May 2007 Archives

Ben “Quality with Noise” Silverman’s first order of business as newly installed head of NBC-Universal-Kmart-GE’s-trivection-oven-unit? Trying to lure Donald Trump and “The Apprentice” back to NBC.

Given “The Apprentice’s” abject ratings this past season, that would seem a pretty desperate move: Trump’s show drew numbers almost as bad as those for “Friday Night Lights,” which – oh, never mind.

On the other hand, it could be just a conciliatory, face-saving gesture toward an obviously wounded (yet still-powerful, if only as a TV wrassler) Trump. Which would make Silverman a nice guy. If only industry people were nice guys to folks who weren’t already wealthy and influential.

Nickelodeon today announced that it is partnering with Marriott to create “a breakthrough new lodging resort brand and concept for travelers seeking fun and adventure: Nickelodeon Resorts by Marriott.” Travelers will be slimed upon entering the lobby.

Well, no, but those traveling on business who inadvertently book a stay at one of these just might feel as though they have been. Although “Mr. Marriott” (the press release gave his full name, but I prefer the mysterious (or is it businessman-as-fun-and-alliteratively-playful-character?) nature of the above moniker, as it appeared in the New York Times-style press release) thinks those without kids will also clamor to stay at a semi-luxury hotel with a lot of unrelated rugrats underfoot:

“Besides being a great new family destination, we believe that ‘Nickelodeon Resorts by Marriott’ will attract younger adults, the young-at-heart, and meeting travelers, especially people who travel on business with their families. As younger boomers and Gen X'ers enter prime child-rearing years, their clear preference for seamlessly mixing business with leisure and family fun will mesh perfectly with the ‘Nickelodeon Resorts by Marriott’ concept," said Mr. Marriott. (Aren’t “younger boomers” closer to departing rather than entering their prime child-rearing years?)

The first of these Vegas-for-virgins resorts is expected to open in San Diego in 2010, with 20 forecast to be open or under construction by 2010. There will attractions strewn throughout the grounds of each, tied into Nick’s characters like Spongebob Squarepants and Dora the Explorer, and guest rooms will have character themes as well (hmm … these guys seem to be relying on the notion that their characters will have an evergreen shelf life amongst a particularly fickle demographic; these places could turn into Knott’s Berry Farm pretty quickly).

And, of course: “Retail offerings will be a key element of the guest experience, with Nick-themed retail items available that are exclusive to the resort, as well as a ‘Nick Pix’ photo studio and Nick.com Cyberzone, where kids and families can safely surf Nick.com and Nickjr.com content online, and view resort-specific information. A large game room featuring the latest and most popular video and traditional table top games will be available for all resort guests looking for added family entertainment and interaction.”

No wonder some guy in a suit and possessing a terrifically stilted public speaking style intoned, “The Marriott and Nickelodeon partnership provides an extremely compelling investment opportunity by pairing the hotel industry leader with the top kids’ entertainment brand. Together, we will create fantastic destinations that we are confident will be a great economic success.”

Also, per the press release: “The resort will encourage sophisticated adult interactions” – ah, so Mommy and Daddy will be getting something out of this, after all.

I’m sure someone, somewhere, is enchanted by the vision of hundreds of impish, shrieking youngsters running roughshod over acres of arcade games (the first step in a natural progression in growing up to become drunken adults stumbling through rows of jangling slot machines), a veritable cacophony of acquisitiveness being marketed as innocence, but if these take off, the dystopian world depicted in “Children of Men” can’t come soon enough.

Mike Darnell, the Karl Rove of Fox’s reality programming, must be kicking himself that he didn’t come up with this idea first: A TV network in the Netherlands will air “The Big Donor Show,” in which a terminally ill woman will choose the recipient of one of her kidneys amongst three contestants.

“The program is unfitting and unethical, especially due to the competitive element, but it's up to program makers to make their choices," said the country’s Education Minister (how’d he get involved?); nevertheless, the government will not try to quash the show.

More fun facts: The kidney may not even be the right match for the winner, and viewers can vote for their favorite moribund candidate, though the final decision still rests with the donor herself, whose inoperable brain tumor might play out as a wild card when she picks the winner.

You just know that if Fox did this, the contestants would have to run obstacle courses with their dialysis machines.

*UPDATE: As my commenter noted, the show was a fraud, putatively to "raise awareness" of the need for organ donors. On Friday night, "Nightline" called it "tasteless." A fraud? Tasteless? Sounds like a real reality show to me.

CBS would like you to know that despite all the media hoopla surrounding shows like “Heroes,” “Lost” and “24,” in the last week of sweeps when shows were presenting their season finales, its own series, “NCIS,” averaged more viewers than any of them – 14.14 million, to be precise. By contrast, “Lost” had 13.86m, “Heroes,” 13.48m, and “24,” 10.31m.

Of course, “NCIS’s” audience skewed a little older than the demographic most sought after by advertisers, and those other shows no doubt all lured more viewers aged 18-49. On the other hand, none of those other shows had to go up against “American Idol’s” final night of competition, either. (Though, to be fair, “Lost” may have arguably had a tougher task – the first 75 minutes of its two-hour finale aired opposite the announcement of the new “American Idol.”) “NCIS” ranked No. 5, among all primetime programs (“House,” the top-rated scripted series on the season, ended its run the previous week), behind only the competition and results finales of “American Idol” and “Dancing with the Stars.”

OK, so CBS wanted you to know that, and now you do. Carry on.

Jeez, I can’t bother to work up enough energy to mock MyNetwork’s new fall schedule, which was announced yesterday, let alone analyze it. So here’re bits from the press release, along with an occasional wan observation:

Here’s MyNetwork president Greg Meidel: “MyNetworkTV strides forward this fall as we offer a slate of programming packed with compelling subjects and vibrant personalities from proven producers. The new schedule offers diverse choices, including action-packed sports to real-life, human interest dramas.”

(If they can’t muster up a canned quote any more enthusiastic than that, how can anyone wrest themselves from their torpor to care?)

(The sports, by the way, are volleyball and smacking each other silly.)

Here’re the shows:

“IFL Battleground:” “Follows the athletes, coaches and personalities of the International Fight League, the world’s first professional mixed martial arts organization to compete in a team format.”

“The Academy:” Actually, this one’s already on Fox Reality, so come fall they’ll be repeating the series about recruits training to become L.A. Country deputy sheriffs.

“Jail:” “John Langley, the creator and producer of ‘COPS,’ now takes us behind bars with ‘Jail.’ Shot on-location in cities across the U.S., ‘Jail’ follows prison inmates from their initial booking through their first moments in the slammer. Each episode captures the harsh and sometimes humorous reality of what happens to criminals once the sheriff throws away the key.”

(Can you imagine anyone stupid enough to sign the release form to appear on this? That must be where the “sometimes humorous reality” comes in, when the cons realize what they’ve signed and how proud their friends and family will be.)

“Divorce Wars” (working title): “An intense real-life look at couples struggling to hold on to their relationships. Husbands and wives tackling issues ranging from financial hardships to infidelity enter the ‘Divorce Wars’ house for five days, submitting themselves to 24-hour surveillance and counseling, to try one last time to find happily ever after.”

(Because nothing sensitively alleviates an already tense situation than a battery of omnipresent cameras. Again, even for those most desperate to get on TV this would have to be considered an absolute final destination.)

“Meet My Folks:” “Parents get to decide who dates their children. Potential love interests are put to the ultimate test through a series of revealing secret interviews, fun tasks and the all-knowing lie detector. When parents play matchmaker, dating gets a lot more interesting.”

(“Interesting,” perhaps, but probably not a whole lot more successful. Incidentally, this show will air after “Divorce Wars,” when in fact it’d be a natural to run beforehand, so viewers could enjoy the whole circle-of-life thing when it comes to relationships in one evening of television.)

“Thursdays and Fridays will continue to be “My Movie” nights, with titles such as Rocky I-IV with Sylvester Stallone; “U.S. Marshals” with Tommy Lee Jones, Wesley Snipes, Robert Downey, Jr. and Joe Pantoliano; “The Amityville Horror” with James Brolin and Rod Steiger; “Carrie” with Sissy Spacek; and Guy Ritchie’s “Snatch” with Brad Pitt and Benicio Del Toro.”

(Movies 30 years old and older and utter box-office tank jobs – pretty sweet lineup you got there, MyNetwork. It's the NetFlix Queue from Hell.)

“The network has also partnered with FOX Reality and Mentorn USA to develop all new episodes of “Paradise Hotel” for debut in March 2008. Shot on-location in Mexico, the program will follow a group of single people living in a luxurious resort and competing to see who can stay in the hotel the longest.”

(Not enough information provided there – how hard would it be to stay in a luxurious resort? I think I could manage that. Is there something trying to oust them, like a plague of zombies? Is this a crossover where the IFC ninjas start beating on the contestants until they flee? Or is the wait staff just a little unduly surly and the participants are particularly thin-skinned so they bolt looking for more amenable accommodations? Certainly they wouldn’t be so crass and unoriginal as to have people voted out – could anyone sit through another reality show where people get voted out?)

Ah, well: “Following is the MyNetworkTV primetime series schedule for Fall 2007. New shows are in CAPS.”

Monday
8 p.m. “IFL Battleground”

Tuesday
8 p.m. “THE ACADEMY”
9 p.m. “JAIL”

Wednesday
8 p.m. “DIVORCE WARS” (working title)
9 p.m. “MEET MY FOLKS”

Thursday
8 p.m. “My Thursday Night Movie”

Friday
8 p.m. “My Friday Night Movie”

Saturday

8 p.m. “IFL Battleground” repeat

Not that The CW affiliates have anything to crow about, but how much must the former WB and UPN affiliate station managers – proud, valiant men and women who no doubt, perhaps even as recently as a year ago, had love for the medium of television and believed in it as a force for good – how much must these folks who didn’t land The CW be fighting the urge to open their wrists with a straight razor when they see that that’s their fall lineup?

Last week, USA Network premiered “The Starter Wife” at the Pacific Design Center – yes, even TV productions have rated splashy premieres with red carpets for a few years now. (Blame “It’s not TV; it’s HBO.”) Quite the event: I’ve never attended a premiere – for a movie or TV series – that served booze both before and after the screening.

Even Gigi Levangie Grazer, author of the novel upon which “Starter Wife” is based, noted afterwards, “It was as big as any premiere I’ve been to, and I’ve been to a few.” (She’s Brian Grazer’s wife, so there’s that, and although she was engaging in typical Hollywood hyperbole, she wasn’t by a whole lot.) (At this point, let’s put aside the question of why USA felt the need to ply guests with alcohol before the screening.)

But that’s hardly the point here. The point concerns the USA Network’s naughty new logo, which you’ll have to link to here if any of the rest of this is to make any sense to you.

After the screening, I was speaking to one of the many representative from NBC-Universal, which had arranged this event and had arranged for USA’s logo to be thrown on nearby building facades, and part of our conversation went something like this:

Your Mayor (referring to logo on a distant wall): The other day I was looking at USA’s logo, and perhaps I have too much time on my hands, but it occurred to me that one of the vowels approximates one gender’s flaccid sex organ, and the other vowel looks a little like a too-titillated gland of the other gender.

NBC-Universal representative: Wow, you do have too much time on your hands. (Further good-natured berating of Your Mayor’s pathetic peccadilloes.) (Protracted pause, while considering the logo on the distant wall.) Omigod, I completely see what you’re talking about.

Thoughts, anyone? Do certain letters in USA’s new logo need to, in the current parlance of the Cleveland Cavaliers, need to “rise up?”

For more than a month, I had been trying to get NBC Entertainment president Kevin Reilly on the phone for a story we had discussed a while back.

Guess we know now why he wasn’t returning my calls.

In January, Reilly declared: “There's been a lot of conjecture, instability, and I can tell you from the top of the organization down it just has never felt better, you know, the support I have gotten from Jeff to do what I wanted to do creatively and to build the team. And what I really feel right now inside the building is a confidence back in terms of what we're doing and a confidence I tell you I have in the individuals with -- to a person, the people we have working with us at NBC I hope to work with for a long time and that feels really good to be able to say that. It's actually shockingly weirdly becoming fun again, which has been -- people are saying ‘What's that feeling that we have? Oh, that's fun.’”

So much for that. Reilly was the fall guy for NBC (though, in typical blundering-network style, he got ashcanned mere months after signing a lucrative three-year extension on his contract, so NBC – the network preaching austerity, the one that announced its intentions late last year to strip its 8 p.m. hour with low-budget reality nonsense – will be forking over a nice wad of cash to him nonetheless, with no headaches attached). The network has been in trouble since the middle of Jeff Zucker’s tenure as Entertainment president; he now, of course, runs the whole show as NBC-Universal president and CEO, a career trajectory we should all be so lucky to chart. Reilly was essentially brought in to perform CPR on a coma patient; he was kind of like the new “War Czar:” He was there to take the blame when things inevitably didn’t improve fast enough.

Despite a fairly spectacular cave-in near the end of the past TV season, Reilly decided to proceed with patience, bringing back low-rated new shows like “30 Rock” and “Friday Night Lights” and low-rated old shows like “Law & Order” and adding only four new dramas to the schedule when a lot of programmers would’ve thrown a lot more new shows up against the wall in hopes that a couple would stick. Of the new shows, one is potentially great: “Chuck,” an action-comedy about a techie who inadvertently gets the entire CIA database downloaded into his brain, which sets him up for a lot of unexpected (and unwanted) derring-do and danger and international intrigue. Unlike a lot of shows in this genre, “Chuck” refuses to take itself seriously, which makes it quite refreshing. (Following the success of “Heroes,” NBC kind of overloaded on the sci-fi-y stuff, with “Bionic Woman” and “Journeyman,” about a newspaper reporter who can travel back in time, both of which take themselves very seriously indeed. (If I were “Journeyman,” my first order of business would be to go back and stop Al Gore from inventing the Internets, so I’d have a smidgen of job security.))

So Reilly’s out and Ben Silverman’s in, with a snazzier title and reportedly greater leeway. As TV executives go, Reilly was a more honest, straight-shooting kind of guy; Silverman tends to talk a little more in industry-ese.

For example: Today, Silverman declared, “I want to find big shows that are quality shows. To me, the hallmark will be quality with noise.”

“Quality with Noise” would be a great name for a band, but it feels like one of those rubrics that sound like what one’s bosses want to hear but may in fact be reductive, contradictory and perhaps untenable (another popular one: “smart but accessible”). At least Silverman has already, for good or ill, chosen the epitaph for his tenure at NBC when he eventually, inevitably departs.

Al Gore may have made global warming cool, but he’s tilting at windmills to suggest that Americans shed fatty infotainment from our daily diets in favor of the granola of the hard news of the day.

When Lindsay Lohan demonstrates the most piquant qualities of the product created by the distillery that planned to host her 21st birthday party bash by bashing up her ride, we want, nay, deserve to know. As for the complicity we may share for our inattentiveness and tremulousness in the run-up to a now spectacularly botched war cooked up by a leader who petulantly holds his breath and keens loudly until he gets his way and wrecks our nation’s global reputation the way Lohan did her car, well, who wants to keep up with that sort of thing? That sh!t’s depressing!

Yet here’s Gore, kvetching that we’re not paying attention to the things in life that really matter: “What is it about our collective decision-making process that has led us to this state of affairs where we spend much more time in the public forum talking about – or receiving information about – Britney Spears shaving her head or Paris Hilton going to jail?”

Gore also assailed the “destruction of the boundary between news and entertainment” and warned that we as a people are “vulnerable as a democracy to mass and continuing distraction.”

Well, excuse me, but a “mass and continuing distraction” seems to be the only logical way to contend with a war that has served to create more terrorists, a woozily punch-drunk economy in which America’s chief export is its jobs and the specter of a future environmental landscape that’ll make “A Boy and His Dog,” “Children of Men,” “Blade Runner,” “The Omega Man,” “Soylent Green,” “28 Days Later,” “Waterworld,” “Escape from New York,” “Hell Comes to Frogtown,” “Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome” and Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road” collectively look like a tea party. We’re like Hugh Laurie’s Gregory House, popping Vicodin like they’re breath mints to stave off our pain and anxiety, only our Vicodin is “Access Hollywood.”

Thoughtfully, the White House seems to agree, as it has done everything it can to curtail coverage of the war in Iraq. Fewer than 100 journalists remain embedded with the troops, fewer than the 143 media employees killed during the war. And: “In an operational security slide presentation … for military supervisors, media is defined as a ‘nontraditional’ threat in the same category as drug cartels.”

But then, we’re not doing our job as well as we might, either: Only 5.5 million people watched “National Bingo Night” on Friday, and fewer than 3 million tuned in last night to Fox’s latest reality sensation, “On the Lot.” Both of those shows are premium-grade when it comes to shutting down the old cerebrum, and they’re opportunities being squandered. We can – and must – do better.

(Incidentally, other headlines linked on the page with the Al Gore story include “Mexicans Boo Miss USA” and “Boy Bags Wild Hog Bigger Than ‘Hogzilla.’” Gore has his work cut out for him.)

The media has been assailed, rightfully so, for being wussies when it came to reportage building up to the war with Iraq.

Here’s an interview I did which ran on in the Daily News March 20, 2003, two days before “Shock and Awe.” Obviously, it changed no one’s mind, but I offer it, on this Memorial Day, as an effort to reduce the number of those planted at Arlington Cemetery, a chance to demonstrate that the media, which seemed out of touch in those days, actually did care:

Daily News of Los Angeles (CA)

NATION'S PRESS GUILTY OF MYTHOLOGIZING WAR?

