December 2007 Archives

December 28, 2007 - Best TV Series of 2007? Best TV Ad? Same Winner...

December 28, 2007 1:09 AM

I've been ranking the year's best TV for more than 30 years now, and haven't seen this happen before. But here it is: The best TV series of the year, and the best commercial of the year, come from (and star) the same person.

The winner, in both categories: Tina Fey.

On NBC this year, her 30 Rock - already blossoming by midseason - finished the season brilliantly, and overcame a summer public-relations nightmare (Alec Baldwin's vitriolic answering-machine message to his daughter) to begin its sophomore season even stronger, with a guest appearance by Jerry Seinfeld. Before the writers went on strike, the show also had gotten great comedy work out of David Schwimmer, Paul Reubens, Elaine Stritch, Andy Richter, Buck Henry, even Al Gore.

But elsewhere on TV, and even sometimes during a commercial break for her own series, Fey also hit a home run shilling for America Express. Her ad - which, like 30 Rock, alludes to her Saturday Night Live days as head writer for a live TV sketch series - has her bombarded with one decision or disaster after another.

My favorite sight gag: One staffer asks her to approve the imported sheepherders gathered for one sketch, and Fey explains, with only slight exasperation, that she meant the other German shepherds.

But there are so many visual and verbal jokes in that commercial, and so many truly funny ones, that Fey's AmEx ad beats out most sitcoms when it comes to laughs. Her ad's a lot shorter - but also a lot better.

So if 30 Rock is on top, what is the rest of my Top 10 of 2007?

Let's save that until Monday, the last day of the year. Meanwhile, here are my five favorite movies, specials and miniseries of the year:
1) The War, PBS. Brilliant - the best yet by Ken Burns and company.
2) Planet Earth, Discovery Channel. Also brilliant, and just as ambitious.
3) Longford, HBO. Fabulous performances, in an intimate, intelligent docudrama.
4) Tin Man, Sci Fi Channel. An imaginative new take on The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.
5) Masters of Science Fiction, ABC. The closest genre show in 40 years to the feeling and quality of the original Twilight Zone.

And the worst TV series of 2007? That's easy. ABC's Cavemen.

December 27, 2007 - My Three Favorite Live TV Mistakes of 2007

December 27, 2007 12:36 AM

There's always a risk compiling this list with a few days left in the year - one major New Year's Eve gaffe could throw off the entire ranking - but barring some last-minute blunders, here are my three favorite live TV mistakes of 2007.

#3) "MISS TEEN USA PAGEANT," NBC.

This is the most famous one of the year, most likely: Miss South Carolina, 18-year-old Caitlin Upton, being asked a question about national student proficiency in geography, and answering with a reply so devoid of sentence structure, content and coherence that it became a viral video overnight.

By year's end, more than 20 million people had viewed the clip on YouTube, and in one of this month's first-run episode of ABC's Boston Legal, footage of Miss South Carolina's fumbling filibuster was presented in evidence in a court case indicting the U.S. educational system. I suspect you've seen the original footage already, several times, but just in case, or for a year-end refresher, you can find it here.

#2) "CLASH OF THE CHOIRS" finale, NBC.

As live shows go, NBC's Clash of the Choirs went relatively smoothly - until the very end, when guest Tracy Morgan was introduced to announce the winner of the week-long live TV competition.

The battle was between Patti LaBelle's hand-picked choir from Philadelphia and Nick Lachey's hand-picked choir from Cincinnati. As the tension mounted, Morgan was told to open the envelope and read the name of the winner. But he didn't read it. Instead, after a very awkward silence, he pointed to his left and identified the victorious choir as "This team right here!"

Then, as Lachey's team jumped for joy, he added something that rhymed with "Team Racy" - and "Team Lacy" was as close as he got, until he heard and parroted the correct pronunciation as "Team La-SHAY."

Mispronouncing names during a live broadcast is no major sin - as a print guy now talking and reading on NPR's Fresh Air with Terry Gross, tricky names are one of the things I fear most. But whether Morgan's difficulty was with reading (ironically, a comic subplot given to his character on 30 Rock) or simply with familiarity, it doesn't excuse the fact that his only job, that night, was to read the name of one of two teams on live national television.

Anyone backstage could have told him, had he asked, how to properly pronounce the names of the two choirs in contention. I wonder: Had the victory gone the other way, would he have said the diva's name accurately? Or would he have pointed with his right hand to "This team right here!" - and congratulated "Team LaBelly"? Here's the clip...

#1) LARRY KING LIVE, CNN.

On the occasion of the first anniversary of the Cirque du Soleil's LOVE, a dazzling Las Vegas show built around the music and legacy of The Beatles, King interviewed surviving Beatles Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr. King asked them about, among other things, the non-surviving Beatles, John Lennon and George Harrison.

Only thing is, after asking Paul about his memories of the day Lennon died, King turned to Ringo and said, "George, where were you?"

Paul, bless his heart, called King on getting Ringo's name wrong. King said he was thinking of George because he was going to ask about him next. Paul didn't buy it.

"No you weren't, Larry," Paul said. "You got it wrong" - at which point an embarrassed King smacked Sir Paul playfully with his interview notes.

Not knowing a dead Beatle from a live one? When you're as much of a Beatles fan as I am, that's the most memorable mistake of the entire year. Watch it here, if you like... then, after you're through cringing, let it be.

December 26, 2007 - "Kennedy Center Honors" All of Television

December 26, 2007 1:44 AM

Tonight at 9 p.m. ET, CBS presents the 30th installment of an annual ceremony that, for every one of those three decades, has provided some of the most entertaining and inspiring television of the preceding calendar year: The Kennedy Center Honors. It's so classy a show, CBS buries it between Christmas and New Year's Day.

But it's tough to give CBS much grief about that, because this is one of the network's tenured traditions it hasn't let get away. Charlie Brown is on ABC now, and so is the Grinch, but Kennedy Center Honors remain on CBS - and remain an annual reminder of what network TV used to provide with much more regularity than it does today.

Namely, TV that is not only good, but is good for you. TV that doesn't give you just what you already want, but what it thinks you might enjoy.

The Grammys, under the inventive eye of producer Ken Ehrlich, is another CBS show that strives to do this. But there aren't many, and this Kennedy tribute has been overseen, all the way, by executive producer George Stevens, Jr., who has done a phenomenal job showcasing art and artists through the years.

The Ed Sullivan Show is a distant memory these days, if not an absolute cipher, but Kennedy Center Honors follows in that fine tradition: showcase the best, and have faith in the concept of variety. If you come for the comic, maybe you'll stay for, and be impressed by, the opera singer.

For this year's celebration, taped December 2, the honorees are Beach Boys founder Brian Wilson, Supremes diva Diana Ross, peerless film director Martin Scorsese, conceptual funnyman Steve Martin, and classical pianist Leon Fleisher. They watch from guest-of-honor boxes as others salute them and/or perform. This year, Steve Carell is there, and Smokey Robinson and Kristin Chenoweth, and Robert De Niro and Franci Ford Coppola, and Yo-Yo Ma and Lyle Lovett, and a lot more.

Among the honorees, Fleisher may seem like the dark horse in the bunch, but if you've heard him play, know his story, or have seen a documentary about him, you know he's no less awesome than any of the others.

Fleisher lost the use of his right hand in 1965, but kept on playing piano - focusing on, and popularizing, left-hand repertoire. And then recently, miraculously, he regained enough motor skills in his damaged hand to begin playing two-handed again. Remarkable story. Remarkable musician.

