September 2007 Archives

Yes, of course Edie’s apparent suicide at the end of last season was a cheat.

Sometimes it seems as though the “Desperate Housewives” plot generator is a simple wheel that the writing staff spins, and a wheel with a rather limited number of options, at that:

* A husband is a jerk;
* Adulterous proclivities;
* Getting divorced;
* Miserable about being divorced;
* Meeting a new guy;
* A hitch in meeting the new guy;
* Getting tight with the new guy;
* Getting remarried (repeat from top);

And, when those get tiresome:

* Pregnancy scare/Kids are a problem;
* Potentially life-threatening incident;
* Mysterious new neighbor moves in.

When they’re really feeling adventurous, a writer may wander off this rather cramped reservation, but mainly, they seem to stick with the tried-and-true.

Most of the above figure into tonight’s fourth-season premiere of TV’s one-time primary water-cooler show, regardless of whether there’s any proper character motivation or not. And though there is much incident tonight, there’s nothing here that really grabs you.

Edie (Nicolette Sheridan) faked her suicide merely to sink her claws into Carlos (Richard Chavira), who wanted to run away with Gaby (Eva Longoria), who discovered her new husband Victor (John Slattery) is merely exploiting her role as his wife for political gain. But Carlos hacks off Gaby by sticking with Edie during her recuperation; despite her ostensibly weakened state, Edie’s soon channeling some nifty “Fatal Attraction” manipulations to lure Carlos deeper into her trap.

Meanwhile, Lynette (Felicity Huffman) doesn’t want to tell anyone she has cancer, which complicates several situations. Bree (Marcia Cross), who for some reason is faking a pregnancy with Orson (Kyle MacLachlan), has a couple of really stupid close calls in which her deception is almost discovered. Susan (Teri Hatcher) is already worried that her marriage to Mike (James Denton) isn’t absolutely perfect, repeatedly and blitheringly complaining, “We’re doomed.” (Note to Susan: Look up the phrase “self-fulfilling prophecy.”)

But the big news is that Wisteria Lane has a new resident – Katherine (Dana Delany), who moved away a dozen years ago and returns with a new husband and a daughter, Dylan (Lyndsy Fonseca), who doesn’t remember anything about her childhood there, but has a recurring nightmare that obviously will manifest itself over the course of the upcoming season. Katherine proves herself adept at making friends by insisting that Bree, the first time they meet, cut down a pine tree in her yard so its shade won’t block Katherine’s “prize-winning” vegetable garden.

Huh, and double-huh? Bree declares said pine tree one of her proudest possessions – I don’t watch this show regularly, but I don’t recall this tree even having been mentioned in any episode I have seen. (Bree has so many prized possessions.) And: Does the sun only come from one direction throughout the day on Wisteria Lane? Does it not arc across the sky so that said tree would only block this garden for a relatively short period of time? I mean, really: Is cutting down a tree going to become a plot point this season? If so, I’m looking forward to “Family Guy’s” gritty realism in the same timeslot.

At episode’s end, Katherine’s husband asks her: “Did we make a mistake coming back here?” She responds, “Did we have a choice?”

This exchange sounds like nothing less than a roundelay from the writers’ room:

Writer 1: “Did we make a mistake revisiting the disastrous Alfre Woodard subplot from season two?”

Writer 2: “We’re out of ideas – do we have a choice?”

- “Desperate Housewives:” 9 tonight; ABC Channel 7 (outside L.A.; check local listings).

Under Ben Silverman’s visionary guidance, NBC has embarked upon a bold new initiative: Signaling defeat by raising the white flags of uninspired remakes of dubious old programs.

Quite a while back, NBC announced its intentions to resurrect “American Gladiators” (which will only work if they bring back the guy in this clip, with the same hair but ideally with a huge beer gut). Here’s guessing they’ll ramp up the “extreme” elements and incorporate, WWE-style, leather-clad, evil gladiators to fully bring the moronic concept into the 21st century (not realizing that simply by being a moronic concept, it’ll fit into the 21st century just fine).

This past week, NBC announced it would be remaking “Knight Rider,” the old Hasselhoff humiliation about a guy with a talking car. Only not really – in the OnStar Age, talking cars are a dime a dozen (well, actually more like $278,388.86 a dozen, but you get the point), and since buying the rights to the “Transformers” franchise would’ve been too costly, they’re calling it “Knight Rider” and having the cars able to morph into different things in a fashion that NBC hopes will be just different enough to keep the intellectual-property-rights lawyers at bay. No doubt this re-imagining will strive more for cool than campy, like this year’s “Bionic Woman” redux.

Yes, this is the sort of thing that NBC, whose motto was once upon a time “The Quality Shows,” is trotting out for viewers these days. They couldn’t be any more pointed in their attitude toward their viewers if they just aired something called “The Bird,” a frenetically edited hour of extended middle fingers bursting from your TV screen.

And so, in that spirit, I offer yet another updated remake for NBC: “The Gong Show,” Chuck Barris’s ritualistic mortification of a talent show, but with an exciting new component in keeping with our times that will truly measure how desperate people are to get on Television.

It will still feature the same sort of bizarro-world performers, but instead of a gong, the judges will have a newer, high-tech means of putting an end to an abysmal act. Even over-zealous law-enforcement officers have embraced this new method of stopping people whose act has grown tiresome, and viewers seem to enjoy watching this means of tough-love dispensed. Hence, I present you with NBC’s new hit show: “Taser the Talent.”

Ben, give me a call. We can have this puppy on the air by January.

Your Mayor was powering his way through four hours of Showtime’s “Dexter” Wednesday when news of a mistrial in the Phil Spector case came down. Which made me think: Too bad “Dexter’s” not one of those ripped-from-the-headlines sort of shows, because Dexter’s all about taking care of those who elude the traditional criminal-justice system so Phil Spector is totally the sort of guy that Dexter would be leaving bits of at the bottom of the ocean.

And Dexter works out of Miami, so how is it that O.J.’s still around to rough up memorabilia collectors?

Last year at this time, ABC was seriously challenging CBS for dominance on Thursdays, one of the most competitive nights of the week, given that advertising rates are at their highest due to all the movie studios angling to sell their movies opening the next day and everyone else is hoping to lure viewers into massive paroxysms of consumption over the impending weekend.

This year, ABC’s backed off a bit. CBS is squarely in the driver’s seat, with “Survivor,” “CSI” and “Without a Trace” all dominant.

Part of the problem is the viewer attrition ABC’s Thursday shows have suffered – both “Ugly Betty” and “Grey’s Anatomy” hemorrhaged 5 million viewers from their season premieres last year. “Betty” still had 11 million viewers, and “Grey’s” 20.5m, so they’re hardly out of the running, but they clearly have already peaked and are now just playing out the remainder of their runs.

Worse, “Big Shots,” the only new show to debut last night, managed to hold onto just over half of the audience ceded it by “Grey’s Anatomy.” Worser, it didn’t even manage the premiere audience that the quickly cancelled “Six Degrees” managed in the same time slot last year. Worsest, a whopping three million viewers decided they had seen enough a half-hour in and snapped off their set or resigned themselves to watching yet another episode of “ER” or just killed themselves in anguish.

NBC had a smidgen of good news: “The Office,” moved to the most competitive timeslot in all of TV, had the highest ratings in the lusted-after 18-49 demographic in its history. And Jim and Pam are totally doing it!

ABC’s not sending out screeners of “Cavemen,” and since the original pilot sent out in the spring has been retooled, critics won’t be able to review the show next Tuesday off of that. While containing your incredulity, pick your own favorite excuse for said oversight:

* Still fine-tuning the premiere episode.
* Production delays due to recasting and reshoots.
* Not sending out screeners worked so well for “Kid Nation.”
* Oh, who are we fooling: Creating and sending out screeners for a show that jumps the shark in its first frame and will likely end up on the season’s scrapheap by November sweeps is just throwing bad money after good.

Late arrival to the doorstep: Tonight’s episodes of “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia,” in which Dee (Kaitlin Olson) discovers that the biggest loser from her high-school class has transformed, which makes Dee herself the biggest loser from her high-school class, followed by the gang going nuclear against a competing Korean bar and grill.

In the former, the gang starts a sweat shop creating hideous dresses and Dennis (Glenn Howerton) – who was considered a cool kid in high school – forever disabuses anyone of that notion ever again. In the latter, the competing bar’s androgenous owner bears a striking resemblance to Kim Jung-Il, Charlie (Charlie Day) dodges felony charges (but just barely) and there’s a pretty tired “American Idol” parody, with Dee sitting in as the soused Paula Abdul (and that’s not even the most abject thing that happens to her tonight).

Line of the night: “You smell like dogfight.”

- “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia: 10 and 10:30 tonight, FX.

The astonishing thing about Bill O’Reilly’s latest case of foot-in-mouth disease is, he genuinely doesn’t understand what the problem is regarding his comments about how surprised he was to find a Harlem restaurant to actually be civilized.

This is a guy who is paid to have opinions; to have opinions worth airing, it generally helps if one is a little educated in the ways of the world. Instead, O’Reilly’s comments suggests that everything he knows about black culture has come from rap videos and ’70s blaxploitation flicks, that it was something of an act of courage for him to venture into Sylvia’s that night for he truly feared that he wasn’t going to exit the joint without a cap in his @ss.

"I couldn't get over the fact that there was no difference between Sylvia's restaurant and any other restaurant in New York City," Billo declared on his radio show last week. "It was exactly the same, even though it's run by blacks [and has a] primarily black patronship. It was the same. And that's really what this society is really all about now here in the U.S.A. There's no difference."

For good measure, he added, "There wasn't one person in Sylvia's who was screaming, 'MF-er, I want some more ice tea.' It was like going into an Italian restaurant in an all-white suburb in the sense of people were sitting there ordering and having fun and there wasn't any craziness at all."

Multi-culturalism is not Bill’s strong suit, but O’Reilly insists that anyone who doesn’t see his words as progressive and inclusive is stupid:

"If you listened to the full hour, it was a criticism of racism on the part of white Americans who are ignorant of the fact that there is no difference between white and black anymore," he told the AP. "Circumstances may be different in their lives but we're all Americans. Anyone who would be offended by that conversation would have to be looking to be offended."

How many Americans does Falafel Guy think don’t realize that black America isn’t some unhinged society defined solely by Thunderbird and dog-fighting, anyway? Does Bill think he ventured boldly into the belly of the beast and emerged with a bulletin – Hey, black people are just like you and me! – that would amaze the country and result in a Kum-ba-yah moment between the races?

OK, let’s try this in a way O’Reilly might understand:

I absolutely cannot believe how refreshing Bill O’Reilly is in his take on African-Americans! Unlike all those other rich, white middle-aged guys, Bill O’Reilly doesn’t make a show of waving around nooses or Confederate flags or eyeing black people with an unmistakable fear welling in his eyes! Yes, Bill may have called those stranded in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina “drug-addicted” “thugs,” but all the other wealthy, middle-aged white guys would’ve called them f@cking drug-addicted thugs, and would’ve personally gone down to the Big Easy to shoot them! Unlike all the other rich, middle-aged white guys, Bill O’Reilly has never personally lynched a black man!

There’s hope for the white race yet if a fine and decent, open-minded soul like Bill O’Reilly, as opposed to all the other rich, white middle-aged men, doesn’t want to systematically exterminate the black race!

See, Bill? It wasn’t that you reported that Sylvia’s offers a pleasant dining experience. It was that you sounded like you were pretty much expecting patrons to be unruly and constantly shout out, “MF-er, I want some more iced tea.”

At least he didn’t expect the patrons to say, “MF-er, get me another 40.”

Last I checked, “Ugly Betty” was a comedy. Of course, last time I checked, characters weren’t the targets of senseless violence or falling into comas following graphic car accidents or wondering who their biological parents were or having their hearts broken by weasels who may have impregnated other women.

All of which is occurring as season two gets under way. Sure, they can make time enough for Betty (Emmy winner America Ferrera) to clomp her way into another glass door, and they can put Amanda (Becki Newton) in a whimsical fat suit and they can further perpetuate Justin’s (Mark Indelicato) latent homosexuality. But they’re also milking the tragedy of Hilda’s (Ana Ortiz) fiance’s murder and still running Wilhelmina’s (Vanessa Williams) obsession with controlling Mode magazine into the ground with ever-grasping plot mechanics that viewers – and even Wilhelmina herself – can see through.

Betty’s dad Ignacio (Tony Plana) remains stranded in Mexico, thereby appearing via rote phone conversations. Daniel’s (Eric Mabius) still mopey about the car accident – really, does anyone really buy Daniel in soulful mode? And Alexis (Rebecca Romijn) awakens from her coma with a plot spoiler so mehhh it’s not worth spoiling.

Honestly: “Ugly Betty” is in danger of forgetting its joie de vivre, its appealing charm, in favor of the overheated melodrama of the telenovelas it parodies. There’s only one good laugh, and it comes in the middle of a heavy-handed scene:

Mode’s shooting a fashion spread of women who have survived natural disasters; Sheila (Illeana Douglas) mistakes Betty for one of the victims. Betty launches into an earnest tirade, declaring, “These women have lost everything and there is not enough styling gel to change that.”

Deadpan, Sheila replies, “She’s right – we don’t have enough styling gel.”

C’mon, “Ugly Betty,” lighten up, or you won’t get to compete in the comedy categories at next year’s Emmys.

- “Ugly Betty:” 8 tonight, ABC Channel 7.

Finally, a couple of new shows had ratings that won’t have the networks flop-sweating and dry-heaving the season away. ABC’s “Private Practice’s” success was a foregone conclusion, and “Bionic Woman” was considered NBC’s best chance at a hit, and neither disappointed.

ABC’s “Dancing with the Stars” continues to be the juggernaut of the new season, pulling down 16.62 million viewers Wednesday.

That sent the new shows reeling: “Kid Nation" was down 1.75 million viewers, to 7.6m. CBS was hoping to cash in on the controversy, but this is an Adult Nation that has tuned out the avalanche of scandal emanating from Washington; skirting child-labor laws is small potatoes. Fox’s “Back to You” suffered even greater viewer attrition, losing nearly 2 million viewers, down to 7.5 million – less, even, than “Kid Nation.” “’Til Death’s” renewal is looking ever more dubious: 6.2m sat through the slapsticky basketball stylings of Brad Garrett. Someone want to give the four-camera sitcom a decent Viking funeral?