March 20, 2003
Tag: 0303200065

Section: U
Edition: Valley

rop
Page: U8
Source: David Kronke
Staff Writer

The New York Times reporter Chris Hedges has covered wars in the Falkland Islands, El Salvador and Bosnia, as well as the ongoing conflict in the Middle East and the first Gulf War (where he eschewed the prevalent pool reports and was captured for eight days by the Iraqi National Guard). His experiences and reflections are gathered in the book ``War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning'' (Public Affairs; $23), which was a National Book Critics Circle Awards finalist. ``It will rattle jingoists, pacifists, moralists, nihilists, politicians and professional soldiers equally,'' said one review.

Like others, Hedges is concerned about how the media, particularly TV news divisions, have covered the debate about Iraq and how they will carry through in the impending Gulf War, which may have already started by the time you read this.

So far, critics haven't given the media high marks. Charles Kupchack, former member of the National Security Council and author of ``The End of the American Era,'' which argues that the United States will in the coming years alienate itself from its former allies, decries the lack of debate on Iraq. ``One of the things we've always been reassured about this country is that it's a marketplace of ideas,'' he says. ``If we go to war, that's fine, but we should have all sides of the debate exposed. But that's not happening. Democracy is not being served.''

In February, Sen. Robert Byrd, D-W.Va., on the floor of the Senate, leveled a similar complaint: ``There is no debate, no discussion, no attempt to lay out for the nation the pros and cons of this particular war. There is nothing. ... We are truly sleepwalking through history.''

Rick Ellis of AllYourTV.com suggested that a few reasons news networks have shied away from questioning the Bush Administration's policies is that they are assuming it will be a short war, ``so they're already planning their aftermath stories. Their thinking goes, 'War's gonna happen anyway - why waste time on whether we should be in it?'

(Interjection: What was deleted from this story at the time was the fact that MSNBC had cancelled Phil Donahue’s show from its schedule, because its executives were worried that Donahue’s anti-war concerns would be construed as anti-American at a time when most new networks were flying American flags and championing destroying Iraq. Still, this story did actually run in the Daily News at a time when such stories were pretty much considered, in light of W’s “You’re with us or with the terrorists” propaganda, heresy.)

Hedges won't be in the Persian Gulf this time. He's lost too many friends and colleagues in battle, he says, and besides, ``I'm old.'' He knew he had had enough when he found himself, at age 42, trying to keep up with 17-year-old Palestinians with bags of Molotov cocktails fleeing from Israeli snipers. He spoke with the Daily News last week about his book and how he sees the media's coverage:

Q: According to your book, the media is simply doing its job in a time of warfare by stoking the fires. But how soon before a war does the media have a responsibility to focus on honest reportage of the pros and cons of the impending battle, before it gets absorbed in the breast-beating? It seems there never was a period of skepticism with Iraq.

A: I don't think the media has much of a period of skepticism. It's better at parroting back jingoism. That's become part of the war effort, where you see Dan Rather saying, where do I sign up, where you see TV anchors wearing flag lapel pins. There's a real sense that they believe they're doing their bit for the country. Those people who function as social critics find that in the rush of war, they're unable to resist the call to arms. Those who do resist find themselves lonely and reviled.

If these outlets looked at their role as being one of a public service, of course they'd examine the issues. But since they no longer see it that way - they just see another act in the circus tent - they're not going to do anything.

But the credibility of the press suffers disastrously. The lie of war is the lie of omission. There's a huge disconnect between the soldiers, who know the reality of the situation, and seeing how it was covered.

Q: How much does the simplistic reporting on the behalf of TV news reporters make it difficult for people to digest serious reporting?

A: It makes it difficult. People don't want to ingest it. People don't want to hear it. It's so much fun, while the economy is crumbling and we're getting stripped of our civil rights, to walk down the street, beating war drums.

There are two medias now. There's print - The New York Times, Washington Post - and they're pretty good. And then there's broadcast media, and that's just become entertainment, all about commercials and ratings. There was never any hope of any significant contributions in reportage from them from the beginning. CNN knows full the mythic narrative of war - they're selling the narcotic of war, and it's very good business - it's how (William Randolph) Hearst built his empire. Broadcast is shameless. There is not even an attempt made to report the facts; news is judged in terms of its entertainment value. Those at The New York Times who raised the right questions were doomed from the start.

But we'll have a horrible hangover when it's over. Or we'll have a collective amnesia. But it's lonely and hard not to join the party.

Q: Were you surprised at how the White House press corps sort of rolled over at Bush's press conference?

A: It was pretty typical of what happens in wartime. Wars always begin with the murder of innocence. To question the cause is interpreted as sacrilege - that's always how wars begin. Again, this was no exception.

Q: So to paraphrase Aaron Sorkin: We can't handle the truth?

A: That's correct. The myth of war exhilarates us: It's powerful, noble and good. The reality is, it's dirty and venal and forces us to confront our capacity for evil. But it's more pleasant to imbibe the elixir.

We were pretty ignorant before, now we're really ignorant. But I wouldn't romanticize the past (coverage and protests of war) too much. In wartime, everyone falls into lockstep. It's definitely worse now, but it's always bad in times of war.”

On March 22, “Shock and Awe” began.

Dammit, people, forget those blockbuster sequels in the motion-picture theaters, it’s “National Bingo Night!” Get your head in the game, already!

In an announcement today that surprised – well, I’m sure, someone somewhere – ABC announced that Rosie O’Donnell, fresh from her latest roundelay with Elisabeth Hasselbeck, would not be returning to the show.

ABC News’ story (linked above) even hints at the bemused exhaustion a lot of people have had with O’Donnell’s hijinx: It begins, “The saga is over.”

The requisite ABC guy was quoted expressing his requisite regrets: "We had hoped that Rosie would be with us until the end of her contract three weeks from now, but Rosie has informed us that she would like an early leave. Therefore, we part ways, thank her for her tremendous contribution to 'The View' and wish her well."

("We wish her well?" That's precisely the sarcastic fare-thee-well the Fox News Channel offers someone it has just eviscerated.)

The requisite Barbara Walters gushing: “Rosie contributed to one of our most exciting and successful years at ‘The View.’ I am most appreciative. Our close and affectionate relationship will not change.”

The requisite Rosie quote: "I'm extremely grateful. It's been an amazing year and I love all three women."

O’Donnell loved all three women so much she reportedly departed the “View” offices with a farewell trashing, and some photos of Hasselbeck lining production walls had mustaches scrawled on them, courtesy Rosie’s chief writer. I’m beginning to think the wrong show is titled “House of Payne.”

And Donald Trump got to use the words “disgusting” and "disaster" one last time as he declared, “A great service was done by getting her off the airwaves.” Actually, we were thinking the same thing about "The Apprentice."

Rosie’s blog seems to be treating the announcement like something akin to a death in the family. She posted a video montage of her “View” days to a Cyndi Lauper tune, “Sisters of Avalon.”

(Again, per ABC’s snarky story: “Lauper sings, ‘And a distant drum rumbling under ground gently guides me on...’ O'Donnell has been guided on...on from ‘The View.’” Well, that’s either snarky or ineptly sentimental.)

She also contributed another poem that begins:

“nothing is loud enough today
i have blown too many speakers”

I’m sure that means something far different to her than it does to, say, me. The poem moves on, however:

“did u hear
a squirrel attacked a woman
its true
it was in the paper”

(We’ve noted Rosie’s fixation on squirrels in the past.)

And, finally, not as an entry but as a general statement, she offers this:

“no new questions
taking a little break”

We’ve discussed Stephen Colbert’s war against Wikipedia, in which he has “invited” fans to alter entries in the online encyclopedia. For example, imagine my surprise one night to discover, per Colbert’s directive, that “reality” had been redefined as “a commodity.”

Tonight, Colbert’s guest was Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, who’s nothing if not a good sport: During the interview, Colbert threw out a few "facts" – Einstein tended alpacas, oxygen is poison, librarians are hiding something – and within seconds each page was locked down by the Wikipolice. I did manage to see oxygen redefined as poison, however, and had to quit breathing momentarily; if you click on the link, you’ll be spared such horror, as the page will likely read “This article is currently protected from editing to deal with vandalism.”

As if Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert and Keith Olbermann aren’t bringing the hammer down hard on the Bush Administration, now a sparrow has also decided to enter the sphere of political satire and commentary.

There goes every environmental protection standard for our birdly friends. Can’t wait to see the Fox News Channel pundits wonder why the sparrow hates America so much.

Not exactly TV-related, but it traversed my Email in-box alongside a TV-related Email, so:

(By the way, this one is absolutely true.)

“One publisher is attempting to answer today's decline of in-flight readership with One Flight Fiction®, a six-book series designed with busy travelers in mind. A new imprint from Banda Press International, One Flight Fiction® offers a refreshing alternative for travelers who constantly find themselves wishing they had time to read-and finish-a good book by the time their plane touches down. Featuring "read times" of 0-1, 1-2 and 2-3 hours, One Flight Fiction® delivers a complete and entertaining story to fit any busy schedule or literary taste.

"‘We would find ourselves purchasing novels during our travels, many of which were abruptly set aside afterward, never to be picked up again,’ says Amber Skoubye of Banda Press, who, along with her husband Dan, is the publisher and creator of One Flight Fiction®. ‘We wanted to create a series of books that can be read in three hours or less: during a flight, lunch break at work or even while waiting for your child's activities to end.’

“The six new titles from One Flight Fiction® include Breaking Stride, a modern story of two dedicated runners giving their all for a race; Home to Wyoming, a journey through the Wild West; The Looking Glass Call, a timeless and mysterious coming-of-age story; Dreamers, a futuristic tale exploring issues of genetics and evolution; Summersville, a haunting tale of ghosts and folklore; and Perceptions, a small-town mystery.

“Each title features a personalized book length depending on the amount of time you have in your schedule to relax and read a book. Hopping a short, one-hour flight from Los Angeles to San Francisco? Pick up a title with a 0-1 hour read time. Been meaning to pick up a book but lack the time or attention span? (Italics mine.) Try Breaking Stride, an inspirational tale of teamwork that can be finished in two hours or less.

"‘One Flight Fiction® opens up the true joy of reading to a much broader audience,’ says Skoubye. ‘People who thought they might never be able to finish a book again can sit down and read a story cover to cover, no longer frustrated by time constraints.’”

Oh, Jeez: Where to begin? Do people really buy books based on their length, not whether their subject matter might possibly be of interest? (Notice how only one paragraph glibly skims through what the books are about, while all the others trumpet the fact that the books don’t take long to read – well, the press release seems to be saying, the books may be crap but they won’t eat up too much of your time, and at that next cocktail party you can impress that potential special someone with a desultory chuckle and the phrase “I read a book the other day.”)

Aren’t novels with a “0-1 hour read time” actually called short stories? Isn’t there some sort of paradox in dumbing-down something that’s supposed to make you feel smart?

All that said, do they want me to author one? What do they pay? If it doesn’t take long to read, how long can they take to write? I could probably expand upon my powerful evisceration of caveman-directed prejudice in a day or two.

* Note: This report derives from an early-Thursday East-Coast feed. As car ads state, your mileage may vary.

After Wednesday’s apocalyptic clash of cultures on “The View” between Rosie O’Donnell and Elisabeth Hasselbeck (which seemed to get even Joy Behar’s skin crawling), one would have hoped for something of a détente today. Alas, one would have been disappointed, as the battle escalated into actual bloodshed.

It began innocently enough, with a chipper discussion of dessert toppings. But when Elisabeth declared Redi-Whip her favorite, O’Donnell assailed Hasselbeck’s views as “puerile and uninformed, just like every other asinine thought that dribbles out of your mouth, like a trollop familiar with too many drunken sailors.” Rosie, instead, championed Cool Whip.

Hasselback jokingly replied, “Well, I cede this debate to you, Rosie, since you’re clearly the expert when it comes to fattening foodstuffs,” and the studio audience, which had tensed up, emitted as one a relieved, good-natured guffaw. But frictions escalated as conversation drifted, predictably enough, to politics, specifically the Oklahoma Rail Act of 1897, created by Congress to protect armadillos from getting squashed by freight trains.

O’Donnell groused that Congress willfully defanged the measure during the 1950s and ’60s, when interstate highways traversing the country were being built in record numbers, further endangering the beleaguered armadillo. Hasselbeck interjected that suggested regulations – such as retrofitting all automobiles with foam-rubber protection devices that would gently bump armadillos off the nation’s freeways – were “Draconian, particularly in light of the conservative, anti-regulatory mood informing Washington at the time.”

Behar, sensing the rising tension, attempted to deflect the conversation with a wan, stale joke about Sanjaya Malakar, but Rosie was having none of it. “Elisabeth, have you ever seen a living armadillo outside of a zoo?” she demanded.

Hasselbeck sputtered, “Well, uh, no, but I haven’t seen one in a zoo, either…” when O’Donnell pounced: “That’s my point, kewpie-doll! You sit there in those cheery Gap summer dresses, professing to be pro-life, but the fact that this country is nothing but a rolling death trap for hundreds of thousands of innocent armadillos means nothing to you! We've become nothing more than a nation of crushed shells lying by the side of the road!”

“I may not have seen an armadillo, but I’ve encountered more than my fair share of scaly, waddling subliterates!” Hasselbeck shot back, causing co-host Barbara Walters to swallow the upper plate of her dentures.

At that, O’Donnell sprang from her seat and began pummeling the pregnant Hasselbeck, inducing labor and, eventually, the premature birth of Elisabeth’s infant, whose limbs O’Donnell set upon, announcing amidst her angry gnawing, “The last thing this world needs is another pious puzzlewit justifying the clueless war crimes of a President whose reckless, bratty policies have been abandoned by 72 percent of the populace!” Behar tried to alleviate the confrontation by making a joke about Fox’s new reality show “On the Lot,” but since no one had seen it, her bon mot fell flat.

Hasselbeck then prayed to her Lord to smite O’Donnell, and, somewhat unexpectedly, He quickly complied. Walters, standing, shocked, over O’Donnell’s lifeless form, and realizing there was no overhead camera for her to turn to and shriek “Noooooooooo!” to, instead declared: “We’ll be right back. We hope.”

When the show resumed, the remaining cast cheerfully interviewed Ramzan Kadyrov, designer of infant novelty bibs.

Ah, McHomophobe, we hardly knew ye. Or we knew too much about ye. Anyway, ye had to go.

Yes, reports are leaking that Isaiah Washington will not be returning to “Grey’s Anatomy” in a regular capacity after referring to co-star T.R. Knight with a not very nice word and then doing it again after the Golden Globes, only by way of saying he hadn’t done it the first time. Apparently his gayhab didn’t take.

But one of Washington’s pals stuck up for him, declaring, “They won’t get rid of Isaiah because, with Kate [Walsh] leaving, they don’t want to ruin the magic.”

Magic? Ah, that’s what they’re calling it these days, sort of like “tripping over my Chihuahua” is a euphemism for, well, something.

Why should I be the only one to have all the fun/suffer all the pain? TV Week is offering trailers for most of the new fall series online, but be warned: If your DSL is as dodgy as mine, you probably can’t play along. I received the following message:

“The connection speed detected will cause a potentially unviewable experience.”

Well, that’d be the case anyway if you’re watching “Cavemen.”

Additional upfront update: Fox’s seven new scripted series arrived today. Which leaves only CBS and ABC holding out on us.

Fox’s “American-Idol”-only-for-filmmakers reality show “On the Lot” debuts tonight after the real “AI,” and though Fox didn’t provide a full screener, they did thoughtfully provide about the first five minutes of the first episode for scrutiny. Which, given those five minutes, is about all I would’ve been able to get through anyway.

It’s your standard-issue reality show set-up – host explaining what precisely Hollywood is to those unfamiliar with the concept, contestants talking about how being on the show’s a dream come true, explications of the notion of “competition,” more contestants talking about how – no, really, you just can’t imagine – being on this show is such a dream come true, a big awesome prize awaits someone but only if you’ve got what it takes (actually, it’s not even that big a prize – just a development deal, and most development deals result in absolutely nothing; at least with "Project Greenlight," the winner, so to speak, got to make an actual movie even if no one actually saw it), yada yada yada.

And it appears, from the sheer number of contestants, that viewers won’t soon be getting to see any significant amount of footage from the work that the contestants do. We will seem them engage in copious product-placement, however. So clearly, they’re not looking for any originality out of these aspiring movie directors.

- “On the Lot:” 9 tonight, Fox (Channel 11).

… Except that technically, on Monday’s season finale of “Heroes,” they didn’t stop the exploding man. They just changed the place where he exploded. So we still need to know exactly how to stop an exploding man, you know, for future reference.

Other questions/comments (obviously, if you TiVo’d the episode, you won’t want to read any further until you’ve actually seen it):

* I didn’t see the past couple of episodes, so can anyone tell me if they explained why the streets of New York were completely empty except for the occasional “Heroes” cast member? Because, usually, they’re, you know, not.

* For a while, it seemed, they had dialed back on the corny narration, but, boyoboy, they ladled it on tonight: “Why are we here? What is the soul? Why do we dream?” At least that, of course, was followed by a replay of Lindermann’s messy lobotomy. Answer: “The soul is what gets jazzed when watching a guy’s brain get sucked out of his skull.”

* Plotting seemed alternately sloppy – Sylar allows himself to get played, again, by Hiro?; Peter’s unexplained journey through the past in order to receive key plot points – and fairly clever in the way they managed to get so much of the cast in the same place for the final showdown (though how did Claire know where to turn up?).