CBS plays The Kennedy Center Honors during a week when poor ratings won't do any damage - when it hurts the least to do the most good. After 30 years, though, the secret should be out: This is where more talent gathers each year, and displays that talent, than almost anywhere else on television.

December 25, 2007 - Merry Christmas!!!

December 24, 2007 11:37 PM

Have a very Mary Christmas, everybody.

See you again tomorrow.

December 24, 2007 - The Next Mass Medium, One Chunk at a Time

December 24, 2007 12:59 AM

In my book Teleliteracy, I warned that when broadcast TV as we knew it ceased to draw a large enough audience on a regular basis, there would be, for the first time, no new mass medium to take its place. Just lots of fragmented audiences, watching things on tape and computers and other things without ever again enjoying that national shared experience than defined half a century of television. I may have been wrong.

Last Friday on ABC's Nightline, I watched a feature on a British singer named Paul Potts, who had won the talent competition on this year's Britain's Got Talent. Worldwide, more than 19 million people already had downloaded the video of Potts' emotional audition, in which the unassuming 36-year-old cellphone salesman shyly approached the mike, told Simon Cowell and the two other judges that he was going to sing opera, and - to Cowell's eye-rolling disapproval - began singing Puccini's "Nessun Dorma."

I wasn't prepared for what happened next, because I hadn't seen it. I'd seen America's Got Talent, which hadn't impressed me, and the British version hasn't been televised in the States, even on BBC America, so who knew? (Millions of computer users, but more on that in a minute.)

But Potts killed. Killed. The audience roared, and one of the judges, a woman named Amanda, cried. ABC showed me what British viewers, and savvy YouTube users, knew already. So what did I do next? Hit the Internet, where my enthusiasm for this gorgeous singer, and touching Cinderella story, led me in other directions.

(To the complete audition, where Potts stunned the crowd, and even Cowell)

(To other Britain's Got Talent auditions, like that of 6-year-old Connie Talbot, who sang "Over the Rainbow" to an even more initially scornful Cowell)

And after watching a lot, and being touched each time by the heartfelt reactions of the female judge, Amanda, I searched on the web to learn about her, too. Amanda Holden, a British actress who hasn't done anything of note in the United States - but I may be in love.

Oh, and before the weekend was out, I found and bought several copies of Potts' debut CD, One Chance, as last-minute Christmas gifts. You can do the same thing - or, if you can take your time, order it here.

The point is, I came to Potts late, but caught up fast, and spread out from there. Because the writers' strike has had David Letterman and Jay Leno in reruns, Nightline has led in late night for the past two weeks, averaging almost 4 million viewers. That's only a portion of its YouTube audience to date, but it's another link in the chain.

And if the chain is long enough, and strong enough, it becomes a mass media phenomenon. TV started the Paul Potts frenzy in England, the Internet carried it from there, ABC borrowed it for a bit on Nightline, and the snowball continues to roll.

Network TV, as we knew it, was all about overall audience. The next mass medium, it appears, will be all about what cable TV calls "cume." It's a place where patience isn't just a virtue. It's a necessity.

December 22, 2007 - Still Easier Than Rolling Off a Blog

December 22, 2007 1:00 AM

Enjoy your weekend. I plan to.

December 21, 2007 - The "Late Show" Christmas Tree Meatball Will be Knocked Down This Year - Guaranteed

December 21, 2007 1:22 AM

David Letterman won't be hosting a new annual Christmas installment of his CBS Late Show this year - but he'll be doing the next best thing. On Christmas night, his Worldwide Pants company has decided to repeat last year's CBS special. That keeps the tradition going, if with a strike-affected asterisk.

Actress Cate Blanchett is one guest in this December 2006 repeat, but the guests who really matter are the ones carrying on Letterman's late-night Christmas cheer. Namely, Darlene Love singing "Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)," which she's done since first performing it on NBC's Late Night with David Letterman 21 years ago, and Jay Thomas, whose toss-the-football-at-the-tree and tell-the-Lone-Ranger-story antics are less tenured, but just as enjoyable.

Monday night is pre-empted by CBS for Christmas Eve programming, so if Letterman, at this point, were to share the Love (and the Thomas), it would have to be Christmas night. And with a Writers Guild of America agreement not yet fully in place, the only options were a) select and broadcast a Christmas-themed rerun, or b) let the entire annual tradition slide.

In this particular multiple-choice quiz, Letterman made the right move. A one-year-old rerun is better than nothing.

Besides, if The Simpsons can show its annual Treehouse of Horror Fox specials on the Sunday after Halloween, maybe Letterman can mount a fresh Christmas special sometime before Lincoln's birthday.

But I'm not greedy. I'm happy, after begging for a gift of this sort, to be handed one just in time for Christmas.

December 20, 2007 - Wait Till Next Year: In 13 Days, Late-Night Talk Shows Return

December 20, 2007 3:56 AM

January 2, 2008.

That's when Jay Leno and Conan O'Brien will return with new shows on NBC, and Jimmy Kimmel will return on ABC - all without their writing staffs. That's also the day, reportedly, that the CBS shows owned by David Letterman's Worldwide Pants, Late Show with David Letterman and Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson, are hoping to return, with their writing staffs.

However, the special dispensation that would allow that special deal to be negotiated - predicated, in part, on the fact that Letterman, not a network, owns those late-night talk shows - may be at risk because of the most tiny, and ironic, of complications.

While Worldwide Pants owns broadcast rights to its talk shows, CBS owns the digital rights. And since digital rights, and writers' fair compensation for them, are a major sticking point in the WGA negotiations with network and studio heads, that may be more of a mountain than a molehill to traverse.

Either way, now that Kimmel has set his return date, the second day of 2008 has become the official start of the mid-strike late-night battle. It's not a battle the Letterman camp, or the Ferguson camp, will want to miss - whether or not they can negotiate an advantage by having their writers return with them.

And prime time is awakening from hibernation that day, too. NBC, for example, is bringing back its longest-running series, Law & Order. Originally, holding back episodes of that venerable Dick Wolf series until midseason was seen as a slap in the face. Now, with the majority of scripted shows shelved for the duration of the strike, it seems almost... fortunate.

NBC will be sure to promote the returns of Leno and O'Brian heavily during Law & Order that night. Also on that first Wednesday in January, ABC is returning with fresh episodes of Wife Swap and Supernanny, and will be promoting Kimmel during then just as aggressively.

If Worldwide Pants gets its way, CBS will have the return of Drew Carey's Power of 10 to help pump its own late-night schedule.

The quandaries, complications and contradictions in all this are everywhere. Shows returning without writers are providing displays of WGA solidarity, yet also helping the networks avoid reruns during one of their most lucrative broadcast dayparts. Shows returning with writers, even with WGA approval, are adding to their network's coffers just as much, and erasing one very visible side effect of the strike.

Writers can claim victory by not returning to some shows, and negotiating favorable terms for others. Hosts can claim victory by looking out for their staff members, and returning to TV under whatever circumstances they could control. And the networks can claim victory by getting their late-night flagship stars back on the air, even as the strike continues.

The clear winner in this particular battle? The viewers. In less than two weeks, we'll get to hear jokes from these guys again - at a time, politically as well as emotionally, when it's very sorely needed.

