon, while many in the New York metro area were filling up bathtubs with their potential water reserve or buying six packs of whatever beer the most resilient bodega was selling, David Letterman was in a yellow rain jacket, standing outside the Ed Sullivan Theater with Paul Shaffer in the pre-storm calm, filming a purposefully dumb opening bit for the night's show. In it, Letterman lays out the situation — the weather is bad and getting worse and they don’t have an audience — and then he casually asks Shaffer if they should do a show. After agreeing to give it shot, they turn to open the doors of the studio: It's locked. Shaffer asks, "Where's the key?" Letterman quietly chuckles and throws his hands up, "Oh, ah, it's upstairs." The real punchline came with the opening credits being set over shots of flooding and sand bags. Even before the man was introduced to an empty theater as "The Perfect Storm, David Letterman" the show's tone was set: It was going to be dumb and silly, seemingly aiming to get a viewer to ask, "Why do a show at all, if it's going to be like this?" In other words, it was going to be like the old days.

As of earlier this year, Letterman has been a late night television host for 30 years. While nearly every show in some way plays with the late-night chat form, from the goofy Conan O'Brien to the absurdist Comedy Bang! Bang! and Eric Andre Show, Letterman was the first to deconstruct and poke at the traditional monologue/desk bit/guest/guest/guest format practiced in its most masterful form by Letterman's idol Johnny Carson. And when NBC's Late Night began in 1982, Letterman challenged the audience to be in on the joke as he framed the whole enterprise as a waste of time, his segments as frivolous exercises. It was a brand new, ironic approach, and in its glory years wowed its young, devoted audience with moments alternately and often simultaneously dopey, brilliant, and surreal. Interviews could be memorably cranky (an interaction with a celebrity that wasn't 100 percent adulatory? What was this?) and you often got the sense that he was ignoring the pre-interview notes.

Then, as these things go, Letterman became more and more popular and his show became part of the new normal. He moved to CBS, started competing with Tonight, got older, and lost the need to surprise or reinvent anything. Letterman's current show for the most part grew into what he has always made fun of. It's a predictable format, the same as Carson's, only instead of one desk bit there is often a handful of microbits strung together to start the show, as if none of them could hold his interest for long. The man is 65, the standard age for retirement, and he'll admit he doesn't try as hard anymore. As he told Alec Baldwin on Baldwin's Here's the Thing podcast:

"I do a lot less work than I used to do. I just got to a point where I have no patience for meetings, so I don’t go to any meetings. I can't make decisions anymore or I don’t like making decisions. We have a dozen producers; they can have the meetings and they can make the decisions and I'll just come down and somebody will tell me what to do and we go ... I used to be involved in everything. Big and large. I don’t know that was necessarily good, but at the time I thought that was what was required when you had your own show. You had to have everything in your view and certainly influence each little choice."

Last night's episode showed what happens when Letterman can't just go through the motions. He performed his monologue while sitting at his desk and looking at Paul Shaffer. The first joke involved a long setup, in which Letterman explained how severe the storm was: "We felt like we'd be putting the audience at jeopardy, if they had to sit through the show." Even before he started the punchline, he began to smile: "And I said, 'Hell, we've been doing that for 30 years.'" The band and Shaffer burst into an artificial uproar and Letterman ironically slapped the table. Back in the day, his monologue jokes (served economically, usually just four or five) used to serve as a parody of cheesy monologue jokes, but as the show's opening act has grown longer on CBS, it's been hard to distinguish between knowingly lame monologue jokes ("it's so cold that the rats have been _____") and lazy, lame monologue jokes. But last night, Letterman seemed to know just what he was doing. He followed jokes written for him with "I don’t get that," like an anti-humor veteran using moves for the first time in years. It's not that he has ever stopped mocking his own jokes, but without the audience's hopped-up laughter shuttling him along to the next punchline, Letterman seemed to actually be paying attention to just how bad they were, turning them back into commentary.

Eventually, Denzel Washington came in and the two had a fairly casual conversation, one that could've fit in any episode of the last few years. He slyly asked about cocaine and they shared their mutual admiration for John Goodman. The difference was, without the usual claps and hollers of a crowd, the artificiality of the conversation was apparent. Denzel's fake laughs reminded you of why Letterman sought to make fun of this format in the first place. This artifice is where Letterman's irony came from. Toward the end of the interview, the notoriously hermitlike Letterman commented, "I don’t know why we're not good, good friends," just so the audience at home knew that he knew that the entire conversation was at least partially ********.