* Re: Peter’s journey through the past: He’s told, “In the end, all that really matters is love.” Aw, c’mon, not quite: In the end, all that really matters on “Heroes” is an average of one grisly scene and one unforeseen plot twist per episode. Even Tina Turner has long suspected that love has nothing to do with it, and I doubt she’s ever seen the show.

* So there’s a little girl who knows where everyone else with secret abilities is on the planet. Of all the superpowers available out there, how much must it suck to get handed that essentially useless and largely self-endangering one?

* Nathan and Peter’s mom must’ve dealt in with the bad guys – they seemed awfully anxious to go blow themselves up. And so “Heroes” scratches Milo Ventimiglia? Kiss the teen girl demographic goodbye come next season.

* Claire was revealed to be Peter’s niece, and there were a few moments of almost-kinda frisson between them earlier in the season, and she couldn’t bring herself to shoot him, even if it meant saving the world, though clearly not for familial reasons. Discuss.

* Every series would be a hit if it featured one Ali Larter v. herself catfight per episode.

* You know, Sylar just doesn’t seem that clever a guy to roust his way through the “Heroes” lineup as easily as he did. That pronounced forehead of his suggests he could star on “Cavemen” sans makeup. Yet take a look at his performance tonight:

Round 1: Sylar v. Ando. No contest; a knockout prevented only by Sylar’s typically lunkheaded villainy w/r/t prolonging Ando’s torture.
Round 2: Sylar v. Hiro. Aborted mid-clash, due again to Sylar’s villainously vainglorious preening. Hiro and Ando escape.
Round 3: Sylar v. Parkman. No contest: Down goes Parkman! Down goes Parkman!
Round 4: Sylar v. Bennett (“Call me ‘Noah’”): No contest, though credit HRG with creating, apparently out of thin air, a sling for his bum arm. Maybe he has secret powers, after all: the ability to conjure over-the-counter medical supplies. (OK, so there’s one even lamer than that little girl’s.)
Round 5: Sylar v. Peter. Again, no contest: Milo is forced into a moment of extreme overacting, and Sylar even manages those extra few game-changing seconds of villainous gloating: “Turns out you’re the villain, Peter – I’m the hero.”
Round 6: Sylar v. Hiro II: The Quickening: At best, a draw. Sylar takes the shiv, but apparently escapes and transforms himself into a cockroach, while Hiro disappears until an afterthought of a coda of an epilogue finds him popping up in 17th-century Japan.

So there you have it: Unhinged doofus Sylar v. “Heroes”’ fighting elite, and Sylar wins in a TKO. Maybe in season two the “Heroes’ll” find a proper Professor X, a really smart guy to properly herd them when battling hyper-powered morons.

* OK, so we pretty much know Peter and Nathan won’t be back for season two, but the rest of the estimable body count was a cheat: D.L. seemed to have been offed in a previous episode, and he’s still hanging in there. Parkman took a chestful of his own gunfire, but they resolutely refused to write him off definitively. Sylar got poleaxed, and yet, during the episode-ending mumbo-jumbo, it was suggested he managed a messy getaway, too, although he seemed to have morphed himself into a cockroach. (Yet another pointless superpower!) (This ending recalled the last shot of “The Departed,” where the rat scuttled on the windowsill.) They even brought back the long-dead Simone, suggesting that on “Heroes,” there’s no such thing as too dead.

* OK, so here’s your next assignment: Next season, in addition to “Heroes,” NBC will fill the spaces in between new episodes with something called “Heroes: Origins,” which will offer stand-alone shows introducing potential new characters with different powers for whom viewers can vote into future episodes of the series. So let’s help them out, shall we, with suggestions for future heroes and their secret abilities.

I’m currently developing a handful, including a woman who can chew nervously at her cuticles while maintaining nails that look immaculately manicured, and an tremulous guy who, in times of moderate danger, can transform himself into a gosling so adorable no evildoer can render it harm.

Somehow, I suspect, you can do better, and, as they say at England’s The Guardian, “comment is free,” so offer us your worst, or best, or most middling. We invite it all.

* Oh, and re: HBO’s commercial for “John from Cincinnati” during the episode: Given all the “Heroes”’ abilities, being capable of hovering a couple of inches off the ground hardly seems all that big a deal.

Mediaweek is reporting today that advertisers like The CW’s new fall lineup, thanks to shows like the teen-angst epic “Gossip Girl.” Because it’s, as they said in “The Hudsucker Proxy,” “you know – for kids.”

Meanwhile, they’re not so bully on Fox shuffling its schedule in January, consigning “Bones” – which made some inroads this past season – to Friday, the network’s perennial Dead Zone. Advertisers aren’t so keen on NBC’s new remake of “Bionic Woman,” either, or ABC’s “Cavemen” (no! really?) or CBS’s “Viva Laughlin” (advertisers being longtime opponents of musical comedy, having lobbied Congress in the 1990s to pass the No-Singing,-No-Dancing-as-Entertainment Directive; the legislation died in committee).

“Bionic Woman” reprograms the ’70s series into a more sinister, paranoid animal. Here, Michelle Ryan stars as a bartender with a high IQ (if it’s so high, then why is she a bartender?) almost killed in an automobile accident – that was no accident at all. Her equally brilliant boyfriend, who survived the punishing wreck with just a couple of scratches, patches her together with militarized body parts (because, you know, our nation would be crippled by a sudden bartender shortage). Turns out he’s part of a shadowy government agency attempting to create high-tech soldiers. As with “The X-Files,” “Battlestar Galactica” (both shows contributed executive producers to this venture) and “Heroes,” unnerving questions of the “Who’s the good guy?/Who’s the bad guy?” variety carry the day.

“BW’s” pilot concludes with a hellacious catfight between our new bionic woman and the first bionic woman – no, not Lindsay Wagner; Katee Sackhoff (so that’s why “Battlestar Galactica” killed off Starbuck), who went nuts, went rogue and promises to be a burr in the backside of all involved. After the two women tussle, they seem well-satisfied with their little workout, a sequence that will no doubt invite all sorts of conjecture and stir prepubescent boys for reasons they cannot fathom.

The great thing about “Desperate Housewives” is that you can not watch it for a few episodes (or a season) and then tune in and you find you still really don’t care all that much.

On last night’s season’s finale, a couple of the DH’s actually became housewives again, Gabrielle discovered she had made yet another huge mistake, and Edie offed herself. (Of course, that’s what viewers were led to believe; no one actually saw the face belonging to the person whose feet were dangling in the final shot; when next season opens, we could just as likely discover it was someone none of the DH’s knew who lived across town.) It makes sense that Edie’d off herself because the writers never seemed to make much of a concerted effort to integrate her into the main storylines. On the other hand, it doesn’t make much sense that Edie’d off herself, since she was such an amoral, Type-A sort and those people, unfortunately, never kill themselves.

Does this mean Edie will take on the cloying voice-over narration chores next season?

Only 18.4 million viewers took in the season finale, a drop of nearly 25% from last year’s closer. If things get worse for the show, Edie’ll be the lucky one.

What is the value of a TV writer’s blood? It’s a question posed early and often in Jeffrey Stepakoff’s “Billion Dollar Kiss: The Kiss That Saved Dawson's Creek and Other Adventures in TV Writing” (Gotham House, $26), a book anyone serious about breaking into the TV business has probably already pored through (though it’s been out just a little more than a week), and a book anyone considering an assault on the industry would do well to read.

Your Mayor greatly enjoyed “Billion Dollar Kiss,” and not just because the author was my first interviewee ever to salute me as the Mayor of Television when I got him on the phone. Part memoir, part trenchant analysis of the TV industry and all utterly entertainingly readable, it may be the closest the Television industry has to “Adventures in the Screen Trade,” William Goldman’s immortal dissection of the film business. (Though Stepakoff has stepped away recently from the industry, entrenching his family in Atlanta, the networks would be well-served by his sane insights into their struggles.)

Stepakoff worked on a lot of shows, such as (the ones his author bio on the book flap mentions) “The Wonder Years” and “Dawson’s Creek” and (many not mentioned on the book flap, like) “Simon & Simon,” “Major Dad” and “Sisters.” He made a lot of money, and was somewhat astonished that he was doing so. Stepakoff never seems to develop the world-weary cynicism most of his colleagues fall into, though he scarcely remains the wide-eyed innocent who began his career back in the late ’80s. (In the book, he does something that seems a bit of an industry no-no: He actually explains, step-by-step, how much TV writers make – for the first-run of a series’ episode, for its repeat and on and on if it goes into syndication. And it’s impressive money.)

The author takes readers into writers rooms, where desperate scribes throw anything at the wall, hoping something will stick (though I imagine his account is just a smidgen sanitized). He examines the shameful disparity in minority writers in TV, but, rather than ascribing the situation to institutionalized racism, he blames in on a more subtle (and more myopic) issue: Showrunners simply prefer to hire people they’re friends with, people they’re comfortable hanging out with, and many of them just don’t have that many minority friends. (Though, if you think about it, how likely is it that a showrunner is friendly with only very talented writers?)

And he examines the death of the sitcom, which began, he notes, around the time the FCC allowed the broadcast networks ownership of the shows they aired. Before that, he points out, boutique TV studios such as MTM churned out quality programming because they could work relatively independent of network meddling; afterwards, network executives fretted over every detail, fairly emasculating the actual creators of the shows.

The title refers to the chaos and tantrums that exemplified life on “Dawson’s Creek” in seasons two and three, before its course was righted by Greg Berlanti (who later created “Everwood,” similarly rescued “Brothers & Sisters” from its own chaos and will have “Big Shots” on ABC in the fall) with a simple edict: The show was about a love triangle between Dawson, Pacey and Joey.

Stepakoff stepped into the industry at the best possible time, by his reckoning, as he also essays the crazy period in which even fairly green TV writers found networks and studios throwing insane amounts of money at them for mere development deals.

Some might find the more personal details in the book a little indulgent, but they’re there to give the reader a fuller view of a writer’s life, not just on the lot, but how personal affairs affect professional considerations (which, in the end, provides even fuller insight into how the industry works). Stepakoff name-drops some industry icons – Steven Bochco, John Wells, etc. – but the only time the book really left me feeling a bit cheated was his seemingly truncated account of his brief but memorable collaboration with David Milch, the bomb-throwing genius behind “NYPD Blue,” “Deadwood” and the upcoming “John From Cincinnati.”

I just know Stepakoff has some great Milch stories and that he’s holding back on us. Looks like I’ll have to contrive to interview him again.

Only 6 milion rubes tuned into ABC's "National Bingo Night" on Friday.

The Republic is safe.

How quickly a network rushes the pilots of its new series to critics can be a measure of its enthusiasm for its upcoming fall slate. Or, at least, its wish to simply appear as though it’s very enthusiastic about its fall slate. (In the past, The WB and Fox sent out screeners of “Everwood” and “Prison Break,” respectively, before they announced their fall lineups.)

By that measure, our winners are NBC and The CW, both of which had screeners of its fall pilots in my hands within 24 hours after their upfront presentations. Still waiting for ABC, Fox and CBS, but then, those networks are successful these days and can afford to play hard to get.

So, yes: I have copies of both “Bionic Woman” and “Gossip Girl,” of both “Life” and “Life is Wild,” of “Reaper” and “Journeyman.” They’re all clearly marked: NOT FOR REVIEW. And, of course, I’ll be obeying that edict. Check back soon as Your Mayor previews (different animal entirely) what the networks hope you’ll be finding entertaining four short months from now.

In the television-justice system, the people are represented by two separate but equally important groups: The producers who commit aesthetic crimes, and the TV critics who warn people to stay away from such offenders. These are their stories.

Tonight’s episode of “Law & Order” could’ve been its last on NBC – there was talk of moving the series over to TNT, talk squelched when the network announced on Monday that the show, now wrapping up its 17th season, would return midseason, after football. So it’s no longer a swan song, but it concludes with a hint at cast changes to come.

Probably the most interesting thing about tonight’s episode, however, is Jeffrey Tambor’s guest turn as a simpering, melodramatically empathetic and camera-loving judge. “Law & Order” had already offered up its take on Anna Nicole Smith’s death; here’s a thinly veiled take on that clown Judge Larry, who presided over the custody battle of her infant daughter. (Larry’s probably miffed he wasn’t offered the part.)

Of course, the case Judge Larry’s doppelganger presides over is nothing so banal as a custody hearing. It’s your standard-issue splashy murder trial, involving a former Senator (Harry Hamlin) with rage issues and a wildly dysfunctional family with everyone beating on everyone else, resulting in two newly mangled corpses. Violence, sexual deviance, rampant substance abuse and an utter lack of even nominal control over basic social instincts – not your typical dynastic family (well, perhaps you’re intended to detect faint echoes of the Kennedys), more one you’d find in a trailer park somewhere.

I’ll spare you the details, but note that the episode features the words “vagina” and “bitch,” a coroner who, noting a wooden spoon found in an unlikely orifice of a murder victim, desultorily adds, “That reminds me, I have to bake a cake,” and Hamlin blurting out when a melee in his home overturns a shelf of books, “Hey, hey, hey! Those are my first editions!”

Anyway, the show could’ve devolved – or is it elevated? – into inspired humor had Tambor been allowed to run with his role as the judge and transformed him into a truly blithering boob. But you know “Law & Order” – it’s earnest to a fault, and doesn’t like to be laughed at. Though Fred Thompson, potential Presidential aspirant, does manage a wry, self-reflexive moment at the end of the episode.

Anyone want to bet that Thompson won’t run for President because he knows he’ll get sick of journalists who think they’re clever yakking about his “Law & Order” platform?

- “Law & Order:” 10 tonight, NBC (Channel 4).

Just a reminder: “National Bingo Night” debuts tonight. ABC’s boasting that 3 million Bingo cards have been downloaded. 3 million viewers would be a disaster during sweeps. And if people will watch and not play along, then our country is lonelier and more pathetic than one’s heart can bear to imagine.

Here’re some of the rave reviews the show is earning:

“A high-concept attempt to low-ball the viewer!” – New York Times

“It’s official: Network TV has run out of ideas!” – Boston Herald

“No amount of low lighting and dramatic music can hide the fact that in the end, what we've just seen is still a game of bingo!” – New York Daily News

“It will probably flunk out after its brief run!” – Louisville Courier-Journal

“Wow, this is bad television!” – Winston-Salem Journal

“If viewers win, they too will get prizes or cash. In other words, they may actually get paid for watching this show. Well, in all honesty, I can't imagine any other reason for watching it!” – Toledo Blade

“If this is the best ABC can offer during May sweeps, an important period for ad dollars, it makes you wonder what shows the network turned down. “Let’s Watch Lettuce Grow”?” – Boston Herald again

Sure, it’s no “According to Jim,” but it’s pretty safe to say that no series will duplicate a fraction of the achievements of “The Simpsons,” which will air its 400th episode Sunday.

My advice: Skip the first five, six, maybe seven minutes (which, besides not being all that funny, has pretty much next to nothing to with the main thrust of the episode), and you may think it’s one of the show’s best.

Entitled “You Kent Always Say What You Want,” it focuses on newsman Kent Brockman’s sorry predicament when Homer knocks a mug of hot coffee in his lap on-air and Kent says something that this blog can only approximate with symbols like these: #%$*.

Lisa predicts Kent’s fate by noting, “There are a lot of religious watchdog groups out there keeping the world safe from the horror of free expression.” Sure enough, Ned Flanders, self-proclaimed “God’s little bellyacher,” finds himself “imploring people I never met to pressure a government with better things to do to punish people who meant no harm for doing something no one ever saw.”

That would seem to be enough trenchant social commentary for a week’s worth of broadcast-network television right there, but then, Kent explains the oft-noted disparity between the conservative bent of the Fox News Channel and the anarchic ways of the Fox network itself: “Fox deliberately runs shows that will earn them huge fines which are then funneled through the FCC to the Republican party.” (Over the years, “The Simpsons” has been at least as astute a critic of its corporate owners as any TV critic.)

Ladies and gentlemen, it has been said that the ugliest truths can only be revealed via the goofiest of comedy. Well, that’s been said, but it hasn’t really been proven. Actually, it may not have even been said. Nonetheless, let it be said here that not only has “The Simpsons” been hilariously inspired on and off for two decades now, but it has also been the sole source of revelation of our nation’s ugliest truths. Particularly those involving just how bad Bart can be when parental involvement is sadly lacking. Yes, without “The Simpsons,” our social ills could reach epidemic status.

I just realized I’ve done two fairly positive entries in a row about a single network. I’ll try to avoid such sentimental simpering in the future.

- "The Simpsons"' 400th episode: 8:30 p.m. Sunday.

Boy, did Fox learn its lesson. After last year’s tediously bloated two-and-a-half-hour leviathan of an upfront presentation, network Entertainment president Peter Liguori introduced 10 new shows, issued a few random announcements (“House” will air after the Super Bowl next February) and paraded his sundry casts before advertisers and media folks assembled in New York in one brisk hour.

And it must be said: Pretty much every single new scripted show looks, at the very least, viable, and most much better than that. So, let’s just sift through them, shall we?

Dramas
“K-Ville:” Anthony Anderson and Cole Hauser play cops struggling with rising crime rates in post-Katrina New Orleans. The NOLA twist makes this intriguing.

“New Amsterdam:” An immortal New York homicide cop. Sounds goofy, yes, but the cut-down of the pilot made it look like it worked.

Midseason dramas
“Canterbury’s Law:” Juliana Margulies plays kind of a female “Shark.” She looks to do it well. “Rescue Me’s” Denis Leary is one of the executive producers.

“The Sarah Connor Chronicles:” A TV “Terminator” spin-off with lots of kick-@ss action.