The real showdown came at 9 p.m., with everyone except Fox and The CW able to cheer. “Private Practice,” the “Grey’s Anatomy” spinoff, won the hour, of course, with 14.24 viewers, but “Bionic Woman” proved to be sturdier than some people expected – it was close behind with 13.6 million sets of eyeballs, human or bio-engineered, and actually had a higher rating in the advertiser friendly viewers-aged-18-49 category.

Mandy Patinkin took a sizable chunk of viewers with him when he left CBS’s “Criminal Minds,” but it still managed 12.7 million fans of perversion.

The CW’s “Gossip Girl” is proving to be the surprise disappointment of the season: A mere 2.55m viewers, off nearly a third of the viewers who tuned in last week and retention of only about half of its lead-in. Sure, network executives and industry analysts looked at the show and said, spoiled rich teenagers having sex and going on the Internets and getting wasted and text-messaging on their cell phones and smoking bud – it can’t miss. But every once in a while, teens have a pretty good horsesh!t detector and so it seems to have gone here (also, the fact that it can be hard to tell the kids from the parents probably didn’t help; it may have in fact alienated young viewers that they didn’t actually see themselves in those characters).

Fox’s “Kitchen Nightmares” isn’t turning up the heat much: 5.4m viewers. I guess the nation’s restaurants will continue to be filthy, germ-infested toilets, as Gordon Ramsay’s mission to clean them up appears to have a rather short shelf life.

Things get tricky at 10 p.m. “CSI: New York” had the most viewers, 12.7m, but the third-place show, NBC’s barely-promoted “Life,” was No. 1 in the 18-49 demo. Which leaves ABC’s heavily-hyped “Dirty Sexy Money” the nominal disappointment – despite a more lurid premise and a much more high-profile cast, it barely had 300,000 more viewers than “Life,” and most of them were apparently Donald Sutherland-aged fogies who don’t buy things from advertisers.

On the other hand, “Dirty Sexy Money” had less viewer tune-out over the course of its hour than “Life” did. They both started out with 10.8m viewers, but “DSM” ended with 10.04m, while “Life” dropped to 9.5m.

I told you it was tricky.

This season, “My Name is Earl,” due to its storyline, has been renamed “My Name is Inmate 28301-016.”

Yes, Earl’s (Jason Lee) still in the slammer as the season begins, put there after confessing to ex-wife Joy’s (Jaime Pressly) crimes in last May’s season finale. Things aren’t going well for poor Earl: When his cellmate escapes, he’s treated to the obligatory beating from the guards. Early explains prison life thusly: “The only thing that alleviates the boredom is when one prisoner tries to kill another one.”

Hey, but you know what? In tonight’s hourlong episode, Earl’s storyline is pretty uninteresting and Joy’s – in which she brings Earl “a straight version of one of those AIDS quilts,” including a scene of her cheating on him, and offers to take care of Randy (Ethan Suplee), who gets, impressively, dumber by the episode (tonight, he’s clueless as to how to set his digital clock and forgets to look in any direction before crossing the street) – is the entertaining one.

(It makes you wonder how Randy got by when Earl was married to Joy and therefore not on hand to help him cross every street, but that’s clearly nit-picking.)

And Earl? Earl’s helping a fellow inmate earn some Scout badges. What dreary whimsy.

No wonder Pressly has the Emmy.

- “My Name is Earl:” 8 tonight; NBC Channel 4.

We called this, though it was pretty much a no-brainer: Fox’s “Nashville” is the first casualty of the new season, getting yanked before most of the new shows even got a chance to debut.

Fox jokes that it’ll be back, maybe in October. Ha, ha: Good one, Fox guys.

Spencer Green, co-creator of the delightfully vulgar “Bukowsical!”, which hammered audiences at last month’s International Fringe Festival in New York, and sometime TV writer, assiduously crafts a Fall-TV schedule every year that tells you pretty much all you need to know about what the networks have cooked up for you in order to justify kicking your plasma screen to the curb.

He has thoughtfully shared this with me and, now, I with you. I, not Mr. Green, tidied up the language with little obscen-icons, for the children, which as you know are our future and thanks to efforts like mine and the Parents Television Council, this next generation will be the first to grow up in a world without profanity.

2007 FALL TV SCHEDULE by Spencer Green

MONDAY

8-9

ABC - Cleaning Adult Store Video Booths With the Stars
CBS - Okay, I Liked "Let's Go To The Mall"; Geeks Sure Are Awkward Around the Ladies, Am I Right?
NBC - Geeks Sure Know a Lot About Computers, Am I Right?
FOX - Shiv-o-Rama
PBS - Ken Burns' Wonderful World of Talking Heads and Slow Dissolves
CW - At Least It Keeps Chris Rock From Making Movies; Muslim Knows Best
VH1 - Teaching Men How to Become the @ssholes Who Appear On Shows Like This
Bravo - My Favorite Curse Word Is "Doodypants"
HBO - Maybe You Didn't Hear--"The Sopranos" Is Gone

9 - 10

ABC - Here's the Pitch: Amnesia Bitch!
CBS - So I'm Guessing Denise Richards Won't Be Dropping By As a Guest; Against the Laws of God and Nature, David Spade Still Gets Work
NBC - Geek Conundrum: Watch This or Wait In Line To Buy Halo 3?
FOX - George Bush Hates TV Shows About Black People
CW - No One Cares; No One Will Ever Care
HBO - Maybe You Didn't Hear--"The Sopranos" Is Gone

10 - 11

ABC - Let's Send Feminism Back to the Paleolithic Era
CBS - CSI: Souplantation
NBC - Time's Up
Showtime - Dave's Not Here, Man; Self-Absorbed, Self-Pitying L.A. Writer? Wait Until I Tell My Therapist!
HBO - Maybe You Didn't Hear--"The Sopranos" Is Gone

TUESDAY

8-9

ABC - The Tidy Bowl Man/Guy Who Says "That's a Spicy Meatball" Show; Four Guys Who Like Buttered Squash
CBS - When This Runs Longer Than "JAG," Let Me Know So I Can Buy a Cake
NBC - Give Them All Stomach Staples And Be Done With It
FOX - Just F@ck Each Other Already
PBS - Ken Burns' Wonderful World of Soothing Voice-Overs
CW - If One of the Beauties Sucks Off a Geek While Dressed as a Green Orion Slave Woman, Then I'll Tune In
HDNet - Dan Rather Bumps Into Walls and Mutters Salty Texas Colloquialisms Under His Breath
HBO - Maybe You Didn't Hear--"The Sopranos" Is Gone

9 - 10

ABC - Cleaning Adult Store Video Booths With the Stars, in Slow-Motion
CBS - Heh, Heh…Unit
NBC - And TV Execs Wonder Why No One Watches the Big Three Anymore
FOX - I Bet He Fakes His Injuries to Get Respect, Like Don Caballero
CW - Captain Howdy, That Isn't Very Nice
HBO - Maybe You Didn't Hear--"The Sopranos" Is Gone

10 - 11

ABC - Steven Bochco Can't Get a Show On TV and This Is Still Running?
CBS - "Dallas" With Plantains
NBC - Law & Order: Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport Men's Bathroom Unit
Current TV - If Al Gore Wins a Grammy and a Tony, He'll Get Both Showcases Plus Ten Percent Off at Any Lenscrafters
HBO - Maybe You Didn't Hear--"The Sopranos" Is Gone

WEDNESDAY

8-9

ABC - See Me, Feel Me, Touch Me, Kill Me
CBS - Any Show Where Kids Drink Bleach Is Okay By Me
NBC - Ah, For the Days of "Card Sharks"
FOX - The Return of Good Old-Fashioned Multi-Camera Sitcoms For the Three People Who Give a Sh!t; Joely Fisher's T!ts Detach and Fight Crime
PBS - Say What You Want But Their Generation Really Does Make Us Look Like the Candy-@sses That We Are
CW - Bulimia Squad--In Color!
HBO - Maybe You Didn't Hear--"The Sopranos" Is Gone

9 - 10

ABC - S-P-I-N-O-F-F, That's How We Spell Ratings Death!
CBS - Apparently On TV, the Only Jobs Available Are Detectives and Profilers
NBC - Manimal 3.0
FOX - Take One @sshole Chef, Mix With Hapless Restaurant Owners, Stir, Then Cancel
CW - America Loves Rich @sshole Teens More Than Life Itself
HBO - Maybe You Didn't Hear--"The Sopranos" Is Gone

10 - 11

ABC - Loathsome Repellent Scumbags, AKA Marking Time Until "Lost" Returns
CBS - CSI: Marienbad
NBC - Word on the Street Is Three Weeks
Bravo - But, Can They Make Hasenpfeffer?
BET - Remember: These Criminals Will Not Be Glorified, I Repeat These Criminals Will Not Be Glorified
Comedy Central - Have They Done an Anti-Zoroastrianism Episode Yet?; She's Post-Modern, Hip-Ironic, Faux-Jew-Nihilistic, Quasi-Pseudo-Anti-Pro-Feminist…Oh, We Give Up
HBO - Maybe You Didn't Hear--"The Sopranos" Is Gone

THURSDAY

8-9

ABC - Dios De Mio! Es Todavía En Televisión!
CBS - Survivor: Fraggle Rock
NBC - #254 On List: Try To Be Funny Once In a While; Apparently I'm the Only One Who Thinks Tracy Morgan Has Less Talent Than Hand Soap
FOX - Are You Lazier Than a Network Executive?
CW - It's Been Seven Years--Does He Work for "The Daily Planet" Yet?
Sundance Channel - Celebrities Gaze Deeply Into Each Other's Eyes
HBO - Maybe You Didn't Hear--"The Sopranos" Is Gone

9 - 10

ABC - If Anyone Resembling a Doctor On This Show Ever Got Near Me, I Would Gladly Perform My Own Colonoscopy
CBS - CSI: Guernica
NBC - Jenna Fischer's Single and She's Mine, Do You Hear Me? Mine!; Flatline
FOX - I Said, Are You Lazier Than a Network Executive?
CW - They're Coming For You, Barbara! They're Coming For You!
HBO - Maybe You Didn't Hear--"The Sopranos" Is Gone

10 - 11

ABC - Guys Doing Guy Things (With Guys)
CBS - Maybe They Can Find My Career
NBC - It's Dead, Jim
AMC - You Mean, Ad Execs Aren't Nice? I, For One, Am Shocked
USA - Law & Order: Sh!tty Cable Slot
Bravo - Why the Whole World Thinks We're Gay
HBO - Maybe You Didn't Hear--"The Sopranos" Is Gone

FRIDAY

8-9

ABC - 20/20: Watch John Stossel Get Miffed About…Well, Something
CBS - Go Into the Light, I Beg You
NBC - Ah, For the Days of "You're In The Picture"
FOX - Reality Show + Wannabe Bands = My Soul Withering
CW - At Least It's Not the "X Games"
Country Music Television - Gimme a "T!" Gimme an "A!"; Customize Your Noose Collection **
HBO - Maybe You Didn't Hear--"The Sopranos" Is Gone

9 - 10

ABC - They Fight Crime…And They're Chicks!
CBS - This Sucks Literally, Figuratively, and Spectacularly
NBC - Oh Yes, Putting It On At This Hour Will Definitely Increase Ratings
FOX - Reality Show + Country Music = My Colon Exploding
Lifetime - For Those Who Miss Uri Geller
HBO - Maybe You Didn't Hear--"The Sopranos" Is Gone

10 - 11

ABC - I Forget--Is Anne Heche Gay Again, Or Is She Just Nuts?
CBS - We Ran Out of Actual Serial Killers In This Country About Two Seasons Ago
NBC - Call Me Sentimental But I Always Like to See Tom Selleck Get Work
Sci-Fi - Stargate Hyannis Port
HBO - Maybe You Didn't Hear--"The Sopranos" Is Gone

SATURDAY

8-9

ABC - Christening Our Future Overpaid Steroid Abusers Today
CBS - Crimetime Saturday: The First Time I Laid Eyes on Terry Lennox He Was Drunk In a Rolls-Royce Silver Wraith Outside the Terrace of the Dancers
NBC - Dateline NBC: Second Word, Third Syllable, Sounds Like "Ear"
FOX - We Run Out of Toothless Vagrants and Start Setting Houses on Fire
PBS - Allo, Guv'nah!; Knickers and Crumpets, Eh?
CW - Movie: "The Snuggler" (1979, Jill Clayburgh, Steve Railsback, Dennis Christopher)
HBO - Maybe You Didn't Hear--"The Sopranos" Is Gone

9 - 10

FOX - You're Home On Saturday Night? You Deserve This
PBS - Something Even the CHUBB Group Couldn't Fund
HBO - Maybe You Didn't Hear--"The Sopranos" Is Gone

10 - 11

CBS - 48 Hours Mystery: When Will Katie Couric Replace Julie Chen on "Big Brother"?
FOX - Occasionally, I Still Get a Residual Check From This So God Bless
HBO - Maybe You Didn't Hear--"The Sopranos" Is Gone

SUNDAY

8-9

ABC - Advanced Tear Milking
CBS - What Happens in Laughlin Should Most Definitely Stay in Laughlin
NBC - Barely Disguised Homoeroticism for Middle America
FOX - Ralph Wiggum: Male Prostitute; Monsignor Martinez Should Get His Own Movie
CW - Bored Free
HBO - Maybe You Didn't Hear--"The Sopranos" Is Gone

9 - 10

ABC - The Last Person Who Watched This Killed Herself When "Weekly World News" Folded
CBS - Let's Combine Every Criminal Procedural Into One Super Show So We Can Have More Room for Reality Shows About Teens
FOX - Please Tell Me There Will Be No Movie From This; Same Thing
CW - We Repeat Our Fine Programming In Case You Didn't Ignore It the First Time Around
Showtime - People…People Who Kill People…
VH1 - Casting Our Net Into the Bottomless Sinkhole of Pop Culture and Seeing What Sticks
We - Let's Send Feminism Back to --Wait, What Comes Before the Paleolithic Era?
HBO - Maybe You Didn't Hear--"The Sopranos" Is Gone

10 - 11

ABC - They Put the "Please Shut the F@ck Up" In "Dysfunctional"
CBS - James Woods Reads the Phonebook, Figuratively Speaking
VH1 - Hangin' with Jeremy Gelbwaks
HBO - Maybe You Didn't Hear--"The Sopranos" Is Gone

** Jena 6! No Justice, No Peace!

As it is in the Red Sox and Yankee locker rooms, Champagne remains on ice at the networks as they’re hoping to celebrate the first solid hit of the new season; “underwhelming" continues to be the word to describe the fall season. The only thing doing spectacularly well thusfar is “Dancing with the Stars.”