The whole thing brought to mind classic episodes of Late Night with David Letterman in which they'd just play with the format because they could. There was the episode in which the camera turned 360 degrees throughout the hour, so halfway through it appeared upside down. Last night's episode felt most similar to the legendary 1985 episode in which Letterman bypassed the studio altogether, sending the audience home and shooting the whole thing in the show's production office. In it, a pizza man came, the writing staff is shown just sitting around, and, most famously, he convinced Teri Garr to take a shower in his office bathroom. Though no celebrity took his or her clothes off last night, it had a similar impromptu, mischievous feel. You could see producers running around and you could hear Paul Shaffer sneeze. The only laughter was that of the crew. Without an audience in the studio, they were only trying to crack themselves up. That's the same vibe the show put out in 1982: Here was a host determined to do what he thought was funny, not what was expected of him by the format he was handed. Letterman was again in charge, for at least one night.

http://www.vulture.com/2012/10/how-hurricane-sandy-revived-the-old-letterman.html

TV Notes
How ‘Pawn Stars’ Crosses Paths With Museums
By J. Peder Zane, The New York Times - Oct. 28, 2012

Ours is an age of mysterious clutter, of attics, basements and closets brimming with objects that make us wonder: What on earth is that? The statue of a bear with a clock in its stomach, the chest of drawers handed down by Great-Aunt Frieda, the painting of the old bald guy no one knows but that’s been in the family forever — are they trash or buried treasure?

In a twist of cultural synergy, an unlikely set of partners is answering these questions: bottom-line television shows and highbrow museums.

As programs like PBS’s “Antiques Roadshow” and the History Channel’s “American Pickers” and “Pawn Stars” attract millions of viewers by assessing crazy collectibles, august institutions like the American Museum of Natural History and the North Carolina Museum of Art are inviting people to haul in their heirlooms for expert appraisal.

“People think that museums and TV shows have little in common,” said Louise Mirrer, president and chief executive of the New-York Historical Society, “but there is tremendous crossover between these reality programs and our reality here on the intellectual and the emotional side.”

Museum officials agree that the similarities extend far beyond the days they set aside to assess items brought in by visitors — the “identification days” that have become signature outreach events for institutions across the country.

While dismissing the idea that they had changed because of the popularity of shows like “Antiques Roadshow,” which made its debut on PBS in 1997, the officials said they had been responding to the broader cultural trends such programs tap into.

These trends include evolving notions of taste, value and authority; the public’s desire to understand the inner workings of once rarefied worlds; and the growing demand of audiences that their thoughts and feelings be put nearer the center of cultural experiences.

In an indication of how the divide between high and low culture has dissolved, museum officials said they watched and enjoyed reality art programs. None interviewed for this article were sniffy, or uttered words like “coarse,” “vulgar” or “Mammon.”

They were, however, quick to note when their institutions had been used as a backdrop by one of the programs. Recent episodes of “Antiques Roadshow” were shot at the Tucson Museum of Art, Alabama’s Mobile Museum of Art, the Utah Museum of Natural History and Denver’s Kirkland Museum, and the New-York Historical Society hosted “American Pickers” for a segment about the models used for the Alice in Wonderland statue in Central Park.

In our throwaway society, the museum officials applauded the shows for helping the public develop a deeper appreciation for the value of objects.

Their criticism, instead, revolved around the shows’ centerpiece: the ka-ching moment when the monetary value of an object is estimated. Reality art programs thrive on moments like when the man in the parakeet print shirt learned that his antique carved rhino-horn cups were worth about $1.5 million, or when the guest who paid $15,000 for what looked like a Fabergé egg found out it was an elaborate fake.

Kaywin Feldman, director and president of the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, said she enjoyed the drama but wished the shows would “de-emphasize the notion of the financial value and emphasize the cultural and historical significance of the objects.”

Nevertheless, Ms. Feldman acknowledged that the bottom-line approach made the concept of value entertaining and easy to understand. It also dovetails with media attention paid to record prices for masterpieces at auction.

“Like it or not, art is a commodity,” said Lawrence J. Wheeler, director of the North Carolina Museum of Art. “It has a monetary value that is set by the marketplace.” This fact, Mr. Wheeler said, conflicts with the “ethical principle” that prohibits mentioning monetary value in museum catalogs and other publications, so people do not conflate a work’s aesthetic or historical importance with its price tag. This is why appraisers at museum identification days do not assign a monetary value to the objects brought in by the public.