Comedies
“Back To You:” Kelsey Grammer and Patricia Heaton star as fractious Pittsburgh TV-news anchors. The star power alone should engage viewers, at least initially.

“The Return of Jezebel James” (midseason): The new show from “Gilmore Girls”’ Amy Sherman-Paladino seems to feature a (gasp) laugh track, which seems guaranteed to put a drag on her trademark machine-gun-fire banter (though it could’ve been inserted for upfront purposes only). Parker Posey stars as a high-powered New York editor incapable of having children; she recruits her slovenly sister (“Six Feet Under’s” Lauren Ambrose) to serve as a surrogate mom. (Oddly enough, a husband and/or boyfriend didn’t seem to be in Parker’s mix, so maybe that’s her problem – she might want to look into that before getting her sister knocked up.)

“The Rules for Starting Over” (midseason): Four newly single friends must relearn their dating skills in this broad comedy from the Farrelly Brothers, whose comedic sensibility would seem to be, at its best, shall we say inappropriate for network TV, even Fox. It seemed a little watered-down by their standards but tried to compensate with manic antics. Rashida Jones is one of the friends, which (SPOILER ALERT!) would seem to give us a hint as to what’ll happen in tonight’s “Office” season finale. (I threw that spoiler alert up waaay too late, didn’t I? Ah, you’re gonna watch anyway.)

Reality shows

“Kitchen Nightmares:” Sociopathic, bullying restaurateur Gordon Ramsay tries to turn around struggling eateries, mainly by shivving the chefs.

“The Search for the Next Great American Band:” Well, the title pretty much says it all, though even Liguori allowed that it’s too long-winded. What about just “Battle of the Bands?” From the “American Idol” folks.

“Nashville:” Aspiring country singers seek stardom in a gauzy, soapy show. It’s from the “Laguna Beach” folks, so that explains the manner of presentation.

Fox’s fall 2007 schedule (as always, * indicates new show; ** indicates new timeslot):

Sunday
7 p.m. Football overrun
8 p.m. “The Simpsons”
8:30 p.m. “King of the Hill” **
9 p.m. “Family Guy”
9:30 p.m. “American Dad”

Monday
8 p.m. “Prison Break”
9 p.m. “K-Ville” *

Tuesday
8 p.m. “New Amsterdam” *
9 p.m. “House”

Wednesday
8 p.m. “Back To You” *
8:30 p.m. “’Til Death” **
9 p.m. “Bones”

Thursday
8 p.m. “Are You Smarter than a Fifth Grader?”
9 p.m. “Kitchen Nightmares” *

Friday
8 p.m. “The Search for the Next Great American Band” *
9 p.m. “Nashville” *
(both are working titles)

Saturday
8 p.m. “Cops”
9 p.m. “America’s Most Wanted”

Fox’s 2008 schedule:

Sunday
7 p.m. “King of the Hill” **
7:30 p.m. “American Dad” **
8 p.m. “The Simpsons”
8:30 p.m. “Family Guy” **
9 p.m. “The Sarah Connor Chronicles” *

Monday
8 p.m. “K-Ville” *, **/“Prison Break”
9 p.m. “24”

Tuesday
8 p.m. “American Idol”
9 p.m. “House”

Wednesday
8 p.m. “Back To You” *
8:30 p.m. “The Return of Jezebel James” *
9 p.m. “American Idol”
9:30 p.m. “’Til Death” **

Thursday
8 p.m. “Fifth Grader”
9 p.m. “Canterbury’s Law” *

Friday
8 p.m. “Bones” **
9 p.m. “New Amsterdam” *, **

Saturday
8 p.m. “Cops”
9 p.m. “America’s Most Wanted”

Thoughtfully, The CW invited Your Mayor to watch its upfront presentation online this morning, rather than go to the bother of arranging a satellite feed for local journalists, sparing the network the expense of plying me with a glass of orange juice and a bagel, and sparing me the ordeal of sitting through The CW’s upfront presentation (given my shoddy DSL service, all I did was spare myself 90 minutes of glitches, freeze frames and system failures).

Given The CW’s rather spectacular collapse in its inaugural season, major adjustments had to be made. Noise had to be made. Big, splashy series had to be made. Attention had to be paid. Attention had to be justified.

Eh, not so much.

The CW failed to fare well this season because its schedule was mainly a patchwork quilt of old WB and UPN shows, with no new breakout hits to distinguish it. The network seems to have learned its lesson, a bit, but still doesn’t seem to realize that in order to call attention to itself over the hundreds of cable networks out there, it needs a big, defining series and can’t just pretend to be a network doing business as usual.

Despite dumping five scripted series and moving another to midseason, The CW rebounded with a mere four new scripted series. The rest of the schedule will be given over to inexpensive reality programs and magazine-style shows, including one that essentially will be telling viewers their time would be better spent online. And the difference between The CW and MyNetwork is … ?

The CW did schedule one ambitious series – “Life is Wild,” based on “Wild at Heart,” which appeared recently on BBC America and shot in South Africa. It’s about a dysfunctional blended family that uproots itself and heads to South Africa, where it renovates a decrepit lodge on a game reserve. The British version was a little hokey, but was heartfelt. This could be The CW’s signature show, except for the fact that it’s utterly unlike everything else on the network and it’s on Sunday, where the network got absolutely buried this past season.

“Gossip Girl” will probably do well for the network – it’s based on a popular series of young-adult novels and concerns wealthy, pampered teens. Other new scripted shows are “Reaper,” about Satan’s bounty hunter tracking down – “with the goofball help of his friends and fellow slackers” – souls who have escaped from hell, and “Aliens in America,” a fish-out-of-water sitcom about a foreign-exchange student who’s a Pakistani Muslim. It’d be interesting, given global events of late, to see how that latter show will be received here, but as it’s slotted amidst a bunch of fairly low-rated programs, it’s not likely to garner the attention it’d receive on virtually any other network.

On Sunday, The CW will air a couple of magazine-style shows that’ll serve as placeholders until the network goes under: “CW Now,” essentially “Entertainment Tonight” for even less-discerning viewers (after all, they’re watching The CW Sunday at 7 p.m.) and “Online Nation,” which will show viewers what they could be watching if they snapped off their TV.

When any or all of those shows fail, The CW has a couple of midseason reality shows (along with the returning, low-rated “One Tree Hill”): “Crowned: The Mother of All Pageants,” a mother-daughter beauty pageant (gee, do you think they’ll cast it with petty, snarky contestants?), and “Farmer Wants a Wife,” a rural version of “The Bachelor” in which 10 women “looking for an escape from the hustle and bustle of the city and wondering if a country man with country values might offer a more attractive lifestyle” vie for the hand and heart of a “a charming, hard-working farmer who is happy with his life but lacking romance and wondering if he might find happiness with a woman from the city.” I’m curious about this exotic “the city” they’re talking about.

The CW’s 2007-08 season (* indicates new show; ** indicates new time slot):

Monday
8 p.m. Past-its-prime sitcom very few people watch
8:30 p.m. New sitcom few’ll watch *
9 p.m. See 8 p.m.
9:30 p.m. See 9 p.m.

Tuesday
8 p.m. Low-budget reality show **
9 p.m. Coming soon: Low-budget reality show *

Wednesday
8 p.m. Tyra Banks frightens skinny young women
9 p.m. Spoiled young rich girls love their Internets *

Thursday
8 p.m. Shouldn’t he be Superman by now?
9 p.m. Oooh - scary!

Friday
8 p.m. Men in tight shorts touch each other

Sunday
7 p.m. Uncool people tell young people what’s cool *
7:30 p.m. Just go online and don’t bother with this *
8 p.m. An ambitious show on The CW? *
9 p.m. Oh, that’s more like it – a repeat

Oh, sorry, that was a typo – here’s the real schedule:

Monday
8 p.m. “Everybody Hates Chris”
8:30 p.m. “Aliens in America” *
9 p.m. “Girlfriends”
9:30 p.m. “The Game”

Tuesday
8 p.m. “Beauty and the Geek” **
9 p.m. “Reaper” *

Wednesday
8 p.m. “America’s Next Top Model”
9 p.m. “Gossip Girl” *

Thursday
8 p.m. “Smallville”
9 p.m. “Supernatural”

Friday
8 p.m. “Smackdown!”

Sunday
7 p.m. “CW Now” *
7:30 p.m. “Online Nation” *
8 p.m. “Life is Wild” *
9 p.m. “America’s Next Top Model” repeat

Near the beginning of CBS’s upfront, Les Moonves introduced a snippet of this infamous YouTube montage of David Caruso punchlines from the opening of “CSI: Miami” episodes, in which the thespian, surveying a crime scene, either whips off or puts on his sunglasses (mainly, he puts them on, consistency being the hobgoblin of, well, you know) and then delivers a wan quip, generally in the same rhythm and always with a pregnant pause mid-line (e.g., “So we have a victim who started the weekend big man on campus and ended it … (protracted pause, for emphasis, so his colleagues can drink in his verbal virtuosity) dead on arrival”).

It was an odd choice, for a couple of reasons: 1) Viacom (which owns CBS) has sued YouTube and ordered it to remove all clips of its programming from the site, and 2) the mash-up isn’t exactly, um, complimentary of either the show’s hackneyed scripting or, particularly, Caruso’s lazily repetitive acting choices.

Ah, but there was a point to all this: The network actually played off Caruso’s ham-fistedness, featuring fresh clips of the actor introducing each night of the new schedule with a hackneyed Caruso-ism retooled to describe the new lineup: (paraphrasing) “Cordon off CBS’s Friday night, because … (campy pause as he dons his sunglasses) it’s a killer.”

Nice to know Caruso has a sense of humor about himself, but it’s also a little distressing to realize that we have someone already lined up to assume the mantle of William Shatner, another actor given to quixotic phrasing in his line readings who remade his career late in life laughing along with the rest of us at his earlier pretensions. (Adam West, another actor whose signature role was defined by bizarre pauses in the midst of dialogue, also managed this, albeit to a lesser extent.)

So: When “CSI: Miami” ends its run, what’s Caruso’s next career move? A spoken-word album covering Johnny Cash’s murder ballads? Playing the anti-Christ in an upcoming “Left Behind” movie series? Recording the large-print-edition versions of audio books? Commercials for the Sunglasses Hut?

Any other suggestions? Anybody?

Boy, getting cancelled from ABC makes people awfully bitter. First, George Lopez kvetched about ABC dumping his low-rated sitcom, accusing the network that has aired his show for the past five seasons of suddenly contracting a case of racism.

"TV just became really, really white again," whined Lopez, apparently unaware that ABC airs “Ugly Betty” and CBS has just scheduled “Cane,” about a family of Cuban-Americans. “So a Chicano can't be on TV, but a caveman can?”

Now, Jim Belushi – star of this blog’s favorite show, “According to Jim” – is dialing up the crank-o-meter. Speaking to an online entertainment magazine – or, perhaps, just thinking it in his head (or, who knows, perhaps I just imagined it) – Belushi also condemned ABC for mistreating a much-maligned segment of society.

“There’s an obvious vendetta out there against fat, dumb white guys,” Belushi opined. “First, ‘The Sopranos’ ends its run, then ‘The King of Queens’ is cancelled, and now my show? Where can fat, dumb white guys turn in the vast television landscape to see themselves depicted now?”

“According to Jim” was just beginning to scratch the surface in terms of exploring its characters’ psyches, the funnyman lamented. “For example, we never found out what might happen if Jim were to slip in the shower and conk his head on the faucet – pure comic gold, let me tell you,” Belushi said. “Wait – did we do that? I can’t remember. Well, anyway, if I can’t remember, then the audience probably can’t, either, so it’d be OK to revisit that fertile funny territory.”

Belushi described his series as “aspirational.” “In real life, no way could fat, dumb white guys have smokin’-hot wives like Courtney Thorne-Smith – heck, they couldn’t even manage anything close to Leah Rimini,” he proclaimed. “My show helped them to live the dream, to get just a tantalizing taste of what it would be like to fold one’s arms around such pulchritude. How in heaven’s name will fat, dumb white guys be able to slog through the day-to-day exigencies of their miserable lives, now that my show won’t be around to give them that faint yet palpable sliver of hope that they, too, might be able to score a slender stunner without engaging in some illicit financial transaction?”

Belushi concluded, “Without fat, dumb white guys populating the television landscape, viewers will be deprived of the laughs they so richly desire and deserve. Society could crumble. Worse, my bank account will no longer expand like my midsection in Sans-a-belt slacks.”

Not much to say about CBS’s upfront today: The network’s been flush for a number of seasons, and is exploiting its success to get a little show-offy with its new series next season. This could take CBS to another level or it could backfire and result in yet more crime procedurals for the 2008-09 season.

With the exception of “Moonlight,” its vampire-as-P.I.-looking-for-love drama that echoes “Angel,” and its sitcom “The Big Bang Theory,” CBS’s new shows offer worlds you tend not to see on broadcast networks. Its splashiest offering is “Viva Laughlin,” an Americanization of BBC America’s wildly entertaining “Viva Blackpool.” It’s a cheeky musical/dramedy about Ripley Holden, a charismatic if low-rent hustler hoping his casino will transform Laughlin, Nevada into yet another gambling mecca, but has all sorts of obstacles in his way, not the least of which is a corpse in his building. Characters break into song – they sing over/under (depending on how good their voices are) pop songs that comment wryly on the action. Hugh Jackman, one of the show’s executive producers, will have a recurring role that’ll hopefully be a bit bigger than Mick Jagger’s was on “The Knights of Prosperity.”

The trick, of course, will be to sustain the concept and the quality for an entire season and more – expect the quantity of intricately choreographed numbers to trail off dramatically after the first few episodes. “Viva Blackpool” featured a self-contained storyline and ran for six episodes (with a telefilm sequel). CBS has no such luxury – its anti-hero will be in a state of perpetual aspiration. And Lloyd Owen has huge shoes to fill – David Morrissey was a constant delight as Ripley in the British version. Still, it’ll be a fascinating experiment.

CBS also added “Cane,” featuring Jimmy Smits presiding over a sprawling ensemble cast playing a Cuban-American family with a business empire involving rum, sugar and, of course, crime. The cut-down shown at the upfront suggested the atmosphere is more accomplished than the actual storyline. If its midseason series, “Swingtown,” can manage to be just half as good as its seeming inspiration, the Ang Lee film “The Ice Storm,” about decadent ’70s suburbia, it’ll be a keeper.

And then, CBS has this kind of bizarre reality show, “Kid Nation,” in which a group of 40 kids ages 8-15 resurrect a New Mexico ghost town in 40 days and create their own, adult-free (well, except for the host and the cameramen) society. It’s sort of like “Lord of the Flies,” except, I’m guessing, omitting the brutality and the cannibalism: As successful as they’ve been, I doubt CBS would be that outré.

CBS’s 2007–2008 schedule (* indicates new series; ** indicates new timeslot):

Monday
8 p.m. “How I Met Your Mother”
8:30 p.m. “The Big Bang” *
9 p.m. “Two and a Half Men”
9:30 p.m. “Rules of Engagement”
10 p.m. “CSI: Miami”

Tuesday
8 p.m. “NCIS”
9 p.m. “The Unit”
10 p.m. “Cane” *

Wednesday
8 p.m. “Kid Nation” *
9 p.m. “Criminal Minds”
10 p.m. “CSI: New York”

Thursday
8 p.m. “Survivor: China”
9 p.m. “CSI: Crime Scene Investigation”
10 p.m. “Without a Trace” **

Friday
8 p.m. “Ghost Whisperer”
9 p.m. “Moonlight” *
10 p.m. “Numb3rs”

Saturday
8-10 p.m. Repeats
10 p.m. “48 Hours: Mystery”

Sunday
7 p.m. “60 Minutes”
8 p.m. “Viva Laughlin” *
9 p.m. “Cold Case”
10 p.m. “Shark” **

Your Mayor received this in his Email in-box yesterday:

“I heard "According to Jim" was cancelled.
“Congratulations.”

Yes, it is a joyous day for the People of Television, made moreso by a fairly promising upfront presentation from ABC, who altruistically (if somewhat belatedly) ceded to the will of the people and removed the blight that is Belushi from our nation’s airwaves.

On the other hand, ABC has turned around and programmed an atrocity entitled “National Bingo Night,” which the network’s own Jimmy Kimmel noted is “for people put off by the complexity of ‘Deal or No Deal,’” so while we have come so far, we have oh so far to go.

Wisely, ABC has opted to exploit its hold on female viewers, established with shows like “Grey’s Anatomy,” “Ugly Betty,” “Desperate Housewives” and “Brothers & Sisters,” by scheduling a slew of female-friendly shows throughout its 2007-08 season. Even its new dramedy about contemporary men, “Big Shots,” looks to play like “Desperate Husbands” more than anything else (hence its appearance on the schedule after “Grey’s”).

Most of the scripted series unveiled Tuesday in New York looked a) promising, b) capable of drawing an audience or c) both. These include “Big Shots” (good cast), “Dirty Sexy Money” (better cast, but looks more uneven – Peter Krause stars as an attorney hired by patriarchal Donald Sutherland to rein in his pampered and unruly family dynasty) and the genuinely quixotic-looking “Pushing Daisies” (a black comedy about a guy who uses his powers to raise the dead to solve murders, but complications set in when he resurrects his childhood sweetheart – seems if he touches those who brings back a second time, they instantly die (yes, it sounds kinda dumb, but it captured the right tone, like a more twisted “Ugly Betty”)). The “Grey’s Anatomy” spin-off “Private Practice” got some heat for making women look particularly blithering (um, have those complaining taken a look at “Grey’s” lately?), but having already heard the complaints, should be able to right its course by the time it debuts. The comedies “Sam I Am” (about a woman who awakens from a coma with amnesia only to discover an unsavory past perhaps best left forgotten) and “Miss/Guided” (in which a woman returns to her former high school as a guidance counselor) looked strong based on funny performances by the leads, Christina Applegate and Judy Greer, respectively – finally, women are allowed to be funny in half-hour sitcoms again.