CBS is trumpeting the fact that “Cane” had the highest ratings the network has had 10 p.m. on Tuesdays since 1999. True, but that was still only 120,000 more people than watched the premiere of “Smith” last season, and “Smith” was done after three episodes. “Cane” lost 950,000 viewers from its first half hour to its second, not the most encouraging of signs.

Results were mixed for The CW’s “Reaper:” 3.2 million tuned in, which is actually less than what “Veronica Mars” lured last season but more than its wan lead-in, “Beauty and the Geek.” “VM” never improved on its lead-in – heck, it never retained its lead-in audience. If “Reaper” had a stronger show in front of it, it no doubt would do much better. So: First pickup for the entire season? Given how The CW is doing elsewhere, why not?

Other returning shows are shedding viewers as ratings fell from last fall. Even with “Dancing” as a lead-in, “Boston Legal” had 1 million fewer viewers than last year. “The Unit” and “House” also lost a million fans, though “House” still had 18.13m and “The Unit” only 10.7m. “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit” lost nearly 2.5m, with 12.1m still watching.

“NCIS” and “Bones” had ratings similar to their debuts last year.

The networks have asked me to extend the following message to you: Watch more television, eh? You think they’re making these monumentally expensive programs out of the goodness of their hearts?

If you’re looking for diversity in programming this season, look no further than ABC (Always Be Caucasian). The network has a flurry of shows appealing to the vast socioeconomic divide represented in its executive ranks, from the appallingly privileged to pampered, overpaid white men to affluent females.

Just take a gander at the panoply of messages sent out by the network’s fall roster:

“Desperate Housewives:” “We’re all beautiful and pampered and vapid. But we can complain too.”

“Brothers & Sisters:” “It’s hard being rich and fabulous.”

“Dancing with the Stars:” “Just because we’re wealthy and washed-up doesn’t mean we can’t have dreams, too.”

“Carpoolers:” “Sure, our lives are comfortable, but that doesn’t mean we’re not utter, thoroughgoing boobs.”

“Boston Legal:” “Lawyers are people, too. OK, well, not technically, but if you do tissue samples, you’ll find we’re very similar to humans.”

“Private Practice:” “California beachfront property doesn’t pay for itself! It’s hard being rich and fabulous!”

“Dirty Sexy Money:” “Haven’t you watched ‘Brothers & Sisters’ or ‘Private Practice?’ It’s f@&#ing hard being rich and fabulous!”

“Ugly Betty:” “Don’t hate us because we’re beautiful. Don’t hate us because we earn more than our IQ’s would suggest we deserve. Don’t hate us because we’re blitheringly superficial – look, just don’t hate us, period, OK?”

“Grey’s Anatomy:” “Just because it seems like we shouldn’t have any problems doesn’t mean we can’t whine incessantly.”

“Big Shots:” “So we’re white men. So we run the planet. In our minds, that just gives us more license to whine about how tough our lives are.”

“Men in Trees:” “Everyone knows that wildly successful self-help gurus are amongst the emotionally neediest people on the planet, so just deal already, OK?”

“Cashmere Mafia” (coming in November): “Yes, we’re women who shattered the glass ceiling. But we still have needs, dammit, and one of those needs is to whine about the one or two things our lives are still lacking that would make them perfect!”

We interrupt this week's regularly scheduled Valentine to "Mad Men" with some actual news: AMC has renewed the series for a second season, and the Paley Center for Media (formerly the Museum of TV and Radio) will be honoring the show on Oct. 10 at 7 p.m. with a program entitled "Smoke and Sympathy: A Toast to 'Mad Men.'" Creator Matthew Weiner and most of the cast will be there to accept your accolades. Tickets $25 at 310-786-1091.

And now, back to our regular fawning.

This week, Don (Jon Hamm) proves not to be so bullet-proof after all: He loses the Dr. Scholl's contract to rival firm Leo Burnett, as Pete (Vincent Kartheiser) - who really needs to tone down the Schadenfreude or Don's gonna clock him - almost giddily informs him.

"The day you sign a client is the day you start losing them," Roger (John Slattery) tells Don philosophically. Then, to cheer him up: "Let's go fire someone."

And because Joan (Christina Hendricks) turned down his offer of a weekend in Cuba, Roger takes Don out to drown his sorrows. Which, if you know Roger, you understand what that will entail. "When God closes a door, he opens a dress," Roger, clearly hoping to gain entry into Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, thoughtfully muses.

So Roger picks a pair of twin models out of a casting call for an aluminum-siding ad and is angling for a threesome; suffice it to say, things don't go as planned. The episode, as usual, ends with a wickedly dark and funny moment as Roger proves once again he's the manliest pathetic guy on all of Television.

Elsewhere, Joan's getting busy her own self.

You sort of have to wonder what HBO was thinking when they let this show get away: The pilot script was what got Weiner hired by David Chase to work on "The Sopranos," so executives there had it just sitting around for six years and did nothing with it. Instead, they went with (among other things) the naughtier and whinier "Tell Me You Love Me which, for all its nudity and graphically staged sex, hasn't pulled (so to speak) the audience or the acclaim that "Mad Men" has. "Mad Men" even manages to examine dysfunctional relationships as acutely as "TMYLM" does, but it has fun while doing so instead of going so morose about it. "Mad Men" also manages to do so much more with so much more verve, whereas "TMYLM" pretty much just pushes that one mopey button over and over.

Were it on HBO, it would be a much bigger hit, but kudos to AMC for realizing what a gem it has on its hands.

- "Mad Men:" 10 p.m. Thursday, AMC.

Your Mayor has received a number of calls in recent days regarding his coverage of the Ken Burns’ docu-epic “The War,” all of them responding to the sidebar story on the controversy over Burns’ not interviewing Latino soldiers for the 15-hour film until an outcry arose.

Three of them came early Sunday morning from one individual, who just kept calling and pretty much saying the same thing over and over: “What is the guy, an idiot or what? Sh!t. … Ah, man, what an @sshole. … I ain’t gonna watch it.”

Fair enough, but then said caller implied that I had something to do with the film, and started insulting me. “That oughta get you a little upset, won’t it? You probably won’t even respond. … @sshole.”

A few minutes later, he called back: “I’m sure you had some input. … What are you? Daily Breeze? L.A. Times?”

Well, you’re right, sir; I won’t respond, but mainly because you never left your name and couldn’t bother to confirm what news outlet I did the story for.

He may not have watched, but an estimated 15.5 million did on Sunday, with a total of 18.7 million when viewership of the repeat immediately after the premiere is figured in. That beat everything else on Sunday, except of course for football.

You’d expect something like “Prison Break” to feature storylines deeply suspicious of the government, but with “The Unit,” CBS’s heroic bad-asses united in a Delta Force-type band of uber-soldiers, you might hope for a vaguely patriotic bent, the notion that these guys are working outside the law in service of a greater good.

Nope. Even their own government sold them out at the end of last season, and now as season three opens, they’re scattered around the world, on the lam in lieu of being tried, ludicrously, for war crimes.

“The Unit” has always sort of ignored coherent plotting in deference to the nice moment, be it a well-turned epigram emanating from the sonorous Jonas Blain (Dennis Haysbert) or a spectacular action sequence.

And so it goes as the show returns tonight. “The Unit” stampedes into a genuinely dark place – where the government will sell out its best soldiers for p.r. purposes – though it’s not quite a thoroughly convincing storyline.

A foreign leader is blown to bits by a car bomb in downtown Washington, D.C. and the incident is ostensibly ignored by the mainstream media. Shuttering the Unit is vaguely credited to “big oil” or “big politics.” The conspiracy “goes beyond the Oval Office.” Col. Ryan’s (Robert Patrick) estranged wife Charlotte (Rebecca Pidgeon) sold out the Unit to advance her own career. Decomposed corpses tying into some conspiracy or another are resting on the ocean bottom. One Unit member (heh-heh – I said both “Unit” and “member”) is Gitmo-ized. And don’t forget the plucky, sexy Latina agent with her guns a-blazing down in Panama.

Despite this unhinged muddle, it’s serviceably exciting stuff. Somehow, the government forgot that these guys were assigned to an elite fighting force for a reason. It’s a battle, Jonas notes, fated to come down to “suicide by dogma – whoever we’re fighting cares about winning as much as we do.” These guys are so unflappably superior to everyone around them that they tamp down this latest threat to our republic in just two episodes, mopping up the conspiracy next week. Let’s see the “Prison Break” guys manage that.

Plus, it’s always fun to listen for the lines that were rewritten – or inspired – by David Mamet.

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

Like inveterate Midwesterners who only know how to do the stoic, stolid thing, viewers greeting the new TV season last night swarmed for the comfort food of familiar programming, eschewing the more exotic fare offered by the new shows.

Is that a simile, or what?

ABC won the evening, thanks to “Dancing with the Stars” disrupting the actual programming by usurping 21.2 million viewers from the scripted shows. “The Bachelor,” on the other hand, looks to be running on fumes; it retained a mere 9.6m of its “Dancing” lead-in. The network should’ve considered scheduling one of its new shows after the first few weeks of “Dancing” rather than squandering such a lead-in on the geriatric “Bachelor.” (The sitcom “Samantha Who?” debuts at 9:30 p.m. on Oct. 15.)

NBC had so-so results – second-place in each timeslot, but third-place overall (it’s complicated, but “CSI: Miami” tilted the evening’s overall second-place ratings to CBS). “Chuck” took second place at 8 p.m. with 9.28m viewers. “Heroes” improved just slightly on its premiere last season with 14.12m. “Journeyman” logged 9.48m, not bad but not great (“Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip” fared a lot better last season in its debut and look where it is today), with more than a million viewers tuning out from the first half-hour to the second.

CBS used to own Monday nights. No longer. If “How I Met Your Mother” can only manage 8.3 million to open the night, we’ll never get around to meeting the mother. Its lame performance makes “The Big Bang Theory’s” improvement to 9.6m at 8:30 all the more impressive.

“2.5 Men,” which dominated its timeslot last season, finished in a wan third-place, with 13.4m. 12.08m ossified souls stuck around for “Rules of Engagement.” “CSI: Miami” won its timeslot with an audience of 14.84m, but, like other CBS shows that have debuted this season, lost a sizable chunk of its audience from last year –almost 3 million.

Fox is hurting: 7.3 million patient people watched “Prison Break” (as opposed to the 9 or 10 million who’d watch last season); with actual competition to contend with, “K-Ville” lost nearly 30 percent of its premiere audience from last week: Only 6.17m tuned into its second episode.

The nicest thing you can say about this is: Well, that could’ve gone better.

“Bones” has been, for the past two years, an agreeable enough crime procedural with a droll sense of humor and nice chemistry between its two leads, Temperance Brennan (Emily Deschanel) and Seeley Booth (David Boreanaz).

And then this season begins. With a skull tumbling into a car windshield hurtling down a highway, which isn’t all that odd for this show, but what follows goes kind of crazy – and threatens to take up a sizable chunk of the season with it.

Said skull belonged to a young violin prodigy (his little finger was insured for $10 million) who was having an affair with the wife of the deputy director of the Secret Service, whose husband not only knew of their trysts but was filming them for his own jollies. And that’s just a little red herring of a subplot that’s quickly dispatched for the weirdness to come.

Brennan [SPOILERS TO COME, LIKE, IMMEDIATELY] discovers markings on the skull suggesting it had been cannibalized. She and Booth locate an abandoned vault with a bizarre shrine including, amongst other things, a silver skeleton.

And so this spirals into a conspiracy of some sort involving the Illuminati, a serial-killing team of cannibals (one of which graciously informs us, “Babies taste a little like fish” before he sacrifices himself) and goodness knows what else before this thing is done.

Let’s see how they keep it light and frothy while all this is going on.

- “Bones:” 8 tonight; Fox Channel 11.

Maybe it’s better for beauty-pageant contestants to shut up: Miss USA, Rachel Smith, dissed Katie Couric: "I just don't want to end up like Katie Couric. I want people to take me seriously."

Of course, she also said, "I always wanted to be a reporter — maybe some TV. Who knows? Some serious news — but some modeling, too." Because nothing gets people to take a reporter seriously like a little stroll on the catwalk.

Even Couric's spokesperson couldn’t let this one go, issuing a statement: "If she continues to offer such profound insight, she will not have to worry about anyone taking her seriously."

*

Meanwhile, Chris Crocker has entered his 16th minute of fame. Mr. “LEAVE BRITNEY ALONE!” informed the AP, “I'm the key to world peace.”

Incredibly, Crocker’s interviewer was so taken aback by such a humbly blithering statement that she couldn’t manage a follow-up, such as, “Oh, yeah? How do you figure?” So we don’t know if he has any proof of that or not.

Crocker seems to think he and Spears are some sort of soul mates, as they’re both Southerners, “entertainers” (depends on how you define the word, I guess) and “easy targets.” Crocker, a Sagittarian, was wary of being queried by the AP’s Capricorn, which, were any more proof necessary, explains the “easy target” thing.

As does this: “I always say Britney's been my mom ... Britney's been there for me when my parents haven't.” So, what – Britney’s fed him Cheetos for breakfast and sat him in her lap as she’s tooled down the PCH?

A few ratings – well, it’s hard to call them highlights – from the past weekend:

If Fox’s reality show “Nashville” isn’t the first cancellation of the young season, Terry Bradshaw must have something on his bosses at the network and is forcing them to keep his spoiled daughter on the air. It debuted to a lousy 2.7 million viewers, and dropped to 2.19 million on Friday.

On Sunday, The CW reached what could be historic lows ratings-wise, and that’s saying something. It may have seemed like a good idea to put pop-culture magazine shows on Sundays – they’re cheap and require next-to-no effort to produce – but it turns out that teenagers don’t need yet another outlet to tell them what to buy and to watch, no matter how superficially and condescending they may be. They have cell phones for that.

“CW Now” had a mere hair over 1 million viewers; “Online Nation” had even fewer, 994,000. To put this into perspective – less than 1/300th of the country tuned into a “broadcast” network’s launch of its fall programming. HBO’s “Tell Me You Love Me” got a similar viewership when it premiered, in a quarter as many TV homes, and that was considered a major disappointment. These were the lowest ratings for any programming in the hour in the history of The CW and The WB (UPN was dark on Sundays).

A repeat of “Gossip Girl” that followed at 8 p.m. drew an equally wan 1.16 million viewers, with a repeat of “America’s Next Top Model” perking up – but just barely – with 1.9 million at 9 p.m.

This bodes ill for when “Life is Wild” debuts on Oct. 7. If The CW hasn’t figured out a fix or two, that show, too, could arrive DOA.