Like many people in the art world, Mr. Wheeler embraces this conflict. An important part of the museum experience, he said, is to help visitors put aside monetary considerations. “You don’t walk around a museum saying, ‘That painting’s worth $50,000,’ ” he said. “You respond to something because it is an arresting work of art that is in a museum because it has value that transcends money.”

Mr. Wheeler said his favorite part of reality art shows was when the appraisers told viewers why an item was worth so much, or so little. In a culture where the lines between opinion and fact, between personal taste and objective quality, are increasingly blurred, these programs underscore the importance of expertise. Just as the public visits museums to see works that art-world authorities deem important, people visit the Gold and Silver Pawn Shop in Las Vegas, featured on “Pawn Stars,” to be informed by someone in the know.

“In their own way, these shows help demystify the process of how value is determined,” said Ms. Mirrer of the New-York Historical Society.

This fits with the modern hunger to know how the sausage is made. Where the Food Network and HGTV pull back the veil on the worlds of fine cuisine and interior design, programs like “Antiques Roadshow” illuminate the standards of quality, rarity and significance.

Many museums are tapping into this desire by letting the public watch them work. The Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, for example, has moved one of its conservation labs into its gallery space.

The new Nature Research Center at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences is an 80,000-square-foot space where the public can watch research scientists at work. In connection with “The World’s Largest Dinosaurs” exhibit last year, the American Museum of Natural History erected a tabletop dinosaur pit where visitors learned how paleontologists dig for ancient bones.

A related, but more subtle, convergence between reality television and museums is their emphasis on the viewer’s experience. Leigh Keno, a regular appraiser on “Antiques Roadshow” with his brother, Leslie, said those who thought the objects were the center of attention were missing the point.

“That program, and others we have done, really revolve around the people who bring us these objects, their connection to them and their response after we tell them about them,” said Mr. Keno, who has also worked with his brother on the shows “Collect This!” and “Buried Treasure.”

Arthur Cohen, chief executive of LaPlaca Cohen, a cultural marketing and strategy firm in New York, said that in the last few decades, “museums have become deeply interested in figuring out how to take something that could be impersonal and make it personal.”

For decades, the museum experience was a one-way street. Great institutions put on exhibitions that the public was expected to appreciate. Today, Mr. Cohen said, these institutions are more interested in “finding new avenues of engagement, in creating new pathways of connection so that a museum visit feels much more like a dialogue.”

Technology has propelled this effort, he said, as the Walkman and iPod have made possible the self-guided tour, giving museumgoers a deep level of detail about art while allowing them greater control over their experience. “Museums from Brooklyn to Denver have also turned to crowdsourcing, posting objects online and asking the public what they want to see,” he said.

Last year, the New-York Historical Society video recorded the responses of 4,000 visitors to its “Slavery in New York” exhibit. “The responses were extraordinary,” Ms. Mirrer said, “because they told us about the very personal ways people experience their visits, the connections they make between what they see and the world around them.”

While reality art programs and museums are responding to similar cultural trends, their deepest connection involves a timeless emotion: the thrill of discovery. People who haunt flea markets and scour their attics for hidden gems are driven the same emotions driving museum curators who spend years searching for masterpieces to strengthen their collections.

“It’s a basic human trait that’s in our DNA,” said Eli Wilner, a leading dealer in antique frames whose clients include the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Smithsonian Institution and the White House. “Talk to people at the Getty Museum or the Met and you’ll find that what they are most proud of is the ‘lost’ sculpture they have rediscovered, or the neglected artists whose work they have championed. Their feelings are not a lot different than the person who finds out that the strange object on their mantel is actually worth something.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/28/arts/artsspecial/museums-and-tv-educate-viewers-on-antiques-and-art.html?ref=television

I used to enjoy his show (quite a bit). Nowadays, I hardly ever bother to record it even if there is a guest of interest. I know if the guest has a child the entire interview will be about kids (ever since Harry was born). If not, it will be about some political agenda of which is repeated just as endlessly. Luckily (for me), Craig Ferguson has more than filled his shoes.

This leaves Fox Soccer with next to nothing in terms of domestic leagues. With only the Champions League left, what will FSC air on weekends during the season?

This is fittingly ironic as it comes right after Comcast finally gave us FSC HD in Northern CA.
Edited by cheesesteaks3 - 10/30/12 at 4:30pm

A work in progress?