December 19, 2007 - New FCC Ruling is Worth Getting "Mad as Hell" About

December 19, 2007 2:44 AM

The Federal Communications Commission's ruling yesterday, allowing media companies in the Top 20 TV markets to own both a newspaper and a television station in the same market, is a big disappointment, but isn't that much of a surprise. Not when the FCC's reversal of financial syndication rules long ago ripped the heart out of most independent production companies - and not when this entire global trend of fewer corporations owning more media outlets was predicted, brilliantly, more than 30 years ago.

Not in a documentary. Not in a think-tank study. It was predicted, in 1976, by Paddy Chayefsky in his visionary movie Network.

It's astounding, in retrospect, how much Chayefsky got right.

Network news becoming profit centers, blurring the lines between news and entertainment in search of higher ratings? An upstart fourth network, coming out nowhere to take the prime-time ratings lead by relying on live reality programming? And in the executive suites, broadcast networks being overtaken by international big-business corporate types, less interested in quality and legacy than in market share and quarterly earnings?

Before NBC sought out predators on Dateline NBC, before there was a Fox that lured viewers with Joe Millionaire and American Idol, and before the spider web of media ownership became more sticky every year, Network had it all.

It had Peter Finch as Howard Beale, that mad prophet of the UBS airwaves, a newsman gone madman who told his viewers, on live TV, to get out of their chairs, open their windows and scream, "I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not gonna take this any more!"

And, most relevant to what happened today at the FCC, and what has happened the past two months with the Writers Guild of America taking on media moguls, is another unforgettable scene from Network. It's the one where Ned Beatty, as UBS chairman Arthur Jensen, lectures Beale thunderously in the network board room, illuminated like an angry god.

"There are no nations. There are no peoples. There are no Russians. There are no Arabs. There are no Third Worlds. There is no West. There is only one holistic system of systems...

"It is the international system of currency which determines the totality of life on this planet."

The speech is long and potent, but the gist is in this key paragraph:

"You get up on your little 21-inch screen and howl about America and democracy," Jensen tells Beale. "There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and ITT and AT&T, and DuPont, Dow, Union Carbide and Exxon. Those are the nations of the world today. "The world is a college of corporations..."

Today, that world got a little smaller, the rich got a chance to get a lot richer - and the voices of diversity, already strangling in this era of corporate cross-ownership, are about to get even more few, and more faint.

Think this is paranoia? Ask Ed Bark, former TV critic of The Dallas Morning News. The owners of his paper, granted a rare exception years ago, also owned a Dallas TV affiliate - and in 2000, instituted a ban against the newspaper critiquing or covering local stations in the country's sixth-largest market. Bark finally got mad as hell, and wasn't gonna take it any more, and left the paper in 2006 to start his own TV website. Read his introductory column at http://www.unclebarky.com/why.html.

If the FCC didn't know what happened in Dallas because of cross-ownership, that's bad. If the FCC did know, but didn't care, that's even worse.

December 18, 2007 - Late Night Shows Ask, "Can We Talk?" - And Some Will, Very Soon

December 18, 2007 1:16 AM

Under different circumstances, and with different restrictions, broadcast TV's late-night shows are poised to return. NBC's Tonight Show with Jay Leno and Late Night with Conan O'Brien, will be back Wednesday, Jan. 2, 2008, but without their writers. And at CBS, David Letterman's Worldwide Pants productions, his own Late Show and The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson, have negotiated a separate deal with the Writers Guild of America to return with their writing staffs.

(In the interim, Letterman has grown a handsome, Santa-ish strike beard, as this New York Post photo shows.)

It's a start, and a good one. Current events are too volatile to have a long strike deny us the perspectives, and punch lines, of our national comics. But at NBC (and most likely at ABC, if a waiver is negotiated for Jimmy Kimmel), that long national nightmare of denial will continue.

When Leno and O'Brien return, it'll be not only without writing staffs, but without monologues. That's part of the deal. Letterman and Ferguson, on the other hand, have a different type of waiver, and will be able to dive right in. That's a palpable advantage, and one that may end up altering the balance, and the status quo, of the late-night landscape.

Had Letterman and Ferguson been forced to come back and play with the same handicap as NBC's late-night tag team, the CBS duo might have fared better anyway. Like Jack Paar, they'd shine in a straight conversational format, so extended interviews wouldn't be a minus.

But if the CBS late-night shows profit from their more favorable Writers Guild of America agreements, so will CBS - whose CEO, Leslie Moonves, is one of the tough negotiators against whom the WGA is striking.

There's no doubt whatsoever that, when Letterman returns, he will do so with both guns blazing, poking fun at Moonves mercilessly and constantly. But he's been doing that already, for more than a decade, and Moonves is a smart enough executive to play along, even to take Letterman's calls on air.

Don't expect any such calls soon - but so long as Letterman has a competitive advantage over NBC, and especially if that's reflected in the ratings, don't expect Moonves to protest too much, either.

For viewers, this impending return is a good development, as is anything that moves the strike negotiations forward. Yesterday was the last day of WGA picketing for 2007, and while the two sides aren't talking, at least, once again, they're talking about talking.

But we now know that if Letterman is going to present his annual Christmas Late Show special before Christmas, it'll have to be Monday, on Christmas Eve - perhaps, sadly, as a rerun. There's talk, though, that Darlene Love and company may return for a new holiday show anyway, even if it's after the New Year.

December 17, 2007 - Yesterday, AFI Embraced TV's Best; Today, ABC and NBC Don't

December 17, 2007 2:50 AM

The American Film Institute yesterday announced its eighth annual roster of the year's most outstanding achievements in film and television. Today, ABC and NBC present the premiere installments of their latest prime-time series offerings: a quiz show named Duel on ABC, and a music competition show named Clash of the Choirs on NBC.

A year from now, don't expect either of those shows to make the AFI's list.

Quiz, game, competition and reality shows can be the most popular shows on television, but they're rarely contenders for anyone's Top 10 list in terms of excellence. That's true now, and it was just as true in the 1950s, when the quiz show The $64,000 Question was the top-rated series of the 1955-56 TV season.

Number two that year? A little sitcom named I Love Lucy.

Half a century later, Lucille Ball remains a TV icon, her shows watched and loved on cable, and collected and treasured on DVD. Now ask yourself the real $64,000 question: When's the last time you saw an installment of The $64,000 Question? Or wanted to?

What's the difference? The difference is obvious. Lucille Ball was a wonderful comedienne, her co-stars and guest stars were talented, and the scripts and direction were - and are - inspired. All of the hit unscripted shows of that period, from Groucho Marx's You Bet Your Life to I've Got a Secret, were diversions.

Today, so is Survivor, which concluded last night, and The Amazing Race, which returns Sunday, and American Idol, which returns next month. They're here today, and very popular and profitable today - but do you collect them on DVD? And a decade from now, will you remember them at all? It hasn't even been a decade yet since ABC revived the prime-time quiz show with Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, and look how quickly that TV comet burned out.

And those shows, in the competition and quiz genres, are the quality entrants. Most of the others - and, because of the ongoing writers' strike, we're about to be hit with a veritable tsunami of unscripted series - are a lot worse. As when the genre began in the '50s, they're all diversions. But soon, because of the strike, there won't be much from which to divert us. Just reruns, rejects and reality, pretty much wall-to-wall.