On CBS, “Cold Case” had 12.3 million viewers and “Shark” had 11.5 million, which isn’t bad unless you note that “Cold Case” was down nearly 4 million viewers from last season’s premiere and that “Shark” was down more than 3 million (and that last year, “Without a Trace” debuted in the same timeslot with 17.5 million).

The news wasn’t all terrible: Fox’s cartoons performed similarly to last season’s debuts, with “The Simpsons” with 9.4m, “King of the Hill” with 7.74 and “Family Guy’s” “Star Wars parody drawing a strong 10.86m. All three shows did quite well in the sought-after 18-49 demographic.

Football, of course, won the night with 16.87 million viewers.

Needless to say, not an auspicious start to the season for the networks. They’re not needed quite yet, but life-support machines should be kept at the ready just in case.

You know how Television works: When a show becomes hugely successful, the self-satisfaction felt by the creators and stars somehow manages to show up onscreen, and the show itself becomes incrementally less fun to watch.

It’s happened on “Desperate Housewives” and “Grey’s Anatomy,” to name but two recent examples.

I’ve often feared that it will happen to “House,” as well and, indeed, there’s the occasional scene that smacks of an inside joke or something that the producers wouldn’t’ve done were they not feeling so bullet-proof. But entering its fourth season, the only thing about “House” that’s truly self-regarding is House himself.

Last season concluded with House’s staff getting fired or quitting, so we begin this season with House (Hugh Laurie) a man alone. Lisa Edelstein and Robert Sean Leonard get some rare and gratifying quality screen time, as Cuddy and Wilson are pressing him to hire a new team. Wilson even “kidnaps” his guitar, threatening to hold it until House has colleagues to bounce ideas off of. (The stealing-the-guitar thing is one of those indulgences mentioned above, but Leonard has some very droll moments in this subplot, so I’ll let it pass.)

Instead, House recruits a janitor for advice: “What about lupus?” he asks (another running joke: Lupus seems to get mentioned as a potential malady in every other episode).

So tonight’s episode boasts an interesting twist, which leads to next week’s episode, in which House transforms his recruiting process into something akin to “Survivor: House,” bringing in 40 candidates to work beneath him.

I know, I know: It sounded gimmicky to me initially, too. But the “Survivor: House” competition is actually a pretty great idea, because the writers have gone to the trouble of giving the cutthroat doctors competing for his jobs some interesting personalities (trouble is, you have a fair idea of who’s at least in the running to get hired based on the amount of effort put into developing their characters).

Wilson warns House that since he’s feeling burned by the departure of his last team, he’ll make bad decisions hiring his new team: He won’t hire the best people, he’ll choose people he doesn’t like so if they leave, no hard feelings.

Oh, and Cameron (Jennifer Morrison), Foreman (Omar Epps) and Chase (Jesse Spencer) start wending their ways back into the series.

Hence, a clever way of reinvigorating a franchise that didn’t necessarily need it. But the fact that they did demonstrates their dedication to keeping “House” the best network primetime show going.

- “House:” 9 p.m. Tuesday, Fox Channel 11.

It can be entertaining to watch an actor enjoy preening (it can also be excruciating), and James Woods struts like no other. “Shark” is a pretty foursquare legal drama, elevated by Woods’ charismatic self-regard.

Season two commences Sunday, and they get their splashy special effect out of the way pretty quickly – a bus blows up outside Parker Center downtown, containing a witness who weaseled out on a murder case Stark (Woods) was working.

A few scenes of requisite exposition later, and we have a sinister new supervillain, a Russian mob boss who kills indiscriminantly but not so indiscriminantly that the police can seem to do anything about it. (Lotsa plot holes in this one, most involving glossed-over dereliction of duty on behalf of the cops and one involving misplaced drama over witness protection when one aspect of the crime would seem to invite the Feds to get involved and be able to offer it.)

And we have a new member of Stark’s team – Danny Reyes (Kevin Alejandro), who's hellbent on nailing aforementioned mob boss, whose drive rivals Stark’s and who has some secrets in his past that will no doubt dribble out over the course of the season.

Season two seems to want to take some of the burden of the show off Woods’ shoulders, for which he is no doubt grateful, and give Jeri Ryan more to do, for which she is no doubt grateful: Her character, Jessica Devlin, lost the D.A.’s election (to a wormy guy played by Kevin Pollak), so she joins Stark’s team.

Here’s hoping they wrap up the Russian mob boss thing pretty quickly: He’s one of those smoothly unflappable guys who tips his espresso cup to Stark because he knows he’s such an evil genius who’ll never get caught and his banter is of that sort of oh-so-civilized manufactured pomposity that really wears on my nerves.

- “Shark:” 10 p.m. Sunday, CBS Channel 2.

Dan Rather wept.

That was the vivid image at last year's summer TV press tour – Rather, there to tout his impending newsmagazine show on Mark Cuban’s HDNet, choked with emotion when asked about his legacy and damning the corporate mentality’s influence on network news.

It’s obviously still gnawing away at the guy, as he has just filed a $70-million lawsuit against CBS for wrongful termination, kowtowing to the Bush Administration, torpedoing his own reputation and giving conspiracy theorists everywhere more grist for their paranoid mills.

There’re three avenues of thought in this sorry turn of affairs: 1) Dan’s lost it; 2) Dan has a case; 3) some combination of 1) and 2).

Rather was ignominiously bounced from the “CBS Evening News”’ anchor chair (for Katie Couric, whose ratings are even lower than Dan’s were, so that’s worked out well) after a 2004 “60 Minutes II: The Reckoning” story on just what George W. Bush may have been up to during the Vietnam war included a forged document as part of its reportage. The right argued that this proved the entire story was bunk rather than debate it on its merits; CBS held back another story critical of Bush until after that year’s Presidential election and now Bush is sitting in the White House, blatantly ignoring public sentiment and threatening to hold his breath and turn blue until Congress gives him everything he wants to maintain the quagmire that is Iraq.

CBS ordered an internal investigation that should’ve pleased no one: It exonerated CBS News of everything but being “zealous” in its reporting and utterly neglected to look into whether or not Rather’s report was true or not. Heads rolled, including Dan’s.

So Dan, in some last-ditch effort to restore his nominally good, if fairly eccentric, name, is suing CBS. CBS is responding by rolling its corporate eyes and saying, “See? This is what we had to put up with.”

Rather told the Washington Post, "I'm surprised someone in government hasn't said, 'We have a wartime president whose military records are missing, can't be found. Let's use the power of government to find out exactly what happened.'"

Fair point; can’t argue with that. But Rather’s also backpeddling from the amount of research he personally put into the story and, more bewilderingly, if amusingly so, the Post adds:

“Rather wades deep into the weeds, talking about how a private investigator he hired dug up information on a ‘mystery man’ – an ex-FBI agent retained by CBS to look into the story once it came under fire. Rather said the network ignored this consultant's allegedly supportive findings and more recently, accused the former anchor of ‘harassing’ the man.”

Needless to say, this behavior isn’t exactly winning Rather any new fans. MarketWatch’s Jon Friedman takes CBS’s side:

“I always suspected CBS was showing Rather respect by letting him continue to preside over a show that had apparently outlived its usefulness. Rather had too many wacky episodes to recount....

“When I contemplate Rather's lawsuit, I think of what he might've said if he were reporting on the story: … ‘It's as thin as turtle soup! It's shakier than Jell-O ... what the plaintiff needs at this point is the equivalent of Tom Brady coming off the bench to rescue him... I know you'd rather walk through a furnace in a gasoline suit than consider the possibility that this lawsuit is a mistake... This lawsuit would give an aspirin a headache.’”

Mary Mapes, the producer of the notorious piece (she was thrown under the bus far faster than Rather), seems like she’d like to wish the whole incident away but supports Dan.

She argues the main problem with the story is it aired a couple of years too early, that given what we know now, fewer wingnuts would’ve jumped at the chance to defend the President:

“Imagine that a report emerged today saying that President Bush and his enablers had unusual problems finding the most basic records, that key documents had disappeared from official files, that he and his supporters dissembled when asked direct questions. Yawn. The country wouldn't bat a collective eye. No one would be attacked for reporting that. That stuff is old hat now.”

Rather’s suit argues that CBS scapegoated him in order to make nice with the White House, with which it had had a rather (can’t decide if the pun is intended or not) contentious relationship. And around that time, CBS COO Les Moonves (who gets Rather in a lather, he hates him so much) got in a little hot water for rubbing elbows with Fidel Castro in Havana, so Moonves sort of needed to redirect his reputation as a commie-pinko Chief Operating Officer of a major corporation, so ameliorating this bit of unpleasantness with his Republican friends was a step in that direction.

Does Dan have any proof of such a conspiracy?

“Well, I'd like to gather more evidence. . . . One way to find out is to put people under oath,” Rather told the Post. Sounds like that would be a “No.”

Mapes thinks frivolous lawsuits are a good way of prying sinister secrets out of an internecine White House hellbent to cover up everything from why Alberto Gonzales was allowed into public service to why it lied for so long about Pat Tillman’s death (one of those scandals that just sort of went away because two or three new ones replaced it).

“A lawsuit also gives him that delicious power of discovery,” she writes. “Who knows what might shake loose?”

Yeah, if Congress can get nowhere with the White House Iron Curtain of concealment, Dan’ll finally reach the truth by suing CBS. To parrot Friedman, as Rather might say, that ride’s gonna be bumpier than a bullfrog on a rodeo steer.

Fox’s cartoons return Sunday, so the fall season is officially here, so quit going outside and enjoying the fresh air and start watching Television again, dammit! The beleaguered network executives are depending on you!

“The Simpsons”

“I will not wait 20 years to make another movie,” Bart writes on the chalkboard during the opening title sequence as the 38th season of “The Simpsons” begins Sunday on Fox.

How does one write about “The Simpsons” anymore? For years, the conventional wisdom has been that it may be true that it’s no longer as brilliant as it once was but it’s still plenty entertaining, or perhaps we’re just taking it for granted (I opt for the former); whatever the case, if you’re channel-surfing and you come upon it and you watch, you’re hardly ever disappointed.

So, the plot: Mr. Burns takes Homer for a ride in his private jet; Homer gets depressed knowing he will never live as high on the hog (his “summer love,” per the title sequence) again. Flying “Commercial is for losers and terrorists,” he opines. “It’s the difference between Champagne and carbonated pee.”

The guest voices: Lionel Richie, onflight entertainment on Burns’ jet; Stephen Colbert as a charlatan life coach who tries to motivate Homer (and good luck with that).

“King of the Hill”

Fox keeps trying to kill “King of the Hill” (a couple of its cast members told me that it wasn’t coming back two seasons ago), but you can’t keep down a man as stoic and enduring as Hank Hill. After all these years, it’s still sort of impressive that one of primetime TV’s most quietly nuanced character studies is on a cartoon.

So anyhoo, as Hank’d say, Sunday finds Hank over the moon about the fact that Bobby’s showing an interest in football. He tries to encourage that interest by taking his son to a Texas Longhorns game, where he soon learns just how costly the toll of fandom really is.

I’m not sure I’ve really laughed out loud at an episode of “King of the Hill” in years, but its steady, laconic look at one ordinary Texan (if there is such a thing) trying to make sense of a world that is passing him by still seems fresh.

“Family Guy”

Here’s a thermonuclear detonation of sheer geek joy: “Family Guy’s” authorized parody of “Star Wars.” Featuring Stewie as Darth Vader, Chris as Luke, Lois as Princess Vader, Brian as Chewbacca and, playing well against type, Peter as Han Solo (blink and you’ll miss Meg), it’s an oddly affectionate affair by “Family Guy” standards, omitting (no doubt in deference to George Lucas) the sort of snarky, anarchic humor of the rest of the series. And there’s a loving attention to detail in the animation, as the sundry space cruisers are depicted with a fanboy obsession to accuracy.

Still, it has its funny moments. An imperial cruiser wafts through the cosmos with a Bush/Cheney bumper sticker on its tail, light sabers also double as bug zappers and the elevator on the Death Star plays a Muzak version of the “Star Wars” theme.

It concludes with Chris and Peter arguing whether or not the fact that Adult Swim’s “Robot Chicken” did its own “Star Wars” parody episode over the summer steals from “Family Guy’s” thunder. Peter dumps on “Robot Chicken,” dismissing it as barely meeting the requirements of a real TV show. The joke, of course, is that Chris is voiced by Seth Green, “Robot Chicken’s” creator.

- “The Simpsons:” 8 p.m. Sunday, Fox Channel 11.
- “King of the Hill:” 8:30 p.m. Sunday, Fox Channel 11.
- “Family Guy:” 9 p.m. Sunday, Fox – oh, you know.

Veteran sitcom stars Kelsey Grammer and Patricia Heaton gave the kids of “Kid Nation” a spanking last night. Fox’s new sitcom “Back To You” had a good opening, with 9.5 million viewers, opposite CBS’s much-hyped “Kid Nation,” which had just over 9 million viewers. (By contrast, “Jericho” had 11.6 million viewers in the same timeslot when it premiered last season. So now we know what “Kid Nation” was lacking: a good nuclear explosion.)

At 9 p.m., things get a little trickier. Fox’s “Kitchen Nightmares” came in fourth in total viewers, with a mere 6.6 million, but was first in the target demographic of viewers aged 18-49. A repeat of “Criminal Minds” took the hour with 8.6 million viewers, with the “Last Comic Standing” finale coming in second and a promotional doodad on “Private Practice” landing in third.

But the evening’s big disappointment was the debut of “Gossip Girl,” which everyone expected would elevate The CW’s fortunes this season. Eh, not so much first time out: It had 3.65 million viewers, which is a pretty average number for The CW, but the bad news is it only held on to 71 percent of the audience of its lead-in, “America’s Next Top Model.” The shows were considered highly compatible (both target teen girls filled with Schadenfreude), so “Gossip Girl’s” inability to lure more fans into its lurid world must be considered a bit worrisome over at The CW.

“I think I’m going to die out here because there’s nothing,” says Jimmy, 8, one of the “Kid Nation” participants, early on in the show’s debut this evening. He doesn’t seem too upset about it, which leads you to wonder about his home life, until, at episode’s end, Jimmy decides home is preferable to the “Survivor Lite” antics of CBS’s show that's so incapable of living up to the hype that it had to be suppressed from critics.