The rest: “Women’s Murder Club,” based on the James Patterson beach reads about four intrepid crime-solving friends, could find an audience (except for the fact that it’s on Friday nights) but looked a little foursquare. “Cashmere Mafia” is a direct crib of NBC’s “Lipstick Jungle” (and, in fact, has reportedly caused a rift between “Jungle’s” creator Candace Bushnell and “Mafia’s” Darren Starr, who once upon a time worked upon “Sex and the City”) and doesn’t really seem to have a persuasive cast but could still appeal to those who persist in lamenting “Sex’s” departure. “Eli Stone” feels like the only real dud – it concerns a high-powered attorney who embarks upon a spiritual journey (look, I’m willing to buy polar bears on tropical islands and guys who can bend the time-space continuum, but this show really belongs on the Sci Fi Channel).

As for ABC’s other comedies: “Carpoolers,” despite featuring the very funny Fred Goss, doesn’t seem to boast much to distinguish it from all the other sitcoms about oafish buddies (except for, maybe, lots more shots of guys nattering away to one another in cars, and I’m not certain that’s a big selling point.

And then there’s “Cavemen.”

Yes, the sitcom based on the auto-insurance commercials. Though most pundits rather quickly dismissed the idea of the show (heck, so did I), wondering just how much material can be dredged from something that’s moderately amusing in 30-second bites, I must sheepishly confess I suspected that its concept might be capable of being expanded, that it might prove, as they say, so crazy it just might work.

Until, that is, I saw the cut-down of the pilot at the upfront. All I’ll say is this: If you have cavemen breakdancing in the pilot (and we all know how well breakdancing served Jamie Kennedy’s movie career, and if you don’t get that reference, there’s a clue as to how well breakdancing served Jamie Kennedy’s movie career), you pretty much have nowhere to go.

In general, though, ABC’s upfront seemed to go pretty smoothly – there was little extraneous material; the networks’ executives got out of the way and let the new shows speak for themselves –until, that is, some genius thought it would be a good idea to expand the presentation an additional 20 minutes by touting its idiot show “National Bingo Night” with a protracted Bingo game that clearly did not go down well with those assembled. As the show’s host Ed Sanders floundered in his efforts to get the hundreds of advertising executives to give a rat’s @ss about a game of Bingo, said executives no doubt were wondering when he’d shut his yap so they could belly up to the open bar.

ABC’s 2007-08 schedule (* indicates new show)

Monday
“Dancing with the Stars”
“Sam I Am” (new comedy series) *
“The Bachelor”

TUESDAY:
8:00 p.m. “Cavemen” *
8:30 p.m. “Carpoolers” *
9:00 p.m. “Dancing with the Stars the Results Show”
10:00 p.m. “Boston Legal”

WEDNESDAY:
8:00 p.m. “Pushing Daisies” *
9:00 p.m. “Private Practice” *
10:00 p.m. “Dirty Sexy Money” *

THURSDAY:
8:00 p.m. “Ugly Betty”
9:00 p.m. “Grey’s Anatomy”
10:00 p.m. “Big Shots” *

FRIDAY:
8:00 p.m. “Men In Trees”
9:00 p.m. “Women’s Murder Club” *
10:00 p.m. “20/20”

SATURDAY:
8:00 p.m. “Saturday Night College Football”

SUNDAY:
7:00 p.m. “America’s Funniest Home Videos”
8:00 p.m. “Extreme Makeover: Home Edition”
9:00 p.m. “Desperate Housewives”
10:00 p.m. “Brothers & Sisters”

Upfront week – one that at least three networks can’t really be looking forward to (since, as this link suggests, they’ll likely have to lower their ad rates to be competitive), began Monday with NBC, which built upon its success this past season with “Heroes” by introducing, uh, well, a bunch more shows kinda like it.

Joining the NBC lineup is a remake of the ’70s show “The Bionic Woman” (which itself was a spinoff of “The Six-Million-Dollar Man”); “Journeyman,” about a guy who can travel back in time and prevent people from making grievous mistakes (oddly enough, they’ve already contacted me about serving as the Episode Two storyline); and “Chuck,” about a computer geek whose brain is filled with a government databank (40 percent of his brain is [REDACTED], and 45 percent of it is filled with tedious studies, Karl Rove’s missing Emails and legalese; hopefully, the series will focus on the remaining 15 percent).

In other words: NBC 2007-08 looks suspiciously like ABC in the ’70s.

If the other networks go super-hero-heavy, then NBC’s screwed, but outside of Fox, it’s quite likely they won’t. NBC also added “Life,” about a cop who rejoins his colleagues after being wrongly imprisoned (some of its creative team has already been replaced), and, at midseason, “Lipstick Jungle,” a dramedy from “Sex and the City” creator Candace Bushnell about powerful New York businesswomen (by placing it Sundays at 10 p.m., the network is clearly hoping for viewers to switch over from “Desperate Housewives”), and the sitcom “The IT Crowd,” a workplace comedy about, like “Chuck,” nerdy techies. A couple of “American Idol” knockoffs, “The Singing Bee” and “World Moves” (from “AI” judge Randy Jackson), will figure into the mix.

That synergy thing will rear its head at NBC with “Heroes: Origins,” which will allow viewers to vote for a character to join the cast of its hit of this past season, and “minisodes” allowing Jerry Seinfeld to essentially advertise his upcoming animated flick “Bee Movie” (NBC has exclusive broadcast and cable rights to the film once its buzz dies down).

Contrary to previous rumors, “Law & Order” won’t be going away, but it will be resting until after the football season; “Law & Order: Criminal Intent,” however, will be setting up at NBC-Universal’s cable network USA. “Friday Night Lights,” the admired but little-watched drama about small-town high-school football – scratch that; now, it’ll just be about small-town high-school life – which NBC had heretofore insisted wouldn’t work on Friday nights, will nonetheless head there in September. And despite much speculation, “Scrubs” will return, making it perhaps the network’s longest-running sitcom that was never actually a hit.

Look, what was NBC going to do, anyway? Despite some initial promise, the network has barely limped across the finish line this season, earning some of its lowest ratings in its history in recent weeks. It’s admirable that the network would rather fail with quality shows than with junk (though, of course, the jury’s out on the new shows). But this clearly will be another season in transition for the network that absolutely dominated the ’90s but is still finding its way in the 21st century.

Bid unceremonious adieus to “Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip” “Crossing Jordan,” “The Black Donnellys,” “Raines,” and the non-scripted shows “Identity,” “The Real Wedding Crashers,” “Grease: You’re the One That I Want” and, quite likely, “The Apprentice.”

NBC 2007-08 (new shows in CAPS; new times get a sweet little *)

Monday
8:00 p.m. Deal or No Deal
9:00 p.m. Heroes
10:00 p.m. JOURNEYMAN

Tuesday
8:00 p.m. The Biggest Loser *
9:00 p.m. CHUCK
10:00 p.m. Law & Order: SVU

Wednesday
8:00 p.m. Deal or No Deal
9:00 p.m. THE BIONIC WOMAN
10:00 p.m. LIFE

Thursday
8:00 p.m. My Name Is Earl
8:30 p.m. 30 Rock *
9:00 p.m. The Office *
9:30 p.m. Scrubs
10:00 p.m. ER

Friday
8:00 p.m. 1 vs. 100 / THE SINGING BEE
9:00 p.m. Las Vegas
10:00 p.m. Friday Night Lights *

Saturday
8:00 p.m. Dateline
9:00-11 p.m. Repeats

Sunday
7:00 p.m. Football Night in America
8:00 p.m. Sunday Night Football

Sunday (after football)
7:00 p.m. Dateline
8:00 p.m. Law & Order *
9:00 p.m. Medium *
10:00 p.m. LIPSTICK JUNGLE

Here’re some DVD-style outtakes and amplifications to Sunday’s interview with Jonathan Lethem, the award-winning author of “The Fortress of Solitude” and “Motherless Brooklyn,” whose latest novel is “You Don’t Love Me Yet,” a romantic comedy about a struggling Silver Lake band. Here, Lethem discusses everything from how damn hard it is to come up with a good band name these days to why he’s reticent to include cell phones in his books.

On setting the novel in Silver Lake:
“I was specifically wanting, after writing about Brooklyn for 10 years, to disrupt that operation and instead write about a place I was curious about, baffled by, attracted to, and Silverlake, Echo Park, I’m very responsive to it when I’m there. Part of that is that it’s got that tenuous, negotiated gentrifying thing going on. There’s this negotiation going on as to what kind of city it is.

“That is not to say – and I hasten to say – this book is not incisive about Los Angeles. It’s an escape from that kind of rootedness for me as a writer. I wanted to write without my credential, and instead use my own fantasies and projections and use the place as a kind of setting for this enchantment for the story. So the tiny bits of research or texture I threw in there are almost a game, almost a diversion. The tone of the book that I aimed at was a youthful fantasia – it’s sort of a perverse sport, but I didn’t want it grounded too much in any real time or space. After ‘Fortress of Solitude’ where I almost did a kind of documentary backdrop, where I was conscious at every moment of what day it was, and what was the No. 1 song that day, and if the characters walked down the street, what was the movie on the marquee behind them. This is not like that.

“I used to think it was a law – you had to make everything up. So if it was a store, it would be an invented store. And then I switched and in ‘Motherless Brooklyn’ and ‘Fortress of Solitude,’ I used a lot of real cultural references. But then I decided, why choose? I could generate a lot of energy in myself and a lot of curiosity in readers if I kept them confused about which things I created. So there are real stores alongside fake stores, real bands mentioned alongside fake bands – of course, the real bands are so obscure you’ll think I’ve invented them.

On the “Complaint Line” (it serves as a subplot in the novel, as the main character works for a scene-maker who creates a phone line inviting all manner of disgruntlement, but readers are given a real phone number – 213-291-7778 – to phone into):
“I’ve been collecting the complaints. I’ve been assembling this giant file on my computer of voice files. They’re good – there are some really brilliant ones. You sort of get what you ask for in this life, so if you invite people to complain, they do, and some people are quite aggrieved about some things. There’s this meta-complaining going on where people complain about the complaint line – why is there no live person to answer? They seem quite put out about it.

“There’ve been some brilliant non-sequiturs, too. One woman called to complain that Jonathan Richman didn’t live in her basement and make breakfast for her everyday.”

It’s reminiscent of certain performance art show in New York:

“What I like about certain performance art projects is the way they infiltrate daily life. I remember going into the bathroom in the arts building (while attending college) one day, and there were people occupying all the urinals with some sort of tube – they had this infinite urine stream, and they were doing this incantation in this monotone while they were infinitely urinating, and I thought, ‘Oh, well, I guess I have to find another men’s room.’

“One of the subjects of the book, to the extent that a book so antic can have serious subjects, is the weird disparity in the lives of artists or wanna-be artists, between the exalted notions of what you want to become and the awkwardness and prosaic nature of the way you live your life – what you do for your day job. And, often, making art is often a homely process. I like the way the complaint line exemplifies the two poles. On the one hand is this extremely esoteric idea, quite conceptual, but to make it come true, Falmouth, the character, ends up having to turn his friends into low-grade office workers and himself into an irritable middle manager. He immediately reduces their circumstances to that of a very bad office job, and so the two things have been smashed together.

(In the book, the characters speak of measuring art by its most marginal elements; e.g., rating Rolling Stones albums by the track on which Keith Richards sings.) How he’d you apply that standard to the novel:
“Oh, that’s interesting. One of them says, a film by its subplot. A novel is a narrative of a similar proportion, very often, so you might say the same. For me, the test of a novel is the degree of identification you experience with the main character or the voice of the book. It’s been interesting for me, because after writing a very kind of ponderous, enormous, encompassing book, people have been disconcerted by how slight this one is. But this is a comedy and there’s nothing worse than a laborious comedy. I was very adamant that I keep it light on its feet. (cut 70 pages from book) The book is better from breathing free from too much overwriting or introspection. It should be a bit of a dance.

“Novelists don’t often think in those terms of major or minor. I notice when I’ve written a long book, but the thing is, I’m not that fast. This book took me two years to write. The real test of whether I’ve made my commitment to the material is when I feel that I’ve become someone else, that I’ve climbed into the skin of another person, and when Lucinda came to life for me, when the interior voice of her thoughts and her behavior on the page had the capacity to surprise and fascinate me, I felt that she was real to me as other characters I’d created that weren’t me. That’s the test to me of a novel – as a reader or a writer, that’s where the life of it dwells.

“There are a lot of reasons to know that whatever anyone else might expect or in some abstract way believes what my next project should be, my project is to follow my impulses and write the book I’m excited to write. If all you’ve ever read of mine is ‘Fortress of Solitude,’ I suppose this book could be quite disconcerting. But the truth is, I wrote some short and fairly silly books in the past, and I knew this project was something that was irresistible to me. The real reason you write a novel is to figure out why you’re interested in something, you want to find out what’s so interesting. So I could know on some level that, well, this is not going to strike people as another epic. It’s not in its nature going to be talked up for the National Book Award. But if all I ever thought was to make sure that once I’d been put in that context I never do anything otherwise, you might end up being Norman Mailer, and think, ‘Oh, I did Lee Harvey Oswald and I did Tutankhamen, what do I do now, oh, I guess I better do Hitler, or Jesus would be good.’ I’m no longer that young a novelist, I’m starting to be a middle-aged novelist, but the fact is, I’m wary of any kind of mantel being draped over my shoulders. I’ve worked so hard to retain my sense of possibility and play and allocate myself as much freedom as an artist as necessary. The world is so ready for you to write 10 or 15 books about the same detective. I wasn’t quite ready to be the sad commemorator of 1970s Brooklyn, either, so there was a great usefulness to the ways in which I surprise myself by choosing this material and then surprise others.

“There’s a great tendency to suspect the arts of being irrelevant or suspect if they don’t have some sort of non-fiction weightiness to them. The reason for some novels being is their historical or polemical basis.

“I really just wanted to emphasize for myself the irresponsible, the capricious nature of storytelling.

On Lethem’s own musical background:
“It’s so marginal, but yeah, for five minutes I was fronting a band. It was never going to go anywhere – I’m not even capable of Lou Reed vocals, and that was what I’d be aiming for at my best, and I wasn’t even able to get there.”

His website offers lyrics for others to write music to.
“It’s a very dilettante-ish thing. Songs don’t need great writers to write them; songs need great musicians to write them. I don’t believe my odd little lyrics are going to become someone’s ‘Monster Eyes,’ but it’s a fun sport, it gives me a vicarious buzz.

Great band names:
“I glanced at my bookshelf the other day, and there’s a very good book, and its subject is exactly what its title suggests, called ‘Nixon at the Movies.’ And I suddenly thought, (ital) that’s (end) a band. But the problem is if you go to MySpace nowadays, you discover that every band name or something close to it has already occurred. It’s quite difficult to make up a band name and not run into the ecstacy of influence. I think there are four different bands whose names are Something at the Movies, which takes the excitement away from my eureka moment there, and there’s a bunch of Nixon bands, too. That’s why I resorted to using obscure band names, because making up band names, you’d come up with something too close or the same exact name. But the Rain Injuries is mine – it’s too stupid for anyone ever to use.”

Where he imagines Lucinda (the main character) in 10 years:
“Someone asked me, is it more likely that she’ll be in a real band or that she’ll still be with Matthew (her sometime boyfriend). The real answer is I don’t know, and the same answer would apply to the characters in my other novels. After the last page, I never know. My knowledge ends exactly at the conclusion of the book, and whether that’s disappointing to the reader or not, they only exist to the extent that I’ve written them – there’s no secret person there to interrogate. I’d be fairly hopeful for Lucinda’s survival and general happiness, but I don’t know that she’s gonna be famous. It doesn’t feel that way to me.

“That you’d want to know is music to my ears.”

On the band never finding a name for itself:
“I’m terribly reluctant to let it seem like the book has any big ideas, because it barely glances off of any ideas at all. But one of the subjects that crept its way in is this state of the negotiation of identity and the tenuousness of that negotiation, how hard it is to compose yourself to the world. These characters are in their 20s and that was what my life was like in my 20s – the fragility of the effort to try to become something. So the fact that even a name isn’t quite possible – it stands for the attempt to assume a role, the attempt to don a viable costume in which to come on stage in life, how hard that is and also how silly that is at the same time.

Pop culture in a novel matters:
“I remember having a conversation with my father. He was basically a hipster, a 50s guy, a painter, came out of the Midwest at the right time to hang out at the bars where the painters hung out. And I had the wit to ask him, ‘Did you realize what was going on when Elvis Presley came out?’ He said, ‘Sure but that’s what teenagers listened to at the time. We listened to jazz. That stuff seemed disposable at the time. Even when I liked it it didn’t seem important.’

“There’s always claiming in vernacular culture, in what might seem to be disposable materials like comic books or rock and roll or movies. It took the whole 20th century and the French to hammer in our heads to get what Howard Hawks had accomplished.