Quality scripted shows, for a while, are going to get increasingly scarce. So savor, for a moment, the just-released roster of AFI outstanding TV shows: Dexter, Everybody Hates Chris, Friday Night Lights, Longford, Mad Men, Pushing Daisies, The Sopranos, Tell Me You Love Me, 30 Rock and Ugly Betty . Except for Tell Me and Longford, it's a very astute and impressive list. (I served on the inaugural AFI TV panel in 2000, so I can attest these nominations are taken, and debated, very seriously.)

Will viewers be watching Sopranos and 30 Rock a generation from now? Yes. Big Brother and American Gladiators? No.

Oh, and what do all the really durable shows have in common? Writers.

Keep that in mind - because the studio and network executives seem to have forgotten it.

December 15, 2007 - Easier Than Rolling Off a Blog

December 15, 2007 12:27 AM

By mere coincidence, the writers' strike and TV WORTH WATCHING began the exact same day, on November 5. Ever since, I've written every single day - and every single day, they haven't. Something's gotta give... so, beginning today, I'm giving up writing a blog on weekends.

I'll continue to write daily, providing BIANCULLI'S BEST BETS. But the seven-day-a-week column/blog pace is killing me, so I thought, while this website is still young (more than I can say for myself), I'd establish a weekends-off blog pattern.

I may break my own rule, but for now, when I'm not supplying a new blog on weekends, I'll post the test pattern below instead.

Enjoy your weekend. I plan to.

December 14, 2007 - Ricky Gervais And His "Extras" Special TV Show

December 14, 2007 1:15 AM

It's miraculous enough for someone to have the talent to create a brilliant TV comedy series. It's even more rare to know when to end it - and rarer still to provide a satisfying, memorable ending.

Ricky Gervais and his writing and directing partner, Stephen Merchant, have pulled off that impressive perfecta not once, but twice.

First they did it with the original British version of The Office, in which Gervais starred as middle-manager David Brent. Only two seasons of that show were made, with only six shows per season - the same stop-while-we're-still-fresh pace as John Cleese's superb Fawlty Towers a generation before.

Gervais and Merchant, though, capped off The Office by returning with a one-shot telemovie finale, in which we learned what happened to all those officious characters. The payoff for the unrequited romance between Tim and Dawn (the same essential characters renamed Jim and Pam in the Americanized NBC version), in that finale, was unexpected unforgettable and perfect.

If you don't believe me, you can see for yourself, by buying the complete British Office, including the finale, on DVD. (CLICK HERE) You should believe me, by the way - but see it anyway.

Gervais and Merchant followed The Office with Extras, shown in the U.S. on HBO. Gervais plays Andy Millman, an extra on film and TV productions who longs to land a speaking part and become a star. (Be careful what you wish for.) Merchant, on camera this time around, plays Darren, Andy's astoundingly incompetent agent - and Ashley Jensen, seen on ABC's Ugly Betty as Betty's seamstress best friend, plays Maggie, Andy's fellow extra and closest friend.

Extras uses the backdrop of show business as does another HBO comedy, Larry David's Curb Your Enthusiasm, to invite stars to come on and poke fun at their own images. Extras, like The Office, ran for 12 episodes, and you can see all of them tonight, in order, in a marathon on HBO sister channel HBO2, beginning at 7 p.m. ET.

Do that, and you'll see laugh-out-loud star turns by David Bowie (singing insults to Andy), Kate Winslet (giving phone-sex advice to Maggie), Patrick Stewart, Ian McKellen, Dame Diana Rigg and many others. You'll also be prepared, at that point, for what HBO is delivering Sunday night at 9 ET: The Extra Special Series Finale.

Once again, Gervais and Merchant give us a wonderful ending (not as poignant as the finale of The Office, but few comedies are). There are guest stars, including cameos by George Michael, Gordon Ramsay and Clive Owen. And there are plot twists, cringingly embarrassing moments, and a satisfyingly finite conclusion.

The Gervais-Merchant team has done it again, perfectly. And amazingly.

December 13, 2007 - "Late Show" Christmas - Baby, Please Come Home

December 13, 2007 2:24 AM

My wish for the holidays this year is simple but sincere, and involves the no-end-in-sight writers' strike. I wish Late Show with David Letterman could get special dispensation to resume production of its CBS talk show, if only for one day.

Otherwise, before the month is out, viewers will be handed a big lump of coal, instead of another delightful dose of one of the holiday's most entertaining TV traditions.

Every year on his last show before Christmas, Letterman brings on Darlene Love to have her sing the song she first recorded in the early 1960s on a Phil Spector holiday record: "Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)." Backed by Paul Shaffer and the band, an augmented orchestra and a stage full of backup singers, this annual treat has been served up since Letterman first shared the Love on NBC's Late Night with David Letterman in 1986.

How long a tradition is that? In TV terms, an eternity. Longer than Law & Order has been on the air. It predates not only the finales, but the premieres, of Seinfeld, Frasier, Friends and E.R.

Look at it this way: The Christmas after L.A. Law was unveiled, that's when Love first belted "Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)" to the delight of Letterman and his viewers.

Or, better yet, look at it this way: Love and Letterman already had established this number as a late-night TV tradition before the previous strike by the Writers Guild of America - and that was 20 years ago.

Something this venerable, and this beautiful, should not be tossed aside lightly. This isn't a streak that should be hobbled with an asterisk. In the spirit of the season, Late Show should be given the okay to mount one new show, to be telecast either Friday, Dec. 21, or Monday, on Christmas Eve.

A CBS spokesperson said yesterday that not even the rerun schedule for Late Show has been set past this week, so we don't know yet whether any earlier Love holiday appearance, much less which one, will be rerun before Christmas. For my money, CBS and Letterman could have started repeating them already - all of them - in a sequential countdown replaying the entire Late Show Christmas canon.

But that's not the best solution, or the point. The point is, commercial broadcast TV has almost no durable holiday traditions left. Why extinguish one of the few remaining shining stars when there's no real need to?

Love's always thrilling vocal is the most tenured spirit-of-the-holiday reason to cut Letterman a break, but isn't the only one. For 10 years, Jay Thomas has shown up to toss a football, with uncanny accuracy, at the giant meatball atop the Late Show tree. And for four years straight, he's told Letterman the same long, true "Lone Ranger" story.

If you have to ask why these are fun and funny, you haven't been watching, which means you don't know what you're missing. But those of us who have looked forward to and thoroughly enjoyed these annual Letterman shows, we do know what we're about to be missing. And we shouldn't have to miss it.

To all the Scrooges at (or away from) the negotiating table, we, the viewers, aren't asking for much this Christmas. We're not asking for the moon, or the stars, or a quick end to the strike. To paraphrase the Beatles:

All we need is Love.

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December 12, 2007 - Reality Can Be Cruel, And So Can Reality TV

December 12, 2007 2:18 AM

Don't blame the month-long Writers Guild of America strike, and the growing scarcity of scripted programming, for tonight's premiere of CW's Crowned: The Mother of All Pageants. That mother-daughter competition was in the works long before the strike. As to what's around the corner, you ain't seen nothing yet.

My advice, on the whole, is to keep it that way.

You might think, given tonight's season finales of CW's America's Next Top Model, Fox's Kitchen Nightmares and CBS's Kid Nation, that unscripted shows might be vanishing almost as much as scripted ones. No such luck. I'd tell you what's around the corner in January, but it's too depressing. Suffice it to say that even before the New Year gets here, ABC gives us a week-long game show named Duel, while NBC gives us a new singing-competition series called Clash of the Choirs.