It opened with host Jonathan Karsh introducing “Bonanza,” which he declares a ghost town but is really just a movie set in New Mexico (“Silverado” and “All the Pretty Horses” were shot here). A prop rattlesnake shakes its tale on the dirt road (and is never seen again). A prop tumbleweed rolls down the street (and is never seen again). Karsh dramatically intones: “No parents, no teachers – anywhere.”

(Yes, well, but CBS has since divulged in the wake of the child-labor-law uproar that there was plenty of adult supervision.)

But what’s most disappointing about this is just how closely it hews to “Survivor” without putting a couple of royalty checks in Mark Burnett’s bank account (like he needs the money anyway). Sundry kids bitch upfront about others not pulling their weight, like on “Survivor.” There are elaborate, milieu-specific, prop-heavy physical challenges designed to reward the participants, like on “Survivor.” Melodramatic lines that seemed coaxed from the throats of the participants by producers are uttered, like on “Survivor” (and every other reality show in the history of TV, for that matter).

Ten-year-old Taylor, one of the town council leaders, proved herself capable with the soundbites. “Here in a kid’s world,” she declared, “there’s no President Bush, there’s nothing.” Sign me up!

And beauty pageants may be in Taylor’s future, as this bon mot carried a faint echo of Miss Teen South Carolina’s map-challenged America: “I’d bring world peace to Africa … especially Iraq; Iraq really needs world peace.”

With 40 kids and frenetic, hyperventilating editing that made virtually every scene suspect in its relationship to reality, it proved fairly difficult for the episode to offer much in the way of character development. The best they could do were a handful of thumbnail sketches:

* Sniffly Jimmy, already gone;

*11-year-old Mike, another town-council leader, who seems somewhat tremulous but willing to be forged by this experience;

*15-year-old Greg, the town bully (he tags the town with chalk and shoves Mike, who refuses to back down – he knew those adults really were around to prevent this sort of thing – prompting Greg to later ominously vow, “You haven’t seen me upset”);

*14-year-old Michael, the voice of sanity;

*14-year-old Sophia, wise and bitchy and calculating beyond her years.

How manipulative is she? The kids are assigned jobs, paying between a dime and a dollar a day (yet more evidence of CBS’s child-slavery practices!), and Sophia’s relegated to a mere dime a day. But she has her eye on a $3 bike in one of Bonanza’s shops, so she earns extra money working the streets as a dancer and in no time is riding that bike proudly. (And who do you think filled her jar with coins? Little girls?) Even more impressively, at a town council meeting, she alone complains about the leaders, yet they turn around and award her a “gold star,” worth $20,000.

Maybe they just wanted to shut her up. Or maybe …

Oh, CBS; brazen, mad CBS: You’re teaching our children lessons of a subversive nature that haven’t been seen since Richard Hatch used subterfuge and calumny to win the first-ever “Survivor.”

It’s easy to see why CBS didn’t bother sending screeners to critics – the premiere episode was merely a distended version of the four-and-a-half minute trailer we saw, a Cuisinart of ostensibly cute/ostensibly moving/ostensibly inspirational scenes. Every future episode will no doubt be exactly the same.

Also: Tonight, the kids won a prize and were given the choice between a TV and seven more outhouses (as the show begins, there’s only one for the 40 children, and the production assistants are probably hogging it because that’s the only place they can empty the contents of their flasks without their employers noticing). There’s a joke about six-of-one-half-dozen-of-the-other in there somewhere, particularly if the TV was airing “Kid Nation.”

If only the LEAVE BRITNEY ALONE! guy would leave the rest of us the f@ck alone, but no: Variety reports (threatens?) that 44 Blue Productions, the Großdeutsches Reich of reality television, is actually considering doing a reality series with Chris Crocker, whose p!ssy meltdown defending drug-addled trailer trash managed to divert our attention last week from the space-alien invasion of Peru (what? You didn’t hear about that? Proves my point).

“It's going to pretty much be the 'Chris Crocker experience,’” Osama bin Laden, a consultant for 44 Blue, told Daily Variety. “We consider him a rebel character that people will find interesting. He's going to be a TV star.

“And then,” he added with an ominious cackle, “the terrorists will have won.”

What kind of idiots are these people – if “people” is the right word – at 44 Blue, anyway? (And doesn’t “44 Blue” sound like a football play or a military strategy or something that will invariably end in violence?) A two-minute hysterical, get-this-guy-some-Methotrimeprazine-STAT screed – no matter how amusing it is upon first viewing – is hardly the basis for an ongoing TV show.

I mean, what other tricks does this guy have in his bag? How many other beleaguered celebrities are there for him to come to their defense in a delightfully unhinged fashion that makes him look in worse shape than those he’s championing? Let’s see:

Leave Phil Spector alone! He was just sticking a gun in some woman’s mouth!

Leave Elmo alone! He’s just ticklish, OK?

Hmm. Guy might have a career ahead of him, after all.

Last season, “’Til Death’s” conceit of comparing/contrasting the sluggish monotony of a long-married couple (Brad Garrett and Joely Fisher as Eddie and Joy Stark) with the bubbly exuberance of two newlyweds (Eddie Kaye Thomas and Kat Foster as Jeff and Steph Woodcock) seemed fresh and funny for – oh, two episodes. After that, it was the usual insult gags and sitcom-silly plotting. The only thing that saved “’Til Death” from death was the fact that it did a little better following “American Idol’s” results shows than other things Fox had tried in the timeslot.

So it’s back, teamed with this season’s Great White Hope to resurrect the moribund sitcom genre, the Kelsey Grammer-Patricia Heaton vehicle “Back To You.”

(We interrupt this rumination for another rumination, about the relative disconnect between sitcoms and the networks upon which they air. Neither “Back To You” nor “’Til Death” seem to fit, as they say, in Fox’s wheelhouse, given that network’s pursuit of younger audiences. They’d be more at home at CBS, while CBS’s smirky “Rules of Engagement” and upcoming geeks-in-unrequited-love opus “The Big Bang Theory” would seem to be more of a fit at Fox. And the only place ABC’s “Cavemen” would belong is on the National Geographic Channel.)

Entering its second season, “’Til Death” is listing aimlessly, cooking up random confrontations and predicaments. Tonight, Eddie and Joy bicker about one another’s more annoying personality quirks before learning, in a sloppily motivated sequence, to embrace them (no, you know what, guys? Those behaviors really are grating and adults your age should learn to tamp down on such buffoonery). Next week, Eddie frees himself by revealing to the world his ineptitude at basketball. (Memo to Garrett: You don’t have to throw the ball over the backboard and out of bounds every time to prove you can’t play hoops; there are plenty of more subtle ways of proving it.)

Of the cast, only Fisher seems to bear down and bother to create something approaching a full-bodied character (and we’re not just talking about her bosom). Garrett’s Eddie is merely Shtick Recast in Human Form, and Thomas and Foster are uninspired and nebbishy – they’re the people you cast in the pilot episode hoping for a pickup so you can get the actors you really want whose pilots weren’t picked up.

On the other hand, if you thought Garrett and Fisher’s riffing on her breasts at the Emmys on Sunday was hilarious (and I certain that someone, somewhere, out there did), you’ll have a blast tonight, as Eddie kvetches about the in-your-faceness of Joy’s boobs. Really – this guy’s gonna complain about that? At this point, one’d imagine that’s about the only thing he has to live for.

- “’Til Death:” 8:30 tonight; Fox Channel 11.

Houstonians will soon be treated to a TV commercial featuring a nude Alicia Silverstone emerging from a swimming pool, alluringly eyeing the camera – and then announcing that she’s a vegetarian and “it’s amazing.”

Yes, it’s the latest from our friends at PETA, the serial leches who seem to congenitally link nudity with being nice to animals: They’ve featured Pamela Anderson and Dominique Swain sans clothing in ads in the past.

Houston was deemed recipient of the PSA, PETA explains, because of its general nutritional retardedness: It won the trophy for the sixth-fattest city in the nation from Men's Fitness magazine this year.

All well and good, but it’s hard to see how showing a writhing nekkid actress is going to convince a city to change its eating habits. Only a thoroughgoing boob is going to see that spot and think, “Hey, if I pass on that Angus steak, maybe I can look like her!” (Or, if you’re a guy, “Hey, if I say no to that rack of baby back ribs, maybe she’d let me score with her!”)

And anyway, the thing looks more like a perfume commercial than a public-service announcement championing nutritional practices. If they want to employ nudity to convince people to quit eating meat, they should run a spot featuring a 400-pound guy with his gut drooping over his junk proudly announcing, “I eat meat – and lots of it! I don’t even know what a vegetable is! Be like me – chow down on our animal friends!”

On an upcoming episode of NBC’s new drama “Journeyman,” Dan Vassar (Kevin McKidd), the man who’s become a ping-pong ball paddled by random forces through the fabric of time, is seen briefly consulting his iPhone (how he was able to afford one on his newspaper reporter’s salary is beyond me). Paradoxically, Dan will never be able to watch an episode of his program on his iPhone because, as we’ve noted, NBC and Apple parted company over haggling over pricing of downloaded episodes, NBC moving to amazon.com, whose system doesn’t accommodate Mac users.

Today, NBC.com announced NBC Direct, in which you don’t even have to spring the $1.99-per-episode (let alone the $4.99 NBC was reportedly wanting) to download episodes of your favorite shows. You do, on the other hand, have to sit through commercials to watch them, and you do have to view them in a timely fashion because the files will expire after a week. And you do have to only want to watch "Heroes," "The Office," "Life," "Bionic Woman," "30 Rock," "Friday Night
Lights," "Late Night with Conan O'Brien" and "The Tonight Show with Jay Leno” when the beta version of this service launches next month, because that’s all that will offered initially.

And, still, you can’t own a Mac, though NBC says that as they work the bugs out of the system over the next few months Mac fans will eventually be invited to the party.

The most preposterous Tommy Gavin seduction scene ever occurs in tonight’s “Rescue Me,” and believe me, that’s saying something.

If you’ve ever seen the show, you know that Tommy (Denis Leary) has scored with a lot of way-out-of-his-league and fairly age-inappropriate women. A lot of them have had fetishes that have been eccentric, to put it mildly (an ongoing subplot this season involves an elusive woman played by Gina Gershon who phones Tommy up for impromptu booty calls, rushes through sex and then kicks him out of her place; “Most guys would think that this is the perfect relationship,” she tells him tonight).

It’s explained that Tommy pulls so spectacularly because he’s a fairly charismatic fireman in post-9/11 New York. Sometimes you buy it; sometimes you just roll your eyes.

Tonight’s credibility-defying tryst is brief and furtive out of necessity, but the circumstances under which it occurs will have you wondering if Leary and his collaborator Peter Tolan are just messing with us these days. Initially, I thought that the scene might’ve devolved into a dream sequence when I blinked. Let’s just say it’s hot, but not in the way you’re thinking.

Add to that Lou’s (John Scurti) peculiar storyline this season and you’re forgiven for wondering if Leary and Tolan come up with their plotting by sitting around in bars listening in on the fevered discussions of drunken louts.

Of course, the episode’s not a complete wash – they never are on “Rescue Me.” Particularly nice is a scene in which Tommy is told that his daughter’s leech of a musician boyfriend can’t read music, but then, neither could John Lennon. Tommy responds, “Where’s Mark David Chapman when you need him?”

- “Rescue Me;” 10 tonight, FX.

In the market for a northwest European country beset by civil unrest and filled with Schipperkes? If so, Belgium’s just the thing for you and you’re in luck: It’s available on eBay!

Well, it was. The eBay folks took the auction down (maybe they should try Craigslist), but here’s a screen capture.

Wonder what we could get for America, as is?

What is it with juries and celebrities that keep them from pulling the trigger with a guilty verdict? The Phil Spector trial will apparently end with a hung jury, split 7-5 (no indication which way it’s leaning). Which means that at least five people thought that Lana Clarkson went home with the music producer after just meeting him with the idea of killing herself and framing him for murder. Isn’t that how it went on the “Law & Order” episode? (Did they do a Phil Spector doppelganger “L&O” episode?)

How would a jury use the audio of O.J.’s tirade during that armed robbery that just got him arrested anew? Probably by saying the recording was made to create more memorabilia for the Juice to sell.

The race is on, and herewith a contest: First cop/legal show to thinly veil O.J.’s current travails in an episode wins renewal for the season, no matter how abysmal your ratings! First show to do it really well gets a two-season pickup!

CBS, hellbent to deprive children of valuable education time, has seen fit to bum-rush our nation’s schools and foist screeners of “Kid Nation” – which wrested its participants from their educational experiences for 40 days this past spring so that they could drink bleach whilst unsupervised – upon students, who immediately demanded to know, “Will we be tested on this?”

Interesting that those scamps at CBS were able to make advance screeners available to kids across the country, but somehow couldn’t manage to get them into the hands of critics. But the show is no doubt getting the sort of buzz amongst the pre-adolescent set that network honchos can only dream about: “It was so much better than the history lecture on the Battle of Anzio we would’ve sat through in its place.”

Not bad news for Fox’s new overheated Big Easy cop show, but not exactly good news, either: “K-Ville” debuted to nearly 9 million viewers, but still only managed to take second place, behind a repeat of “2.5 Men.” When the rest of the schedule is flooded with fresh episodes, “K-Ville” may get swept away.

But “K-Ville’s” ratings look better when you consider that worse news for Fox was “Prison Break’s” season premiere: Two million viewers have escaped from the habit of watching. 7.4 million tuned in, down significantly from the 9 or 10 million that watched last season. Apparently, the sight of Wade Williams in soiled underpants isn’t the huge draw they were hoping for.

A little spin seems to be coming off Patty Hewes’ fastball. In tonight’s episode of “Damages,” the best the ruthless civil litigator (Glenn Close) – who manipulates and ruins lives! who had a dog killed, for heavens sake! – can manage is to mildly verbally abuse an old man. C’mon, Patty: We know you can do better.

Meanwhile, everyone’s trying to figure out if a witness in the class-action suit may have been murdered.

At this point, the Frobisher (Ted Danson) storyline is the most interesting one going. He’s an exquisite mess. There’s a funny scene tonight in which he’s talking to someone and he’s clearly disinterested with the guy, not even really listening, and then he avuncularly tries to mask this. Danson’s really starting to steal the show: He’s slimy in all the best ways.

Conversely, Ellen’s (Rose Byrne) flashback storyline is getting progressively trivial. She has an ineffectual assistant. Her parents are involved in an auto accident.

At least Ellen’s current-day storyline – she’s on trial for the murder of her fiancé – is picking up some steam.

But if Patty doesn’t do something inextricably vile next week, I’m gonna have to have myself assigned to the writing staff and give her a scene where she gets sick of Frobisher’s lawyer’s molasses-sap Southern drawl and decides a pickaxe to the larynx is the only way it can be resolved.