“We live in a time when certain kinds of high-low prejudice are being broken down in sort of a revolutionary way. Some of the quarantines that exist about certain kinds of materials that are essentially no more than exercises in class snobbery, some of this is looking more and more peculiar and outmoded. The rear guard, the retrenchment, the retreat into an ivory tower where people express great … this is not a matter of saying that standards of quality are irrelevant, but to grasp that there have been boycotts on certain manners of culture operation or motifs that have been branded as the downmarket ones in a way that doesn’t make any sense at all. But the class impulse is a very powerful one; I wouldn’t want to underestimate its force.”

On 9/11 novels:
“I haven’t read all the ones that made the most deliberate use of that. It’s probably a little early to generalize how it’s been treated but I haven’t had the temptation myself to write about it. The reason I’ve skirted reading books that go straight at it is that it seems to me too raw, too immediate a material to generate a lot of metaphorical or other kinds of narrative energy. The risk it seems to me that they would be rendered powerless in the face of those facts, it may be waiting to be done superbly and it will be done superbly.

“For me, you can see by my use of real history, I’m very slow-moving. I’m the opposite of a newspaper. I’m still having trouble letting my characters have email and cell phones. I’m very slow to digest contemporary reality and that includes its traumas or big historical moments.”

Why not cell phones?
“It’s not a rational impulse. I guess I’m just so conscious of the fragility of my own sense – I don’t really believe that cell phones exist. I have one, but I don’t believe they exist. In some way, reality for me – I trust my subjective impression of reality and in that way, I still dial a telephone. There’s no verb that captures the hitting of buttons; it’s a dial, and I feel that dial and I feel my fingers in the little circles. I feel the introduction of up-to-the-minute technology weirdly disruptive to the atmosphere of my character’s lives, and I don’t know why.”

If you use the technology of today, you lose that timelessness, particularly in the future, when that technology won’t exist:
“Yeah, it’s not that I don’t think cell phones won’t be real; it’s just that I don’t want to put them in a book and have them vanish a couple of years later. You’re actually probably right – on a practical level, it’s a way to keep the books from expiring. It’d be like writing a book and having people using four-track players all the time.”

Lethem feels his age:
“I’ve migrated into my 40s, and it’s going to be icky for me to write about people in their 20s any minute now. In fact, maybe it already is. The Complainer is a version – I still identify with college-age students. I can still feel this sense and feel they’re me, but they don’t look at me and feel I’m them. I’m not anyone’s grandfather, but I’m not Lucinda and Matthew anymore. I’m still so easily connected to that part of my life. My childhood seems irretrievably far away, and if I write about it, it’s from across this gulf of time. My 20s seems sort of like what I was doing yesterday; now, suddenly, they’re (ital) not. (end) So that gap is being contemplated in not just the Complainer, but the more foolish older characters wanting a part of the band.”

Your Mayor was chatting with the esteemed ratings analyst Marc Berman, whose daily reports on the overnights get a lot of numbers wonks to debate the impending fates of their favorite low-rated shows (I think everyone who watches “Veronica Mars” must comment there), and he brought up a salient point:

“Normally, this time of year, a lot of shows go away. These shows usually have a chance to say goodbye to their viewers. This year, there are a lot of shows on the bubble – the networks aren’t going to announce what happens until next week. So it’s quite possible that ‘Law & Order,’ which has been on the air 17 years, won’t have a chance to say goodbye in its final episode. Same with ‘(Law & Order:) Criminal Intent.’ They’ve already announced ‘Gilmore Girls’ won’t be back, so they won’t have a chance for a series finale.”

(*UPDATE: After Berman and I talked, it was reported that “Law & Order” might move to TNT, albeit at drastically reduced budgets per episode, meaning many cast members still won’t have a chance to bid you adieu. “Criminal Intent’s” still quite likely toast, however.)

Any way you slice it, denying longrunning shows farewell episodes is pretty cold. Fans deserve closure – hell, even good ole turgid “The King of Queens” has been allowed an hourlong series finale. Of course, if “King of Queens”’ series finale was the template for TV farewells, then I’d wager Berman wouldn’t be championing them so much.

In this upcoming Monday’s swan song, Doug (Kevin James) and Carrie (Leah Rimini) are still coping with the fallout of their recent falling out. Just as Carrie’s boorish father Arthur (Jerry Stiller) is about to get married, Doug’s ready to call it quits with Carrie. He spends the day of Arthur’s betrothal quaffing beers in his suit coat and underpants – that zany Doug, a rebel Man of the People to the bitter end – then breaks the news to Carrie at the wedding, just as she tells him they’ve been given the OK to adopt a Chinese baby.

Needless to say, Arthur’s wedding plans go horribly awry, and sundry pointless bickering business amongst the supporting players ensues. Still waiting on a remotely witty joke at this point.

Then Doug and Carrie opt, in a fairly devastatingly poorly motivated fashion, to race each other to Beijing to adopt the child for themselves. The scenes set in China are so utterly chockablock with verisimilitude that you’d swear CBS agreed to quintuple this episode’s budget – that, or they wouldn’t even pony up for a stock establishing shot from China itself, and then halved the set-decorating budget, to boot.

Cue the requisite lachrymose climactic scene, which neither actor is up to playing. But at least it’s really close to being over.

Everyone knows that fixing a busted marriage by having or adopting a child is a genius move, although, to be fair, it’s undocumented as to whether James’ character has actually ever done anything remotely intelligent in the run of the series. So perhaps all this boobitude is entirely in character.

Meanwhile, “My Name is Earl” offers its season finale tomorrow, answering that question bedeviling fans all season: Will Joy (Jaime Pressly) go to jail? Will Earl (Jason Lee) get busy with Joy’s lawyer Ruby (Marlee Matlin)? Why would they bother to bring back Christine Taylor (who earlier played one of Ed’s ill-fated paramours) and then not even give her any fresh camera time?

Near the end, there’s a plot twist that may change the direction of the show next season – then again, most likely it won’t. But at least Joy does offer up one nugget of wisdom for all prospective bail jumpers in the future (pay attention, Paris): “Runnin’ from the law isn’t as easy as they made it look on ‘The Dukes of Hazzard.’”

- “The King of Queens:” 9 p.m. Monday, CBS (Channel 2).
- “My Name is Earl:” 8 p.m. Thursday, NBC (Channel 4).

And this, too, must serve as a farewell of sorts: Your Mayor is taking some more use-it-or-lose-it vacation time today, that is, if the pinheads at United Airlines (motto: Something Incompetent in the Air – and Online, Not to Mention Our Antiquated Automated Phone System) can get their acts together and cobble together an itinerary that doesn’t involve traversing huge, irrelevant swatches of the country and getting me to my destination hours and hours and hours after the arrival time I paid them good money to ensure me. If they didn’t waste so much money on paying Gene Hackman to do the commercial voice-overs, maybe they could spring for a mechanic or two to ensure that their fleet might be flight-worthy in a timely fashion.

P.S.: Took one last late-night look at the Griffith Park inferno from my undisclosed hilltop location: Great swatches of the hills there continue to glow an iridescent orange, though most of the smoke seems to be billowing from the Burbank side.

I’ll be back late Monday, when we can deconstruct NBC’s fall 2007 schedule – that is, if NBC hasn’t burnt to the ground by then.

VH1 must be so proud: Actor Tom Sizemore, whose struggles with addictions were depicted for your entertainment on the network’s reality series “Shooting Sizemore,” was arrested. In Bakersfield. With methamphetamine. But, alas, apparently not with his show’s camera crew in tow.

This follows VH1’s “Breaking Bonaduce,” which unwittingly but ultimately appears to have essayed the dissolution of the former Danny Partridge’s marriage.

Obviously, Train Wreck TV has its adherents and (perhaps) defenders, but here’s the ugly little flipside: These shows aren’t created to be documentaries or edifying; they’re made to be titillating. And while beholding such a public descent can have a grisly allure, when the marriage does break up or when the actor is eventually busted (and faces jail time), it’s hard to feel good about having watched such programming.

Not to mention those who participated in the making of the shows, which no doubt exploited and exacerbated the tenuously fragile mental states of their subjects. So kudos to “Sizemore’s” Terence Michael – whose upcoming project, according to imdb.com, looks to be every bit as tasteful, entitled “MILF” – and “Bonaduce’s” supervising producer Bill Hochhauser. It might be entertaining to follow these guys with cameras to find out how they sleep at night, but here’s guessing they at least would be savvy and sober enough never to sign any releases allowing such an imposition on their private lives.

OK, this could get a little dangerous. I have a pretty low tolerance for stupid, boring and pointless things, but nonetheless I’m going to try to sit through the first episode of “National Bingo Night,” ABC’s stab at reality-show-as-church-social, debuting Friday, May 18.

Before I get started, allow me to quote from the press release: Blah blah blah, print your own Bingo cards blah blah blah “so they’ll not only experience the excitement of watching the on-screen competition but can concurrently enjoy the pure fun of playing bingo at home, free of charge….” Clearly, this show could be dangerous for anyone whose heart is not in tip-top shape.

Fortunately, ABC sent only a snippet of the first episode, just one game (they manage to pack three electrically charged games into an hour of TV). They also sent some Bingo cards and “The Official Bingo Dauber for National Bingo Night,” which is good, because I’d hate to have some cheap imitation knock-off go off in my hands and injure someone.

Seriously: Is it just me or does airing an hour of Bingo on a broadcast network during prime-time spell the End of Television As We Know It?

And we’re off:

- Opening seconds: Random, breathlessly edited images; a narrator quite excitedly blurts, “The game that’s fast, fun and so, so easy to win!”

- The balls are in a two and a half story, one-ton “Bingosphere,” the show’s nod to “Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome,” which seems to really rile up the studio audience. Tonight’s games have been “sanctioned” by a mustachioed man wearing a referee’s zebra shirt from the “NBN.” That puts my mind at ease, a little.

- The host is one of “Extreme Makeover: Home Edition’s” lesser acolytes, but to my knowledge has no DUI’s. He classes the joint up a bit with his British accent; diminishes it just as much with his Howie Mandell-style cueball head. He’s actually explaining the rules of Bingo to the audience. If you don’t already know the rules of Bingo, what are the chances you’re watching this? Who’s watching a Bingo show to get educated?

- Our studio contestant is playing “Bingo 500,” a dopey guessing game, so he’s not actually playing Bingo; just the studio audience is. One of the prizes the contestant (a married man with three children) can win is a date with Fabio. I can’t imagine a much greater inducement to lose.

- Blackballs – just added to the Bingosphere! – could derail the game beyond all repair. Blackballs? Have you no sense of decency sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?

- They still keep explaining very simplistic rules: “If you’ve got 0-72 at home, mark it off your Bingo Cards.”

- God, they’re dragging this out, just as they do on “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire,” “Deal or No Deal” and all those other game shows aimed at those who aspire to be the Forrest Gumps of the world. 14 minutes in, I’ve only got six numbers on my Bingo card. If I fast-forwarded this it would still go too slow.

- Mustachioed NBN Sanctioning Guy – who kind of sounds like Apu on “The Simpsons” – dramatically informs us that no one in the studio audience has a Bingo. “No Bingo – play is still on!” he enthuses.

- Hey, I’m an N-40 away from Bingo!

- The contestant has gone delusional from this experience; he’s feverishly talking to a photograph of his kids.

- The Host – who, really, can’t be paid too much to feign such an irrational fervor for Bingo (I’m never this enthusiastic about stuff that I actually like) – is now dragging out the phrase “The … Moment … of … Truth …” taking maybe 20 seconds to get it out.

- Well, there’s 22 minutes of my life that I’ll never get back.

Hey, it’s nearing the end of the season, and with season finales coming at us from every direction, the networks suddenly remember that TV critics exist and that they might write about their shows, so, hey, we’re getting screeners of shows again. Huzzah.

On tonight:

You’d think after saving the world a few times, you’d get a thank you or at least get cut a little slack from your government employers. But then, you wouldn’t be familiar with the way things work on “The Unit,” where Jonas (Dennis Haysbert) and his heroic crew of bad@sses are routinely used by the military as guinea pigs and punching bags and cannon fodder in all manner of abusive ways. So, for the season finale, they’re investigated by the CIA for following orders. Of course, in their case, following their commanders’ orders puts them in danger of being tried for war crimes. You just can’t trust anybody in this government.

- “The Unit:” 9 tonight; CBS (Channel 2).

Meanwhile, over on “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit,” they try to get a little fancy and political with the rape/murder of a fiancée of a purported undercover CIA agent – are terrorists responsible? Ah, but that’s all just subterfuge for one of those really convoluted cases that eventually ends up involving murdered children – and you know just how much dead kids mess with Det. Stabler’s (Christopher Meloni) head. (In case you don’t know: a whole lot.) Meloni’s anguished performance is what most recommends this mystery with one of those “Well, if you say so…” solutions.

- “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit:” 10 tonight, NBC (Channel 4).

Next week, the networks will unveil their fall lineups. It seems this time of year gets a little more anxiety-ridden each year, as the networks continue to flounder.

Herewith, a look at each of the networks – how much help they really need, and how much they’ll likely seek out. Sorry in advance it's not a laff riot, but then, how funny can endlessly fretting over the finest nuances of a network schedule only to have much of the audience TiVo the shows so they can watch them whenever they want really be?

Oh, that's right: hilarious. So, even more apologies for the shoddy nature of this analysis, but then, I'm leaving town in some 30 hours and you should consider yourselves lucky to be getting anything out of me.

NBC (presenting its schedule Monday)

Programming holes:
All Sunday night, after football season ends.
Monday: 10-11 p.m.
Tuesday: 8-10 p.m.
Wednesday: 8-11 p.m., though “Medium” has been brought back and “Friday Night Lights” will likely be, as well.
Thursday: “Scrubs” would seem to be iffy. The prospective series “Area 52” would seem a nice fit with the evening’s other sitcoms. “ER’s” on life support and should probably go, but probably won’t.
Friday: Everything’s weak, but everytime NBC has replaced a bubble show on Friday nights with something else, the replacement show invariably does even worse.

Synopsis: NBC recently suffered through its lowest-rated week since the introduction of Nielsen “People Meters” 20 years ago, and, quite likely, in its history. Only one show – “Deal or No Deal” – had more than 10 million viewers. It’s bringing back “30 Rock” and perhaps “Friday Night Lights,” both of which averaged fewer than 7 million viewers on the season, a new lowest-rated renewal for the network. Thing is, most of NBC’s shows weren’t bad. Just misunderstood.

Advice: Prayer. And lots of it. After all, there are no atheists in a foxhole.

ABC (announcing Tuesday)

Programming holes:
Monday: 8-11 p.m. whenever “Dancing with the Stars” isn’t on.
Tuesday: 8-10 p.m. whenever “Dancing with the Stars”’ results show isn’t on.
Wednesday: 8-10 p.m.
Thursday: 10-11 p.m., though “October Road” – which one commenter to this blog brilliantly described as “The Sanjaya Malakar of TV dramas” – did less horribly than the other shows tried out in that timeslot.
Friday: 8-11 p.m.

Synopsis: It’s feast or famine for ABC, whose hit shows are huge hits and everything else is a thorough tank job. They’re bringing back “Men in Trees” despite subpar ratings.

Advice: Hope the hits don’t ebb as drastically as “Lost” and “Desperate Housewives” did this year and something gains a little traction. The Americanization of the British “Footballers’ Wives” is just one of several dramas in development that seems a natural fit with the networks’ women-friendly programming. Scrap comedies, perhaps altogether (although “Arrested Development’s” Mitch Hurwitz tackling the hilarious British sitcom “The Thick of It,” about dense, incompetent politicians, sounds more than promising, you still wonder how ABC, who hasn’t succeeded with a smart sitcom in years, would lure it an audience).

CBS (up Wednesday)

Programming holes:
Sunday: 8-9 p.m.
Monday: 8-9 p.m.
Tuesday: 10-11 p.m.
Wednesday: 8-9 p.m.; 10 p.m.’s been looking a big slack of late, as well.
Friday: Fairly acceptable, though some reports have “Close to Home” (whose ratings have been comparable to those around it) on the bubble.

Synopsis: Despite more than enough evidence that audiences passionately ignore shows about Hollywood and the media, five of CBS’s sitcoms in development are set in that milieu. Dumb move, CBS. (Ah, well, the others didn’t sound too promising, either.) Likewise, three of the prospective dramas have paranormal themes.

Advice: Fortunately, they have few holes to fill. Word is CBS will try to prolong the lives of “Survivor” and “The Amazing Race” by featuring them only one time each next season, likely in “Survivor’s” timeslot. Seems a reasonable gambit. The drama in development veers from very traditional to very bizarre (“Babylon Fields:” “Sardonic, apocalyptic comedic drama in which the dead are resurrected and try to resume their former lives. As a result, lives are regained, families restored and old wounds are reopened”). Expect traditional to win the day, particularly given one show, the bounty-hunter drama “Skip Tracer,” comes from Mitchell Burgess and Robin Greene, fresh off of “The Sopranos.” “Viva Laughlin!” – a take on the terrifically stylish BBC miniseries “Viva Blackpool” executive-produced, in part, by Hugh Jackman – sounds like a great idea, but it would probably be impossible to sustain the level of quality over 22 episodes.

Fox (Thursday)

Programming holes:
September through mid-January in general.
Sunday: 7-8 p.m., 9-10 p.m.
Thursday 9-10 p.m.
Friday 8-10 p.m.

Synopsis: Though it never seems to hurt the network in the long run, Fox executives really would like to find a formula for getting viewers to swarm to the network before “American Idol” and “24” return in January. It developed a whopping 15 sitcoms this spring (more shows than The CW bothered to develop in total) and an additional 10 dramas, so it likely has the most promising new shows to choose from.