And then there's Crowned.

Eleven mother-daughter pairs are asked, in tonight's inaugural episode (at 9 ET), to adopt a name for their team, and select suitable costumes. One team, 50 percent short on ego, calls itself "Hot and Not." Another team, insulting itself accidentally, adopts the name "Skin Deep." Yet another, intending to invoke stealth tactics but instead evoking something else entirely, goes by the name "Silent but Deadly."

That paragraph, I fear, makes Crowned sound more entertaining than it is. So does any description of the "de-sashing" ceremony at the program's climax. The truth about Crowned, though, is that it's 80 percent mean-spirited, at least 90 percent derivative, and a 100 percent waste of time.

Reality shows, these days, are assembled like prime-time Mad Libs. Swap a noun here, insert a slight variation there, and presto: another show. No matter how many of them are cranked out, they seem to come in only two basic flavors: inspirational or exploitive. Instructive or mean.

The Amazing Race, which has won the Emmy every year a reality competition series has been eligible for one, is one of the good guys. No less so than when watching My Name Is Earl, viewers of Race witness the consequences of good and bad karma. Beauty and the Geek is instructive, too, and so are Survivor, The Apprentice, Project Runway, even Kitchen Nightmares.

Most of the rest, though, including Crowned, are designed more to amuse viewers by encouraging laughter, shock or pity at the expense of the subjects. They're easy to concoct, cheap to make, and as simple to discard as disposable diapers if they don't catch on. Many times, the smell is similar.

At the end of the 1950s, so many Westerns filled prime time (the astonishing high point was 31 different weekly shows in 1959) that the genre collapsed under its own overpopulated weight. As the strike of 2007 continues, and reality TV spreads like kudzu, that's about all viewers can hope for in terms of relief.

That, or the modern equivalent of another Darwinistic course-correction from the '50s, the quiz-show scandal. But this generation's reality shows have had their scandals already (two words: Darva Conger), and not even that could stop the avalanche of reality TV.

Today, TV fans purchase and treasure DVD sets of The Honeymooners and Lost, enjoying scripted shows old and new. Twenty years from now, whatever the format, will viewers be collecting and enjoying discs, downloads or holographs of I Love New York 2, Shot at Love with Tila Tequila or Party Mamas? (All of which, by the way, are reality shows televised tonight, on VH1, MTV and WE, respectively.)

I don't think so. When was the last time you watched an episode of Queen for a Day? That was a 1950s show awash in contestant humiliation - add a few daughters to the mix, and you're not far away from Crowned.

But take my advice: you should be.

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December 11, 2007 - Another Sign This Strike Is a Tough One: For the First Time, the TCA Has Canceled Its Press Tour

December 11, 2007 1:38 AM

Last night around 11 p.m. ET, members of the Television Critics Association were sent an email delivering some bad news. TCA President Dave Walker of the New Orleans Times Picayune, who has been working exhaustively to preserve the January 2008 TV press tour, pulled the plug. It will be the first TCA semiannual press tour scrubbed since the organization of TV critics and reporters was formed in the late 1970s.

Walker is the hero in this scenario, trying until the last minute to work on Plan B scenarios, and calm and appease broadcast and cable network representatives, understandably concerned critics, writers, producers, talent, and managers of the host hotel. Last night, though, turned out to be the last minute.

"Consider the tour officially canceled," Walker wrote, "whether the strike is settled before January 8 or not."

So what? Why does this matter?

It matters, for one thing, because the TCA, as a professional journalistic organization, does something at these semiannual events that's unique to reporters covering the arts. In addition to interviewing stars, writers, producers and directors, the TCA insists upon getting regular access to network executives and asking questions about not only programming, but policy, responsibility, ownership, technology and so much more.

In January 2008, the start of a presidential election year, news divisions would be accounted for as well. Reporters and critics at big-city dailies may still enjoy access to these news and entertainment executives, but TCA members in smaller markets, and the readers they represent, are likely to lose their only chance to question these people directly.

Another reason it matters, more pragmatically, is that the networks have just lost another major component of their program-publicity campaigns. Just as they can't promote new series on most TV talk shows - because most of those shows, to this point, remain on strike - bringing casts of new shows to TCA in January no longer is an option.

But the real reason the TCA tour cancellation matters is that it's one more measure of collateral damage. "I'm grateful to the Universal Hilton for the spirit of cooperation and partnership it has demonstrated," Walker said in his letter to fellow critics. "Now, the hotel and its employees have become collateral damage of the strike."

Walker did everything he could to avoid this. He even called upon former TCA presidents and other long-standing tour veterans to offer advice and options as the strike loomed, then happened, then continued. I was honored to be on that committee, and not just because of Walker, who was indefatigable and inspirational throughout.

The committee also impressed me because it displayed something lacking in most TV executive suites and, truth be told, many newspaper newsrooms: institutional memory. Such critics as Tom Jicha of South Florida Sun-Sentinel and Mark Dawidziak of the Cleveland Plain Dealer were, like myself, reporting on the last Writers Guild of America strike in 1988. Jicha remembered valuable press tour history and precedents better than anyone, and Dawidziak recalled the key "collateral damage" issue that Walker's letter brought home.

The previous strike, Dawidziak remembered, rippled through the entire Hollywood community, affecting dry cleaners, restaurants, and all other ancillary service industries, all of which lost 20 percent or more of their business during the lengthy strike. We remember that, but not a lot of people involved in this strike have that sort of longevity.

Which just goes to show you: When it comes to a strike affecting television, if we don't remember our history, we're doomed to repeats.

Fresh Air flash: Schedules always are subject are change, but this looks to be a busy week for me on National Public Radio's Fresh Air with Terry Gross. On today's show, I'm scheduled to file a report on my holiday DVD recommendations. Tomorrow, I'm scheduled to interview Marshall Herskovitz about his Quarterlife Internet TV series (which I reviewed here and on Fresh Air). And Friday, I'm the guest host, and also am reviewing the new Ricky Gervais HBO special, his movie-length finale to Extras. As they say, check your local listings.

December 10, 2007 - It's Time for David Letterman to Come Back - And Jon, and Conan, and All the Rest

December 10, 2007 2:01 AM

So long as both sides were at least attempting to negotiate an end to the month-long strike by the Writers Guild of America, it made sense to support the shutdown of most scripted shows, wait patiently, and hope for the best. But the best isn't happening, so it's time for viewers to make some demands of their own: Bring back Dave. And Jon, and Conan, and all the rest.

Friday's cosmic meltdown of communication between representatives of the WGA and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers all but guarantees this strike will continue not only into the new year, but probably past the spring thaw.

Writers want to hang tough until actors and directors, whose contracts are up in June, can join them and flex greater strength together. Networks already have a midseason avalanche of unscripted and off-the-shelf fare to roll down the pike, so it's a game of chicken.

A stupid game, which, like the last strike in 1988, may take more than half a year to play.

For fans of many scripted series, this delay will be inconvenient but not devastating. When Heroes finally starts up again, whenever that is, it'll be picking up about where it left off. But every week that goes by without a Late Show with David Letterman or a Daily Show with Jon Stewart is another week in which viewers are robbed of jokes, insights and a valuable part of the national conversation.

I'm not kidding. We need these kidders - now more than ever.