- “Damages:” 10 tonight; FX.

The season finale of “Saving Grace” certainly grabs your attention immediately: Our first image is of a naked Holly Hunter, as Grace Hanadarko handcuffed belly-down to her bed, with a guy she’s just picked up writing with lipstick on her bottom. The phone rings, she can’t reach it; she tells him she needs to answer it because she’s a cop, which flips him out and he bolts.

(This she-sure-can-pick-’em theme resonates throughout the episode.)

Her partner and sometime lover Ham (Kenny Johnson) bursts in on her; seeing her in such a position, he, too, angrily bolts.

Enter Earl (Leon Rippy), her good-ole-boy guardian angel/pest. He won’t help, either: “God’d throw a flag for interference,” he explains, though he just sort of seems to enjoy the situation. When she tells him she’s learned her lesson, “In your mind that means next time you hold the cuff key.” Hunter spends the first 10 minutes of the episode in this position.

From there, we’re off to solve the sadistic murder (there are no genteel murders on TV cop shows) of an attractive young woman (TV’s victim of choice), a crime that resonates with Grace for reasons we only fully discover during a pretty nicely staged interrogation scene at the end of the episode. Meanwhile, Rhetta (Laura San Giacomo) is trying to piece together the whole mystery behind Earl – she’s more interested in what his message may be than Grace.

Last scene is pretty bogus: Earl and Grace back on a mesa in the Grand Canyon, Earl giving a short what-have-we-learned-here speech then telling Grace (or, more importantly, viewers) that next season her life is gonna get even trickier. Oh, well, still, “Saving Grace” is a pretty good show when it avoids such hokum, and Hunter elevates the show and makes the most of a fascinating character.

- “Saving Grace:” 10 tonight, TNT.

(I know, I know: These last two entries should’ve been posted a lot earlier, but my recent near-death experience and the Emmys conspired to throw me off my schedule, not to mention the small matter of this 14-hour behemoth called “The War” coming up. Oh, and the whole fall season, too; there’s that as well. But I’m catching up.)

It seems that the goal of heavily serialized shows is to simply survive their first season. That accomplished, the writers can sit back, roll a fat one and prepare to insanely spin their narrative wheels in the mudhole that is network primetime for a few years.

Hey, it happened to “Lost.” It may happen to “Heroes,” now that it looks like they’ve lost their nerve and are loathe to kill off characters (both Adrian Pasdar and Milo Ventimiglia, whose characters apparently died in last season’s finale, are returning to the show) while continuing to stockpile new ones, threatening to become very unwieldy.

And it certainly seems to have happened to “Prison Break.” This show has gone certifiable.

Last season, even though Lincoln (Dominic Purcell) was exonerated in the murder of the Vice President’s (then President, then ex-President) brother, they’re still on the lam. In Panama, of all places. Where Michael (Wentworth Miller), who masterminded the breakout in the first place, has been tossed into yet another clink: SONA, a hell-on-Earth that has been abandoned by its guards, is run by "the worst of the worst" - murderers, rapists, druglords - and features fights to the death as afternoon entertainment. My favorite thing about SONA, however, has to be that when the inmates get bored, they take up a game of darts. Just the idea that someone somewhere thought that having darts in a prison atmosphere was a good idea makes me laugh.

Anyway, because TV worlds are very small, Michael’s incarcerated with some blasts from his past: Bellick (Wade Williams), the sadistic guard from the Illinois prison who has devoted his life to making Michael’s life miserable (Williams must’ve done something to hack off the writers, because for the bulk of the first two episodes of the new season he’s slouching around SONA in some rather unsavory tighty-whiteys and cleaning out filthy toilets and stumbling around in sewers – none of which are images anyone’d really want burned into their retinas); Alex (William Fichtner), the crazed Fed who dedicated his life to making Michael’s life miserable; and T-Bag (Robert Knepper), the psychopath who has dedicated his life to making everyone’s life miserable.

And so there’s a new conspiracy and Michael’s at the heart of it, again, forced to break another prisoner out of this rank, fetid and altogether unpleasant place. Which isn’t so awful that he can’t take a few minutes out from the beatings and murder attempts to pine away for Sara (Sarah Wayne Callies, another victim of humiliating storylines).

Lincoln wants to help Michael escape, but apparently not too zealously – when important information drops out of a connection on his cell phone, he doesn’t ask the caller to repeat anything.

So naturally the new season opens with a scene with an alluring woman in her underthings putting on makeup. Huh?

- “Prison Break:” 8 tonight; Fox (Channel 11).

While there was much speculation over whether “Cavemen” or “Viva Laughlin” would be the first new show to get cancelled this season, what was overlooked amidst such theorizing was the fact that both of those series have pretty late premiere dates (Oct. 2 and Oct. 18, respectively), so they’d have to do spectacularly poorly to get the hook quickly enough to die first.

No, ladies and gentlemen, we have our winner: The first new show to get cancelled this season will likely be the first new show to premiere: Fox’s soapy reality show “Nashville,” about aspiring country singers. Turns out none of them will likely be stars, given the paltry 2.7 million viewers who turned out for the debut on Friday.

Perhaps even worse news for Fox – and the TV industry in general – was the tune-out suffered by the Emmys last night: A mere 12.9 million watched the industry’s biggest night (guess Seacrest wasn’t that big a draw for the youngsters, after all), down nearly four million viewers from the abysmal ratings performance of last year. Doesn't look like "30 Rock'll" be getting much of a bump as NBC was hoping, if its big victory was seen by so few people. Apparently, people don't care that much about their quality TV shows.

Which calls to mind that existential brain-teaser: If a big, splashy awards show can’t draw 20 million viewers, does it make any noise?

What Radar magazine declared the “Summer of ‘Meh’” ended appropriately, with a shrug of an Emmy ceremony.

The 59th Emmy Ceremony was billed as the “greenest ever.” They meant in terms of its environmental footprint, but it also would’ve worked in terms of some amateurish production work.

Host Ryan Seacrest wasn’t awful (though his interaction with the “Desperate Housewives” cast was pretty cringe-inducing, his appearance in a costume from “The Tudors” was pointless and Sally Field fairly frowned when he referred to her as “a legend”), mainly because the producers didn’t give him enough to do to affect the broadcast. He even had a couple of funny lines, shots at Jeremy Piven’s womanizing and “Kid Nation’s” child-labor practices. But unlike past hosts, you never had the impression he was clever enough to have thought those jokes up himself.

Clearly, the decision to stage the ceremony in the round was one that was profoundly unpopular in the Shrine Auditorium itself. It meant that half the audience had to watch the back of the action. A number of presenters, including Ray Romano and Stanley Tucci, commented on the discomfort, but an actual winner – “Boston Legal’s” James Spader – let it be known that going home with a trophy didn’t change his opinion of the setup. “I’ve been to thousands and thousands of concerts in my life,” he declared, “and I can tell you these are the worst seats I’ve ever had.”

Glitches, too: Ray Romano and Sally Field were ham-handedly censored (Romano for a pretty minor offense, it would seem), music and announcer cues were spotty and, when the producers of “The Amazing Race” were taking the stage to accept their fifth consecutive Emmy, all that could be heard was a confusion of wild sound, production room or auditorium banter.

As usual, a couple of the funniest moments came during the list of nominees for the Writing for a Variety/Music/Comedy show films listing each of the shows’ writers.

“The Daily Show with Jon Stewart” played its list of names over a montage of Alberto Gonzales saying “I don’t recall” during Congressional testimony. “Real Time with Bill Maher’s” list was recited as the memory of Senator Larry Craig was evoked – all we saw were feet tapping – and doing much more – beneath men’s room doors, before Maher exited the final stall and shot some breath spray in his mouth.

The rest of the comedy was, well, “meh.” The “Family Guy” musical number wasn’t bad, but really pulled its punches by that show’s standards. Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert’s bit on the greening of awards shows – “If entertainers stop publicly congratulating one another, then the earth wins!” Colbert barked – wasn’t as sharp as their routine last year.

As for the awards themselves, well, “The Sopranos” did win, but James Gandolfini and Edie Falco got robbed, and not because Emmy was honoring fresh blood – both James Spader and Sally Field, who beat the favorites, have won three Emmys. And even Tina Fey seemed to recognize that her “30 Rock” win had eerie echoes of “Arrested Development’s” triumph and tragedy.

Lame speeches, too, except for bits of Sally Field’s (the bit we didn’t hear, natch) and Katherine Heigl’s (though her mom was right – she probably didn’t deserve to win).

And we’ll all have forgotten about most of this by Tuesday.

Your Mayor has been a longtime champion of BBC America, the cable network that brings some of the best of British television to our shores. I’ve always wondered why, given the general quality of its original programming, it doesn’t have a higher profile in this country.

And now, sadly, I know. BBC America is engaged in a self-abnegating Intifada, a jihad hellbent to exterminate its Stateside fans until the network has fewer viewers than than E! on a good night.

Consider: I was ostensibly beneficently invited to the BAFTA/BBC America pre-Emmy tea Saturday afternoon in Hollywood in lieu of tonight’s Emmy ceremony. Big-time celebrities and British Emmy nominees were promised to attend. (Just a note: Everything from this point on, including my near-death, is pretty much true.)

At the party – populated not by Hugh Laurie or Helen Mirren but by Holland Taylor (its highest-profile attendee I saw), Lennie James of “Jericho” (he’s British – who knew? Well, anyone who watched “The State Within,” which obviously wasn’t anyone who votes on Emmy nominations, since it got snubbed in the Outstanding Miniseries category – OK, OK, let it go), a couple of minor players from the U.S. incarnation of “The Office” and the most annoying judge on “America’s Next Top Model” (no, not Tyra Banks – the other one, the guy who you wonder how he has any credentials when it comes to divining female pulchritude) – there were finger sandwiches, as befitting a tea.

But, as Your Mayor’s companion regretfully noted, no cucumber sandwiches, which negated the notion that this was a proper British tea. (The copious flow of vodka might’ve been a second clue.)

And so, I inquired as to the contents of the appetizers, and was told that a tiny roll, about the size of a large-ish dumpling, contained chicken salad. And so I nibbled upon about three-quarters of this foodstuff. Which, it turned out, was rife with nuts.

One of the reasons Your Mayor is such a humble man is because he is not perfect: He has a devastating nut allergy (enough to understand that peanuts and cashews are, in fact, not nuts but legumes, which confuses so many people) that has landed him in an emergency room on two previous occasions.

Because of this, I am reduced to humiliatingly asking the contents of many menu items. And so I did on this day, and still, my servers betrayed me, because they did not mention the nut content of the chicken-salad appetizer. Mere coincidence? I think not.

When one is cursed with such an allergy, one learns how to detect a bad reaction pretty quickly. And so, I, upon munching upon a mere few bites of the “treat,” realized that forces greater than myself were attempting to lay me low. At that point – and there is no polite way of putting this – one’s only alternative is to purge the offending foodstuff, as violently as possible, from one’s system.

(A brief diversion: Fatal nut allergies aren’t exactly secrets in the 21st century. F@ckloads of people suffer from them. So why does anyone plant these things in food without informing servers that people could actually die if they nibble upon such trivial snacks? Your Mayor’s companion, while he was off endeavoring to induce himself to – there is no polite word for this – vomit, asked the server if the appetizer included nuts; the server said she didn’t know. No matter: I knew.)

Extricating such poisons from one’s system is a tricky game. When a potentially fatal allergy enters your system, mucous fills whatever tube you might be able to breathe through. It’s very clever that way.

And let it be noted that Your Mayor, like about 85% of the country, is in thrall to an abysmally p!ss-poor insurance provider (a Blue Cross PPO that routinely rejects the service providers requested by their clients in favor of some no-name half-@ssed group, if you must know). Hence, under such circumstances, the honorable thing to do is to die outright, because the only alternative is to die whilst sitting in an abjectly managed emergency room and having one’s estate billed $75K for the privilege.

So there was Your Mayor, barely able to breathe and circling the drain (and perspiring at a rate so profuse as to put Albert Brooks in “Broadcast News” to shame), when his plucky companion managed to produce a Claritin from a passer-by who clearly had no connection to BBC America. Fortunately, said plucky companion could drive a stick, so could navigate Your Mayor’s bitchen sports car; unfortunately, “gridlock” is but a euphemism for traffic in L.A. on a Saturday afternoon. While vegging out and preparing to expire in the passenger seat of my car stranded in Hollywood Boulevard traffic (hey, it beats writing about the Emmys), we somehow managed to make it to my home, where I fell into a not altogether unsatisfying coma as the Claritin kicked in and the simple syllogism of breathing manifested itself.

So, in the past 24 hours, I’ve consumed nothing more than that chicken-salad-death-machine (which, of course, I subsequently purged). All the better, one presumes, for maintaining my boyish figure.

Nonetheless, in my weakened state, I will heroically endeavor to provide coverage of tonight’s Emmy ceremony. But please do not hold it against me if, in my beleaguered condition, I inadvertently report that “The Sopranos” won the Best Drama Series trophy even if “Grey’s Anatomy” actually does.

You gotta hand it to O.J. Simpson: Though he’s not making any money off his ghostwritten memoir, “If (imagine the ‘If’ very, very tiny, because that’s how they’ve redesigned the book cover) I DID IT,” he’s proving to be a trooper nonetheless, getting his name out there to help promote it and doing interviews – albeit only with Las Vegas police investigators looking into the Juice’s participation in a possible armed robbery at a sports memorabilia store at a Vegas casino.

Apparently, getting arrested is easier than participating in a grueling interview mill with the People Magazines of the world these days. Lindsay Lohan got popped with a DUI and possession of cocaine just before her movie “I Know Who Killed Me” opened. Tracy Morgan was arrested and charged with a DUI last November; his show “30 Rock” had just premiered a couple of months earlier. Paris Hilton used her release from the slammer to promote her new clothing line.

And just as O.J. returned to the news to help Fred Goldman, who owns the rights to the book, Idaho Senator Larry Craig thoughtfully allowed his bust for men’s room perversions to drop Attorney General Alberto Gonzales’ embarrassing resignation from the news networks' radar.

So here’s how you know Phil Spector is nuts: He had no new product in the pipeline to peddle when he (allegedly, pending the jury's decision) shot Lana Clarkson in February 2003.

Friend to Your Mayor, MediaWeek ratings guru Marc Berman, will handicap the new fall season in an online webcast on Monday at 2 p.m. EST/11 a.m. PCT. He’ll examine the season with an assiduousness that may shock you: “network by network, and night by night, with an in-depth look at the probable trends, sure-to-be disappointments, and potential sleeper successes next season.”