Advice: If only they can find the right way to schedule them. Fox must get away from plugging every hole in its lineup with “House” reruns. It still seems to me that some kind of limited, over-the-top reality event is the way to go in the fall. And then unleash a blitzkrieg of new shows in January, when “Idol’s” back to help promote them.

The CW (also Thursday)

Programming holes
All Sunday
All Monday (except maybe “Everybody Hates Chris,” which really crash-landed this season)
All Tuesday
Wednesday 9-10 p.m.
Thursday 9-10 p.m.

Which means The CW is solid for a whole four hours of its schedule (“America’s Next Top Model,” “Smallville,” which to be fair is fading, and its wrasslin’ show). But the network scarcely developed enough new shows to plug all those holes.

Advice: Oh, I dunno – some insurance-fraud scheme, perhaps?

This entry is dedicated to Fred, a commenter who didn’t much care for the Karl Rove Emails thing and clamored for an entry on the upfronts.

While Lindsay Lohan continues her publicity tour for “Georgia Rule,” here’re a few items for your televisual edification:

Why does Mickey Mouse hate America?: Here’s the most precious way of disseminating hatred, ever.

“The squeaky-voiced Mickey Mouse lookalike, named Farfur, is the star of a weekly children’s program called Tomorrow’s Pioneers on the official Hamas TV station (Al-Aqsa TV). Farfur and his co-host, a young girl named Saraa’, teach children about such things as the importance of the daily prayers and drinking milk, while taking every opportunity to indoctrinate young viewers with teachings of Islamic supremacy, hatred of Israel and the US and support of "resistance" – the Palestinian euphemism for terror. …

“Farfur's performance is unquestionably funny and entertaining, as is the character’s comic timing. For example, as he rhymes off a list of world figures, he chirps: “We will win, Bush! We will win, Condoleezza! We will win, Sharon!” Then, without missing a beat, he quips, “Ah, Sharon is dead” (sic), reinforcing his message that the plan for world domination is progressing. …

“The effectiveness of this program is heightened by including child viewers, who phone in to the show and recite poems with images of hate and violence; for example, ‘We will destroy the chair of the despots, so they will taste the flame of death;’ and, ‘Rafah sings ‘Oh, oh.’ Its answer is an AK-47. We who do not know fear, we are the predators of the forest.’”

Kids these days.

*

“Lost” has been cancelled. Well, after the 2009-2010 season, that is. ABC announced that the series will wrap it up after three more seasons of 16 episodes each, and yes, they’ll run straight through, without repeats or interruptions. So they have 48 episodes to explain what happened in the previous 72.

Because I know how much you love the language of the press release, here’s a whole bunch of it:

“In considering the powerful storytelling of ‘Lost,’ we felt this was the only way to give it a proper creative conclusion,” said [ABC Entertainment president Stephen] McPherson. “I always said that we would allow the series to grow and give viewers the most compelling hour possible. And, due to the unique nature of the series, we knew it would require an end date to keep the integrity and strength of the show consistent throughout, and to give the audience the payoff they deserve. ”

“Additionally,” said McPherson, “having Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse signed on to complete the journey of this show was critical to me and the network. Damon and Carlton have tremendous talent, and we’re thrilled that they’ll be with the show throughout its run.”

“This is a bold and unprecedented move for ABC,” said Lindelof and Cuse, executive producers. “The show would not be what it is without the vision and support we’ve received from Steve McPherson, Mark Pedowitz and everyone at ABC and ABC TV Studios. We always envisioned ‘Lost’ as a show with a beginning, middle and end. By officially announcing exactly when that ending will be, the audience will now have the security of knowing that the story will play out as we’ve intended.”

Lindelof and Cuse added, speaking in perfect harmony, “Once we establish precisely what that is.”

*

The networks’ upfronts – where they unveil their fall schedules to advertisers and one another – are next week, and nobody has a clue as to how this will all shake out.

It all has to do with the hubbub over DVRs and if people are watching commercials, but then, the schedules in some cases will be so overhauled that past records of viewing would more or less get thrown out the window, so no one knows how much to charge or what to pay for a 30-second spot. Its pretty technical nature makes it a little less fun, but it’s still entertaining to imagine the chaos as network executives hurtle about cluelessly as they tinker and hone their meticulously strategized schedules, only for viewers to dash all that sweat and tears by recording everything and watching it when they feel like it and skipping through the commercials.

*

From an otherwise nuts-and-bolts-y story on networks plugging some of its summer programming into May sweeps:

“Jeff Bader, executive vp of ABC Entertainment, said his network also hopes to use its high-rated shows to promote … its midseason holdover “Traveler”, (which) it previews May 10, following “Grey’s Anatomy.” ‘It’s all about sampling,’ Bader said. ‘Putting ‘Traveler’ after ‘Grey’s’ gives it an audience of more than 20 million people. When will there be that big of an audience again?’”

Can you just hear the wistfulness in his voice as he says, “When will there be that big of an audience again?” You can hear the audible sigh that follows, as well as the even more deflated, “I’m going to clean my gun again.”

While Alberto Gonzales’ Justice Department scandal proceeds apace, with the latest information strongly suggesting that the White House in fact did play a role in the firing of eight Federal prosecutors, so too did the seemingly vain search for all of President Bush’s chief advisor Karl Rove’s missing Emails.

Until now.

Your Mayor phoned up his I.T. guy Bickwick, who managed to locate said Emails on my iBook G4. You see, I ran into Mr. Rove a while back in Kerr County, in the Texas Hill Country where he owns righteous property on the Guadalupe River, and he asked me if he could borrow my computer for a few hours. He seemed like a nice enough guy, so I lent it to him.

That might’ve been a mistake, particularly if I’m charged with Felony: Treason for Undermining the Constitution. Otherwise: no biggie. Nonetheless, here’re the Emails Mr. Rove sent from my laptop:

From: tblossom01
To: [REDACTED]
Subject: Forever and Ever, Amen

Alberto,

While you keep up on your front, we’re looking into ways to revise the PATRIOT Act to make it unconstitutional for anyone with a perceived liberal bias to actually serve in the government, period.

This does not mean you should relax in your efforts. There seem to be a couple of hitches as drawn up in that pesky Constitution that may drag the process out a bit. I know you haven’t taken a look at the document lately, but if you could go to the bother (yeah, I know – reading? musty old documents?), maybe your keen legal mind could find a legal loophole we can exploit.

Viva la Revolución!

*

From: tblossom01
To: [REDACTED]
Subject: Global warming

W,

Good news/bad news. The bad news is, looks like this so-called “global warming” is a fact. The good news is, we’ve surreptitiously had our scientists on it, and they’ve devised a machine that can actually accelerate the process, so that the Left Coast can actually be submerged by ocean water mere hours before Election Day 2008. Which, of course, will cede the election to our Chosen Republican Successor.

All we need now is for you to give the word. I’d go ahead and do it, but I know how you’re the “Decider” and everything.

K

*

From: tblossom01
To: [REDACTED]
Subject: Codename: Falafel

My Dearest Roger,

Worry not about what those treasonous anarchists at Media Matters say: We still consider Special Weapon Codename: Falafel to be one of our most effective tools. On the Global Struggle Against Reason, that is.

But some in our office seem to have voiced some concerns of late, and we’d just like you to double-check: He is up to date on his rabies shots, correct?

Your Fondest Admirer.

*

From: tblossom01
To: [REDACTED]
Subject: Tortured logic

Alberto,

You know what’s so amazing about this whole stupid torture and extraordinary rendition debate? Those liberal pansies are wringing their hands about what we’re doing with suspected terrorists overseas, but they don’t seem to care a whit that we’ve flooded the American airwaves with shows like “According to Jim,” “Ghost Whisperer” and “Rules of Engagement!”

Fight the battle on enough fronts, and your enemies will be too exhausted to keep up. Kudos to us.

You Know Who

*

From: tblossom01
To: [REDACTED]
Subject: Enough already

Look, Boss,

I don’t know how many times we have to go over this: I had nothing to do with those guys calling that book “Bush’s Brain.” I know you haven’t read it, but trust me, it’s not all that complimentary of me, either.

K

*

From: tblossom01
To: [REDACTED]
Subject: Billing procedures

My Dearest Lady Palfrey,

I realize that we’re probably not going to come to terms over this, but let me again reiterate that while $275 for 90 minutes is a more than reasonable fee, $275 for 8.5 minutes is not, and that’s all I seem to require. I would appreciate it if you would reconsider those Draconian rates.

Besides, last time, the Hillary costume wasn’t all that convincing.

Your fondest admirer.

*

From: tblossom01
To: [REDACTED]
Subject: Let them eat dog food

Dickster,

I almost feel a little bad to report this while sitting in my motorized wheelchair, my legs covered by an elegant woolen afghan, while stroking my favorite white-haired cat, but the fact is, we’re moving along briskly on the plot to poison the nation’s supply of pet food. Our triangulations suggest that an inordinate amount of the tainted sustenance will show up in blue states, resulting in grief-stricken liberals who, having no legal recourse, will believe their government has failed them, and therefore won’t bother to turn up for the next election.

This strategy, if I say so myself, was a real stroke of genius. Sometimes I wish I had a handlebar mustache so I could curl it while expostulating the requisite “Bwahahahahaha!”

You owe me,

KR

*

From: tblossom01
To: [REDACTED]
Subject: Itchy scabs

Doc,

I’m still getting these embarrassing rashes, even though I’m slathering my body with the skin cream you prescribed.

I realize you believe my condition to be psychosomatic, a deep-rooted punishment against myself for whatever perceived sins you think I think I may have committed, but I assure you: I’ve been in this business for several decades and this has never happened before. So may I be so bold as to suggest a radical new medical regimen? After all, I have a lot more of my job to do in the next 18 months.

Patient Zero

Is it mere coincidence that those humiliating snippets essaying meltdowns on the behalves of Alec Baldwin and David Hasselhoff turned up online in such close proximity? I think not. It looks like we’re entering a new golden age of divorce-lawyerly scumbaggery, and we have Kim Bassinger’s Rovian evil genius, Neal Hersh, to thank. Celebrity marriage-counseling services should enjoy a huge boom in business, and pre-nups are about to get a whole lot trickier. Because, you know, not even these antics are enough to cow celebrities into actually behaving better.

Hasselhoff’s video looks a little like Your Mayor on a good night. Anyone want to bet its bursting on the scene has improved ticket sales for Hasselhoff’s Vegas production of “The Producers?”

According to a new Gallup Poll, a third of us just plain don’t like Katie Couric. (Half of us still do, though, Katie, so don’t feel too down.)

How did this come about? Wasn’t she the 21st century’s “America’s Sweetheart?” Sure, industry folks have all heard anecdotes about her behind-the-scenes diva-like behavior, but I doubt a third of the country has. There’s a difference between thinking she’s not serving her position as “CBS Evening News” anchor well and having actual negative feelings about her, isn’t there?

And anyway, what’s the point of a public-opinion poll like that? (It also found that NBC’s Brian Williams and ABC’s Charlie Gibson were both more liked and less disliked, to relatively similar measures.) I can see a network doing an internal study, but why do the Galluping inquisitors think this is the sort of information we’re hungering for?

What’s next, intrepid Gallup Pollsters? Lasagna or spaghetti or ravioli? Stilettos or strappy sandals or sensible shoes? Universal remotes or remotes for specific functions or turning on the set manually? Pony rides in the park or rollerblading on the beach or skeet shooting in the meadow? America wants answers, dammit!

Mitt Romney won the Republican Presidential candidates’ first debate Thursday evening at the Reagan Library in Simi Valley.

How do I know this? Well, because backstage in the “Spin Room” I was handed a press release designed to look a little like a USA Today story. Its headline read: “GOVERNOR MITT ROMNEY WINS FIRST DEBATE WITH MESSAGE OF CONSERVATIVE CHANGE IN WASHINGTON.”

So there you go. No one else had the chutzpah to hand out a similar declaration in the Spin Room, so Romney’s clearly our winner. Though, to be fair, once I returned home, I had an email from John McCain’s campaign insisting that he had won the debate. Additionally, rather than merely quoting Romney’s communications director, McCain’s email cited outside sources like bloggers and pundits, such as NBC’s Chuck Todd, who contributed this inspiring nugget: “McCain solid.” (Must’ve been McCain’s proclamation on Osama bin Laden: “I will follow him to the gates of hell.” Simmer down, tough guy; I’m fairly certain he’ll be able to find that particular place all by his lonesome.)

Still, McCain’s email didn’t look like a faux newspaper article, so I’m sticking with Romney, even though at one point he explained that he decided he was against abortion after hearing about how evil cloning was.

(The other quote of the evening was Senator Sam Brownback’s declaration: “I'll be taking it behind the barn and killing it with a dull ax.” Apparently, tax cuts sliced his ax-sharpening programs, while women corresponding with imprisoned serial killers accounted for his short, sudden burst in the polls.)

Everybody who was Anybody (and, in addition to all that, Your Mayor) attended the Republican debate at the Reagan Library (or, as it was repeatedly, and long-windedly, called, “The MSNBC-Politico.com-Reagan Library GOP Republican Presidential Candidate Debate Brought to You by Taco Bell (Except for the Bits with Duncan Hunter and Tom Tancredo).” A long day for all involved – if you didn’t get there by 2 p.m., you didn’t get in, even though the thing didn’t start until 5 p.m. locally, which would’ve given you plenty of time to tour the museum – well, if it hadn’t’ve been closed. Oh, well, you could at least while away that down time spending money at the Reagan Country Café (motto: “Sorry, no Refills on Fountain Drinks”), where one of the cafeteria ladies mused of the debate lineup, “I like the fact that no girls are on the panel.”

Journalists parked off-site; my shuttle driver boasted red, white and blue fingernail polish and a leather Harley Davidson hat. She drove us past demonstrators ranging from a someone in a dolphin costume and a Romney T-shirt, folks with a banner reading “World Trade Building 7 Didn’t Just Blow Up!” and people on both sides of the immigration issue standing next to one another peaceably.

About 30 news trucks with satellites ringed the premises, four from Channel 7 alone. TV reporters seemed to be desperately trying to find ways to pad their reportage until the main event began: One camera crew was even shooting B-roll of a tray of cookies laid out for the debate’s audience.

And if that sounds too stupid to be true, here’s the reason: That camera team came from Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart,” who had dispatched its British correspondent, Jon Oliver, to cover the debate. I chatted briefly with Oliver, who explained that his report was going to contrast “musty British” politics with the “razzmatazz of democracy,” adding, “We’re very excited about the cookies.” He actually bid me adieu with a cheery “Cheerio.”

Off to the Spin Room, undoubtedly the dreariest area of the otherwise entirely elegant Reagan Library – no inspiring spacious area featuring a former Air Force One here, as could be seen in the hall where the debate took place; not even a glimpse of the cool Naval F-14 or the chunk of the Berlin Wall which could be found elsewhere on the grounds. The only adornment here was a perfunctory gallery of portraits of past Presidents; a potted tree hugged the wall, obscuring the painting of JFK.

And so, the debate:

Its initial improbable salvo came from former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani: “We're a country that has the greatest health care system in the world.” Per Wonkette: “By ‘greatest,’ we guess he means ‘none.’”

Arizona Senator John McCain on what he’d need to win the war in Iraq: “I would need the support of the American people.” OK, that ship has sailed; is McCain outing himself as a Defeatocrat?

Former Wisconsin governor Tommy Thompson declared that the Iraqi government would need to vote on whether it wants American troops in its country: “If they vote yes, it gives us a legitimacy for being there. If they vote no, we should get out.”

With that, Thompson broke slightly from the other Republican candidates, who, in the face of mounting criticism, resolutely refused to admit that too many mistakes were made. Except for, God bless him, Texas Congressman Ron Paul, the Republican bomb-thrower who slashed and burned the Bush Administration’s folly in Iraq:

“You might ask the question, why are 70 percent of the American people now wanting us out of there, and why did the Republicans do so poorly last year? I would suggest that we should look at foreign policy. I'm suggesting very strongly that we should have a foreign policy of non- intervention, the traditional American foreign policy and the Republican foreign policy. Throughout the 20th century, the Republican Party benefited from a non-interventionist foreign policy. … How did we win the election in the year 2000? We talked about a humble foreign policy: No nation-building; don't police the world. That's conservative, it's Republican, it's pro-American -- it follows the founding fathers.”

Nonetheless, the Republicans, in stark contrast to the Democratic Presidential candidates’ debate last week, managed to sound even more bellicose and saber-rattling than you’d imagine for folks running for office in a country in which two-thirds of the populace is sick of conflict. Most of them sounded ready to mix it up with Iran, forget that the battles in Iraq and Afghanistan are floundering. Colorado Congressman Tom Tancredo is ready to start bombing now: “(Iranian leadership) should put us in the position of saying that anything we can do to stop that is imperative.”

Giuliani (and, to a lesser extent, McCain) dialed back on that sort of rhetoric, but Rudy also dialed back on his pro-choice stance when it came to abortion: When asked, “Would the day that Roe v. Wade is repealed be a good day for America?” he wanly responded, “It would be OK.” (By contrast, Kansas Senator Sam Brownback declared, “It would be a glorious day of human liberty and freedom,” apparently forgetting that women fall under the rubric of human liberty and freedom.)

Moderator Chris Matthews spoon-fed his panel a lot of insipid questions that didn’t demand tough answers so much as massaged their preconceived notions. The abortion question didn’t demand that any candidate – except Giuliani – explain their philosophy. A lot of his queries allowed the candidates to lapse into gormless rants about “values” and how America would be better if everyone was just happily married. Matthews later offered poorly posed questions on Republican scandals (solution: get happily married) and centrist politics that easily allowed the candidates to wriggle out of their responses and vapid questions on taxation that didn’t consider the national debt; he couldn’t even really get a candidate outside of Paul to assail Bush, which a whole bunch of Republicans in Congress are more than happy to do these days.