The hosts of most of these shows - not only Letterman and Conan O'Brien, but Jay Leno and Jimmy Kimmel, too - have shown lots of class by dipping deeply into their own pockets to keep staffers on the payroll. But with both sides away from the negotiating table, and pouting and posturing like petulant children, not even talk-show millionaires should be expected to bankroll the status quo with no end in sight.

During the last WGA strike, in 1988, three months went by before NBC's Johnny Carson, the 800-pound gorilla of late night, returned with new Tonight Show programs, using union writers who had negotiated separate contracts. Three weeks later, NBC's Late Night with David Letterman returned, too, with fresh shows, but without writers.

At this point, the WGA should offer special dispensation to shows whose output is topical, and whose lost shows are irretrievable. Potential weapons of mass destruction have just not been found again, this time in Iran - and we don't get to see Jon Stewart's incredulous double take or hear Letterman's caustic Top 10 List.

Mike Huckabee has taken the lead among Republicans in Iowa. Mike Huckabee. The first caucuses are a month away, and we're not laughing at them nearly enough. Which means, in a way, we're not taking them seriously enough, either.

These shows don't just make us laugh. When the monologues and Top 10 lists and daily news deconstructions are at their best, they also make us think.

And I for, one, think it's time for the hosts to step up and come back. Cut a deal, agree to honor any eventual agreement terms, and get back in the game. The WGA is owed a lot of loyalty and consideration, but so is the USA.

Right now, we need you even more.

December 09, 2007 - Tom Brokaw Brings "1968" Up to Date

December 9, 2007 3:21 AM

Tom Brokaw, who celebrated WWII veterans as The Greatest Generation, focuses on the 1960s in his latest book - and tonight at 9 ET on The History Channel, in a two-hour documentary, he hones in on one year in particular: 1968.

The most powerful parts of 1968 with Tom Brokaw are the ones devoted to the Robert F. Kennedy assassination and the year's volatile Democratic National Convention. If you don't know, or have trouble remembering, just what made 1968 such a raw and pivotal year, those segments explain it powerfully.

What's best about 1968 with Tom Brokaw, though, is how Brokaw, rather than wallow in simple nostalgia, keeps pushing the past into the present. A nurse and an amputee from Vietnam are shown today counseling war veterans from Iraq. Racial protests in the Deep South in 1968 are compared to protests in Jena in 2007.

And bridging four decades of political comedy, Brokaw interviews Tom Smothers from the bold 1960s variety series The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour and Jon Stewart from today's bold fake news series The Daily Show - at the same time.

Seeing those two men sitting next to one another, each respecting the other's attitudes and accomplishments, is good to see. Personally, it's great to see, and to hear, because right now I'm writing a book about the content, censorship battles and legacy of The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour. Hearing Stewart talk about Tom and Dick Smothers as his earliest important comedic influences makes me feel even better about Stewart... and I was feeling just fine about him before.

The Smothers Brothers, in 1969, were silenced by CBS - fired, not cancelled, as Tom Smothers corrects people all the time. Jon Stewart, right now, is being silenced, too - by the writers' strike. The times, as Brokaw suggests in tonight's very worthwhile documentary, haven't a-changed nearly enough.

December 08, 2007 - Fasten Your Seat Belts: Strike Talks Break Off Again, And Sound Really Broken

December 8, 2007 1:44 AM

Press releases from the networks started coming in about 10 p.m. ET last night, late enough to minimize coverage on a Friday night in December. But there was news, and the news was bad: The studios and networks had walked away from the negotiating table, leaving them and the striking Writers Guild of America members both moaning about intractable positions and irreconcilable differences.

That the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers had such a hefty statement ready so quickly suggests this was the group's A plan all along. Wait until the start of the weekend, throw down the gauntlet and leave. They've been losing the public-relations battle, so now they're declaring all-out war.

"Instead of negotiating," the AMPTP statement read, "the WGA organizers have made unreasonable demands that are roadblocks to real progress."

"We reject the idea of an ultimatum," a WGA release last night stated just as defiantly.

The lines, at this point, are drawn in the sand, and may as well be drawn in cement on Hollywood Boulevard. Unless this is some bellicose form of last-minute posturing, and one side or the other caves suddenly before the holidays, this TV season is about to become a very flimsy shadow of its former self.

If the strike isn't settled by Friday, you can pretty much say goodbye to the January press tour by the Television Critics Association, which means less coverage and promotion for midseason shows. And if late-night talk shows stay in reruns, other venues for promotion will be just as endangered.
When the two sides of the strike aren't in the same room, much less at the same table, the only end in sight is an end to the supply line of quality scripted television. The fail-safe point for salvaging this TV season, it's sad to say, is right around the corner.

And it's looking, more and more, like a one-way, dead-end street.

December 07, 2007 - Shop! In the Name of Love...

December 7, 2007 3:49 AM

I'm channeling the Supremes here, but that's only because I'm happy enough to sing. After weeks of work, it's finally ready: TV WORTH WATCHING's one-stop holiday shopping guide.

Click on the special banner on the main page (look for Nipper the RCA dog, wearing a Santa hat), or just CLICK HERE, and it'll take you to mini-reviews of dozens of suggestions for TV-on-DVD collections to purchase as gifts for the season - everything from single discs to massive sets, from selections aimed at young kids to ones aimed at adults old enough to remember Hopalong Cassidy.

In which case, Hoppy holidays.

My very favorite picks, overall, include the Planet Earth/Blue Planet collection and, for kids (or, to be honest, all ex-kids), The Point, the Harry Nilsson animated fable that gave us "Me and My Arrow." But the Point of this entire holiday section is that it's nothing but undiluted, honest recommendations. I love all these, and suspect your loved ones will love them too.

And, as I say in the intro to this special section, you not only do something nice by shopping for a great gift, but do something nicer by purchasing directly from this site, since TV WORTH WATCHING receives a small percentage of each sale. The motto here is: "Costs you nothing extra. Helps me stay alive."

The plan is to update this weekly through the holidays, so send comments with suggestions for additions, or keep coming back to see what's just on the horizon - like the complete second season of Saturday Night Live, the one saying goodbye to Chevy Chase and hello to Bill Murray.

That plan, though, relies on even more patience from designer Eric Gould and programmer Chris Spurgeon, my behind-the-scenes buddies in this website venture - and I don't know how much more they can stand. Here's a very special thank you, you two guys, for working so hard, making everything look so great, and asking and receiving so little.

And let me also, at this point, thank everyone who's reading this, whether you take advantage of the shopping feature or not. Like Chris and Eric, I'm spending a lot more time and effort on TV WORTH WATCHING than I could have imagined - but I really feel like we have something special here, and that we're communicating with some very special people.

One of you, responding to a recent Bianculli Blog, wrote: "I notice, David, that most of your readers' comments are more literate and thoughtful than many other blogs I have read recently."

I'm noticing the same thing - and I'm grateful for every single person reading this. To quote Tiny Tim, "God bless us, every one."

At least that's what he said in Mr. Magoo's Christmas Carol. Hmmm. Better add that to the list...

December 06, 2007 - TV Alchemy: Turning "Tin Man" Into Gold

December 6, 2007 12:00 AM

The three-night, six-hour telecast of Tin Man just earned Sci Fi Channel the biggest audience for a miniseries in the network's history, outdoing even Taken and Dune. Average audience for the imaginative reworking of L. Frank Baum's Wonderful Wizard of Oz: 5.3 million viewers.