He promises to answer the question on everyone’s mind: “Will ABC’s ‘Cavemen’ be the first new cancellation of the season?” (Sign up at the link above.)

Predicting Emmy winners is a fool’s errand. Compared to the Oscars, there are too many shows, too many categories. There’s less floating about the Zeitgeist to make it easy to read the tea leaves and, most confoundingly, as opposed to a movie, which is a single entity, released at a strategic time in the year, TV series are ongoing concerns. One show’s or performer’s brilliant season can be trumped by a single episode from another show, since that’s what Emmy voting is based upon. (And only award wonks know which episodes were submitted for consideration.)

A fool’s errand, then, but someone’s gotta do it. We’ll look at the major categories and guess who’ll win both in a perfect world and in a world dominated by the sort of dim-witted Emmy voter who has snubbed “The Wire” for four seasons running.

* Fantastickest Drama Series

In a perfect world: “The Sopranos,” which has only won this title once in its storied history, would go out on a triumphant note.

In an Emmy voter’s world: “The Sopranos” had that enigmatic finale, which some found vexing, so they may opt for the simpler pleasures of the McDreamy’s, McSteamy’s and Mayor McCheesy melodrama of big-hit “Grey’s Anatomy.”

* Funniest Comedy Series

In a perfect world: “The Office” would repeat, or “30 Rock” would go the “Arrested Development” route and call attention to itself (to, ultimately, no avail).

In an Emmy voter’s world: “Ugly Betty’s” style-over-substance substance will resonate.

* Bitchingest Lead Actor/Drama

In a perfect world: James Gandolfini would receive an Emmy Laureate for essaying one of the most indelible characters in television history.

In an Emmy voter’s world: Hugh Laurie would get the props he deserves for almost single-handedly dragging his show into the pantheon of current greats. (Actually, that’d be OK with me, too.)

* Outstandingest Lead Actress/Drama

In a perfect world: Edie Falco (see James Gandolfini).

In an Emmy voter’s world: Kyra Sedgwick (see Hugh Laurie).

* Comediest Lead Actor/Comedy

In a perfect world: Alec Baldwin’s self-deprecating depiction of a brutish lout is worthy of recognition.

In an Emmy voter’s world: Actually, that seems to be how they’d see things, too.

* Hilariousest Lead Actress/Comedy

In a perfect world: Mary-Louise Parker’s edgy/deft/layered/wide-eyed/insert-your-adjective-here portrayal of a beleaguered pot mom has more levels than most of the competition.

In an Emmy voter’s world: America Ferrera’s lovable loser is more lovable than loser (and, again, this would be OK with me, too.)

* Most Talentful Supporting Actor/Drama

In a perfect world: Has Michael Imperioli won? (Answer: Yes.) Oh. Well, then, give it to Masi Oka.

In an Emmy voter’s world: Hell, yeah, give it to Masi Oka: He starred in one of the biggest new hits of the past season playing a character no one had ever tried to create before.

* Alluringest Performance by a Supporting Actress/Drama

Hmmm. All of these annoy me to one extent or another. But somehow Sandra Oh hasn’t won after three previous nominations, so throw her the bone.

* Wit-Filliest Supporting Actor/Comedy

In the only world worth living in: Rainn Wilson, who can perpetuate the atmosphere of perceived dominance he has so ineptly rendered on “The Office.”

* Geniusiest Supporting Actress/Comedy

In a perfect world: Jenna Fischer’s character is the most appealing – actually, hers is the only one who’s appealing amongst the nominees. But does that mean she’s the funniest? Probably not, but oh, who cares – it’s Pam, dammit, and America loves themselves some Pam!

In an Emmy voter’s world: Oh, who am I fooling – I don’t have the first clue to how an Emmy voter thinks. Nor do I want to.

With all the hoopla surrounding this weekend’s upcoming Emmy Awards ceremony (heck, they don’t have to distribute any trophies; three hours of Ryan Seacrest on a stage is enough for me), one extremely glamorous event is being egregiously overshadowed.

Here’s the press release in full. I don’t even know what to make of this, aside from the fact that there’s apparently an organization for everything.

(Hollywood, Calif., Sept, 13, 2007) – The “gate-keepers” to Hollywood’s royalty, the Association of Celebrity Personal Assistants (ACPA), is celebrating its 15th Anniversary on September 18 with a soiree hosted by the Hotel Bel-Air.

Unlike typical star-studded celebrations that take place nightly in Los Angeles, the stars of this event are the behind-the-scenes, hard-working assistants who are “as valuable to their celebrity employers as oxygen,” said Bradley Whitford, the evening’s keynoter.

In addition to his busy acting career (recently “Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip,” “West Wing”), Whitford and his actress wife Jane Kaczmarek ("Malcolm In The Middle") appreciate the vital role their assistant plays in their hectic lives. “We have so many people wanting a piece of our time, there’s no way we could juggle it all without our assistant,” said Whitford.

Apart from career and family concerns, the acting couple also spends time philanthropically as co-founders of The Clothes Off Our Back Foundation. The non-profit 501c3 organization hosts charity auctions showcasing today's hottest celebrity attire, with proceeds going to benefit children's charities.

Whitford is pleased to be the keynote speaker for the ACPA’s 15th Anniversary Celebration, but he is also planning to talk about the upcoming EMMY Auction for Clothes Off Our Back. According to his assistant, Whitford realizes that the ACPA is the perfect audience because he knows that they have the ears of their bosses. He is hoping that the assistants will convince their celebrity employers to donate their clothes from the Emmy’s to help improve the lives of children across the globe.

The ACPA was founded in 1992 by former personal assistant Jonathan Holiff, who was looking for a way to connect with others who truly understood the intricacies of this unique profession. According to Holiff, “This is a tough job, not the glamorous life people envision it to be. I was simply wanting to network with others who understood this so we could help each other do our jobs more effectively.”

15 years later, the 130 plus members in Los Angeles (and a similar group in New York), share resources through monthly meetings and a private e-mail system that allows them to handle even the most challenging of tasks their bosses may dish out. Needing a 24 hour dentist who speaks English in Costa Rica? No problem. Trying to track down some dancing poodles in tutus for the upcoming Birthday Bash? Consider it done. Where can you find a dry cleaner who specializes in beaded gowns? Just ask your fellow assistants and within minutes, you’ll likely have a half dozen answers to choose from.

*

OK; well, whatever; that should be quite the bash. Somewhat shockingly, there’s not mention of handing out awards, such as Best Response To Being Pursued By A Well-Lubricated Celebutard In A Car-Jacked SUV or Greatest Endurance To Repeated Humiliation or Most Justified Excuse For Turning To Alcohol.

Anyway, since you sat through that, here’s a little bonus: A parody of Chris Crocker’s “Leave Britney Alone” video (if, in fact, that wasn’t parody enough) defending General Patraeus.

Herewith, the transcript of the interview with Rob McElhenney, Glenn Howerton, Kaitlin Olson and Danny DeVito of “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia” (another snippet appears here).

Q: When writing scripts, do you have Danny say “whore” as often as possible because…

Kaitlin: It sounds funny. Yes.

Danny: It’s also in my contract that I have a certain amount of “whores” to say.

Rob: He pronounces it with the “W.” Most people do not.

Glenn: But to answer your question, yes, and then Danny sprinkles a few of them in there himself. I think he enjoys saying it.

Rob: Even when the scene doesn’t call for it at all.

Q: (To Danny) In the first four episodes, you’re doing a lot of drooling and sweating.

Danny: They put me through my paces there. We shoot in very cramped quarters and I get very emotional. It cranks the old ticker up there.

Rob: We found that when we crank the temperature up to 102 degrees, this guy comes alive.

Danny: It’s a myth that only cold is funny. (Being) uncomfortable forces you into a spot where you’re sexually active all the time and you’re funny. You also have a chafing problem.

Glenn: A lot of talcum powder.

Danny: Naw, I use dirt.

Q: Is it hard to top yourselves in terms of outrageous behavior?

Danny: I’m not writing the shows – they’re writing the shows – so I’ll answer that question. When I say, we’ve got to pull out all the stops, I get scripts that are so f@ckin’ far out. I don’t think it’s more difficult for them. They don’t act like it. They bitch and moan constantly, but I think it’s second-nature for them to come up with these sleazy, scummy, lowlife views on the human race.

Rob: Ultimately, we’re not looking to push any boundaries, it’s just that inevitably, what we end up finding funny ends up being kind of out there. It starts out as a regular joke …

Danny: It is a fun genre, you must admit.

Glenn: We also don’t want to do what everyone else is doing on TV. You watch most of the shows on CBS …

Rob: But it’s not like we don’t want to do what everyone else is doing; it’s that we don’t find what everyone else is doing funny. If everybody else was funny, I’d have no problem doing what they were doing. But we don’t find it funny. It’s excruciating, played out.

Danny: There is something to be said for uniqueness. You don’t take the easy way out. The characters think they’re taking the easy road. But as writers, you always push yourselves into corners and work yourselves out. You’re in an era where you have to come across with the goods or get the f@ck outta town.

(Danny leaves to catch a plane.)

Q: blah blah blah about the online episode in which the gang believe Mac is a serial killer based on no evidence whatsoever.

Rob: I’ve heard some criticism of that episode – it didn’t make any sense that the characters thought that their friend could be a serial killer. To me, whoever thinks that doesn’t understand the show, because that’s the nature of the show. You’re never gonna see that on ‘Friends,’ because on ‘Friends’ it doesn’t make any fucking sense. But in this world, without any shred of evidence, they could instantly assume the worse.

Glenn: Of their best friends.

Kaitlin: It’s fun for them, because everyone had some selfish reason to think that.

Q: The characters are perfectly comfortable with the fact that they are absolutely venal and will sacrifice one another at the drop of a hat.

Glenn: I think our characters have extremely short-term memories, episode to episode, which is fun to use. They genuinely have absolutely no idea.

Kaitlin: We’re too busy thinking about ourselves to remember stuff. Any stuff.

Glenn: We’re onto the next thing. We like to think of it as living in the moment.

Kaitlin: Yeah, it’s really spiritual.

Rob: So many sitcoms that have been really great have come from a place where the characters have to be nice and likable an you have to understand their motivations all the time. And we want to do something different; that’s been done.

Q: Any protests from Philadelphia’s inbred families? (referring to the McPoyles, the gang’s avowed enemies)

Kaitlin: (laughs) You mean, like in letter form? They don’t know how to write.

Glenn: Maybe in the form of feces flung.

Kaitlin: However they’re expressing it to us, it’s not getting to us.

Glenn: They haven’t figured out how to communicate through – what’s the word? – language?

Q: (to Howerton) What’s it like, making out with a McPoyle?

As Us Magazine might enthuse, Stars! They’re just like us! Except, of course, they appear on the TeeVee and are famous and we don’t and aren’t! So, really, they’re nothing like us except for the biped and opposable-thumb things.

CBS wants you to know that people you may have heard of will be appearing on some of their returning shows. So they have passed along this information to me, so that I can act as a conduit and provide you with the particulars of these exciting developments.

Which I do, even though the network has confirmed that it will not be providing advance screeners of “Kid Nation.” Apparently, CBS believes the show’s dubious, possibly illegal but certainly unethical back story would poison reviewers and therefore they wouldn’t be able to catch a break, so they’ll just ride that well-oiled publicity machine of contempt and outcry and wager that no legal authority will be able to figure out who, specifically, should be incarcerated – make that, put in a fun, maximum-security summer camp with a lot of menacingly brawny men with tattoos – for creating such runaway entertainment.

So, where were we? Oh, right – the CBS shows that didn’t endanger children have some cast changes. And I’m cobbling this fact into a blog entry.

Well, we already told you about Joe Mantegna replacing persnickety Mandy Patinkin on “Criminal Minds,” so never mind.

Jay Mohr, a comic actor who had an edge once upon a time (he starred in “Action,” remember? No? Well, he did), has joined the cast of “Ghost Whisperer,” per the press release, “playing Professor Payne who provides an encyclopedic knowledge of the spirit world, as well as genuine concern for Melinda’s (Jennifer Love Hewitt) safety as she puts herself in ever greater danger to protect those she cares about — even though he hides his concern behind an ever-present irreverent sense of humor.” Because that’s what I associate with “Ghost Whisperer” – an ever-present irreverent sense of humor.

Kevin Pollak, who does the best William Shatner imitation going, will no doubt allow that talent to lie dormant and ossify when he joins the cast of “Shark” in the recurring role of James Woods’ new boss, the new D.A.

Remember Henry Thomas? Adorable little Elliot in “E.T.?” Well, having peaked so early in his career has sent him over to the dark side, so he’ll be playing a villain on “Without a Trace:” Specifically, “Jack's (Anthony LaPaglia) evil nemesis, and the leader of a human trafficking group who the FBI team is pursuing.”

On the other hand, James Marsters, best known as Spike on “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” and “Angel,” gets to play a nicer guy on “Without a Trace,” a detective working a case with the Feds.

Last, and least – because it concerns “Rules of Engagement” – Heather Locklear will appear in a couple of episodes because that’s likely all she could stomach, particularly since they’re gonna have her character date David Spade.

Hacking everything out for last Sunday's Fall-TV preview prevented my weekly tub-thumping for "Mad Men" last week (though a commenter in the previous week's entry provided a mini-recap of the episode's most resonant moment), but we're back this week, only to ponder the question: Will Don Draper (Jon Hamm) jump ship from Sterling Cooper?

Tonight, Don is recruited by a larger ad agency, McCann Erickson, and the recruiter approaches him via his wife Betty (January Jones):

"Did anyone ever tell you you're a dead ringer for Grace Kelly?"

Betty: "They used to."

Betty's hired by McCann Erickson to model for a European Coca Cola campaign. Don's not sure he likes having a working wife.

Meanwhile, the Sterling Cooper guys find an inspired way to sell Nixon via laxatives, and Peggy (Elisabeth Moss), fresh from her triumph in ad writing and her heartbreak from being cruelly dismissed by Pete (Vincent Kartheiser), is losing her heat in the office; one guy refers to her as "a piece of fruit who went real bad real fast and no one got to eat it."

But tonight's line of the night goes to Joan (Christina Hendricks), addressing a switchboard operator lamenting her lowly position: "One hour on the Sterling Cooper switchboard would be a Russian novel."

Again, the women get the short end of the stick, though at episode's end, Betty does manage to let off a little steam.