His most stupid question, however, was: “Would it be good for America to have Bill Clinton back living in the White House?” Did he actually think any Republican was going to endorse Hillary for President? (And this guy’s show is called “Hardball?” Shouldn’t it be titled “Intentional Walk?”)

At some point in the debate – Virginia governor Jim Gilmore was ragging on the Middle East – “The Daily Show’s” Oliver tramped through the journalists in the Spin Room and, under a flatscreen televising the debate, leaned against the wall beneath a portrait of Jimmy Carter and beamed ecstatically. No idea what that was about.

Anyway, it was impressively distressing to watch most of the candidates tell former First Lady Nancy Reagan to stuff it when it comes to stem-cell research. And it was great to see Tancredo and Brownback and, the moment passed so quickly but I’m sure the third guy was Duncan Hunter (who did his best impression of Powers Booth on “Deadwood”) (UPDATE: Apparently, Guy No. 3 was Mike Huckabee), admit that they didn’t believe in evolution because, you know, those scientists, they’re, well, scientists.

And so the debate ended, and Spin Room antics began in earnest. A Romney spokesman proclaimed, “We introduced Mitt Romney to the American people today. People saw his heart.” McCain spokesman Charlie Black declared, “McCain’s more prepared and experienced.” Giuliani’s guy enthused, “This was a chance for the American people to see Rudy Giuliani. They know what a tremendous leader he is.” They pay people to mouth these homilies?

Romney, McCain and Giuliani, being the front-runners, didn’t feel the need to appear personally in the Spin Room. The other candidates, however, did mingle with we lesser beings, and this is how you know our political system is hopeless: Despite my political prowess, Your Mayor’s Day Job is TV Critic, meaning my expertise lands more in the realm of whether people should watch “The King of Queens” rather than for whom they should vote, yet several of these candidates for the job of Leader of the Free World happily spent time speaking with me.

Virginia governor Jim Gilmore, speaking of the hostility many in the Middle East feel toward America, neatly deflected a question as to whether President Bush was responsible, yet allowed, “What I think we have to do is to use all of our abilities, diplomatic and economic and military, above all things, put ourselves on the moral high ground,” suggesting that America is no longer on the moral high ground and therefore, implicitly criticizing the President. I asked him what America should do to reclaim the moral high ground. His response began with the usual dissembling, including the words “material and spiritual opportunities,” “education” and “aspiration” but then more articulately championed “reaching out” to show other nations that “Americans care about more than themselves.”

I also spoke to Ron Paul, asking him how it felt to, in general, be in the majority in public opinion re: the war, yet to stand on a stage where he was in the decided minority.

“I think I win in terms of ideas – I don’t know if I win on debating skills,” Paul said. “I don’t feel uncomfortable on that stage. They’re the ones who should feel uncomfortable. Unless (Republicans) elect someone like me, I don’t think we can win next year.”

Former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee (who said of Bill Clinton, “I like Bill – he’s a very affable guy” while demurring on Hillary: “I’ll leave that one alone”), however, offered a pretty incisive criticism of the debate: “It was difficult to get into substantive issues,” he noted. “The questions that were asked, there was not a lot of substantial differences among the candidates.”

Amongst the oversights? He joked, “Nobody brought up questions about music – I’m the only one up there with a rock ’n’ roll band, and it was a glaring oversight that no one asked about it.”

Meanwhile, “The Daily Show’s” Oliver and his crew were gathering one-dollar bills to use for some sort of comic coup. I didn’t see what came of that, but they approached Steve Durham, one of the champions of the anti-immigration Tom Tancredo, and the British comic asked what he needed to do to remain in the country. Durham, affably if hardly amusingly, told Oliver, “You’ve done it the right way.” (Damn! I was in the background of that shot! If Durham had been funny, I’d’ve gotten on TV!)

Much later, I saw Oliver and his team glad-handedly congratulating themselves on their glib contributions to the evening’s discourse before dispersing into the night. Meanwhile, bombings increase in Iraq. So joking around and dithering around share equal moral ground, as long as our leaders and our comedians are equally self-satisfied.

Your Mayor won’t be posting much the rest of today as I’ll be holed up at the Reagan Library, awaiting the Republican Presidential candidate debate, which will air on MSNBC this evening at 8 p.m. (5 p.m. West Coast time). I’ll be camping out in the “Spin Room,” the dungeon all politicians’ lies go to die, only to be reborn again as glorious truths.

Because of the stringent security measures, I don’t think I’m allowed to make jokes about all this until afterwards.

Still, the question persists: Is Tom Tancredo the Republicans’ version of Mike Gravel? Or is it Ron Paul? Who is Ron Paul, anyway? (Actually, Paul’s website asks the very same question, and if they don’t know, then his campaign’s in trouble. Though it does modestly note that he “enjoys a national reputation as the premier advocate for liberty in politics today.” Because, you know, all those other politicians really hate liberty.)

Anyway, we’ll have a nice little report for you later on this evening. Something to live for in the wake of “Gilmore Girls”’ imminent departure.

Much speculation, much debate, many heart-filled pleas for an eighth season, but here’s the final word: “Gilmore Girls” is done, as of May 15.

Here’s the terse press release jointly issued by The CW and Warner Bros. Television:

“Announcing the final season of 'Gilmore Girls' is truly a sad moment for everyone at The CW and Warner Bros. Television. This series helped define a network and created a fantastic, storybook world featuring some of television's most memorable, lovable characters. We thank Amy Sherman-Palladino, Dan Palladino, Dave Rosenthal, the amazing cast led by Lauren Graham and Alexis Bledel, as well as the producers, writers and crew for giving us this delightful gem for the past seven years. We would also like to thank the critics and 'Gilmore' fans for their passionate support and promise to give this series the send-off it deserves."

“The send-off it deserves?” Does that mean airing it on Fox or ABC and not The CW?

I sat down with James Woods at the beginning of this season, when “Shark” was just beginning to find its footing with audiences, and he told me, ``Oddly, you're here in the 20-minute window when I'm not saying every other line that's in the scene. This is Jeri Ryan's first big episode where it features her, so she gets to do all the courtroom stuff. So it's kind of a nice relief.

``But they still had me sitting in the courtroom, so what was the point?'' He was joking. I’m pretty sure. He added, ``I might as well be talking. I said to the writers, `Look, the trick is you write him out of the scene so he has 20 minutes to go home and do his laundry. If he's here and not talking, then (expletive), he might as well be talking. I am the star of the show. If I have to be here, I'll say the stuff. It doesn't help for me to be here and sit on my ass and have someone else talk.'''

In tonight’s season finale, Ryan gets her second close-up. In tonight’s “Shark,” Sebastian Stark (James Woods) gets a chance to compensate for losing a case against an ingenious serial killer, Wayne Callison (Billy Campbell), who wrote a bestseller assailing Stark, “The Hunted Man,” and who has apparently killed again. Stark recruits Ryan's character, who lost the D.A.'s election, to put the guy away for good.

Needless to say, Shark crosses the line, again, and then crosses yet another line. Needless to say, his transgressions almost cost him the case. Needless to say, Shark’s almost as messed-up as those he attempts to imprison. Needless to say, he needs Jeri Ryan back next season. Needless to say, CBS will be bringing this show back next season, as it’s (quietly) garnered ratings approaching those of the year’s breakout hit “Heroes.” Needless to say, watching James Woods in a sort of formulaic thing like this is still almost as good as watching James Woods in something really great.

Hardly a stop-the-presses moment, but here goes: Bill O’Reilly insults people. Prodigiously.

A study from my Alma Mater found that “O'Reilly called a person or a group a derogatory name once every 6.8 seconds, on average, or nearly nine times every minute during (‘Talking Points Memo,’) the editorials that open his program each night.”

Wow. That’s way better than I manage. Bill O’Reilly rocks! If he could manage that rate through his entire show, Keith Olbermann’s MSNBC show would be dust.

And: “(P)oliticians and media, particularly of the left-leaning persuasion, are in the company of illegal aliens, criminals, terrorists - never vulnerable to villainous forces and undeserving of empathy." One imagines O’Reilly responding, “Yeah, your point is?”

Actually, O’Reilly did issue a statement: “Those long-haired, hygiene-hating liberal hippies in Indiana, long known as a terrorist-supporting blue-state bastion of secular progressives, once again resort to responding to my issuances of immutable truths with the sort of shrill, bomb-hurling, crudely bombastic politics of personal destruction practiced since time immemorial by left-leaning, Satan-worshipping tree huggers. Nonetheless, being on the side of wrong will eventually catch up to them, as the Forces of Good, with me on their side, will smite them with the Sword of Righteousness, and they shall wither and die, melting into their own putrescence, their final seconds of cognizance to be spent realizing and ruing the blight they have been to this planet.”

He concluded, “Nyah, nyah, dweebs.”

I’m not sure why a press release for an ad campaign merits 900 words in a mainstream newspaper, but anyway, they’re changing the Maytag repairman, a strategy somewhat over-dramatically described as “tricky” and not “without risk.”

Apparently, that Maytag repairman has been collecting a paycheck for doing nothing for a full 40 years, though I can’t remember seeing him moping about since I was a kid. But anyway, here’s the drastic change: Instead of sitting around waiting in vain for a phone call that will never come imploring him to come fix a faulty washing machine, like a Madison-Avenue production of “Waiting for Godot,” the guy’s going to be more enterprising and try his hand at fixing other appliances not made by his employer.

"The new repairman is no longer fatalistic, but optimistic," reports some guy who’s paid by Maytag to explain very simple concepts to extremely dim people.

Well, that’s genius. Wasn’t the whole point of the Maytag repairman his sad-sackiness? Wasn’t his eternal existential crisis what set him apart from all the other TV pitchmen, his bleak understanding of life’s quixotic truism that one person’s ecstasy translates into another’s agony? Now he’s just another glad-handing goofball in a landscape filled with them.

Oh, and kudos to the story for wandering off-message about halfway through for a non-sequitur about a commercial aimed “to signal younger consumers that Dairy Queen has a sense of humor about dairy products behaving like people.” But then, who doesn’t?

The New York Times’ Bill Carter, the best-connected journalist covering the TV industry, recently offered up this marshmallow confection of a story: Old episodes of what we now indisputably understand to be lame old shows like “Starsky & Hutch,” “Charlie’s Angels” and “T.J. Hooker” will soon find a new life online with “minisodes” of old shows cut down to between three and five minutes in length. Per Carter:

“As Steve Mosko, the president of Sony Television, described it, ‘So in “Charlie Angels,” they have a meeting, Charlie’s on the intercom telling them what the assignment is, there’s a couple of fights, and then a chase, and they catch the bad guy. Then they’re back home wrapping it up.’”

And:

“‘T. J. Hooker,’ an especially formulaic cop show ... can be seen in short bursts of action as William Shatner interrogates suspects, fires shots and chases bad guys. ‘Shatner is just hilarious,’ Mr. Mosko said. … ‘It’s really campy and fun.’ … What he would like it to be as well is lucrative.”

Three contradictory yet somewhat divergent thoughts:

* It’s a good idea, because history has decreed those shows to be crap, and three-to-five minutes of each one is about all anyone today should be able to stand and laugh at.

* It’s a stupid idea, because history has decreed those shows to be crap, and after you’ve seen one or two or maybe, for the particularly dim, three minisodes of these formulaic junkers, you’ve pretty much gotten the idea that every episode was pretty much the same and there’ll be no need to bother with the remaining dozens that’ll be available online.

* Who cares? Because history has decreed those shows to be crap, and YouTube and all the other online video libraries are downloading plenty of brand new fresh crap into the pants of the Internets for our edification every damn day. (Not to mention the scads of fun and actually interesting stuff that the laws of physics decrees we won't possibly be able to get to.)

“We’re not overthinking the process,” Mosko told Carter. “You could almost look at this and say a group of college kids put this together.”

High praise indeed. Too bad we all didn’t videotape every time during our college days we emptied the contents of our stomachs into toilets: It’d be just as nostalgic, and have almost as much entertainment value.

I’m not sure what the point is of presenting ideas to advertisers that are merely under consideration for airing, but some cable networks do it at their upfronts. Perhaps it’s just the chance to quote Bill Clinton’s immortal words to Chris Wallace: “At least I tried. That’s the difference in me and some, including all the right-wingers who are attacking me now. They ridiculed me for trying. … I tried. So I tried and failed.”

Today, A&E, in a marvelous show of smoke and mirrors, unveiled nearly as many shows that they won’t ever air as those that they will. A&E used to stand for Arts & Entertainment, but, since the network trucks largely in rancid reality programming like “Intervention,” “Gene Simmons’ Family Jewels” and “Dog the Bounty Hunter,” I believe it now means @ssholes & Exploitation. Anyway, here’re the shows we know A&E will be presenting in the near future:

A miniseries version of “The Andromeda Strain,” based on Michael Crichton’s prescient-ish novel about killer viruses and plagues, not to be construed as a metaphor for A&E programming.

Unless, of course, you’re specifically talking about “The Two Coreys,” a reality show I’m fairly certain no one has been clamoring for, starring those heartthrobs of undiscerning fans of bad ’80s teenflicks, Corey Haim and Corey Feldman. Haim moves in with Feldman and his wife; hilarity no doubt ensues as in that steaming cinematic pile known as “You, Me & Dupree” (22% on the Tomatometer). Honest: That’s the level A&E hopes this series aspires to.

“Crime 360” – No idea what this is about, but from A&E’s description it’s a reality show about crime-solving in which the CGI graphics are far more important than the investigations themselves.

“The Rookies” – In this rather grim-sounding reality series, hastily prepared rookie cops take on the mean streets of post-Katrina Louisiana, where the crime rate (particularly the murder rate) has risen exponentially since the disaster. Why didn’t they send those “Armed & Famous” guys into this shooting gallery?

“Paranormal State” – A&E rips off Sci Fi Channel’s “Ghost Busters,” but that’s OK, because Sci Fi Channel has already ripped themselves off (we discussed “Destination Truth” last week), opening the floodgates to imitators.

“Confessions of a Matchmaker” – Namely, matchmaking doesn’t work? Reality fodder featuring a “raw,” “brutally honest” (read that: obnoxious as hell) matchmaker who takes money from lonely people desperate enough to find anyone of the opposite sex nominally attractive and introduces them willy-nilly.

Now, onto the other shows A&E proudly announced today, so proudly, in fact, they may never allow them to see the light of day:

“The Pendletons” – Spinoff of A&E’s reality-tattooing epic “Inked,” which was so successful its lead character, Thomas Pendleton, left the show. Now, A&E’s intrepid cameras follows the guy as he wanders aimlessly around America with a mobile-tattooing bus service.

“Good in the Hood” – Ice Cube produces this look at the positive side of inner-city gangs; namely, some of them eventually feel remorse and try to atone for their behavior.

The following are scripted shows in development at A&E, with an eye toward one reaching the schedule:

“THE CLEANER” – You know how sometimes, when someone has one of those life-changing epiphanies and it really turns them around, they come to the conclusion that their answer is the only correct one and that everyone in the world could benefit from what helped them, and so they become utterly unbearable in trying to hammer their values into you with a messianic zeal that lacks the understanding that not everyone has to behave or believe in the same way? (Examples: Pope Urban II, George W. Bush.) Well, that’s what we have here, a drama based on a real-life "Extreme Interventionist" who cleans up people’s lives “by any means necessary.”

“THE BEAST” – A&E calls this “in the spirit of ‘Training Day,’” but based upon its description, it should probably just be referred to as “a rip-off of ‘Training Day,’ period.”

“HOMESTEAD” – ABC Family already does this. It’s called “Lincoln Heights.”

“TAKEDOWN” – Fox already does this, only from the flipside perspective. It’s called “Prison Break.”

“UNDER” – A former mobster becomes a member of NYPD. Sounds a little like "The Departed." Maybe A&E should just stick to reality.

No other show has lasted as long on broadcast network with ratings as low as “Veronica Mars.” When it was renewed for a second season, UPN president Dawn Ostroff declared the show was returning thanks to momentum from critical acclaim and fan word of mouth. It basically duplicated the lame numbers as season one. When it was renewed for a third season, The CW president Dawn Ostroff said now that it had a dream lead-in in “Gilmore Girls,” it was set to take off. Again, it didn’t.

But that hasn’t stopped the dreamers at WatchVeronicaMars.net from launching yet another scheme to save their favorite show: Littering. Yes, they papered four cities (all major media markets, where you’d think folks’d’ve had the chance to hear about “VM” if they were truly interested, and not smaller markets, where the show probably doesn’t get much attention) with 30,000 flyers, and invited fans to download, print and distribute even more.

When was the last time you paid attention to a flyer? And given that “VM” needs a bounce of a good 1, 2 million viewers (or – a 50-100% ratings boost) for The CW to be able to justify bringing the show back, just what are 30,000 flyers going to manage except killing trees in vain?

Ah, well, Veronica returns tonight at 9 for her swan song in some stand-alone episodes, as opposed to the serialized story arcs ignored by the majority of the populace. (Note that The CW did not send out screeners to critics in a last-gasp effort to save the show, as NBC did all season in efforts to keep “30 Rock” and “Friday Night Lights” alive.) Memo to “VM” fans: Good shows die all the time, so you should consider yourself lucky that some quirk in the time-space continuum kept this one on for as long as it managed.

At least no one’s mounted a campaign to save “According to Jim.”