For a broadcast network, that's no big deal. It's about the same number of viewers as ABC's Big Shots or October Road, which, in last week's list of prime-time programs, ended up ranked in the 80s. But for cable, it's a very big deal. Last week, the only cable offerings more popular than the first installment of Tin Man were two prime-time NFL games.

The biggest achievement, and lesson, of Tin Man, though, is this: the miniseries form, long abandoned by the broadcast networks, is very much alive and well. Sci Fi doesn't make too many long-form dramas, but promotes heavily the ones it does, and selects ambitious and interesting projects. The broadcast networks are foolish for not doing the same.

Ever since Lost, the broadcast networks have tried, but mostly failed, to hook viewers with complicated serialized series that unspool their stories over an entire season. Time and again, viewers have rejected all but the best of such shows, suggesting strongly that it's just too much to ask, these days, to have people make season-long commitments to too many shows.

But a concentrated three-night chunk of time - that's doable. And even if it's riskier financially in the short run, there are other payoffs. ABC once made its reputation as much on long-form TV - Roots, Thorn Birds, Winds of War, East of Eden - as anything else. Today, when "branding" is such an all-important concept, ABC and CBS, especially, could benefit from mounting some high-class, short-term special offerings again.

CBS, which gave us the spectacular Lonesome Dove in 1989, gives us Comanche Moon, anther chapter in Larry McMurtry's Dove saga, next month (now rescheduled to begin January 13). But on the broadcast network front, that's about it.

At this year's Emmy Awards, only three entrants competed for Outstanding Miniseries, and not one was from a commercial broadcast network. Broken Trail, by American Movie Classics, was the winner - and it was a Western starring Robert Duvall, just like Lonesome Dove.

It's not an exaggeration, but it is an embarrassment, to note than in this century to date, only five miniseries have been nominated for Emmys from commercial broadcast networks - all from either CBS or ABC. In 2001, ABC boasted two excellent ones, Life with Judy Garland: Me and My Shadows and Anne Frank. Since then, the only nominated miniseries not from PBS or cable have been relative tossaways: ABC's Dinotopia and, from CBS, Hitler: Rise of Evil and Elvis.

Compare that to 1989, the year of Lonesome Dove on CBS. Also nominated that year, from its commercial competitors: NBC's I Know My First Name Is Steven and ABC's The Women of Brewster Place and War and Remembrance.

One way for these networks to attract and retain viewers in this increasingly fragmented media age, I firmly believe, is to rededicate themselves to the miniseries form.

For that, of course, you need writers...

December 05, 2007 - WGA Strike Reaches One-Month Mark - And So Does TV Worth Watching

December 5, 2007 4:21 AM

One month ago today, the Writers Guild of America went on strike, and this website was launched. A month later, I'm still writing... and the writers still aren't.

The writers and studios resumed talks yesterday, but didn't even finish outlining their respective positions, and plan to talk more today. Meanwhile, the networks have begun announcing their strike-affected revised lineups for January and beyond.

Among the most interesting moves comes from CBS, which is talking about importing edited versions of such Showtime series as Dexter. That's a smart short-term solution, because it's clever corporate synergy. Dexter is reaching little more than 1 million viewers right now - impressive numbers for Showtime, but only a fraction of what a broadcast on CBS would bring.

Besides, Dexter is better than any scripted drama on the entire CBS network right now. But there's the rub. Sooner or later - and it looks, at this point, like it's probably going to be later - quality television comes down to the writing, and to the writer. Sooner or later, even the cable inventory will run out and who knows where viewers will be by then?

Seeing Dexter on CBS will be nice, but seeing it unedited on Showtime is nicer. As for a less laudable CBS move, the prospect of an in-season cycle of Big Brother, beginning in February, is just painful to contemplate. So is NBC's prime-time revival of American Gladiators, beginning next month. Television, on balance, is about to get much, much worse.

Which makes a website devoted to TV WORTH WATCHING more challenging to generate, as well as more valuable to use. At this point, a few pages have yet to be designed and uploaded, but email updates and a special holiday shopping section are imminent - so please be patient, and keep returning to see what's new.

Come to think of it, that's good advice for the writers and studio representatives hovering around the negotiating table as well.

December 04, 2007 - The Morning After... "Heroes," "Monday Night Football" and "Last Call with Carson Daly"

December 4, 2007 2:57 AM

If you watched TV last night, you were witness to, among other things, two abrupt endings and one uneasy beginning. ESPN's Monday Night Football went down to the last second, with the Baltimore Ravens coming two yards shy of ruining the New England Patriots' perfect record. NBC's Heroes ended its second volume with a gunshot and, just to tease us, showed the first seconds of volume three.

And then, 97 minutes past midnight on NBC, Last Call with Carson Daly became the first late-night show to return during the writers' strike.

Daly came out with no fanfare, sat at his desk, and joked, "Good to see the batteries in the applause sign still work after a month."

He offered reasons for coming back, some joking ("We ran out of repeats") and some serious ("75 members of my loyal staff and crew were going to be laid off").

"I miss my writers," Daly said. "None of this is written, clearly. It's not fun to be up here with no safety net and no writers, but I'll figure it out."

Good luck with that.

"We look like a car in the late-night fleet," he added. "But believe me when I tell you, under our hood in a 1982 Pinto engine."

Even a Pinto would have run more smoothly than last night's Last Call, which never even turned over the ignition. After proposing that he might fill time, over the coming shows, by doing more interviews and featuring more bands, he then filled time before the first commercial break by showing pictures of his crew during down time.

Then, when that was over, he asked, "How much time do we have left to kill?"

At that point, he had one minute - until the first ad break.

But the rest of the time the show has to kill, from now until the strike is over, looks to be deadly dull.

December 03, 2007 - "You Guys Know Who Philo Farnsworth Was?"

December 3, 2007 12:49 AM

That quote - "You guys know who Philo Farnsworth was?" - was the way William H. Macy, playing a ratings expert on the ABC comedy Sports Night, began lecturing a trio of meddling network executives on the true inventor of electronic television. That speech, and that episode, was written by Sports Night creator Aaron Sorkin in 1999.

Tonight, eight years later, Sorkin's new play, The Farnsworth Invention, opens on Broadway. (Finally, after being delayed by the Local One stagehands strike.)

"He invented television," Macy's TV consultant explained. "I don't mean he invented television like Uncle Miltie. I mean, he invented the television, in a little house in Provo, Utah - at a time when the idea of transmitting moving pictures through the air would be like me saying I had figured out a way to beam us aboard the starship Enterprise.

"He was a visionary. He died broke, and without fanfare. The guy I really like, though, was his brother-in-law, Cliff Gardner. He said, 'Philo, I know everyone thinks you're crazy, but I want to be a part of this. I don't have your head for science, so I'm not going to be able to help much with the design and the mechanics of the invention. But it sounds like you're gonna need glass tubes.'"

Sorkin, though Macy's character, went on to say that Cliff offered to learn how to be a glass blower, so he could be part of the team inventing this exciting new dream Farnsworth called television. And tonight, working with a team of onstage and backstage talent, Sorkin revives Cliff and Philo, and that exciting dream, in a play that ought to earn very positive reviews.

Here's one of them.

The Farnsworth Invention tells two stories at once, each with its own protagonist, point of view and narrator. Jimmi Simpson plays Farnsworth, an inventive farm boy whose idea for breaking broadcast images into separate scan lines came from the parallel patterns his tri-bladed plow made when furrowing the fields. Hank Azaria plays David Sarnoff, whose stratospheric rise through the nascent medium of radio led to him being founder of NBC and president of RCA. When he heard about television, he was determined to control it, and its patents and royalties, just as aggressively.

Sorkin's master stroke, in the construction of the play, is to have Sarnoff narrate and comment upon Farnsworth's story, and vice versa. This allows each man to give credit where it's due, but also to sprinkle seeds of doubt.

Sarnoff's claims of being the exclusive wireless telegraph operator relaying news of the survivors of the Titanic, long questioned by historians, are ridiculed by Farnsworth himself in Sorkin's telling. Conversely, when the brilliant young inventor Farnsworth is encouraged, in the play, to retire to a different room and relax by playing one of the musical instruments there, the sound of beautiful music draws laughs from the studio audience, but a scowl from Sarnoff.

"Yeah," Sarnoff says sarcastically. "Turns out 'Astro Boy' was also a concert-level violinist." (That turns out to be true.)

There are lots of laughs in Farnsworth Invention. The very biggest is saved for last, delivered expertly by Azaria, and is wholly apocryphal. So is a more dramatic scene, as utterly without basis in fact as a key scene in Nixon/Frost - but, in the case of The Farnsworth Invention, labeled as such immediately after it's over.

Dramatic license is taken in other regards, but nothing major, and Sorkin gets the key details just right. Even the things that sound most preposterous - a 14-year-old Farnsworth winning a contest to invent the first ignition lock for an automobile, or sketching his basic concept for television to an incredulous ninth-grade science teacher - actually happened.

Director Des McAnuff keeps things moving almost as swiftly as a West Wing walk-and-talk. The supporting actors, all paying multiple roles, sometimes literally run through the decades, covering everything from the crash of the Titanic to the crash of the stock market.

Sarnoff is the best role of Azaria's career to date, and, as for Simpson, his tender portrayal of Farnsworth could well make him a star. Handling all the exposition and techno-babble is tricky enough. Making both men likable, especially when Farnsworth is the clear hero of the piece, is even trickier, and both leads perform that task superbly.

Fewer than 10 city blocks where the real Sarnoff set up shop at Rockefeller Center and Radio City, Sorkin's The Farnsworth Invention, at the Music Box, tells the story of television's inventor in a way that is itself fittingly inventive. At a time when television writers are on strike, one of this generation's best TV writers has a dynamic new work you can, and should, enjoy.

It's about television - but it's on stage, and it opens tonight.

December 02, 2007 - "Tin Man": Sci-Fi Channel Dares to Dream, While the Broadcast Networks Merely Sleep

December 2, 2007 1:49 AM

For months now, Sci-Fi Channel has been publicizing Tin Man, its six-hour miniseries, arriving tonight, that offers a rebooted take on L. Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. It's worth watching because (after a slow start) it builds nicely and imaginatively. It's also worth applauding because - well, because it's a risk, the type the networks mostly are avoiding these days.

First the review. Then the context.

Tin Man, presented in two-hour chunks tonight, tomorrow and Tuesday night at 9 ET, doesn't exactly come to TV with overly heightened expectations. Its executive producers are Robert Halmi Sr. and Jr., currently the overseers of Sci-Fi's wholly expendable Flash Gordon, and purveyors of one series or miniseries misfire after another for years. Make that more than a decade: Their last unqualified home run was in 1996, with Ted Danson in Gulliver's Travels.

Moreover, for Tin Man, their executive producers and writers of choice are Steven Long Mitchell and Craig W. Van Sickle, who have some genre credits (including Alien Nation) but also such drivel as She Spies. Director Nick Willing, who did Photographing Fairies, at least has some expertise at mixing fantasy and reality, as does cinematographer Tom Burstyn, who did that excellent NBC docudrama about Baum, The Dreamer of Oz, starring John Ritter.

Given the way The Dreamer of Oz recreated the novelist's inspirations, and the 1985 movie Return to Oz mounted a darker, non-musical sequel, and the hit Broadway musical Wicked reinvented the fabled relationship between good and evil witches, it wouldn't seem there's that much new territory to explore.

Tin Man, though, especially in its final four hours, deepens and twists the text and subtext, while staying true to the major cornerstones of Baum's story. Dorothy is now an adult young woman, played by Zooey Deschanel from Almost Famous, and her traveling companions are a former cop (Neal McDonough, whose badge gives him the "tin man" nickname of the title), a brainless torture victim (Alan Cumming), and a timid wolverine (Raoul Trujillo). There's a beautiful but heartless wicked witch, played by Kathleen Robertson, who isn't quite what she seems - and the same could be said for Toto, too.

Richard Dreyfuss is the equivalent of the wizard of Oz, though here the land is called the O.Z., and Dreyfuss is used far too sparingly. Deschanel and Robertson are by far the central figures in Tin Man, its title notwithstanding, and each is bewitching in her own way. Cumming is endearing as always, McDonough is a fine wounded hero, and the flashback-mystery framework and ingenious special effects make Tin Man an enjoyable, though far from light, romp.

Even if Sci-Fi Channel hadn't succeeded, though, at least it tried. CBS, at the end of the year, presents Comanche Moon, a prequel to Lonesome Dove, but that's more the exception than the rule. Commercial broadcast TV has just about given up on long-form drama. In so doing, it's missing out not only on Emmy nominations and prestige, but on major events that can help draw viewers back to the TV set.

The broadcast networks no longer think it makes good financial sense to produce and present miniseries: costs and risks are too high, especially if viewers don't show up. Instead of not making any, though, the broadcast networks should follow the lead of Sci-Fi and other cable networks.

Make good ones.

December 01, 2007 - All Hail the Queen of Christmas TV

December 1, 2007 1:55 AM

In certain areas of TV criticism and history, I bow to no one. (I should, but I don't.) But when it comes to holiday television, I bow quite humbly to The Queen of Christmas TV.

She Who Cannot Be Equalled, during this time of year, is Newsday TV columnist Diane Werts. When it comes to December holiday shows on television, she wrote the book.

She really did. It's called Christmas on Television, and it's full - astoundingly, almost ridiculously full - of just about every holiday special, or holiday-themed series episode, made at the time the book was published two years ago.

I don't even know why I use the qualifier "just about," because every time I think of something and look it up in the index, it's there. Jack Benny's special Christmas episode, and Gumby's? Check. The Star Wars Holiday Special? Check. Mr. Hankey the Christmas Poo from South Park? Chrismukkah from The O.C.? Festivus from Seinfeld? Check and double check. Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, even Chrismukkah - all present and accounted for.

Her book can be purchased here, in time for a perfectly appropriate gift for any TV and book lover.

(Full disclosure: I'm credited as the series editor for this Praeger Television Collection, but that's completely separate from my enthusiasm and admiration for this particular book.)

In the meantime, here are Diane's seasonal updates. First, her holiday column for 2007, from Newsday:

And here are her complete listings of holiday TV shows, which you can peruse to find if, when and where your own favorites will be televised. Like Diane, it's insanely thorough.

Even on December 1, it's not too early to start collecting and enjoying holiday TV classics. Tonight at 8 ET, TV Land begins a 24-hour marathon of holiday-themed episodes. Included early in the marathon: 9 p.m. ET's memorable episode of M*A*S*H, in which Alan Alda's Hawkeye writes home from Korea.

That, and more, makes for a ho-ho-whole lot of TV WORTH WATCHING this month. Strike or no strike.