- "Mad Men:" 10 tonight, AMC.

The shortest story ever about “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia” ran in the Daily News today, but it wasn’t written that way. But, many trees (and readers) were spared the entire story. Even the online version was truncated.

So here it is (it’s still not that long) in its entirety. Perhaps we’ll even share the transcript of the interview later.

Since its premiere two summers ago, “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia” has always played by its own rules, if it can be said to have any rules at all.

The comedy, which returns tonight at 10 p.m. on FX, concerns four friends, Mac (Rob McElhenney), Charlie (Charlie Day), Dennis (Glenn Howerton), Dee (Kaitlin Olson) – well, “friends” might be too strong a term, as they’re invariably happy to betray one another or think the worst of each other. Danny DeVito joined the cast last season as Frank, the father of two – and maybe three – of the gang, a guy whose arrested development may even be worse than the others’.

The group run – barely – a bar; in the course of the series, characters have organized Russian Roulette games, become crack addicts to cadge welfare checks and been accused, not wholly unjustly, of terrorism. Tonight, they try to profit off of a baby they find abandoned in a dumpster.

In an episode released online over the summer, Mac was suddenly and casually suspected by the others of being a serial killer.

“I’ve heard some criticism of that episode – people said it didn’t make any sense that they thought their friend could be a serial killer,” says McElhenney, who created and executive-produces the series along with Howerton and Day. He, along with DeVito, Howerton and Olson, are sitting in a barely air-conditioned trailer approximating their bar, only minus the booze, after sweltering for two hours in 100-degree heat signing autographs on the USC campus.

“Whoever thinks that doesn’t understand the show, because that’s the nature of the show,” McElhenney continues. “In this world, without any shred of evidence, they could instantly assume the worse.”

“Of their best friends,” Howerton adds.

“It’s fun for them, because they all had some selfish reason to think that,” Olson offers.

But the characters are perfectly comfortable with the fact that they are absolutely venal.

“I think our characters have extremely short-term memories, which helps,” Howerton says. “Episode to episode, which is fun to use. They genuinely have absolutely no idea.”

Olson adds, “We’re too busy thinking about ourselves to remember stuff. Any stuff.”

“We’re onto the next thing,” Howerton agrees. “We like to think of it as living in the moment.”

“Yeah, it’s really spiritual,” Olson deadpans.

“I get scripts that are so (expletive) far out,” DeVito marvels of the writers’ ability to one-up themselves. “I don’t think it’s more difficult for them. They bitch and moan constantly, but I think it’s second-nature for them to come up with these sleazy, scummy, lowlife views on the human race.

“There is something to be said for uniqueness,” DeVito continues, then, turning to the others, adds, “You don’t take the easy way out. The characters think they’re taking the easy road. But as writers, you always push yourselves into corners and work yourselves out. You’re in an era where you have to come across with the goods or get the (expletive) outta town.”

And yet, no one in the cast will condemn their characters’ behavior.

“I don’t think of them as bad, I think of them as retarded,” Olson says.

McElhenney interjects, “Sad…”

“Sad, and insecure and self-serving,” Olson continues.

“They’ve very insecure,” Howerton agrees.

“Really just pathetic,” McElhenney adds. “I kind of feel sorry for them.”

“I want to hug all of them and bring them over for dinner,” Olson says wistfully.

McElhenney brings her back to Earth: “But they would just ruin your life.”

And the riffing give Howerton an idea for an episode.

“Someone might recognize these characters and feel sorry for them and really genuinely try to help them,” he says, “and then they’d just ruin their lives.”

- "It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia:" 10 and 10:30 tonight, repeating at 11 and 11:30 tonight; also midnight Sunday and 11 p.m. Monday, FX.

It was the best of times for Keith Olbermann; it was the worst of times for Katie Couric.

Despite potentially putting herself in harm’s way in Iraq, Katie Couric earned the worst ratings of her year-and-a-week tenure as anchor of “The CBS Evening News.” Just under 5.5 million on average watched her newscast last week. CBS News blamed the slump on, naturally, golf. (The U.S. Open cut into viewership on Friday.)

Meanwhile, for the first time in his career, Keith Olbermann smacked down his arch-nemesis Bill O’Reilly (since when do newscasters have arch-nemeses?), beating Billo on Friday in the advertiser-friendly viewers-aged-25-54 demographic. The Screaming Loufah still had scads more viewers than Olbermann, but they tended to be Bitter Old White Men Who Won’t Part With Their Money and therefore not particularly valuable to advertisers. Olbermann’s “Countdown” was, in fact, the highest rated newscast in all of prime-time cable on Friday, a first for once-lowly MSNBC.

Couric, of course, still boasts far larger audiences than O’Reilly and Olbermann combined, but then, she is being paid $15 million per year, or a little less than $3 per viewer on a nightly basis. O’Reilly earns an estimated $9 million per annum, thanks to his TV and radio shows, books and speaking fees. By comparison, Olbermann got a raise to $4 million this year, for his work on “Countdown,” co-hosting NBC’s “Sunday Night Football” pre-game and halftime shows and occasional other contributions to NBC News. Not bad for a newscaster whose show occasionally recreates the news with cardboard puppets on popsicle sticks.

And now, the final installment of our Peabody Award-winning series on categorizing this year's Emmy presenters:

This is Mutually Beneficial: Teri Hatcher, Felicity Huffman, Sally Field, Masi Oka.

I Need Help Promoting My Show: Kathryn Morris.

I’m Doing You a Favor: Patrick Dempsey, Ray Romano.

You Threw Me a Bone; I’m Returning the Favor: Leslie Caron, Elaine Stritch, Stanley Tucci, John Goodman. All won Emmys this past weekend for guest appearances on shows.

I’m Throwing You a Bone; Please Return the Favor: Queen Latifah, Debra Messing, Helen Mirren. All are up for Best Actress in a TV-Film or Miniseries. What they should do is have these three present the award and see if a big ole catfight breaks out when the winner is announced.

THE FOLLOWING IS A PUBLIC SERVICE MESSAGE FROM THE MAYOR OF TELEVISION.

Have you ever lamented that there are no good TV-watching/drinking games these days? Now, thanks to HBO, there is!

Introducing the "Tell Me You Love Me" chugfest, which combines everyone’s favorite pastimes, drinking and sex, only without the danger of contracting an STD! (Alcohol-induced comas, however, are another thing.)

Rules: Have a drink every time one of the following occurs:

* One shot for bared female breasts.
* An additional shot for bared male or female buttocks.
* A shot and a beer chaser for any glimpse of female genitalia, no matter how fleeting.
* Two shots for any sighting of male genitalia.
* Two shots each time you wonder if the actors're really doing it.
* A beer for each act of self-gratification.
* One shot for each time you're grateful your parents aren't watching this with you.
* One shot for realistic orgasmic grunts.
* A beer for other orgasmic grunts.
* A beer for every time a character whines about how depressing his/her life is.

No viewer makes it into the office the next day!

Disclaimer: If you pass out, do not continue playing the game. Do not attempt to operate heavy machinery within three days of playing the game. Beginners may want to pick but one character and drink only when that character meets one of the above criteria. Please play responsibly.

The New York Times is reporting that Jon Stewart will host the 80th annual Oscar ceremony next year, despite mixed reviews and middling ratings for his first outing (but then, you can’t blame the ratings on Jon when “Crash” was the movie that was named Best Picture).

Well, it certainly beats Ryan Seacrest. And Stewart got better as the show progressed.

And at least you know kinda sorta what you’re getting with Stewart, as opposed to Stephen Colbert, whose Washington Correspondents Dinner performance offended its target audience.

It has become something of an annual tradition, my kvetching about the networks frequently providing only the pilot episodes of their new series.

This year, I may have to be content with merely receiving updated versions of the pilots.

The fall season officially begins Monday, Sept. 24. As of today, here are the screeners (and number of episodes) that have landed on my doorstep:

ABC
Two new shows:
“Pushing Daisies” (the pilot)
“Private Practice” (the first episode – the “Grey’s Anatomy” spinoff episode being the putative pilot)

Four returning shows:
“Desperate Housewives” (one episode)
“Ugly Betty” (two episodes)
“Brothers & Sisters” (one episode)
“Extreme Makeover: Home Edition” (one episode)

New shows Missing In Action:
“Samantha Who?”, “Cavemen,” “Carpoolers,” “Dirty Sexy Money,” “Big Shots,” “Women’s Murder Club”

CBS
One new show:
“The Big Bang Theory” (pilot)

Three returning shows:
"Shark" (one episode)
"Numb3rs" (one episode)
"The Unit" (one episode)

New shows MIA:
“Viva Laughlin,” “Cane,” “Kid Nation,” “Moonlight”
(By the way, pilots for “Kid Nation” and “Moonlight” were never sent out.

NBC
Four new shows:
“Chuck” (pilot)
“Bionic Woman” (pilot)
“Journeyman” (pilot)
“Life” (pilot)

Returning shows:
“Law & Order: Special Victims Unit” (one episode
“Deal or No Deal” (gimme a break; one episode)

Note: A second “Chuck” episode is supposed to be on the way, and “maybe” a “Journeyman.”

Fox
Four new shows:
“K-Ville” (two episodes)
“Kitchen Nightmares” (two episodes)
“Back to You” (two episodes)
“Nashville” (one episode)

Eight returning shows:
“House” (two episodes)
“Prison Break” (two episodes)
“Bones” (one episode)
“’Til Death” (one episode)
“The Simpsons” (one episode)
“Family Guy” (one episode – the hourlong “Star Wars” parody)
“King of the Hill” (one episode)
“American Dad” (one episode)

MIA:
“Next Great American Band,” but it’s a live reality show, so they can’t exactly help us out there.

The CW
One new show:
“Gossip Girl” (pilot)

No returning shows

MIA:
“Aliens in America,” “Reaper,” “Life is Wild” (also the pop-culture magazine shows “CW Now” and “Online Nation,” but those aren’t likely to be sent out)

Hence, only Fox seems to have its act together (and, to a lesser extent, NBC); everyone else looks to be cutting it close.

With shows that were particularly admired by critics (“Pushing Daisies,” “Chuck,” “Reaper”), it’s important to have additional episodes to see if the showrunners can maintain the pilot’s level of quality (particularly with “Pushing Daisies,” which was quirky and stylized to a degree that would seem to be difficult to sustain). Here’s hoping the networks see fit to help us help you, the viewer, make smart, sane viewing choices.

Your Mayor was interviewed by BBC Radio Monday about the lamentable decision to hire Ryan Seacrest to host Sunday’s Emmy Awards ceremony. Yearning to salve diplomatic relations between our two countries, which were sorely tested when Tony Blair became branded Bush Junior’s lapdog during the war in Iraq, I suggested the only reason Seacrest was picked was that the producers wanted to get Simon Cowell as part of the bargain; he’d sit at a desk to the side of the stage and inform Seacrest at intermittent stages of the ceremony what an abysmal job he was doing, and dump on the quality of the nominees and winners in general.

All this, I informed the journalist in a Cockney accent that’d do Dick Van Dyke proud, and while repeatedly calling my interviewer “Gov’nor.”

This reminded me, however, that in my preparations for the Fall TV Season, I had overlooked the dispensing of sundry technical and minor Emmy Awards over the weekend, something easily accomplished, because all right-thinking people were too busy taking in the cinematic blunderbuss “Shoot ’Em Up” rather than wringing their hands over who would take home the trophy for Creative Achievement in Interactive Television or Best Makeup (Non-Prosthetic).

The weekend’s big winners were Discovery Channel’s visual dazzler “Planet Earth,” HBO’s Bush Administration buzzkill “When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts” and, for technical achievement in politically correct television, HBO’s “Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee.”

But the biggest (and you know what I mean) winner was “Saturday Night Live’s” “Dick in a Box” (watch it once more for old time’s sake), which actually won a trophy for Best Song.

In accepting his pointy, gold-plated gewgaw honoring the highest achievements in the television arts, Andy Samberg (accepting on behalf of his collaborator Justin Timberlake) declared, “It's safe to say that when we first set out to make this song, we were all thinking, ‘Emmy!’”

If just one winner in Sunday’s televised ceremony will be that interesting, it almost might be worth watching.

Zachary Levi seems like a stand-up fellow. After our interview, he told me to keep his phone number and call back if I ever need a quote on anything. (Though here’s betting it was the phone of a friend he’s punking or one of those disposable cell phones.)

Levi’s the star of “Chuck,” which is one of the favorite new shows of pretty much everyone who’s weighed in so far. “Chuck,” as you likely well know by now, concerns an underachiever who gets a government database downloaded into his brain and now is either the CIA’s best weapon or biggest liability.

So to further perpetuate its front-runner status, I wrote a little story about the guy (no direct link available, but click here, then click on the Fall-TV preview image of Kristin Chenoweth and you’ll get some cool little animations, the story (“Five to Watch”) and the rest of the Fall TV package, including reviews. Or if that seems like too much work (did I mention the animations? The one for “Resistance is Futile” is very cool), you can just read the pertinent information after the jump) and had some material left over in which he explains some minutiae about the show and divulges a spoiler or two that he probably wasn’t supposed to.

On just what’s going on in Chuck’s head: “Ultimately, what’s happened is he’s absorbed a U.S.-government sanctioned ‘Intersect’ computer. ‘Intersect’ takes all the information from all the different branches of government and puts it together, and has its own logic processor. It puts pieces of information together for the government.

“In the pilot, ‘Intersect’ found out the bomb schematics from one computer database, knew the general was speaking at the hotel, found the blueprints from the hotel and information from the NSA about the Serbian demolitions expert. ‘Intersect’ put those pieces together and formulated equations into their meaning something – there’s a bomb in the hotel meant to blow up the general. And that’s what’s in Chuck’s brain.”

On Chuck’s unrequited relationship with Sarah (Yvonne Strzechowski), the CIA agent charged with protecting him (and does so by faking a relationship with him): “Chuck and Sarah’s relationship is thrilling and very frustrating for Chuck. In the pilot, he thinks he’s met this girl who’s into him, but then he finds out she’s not. He feels good about himself for a little while, now he’s more concerned with having to stay safe. Ultimately, he’ll have say, ‘Forget this, there’s nothing between us, I’m not gonna get to kiss you.’

“By episode 7 or 8 he kind of has a fake breakup from their fake relationship, and that plays into tension of that fake relationship and has her wondering whether she has some feelings for Chuck.”

Plus, Levi says, Chuck’ll later discover that she dated his college arch-nemesis who stole his girlfriend and eventually got him cut loose from Stanford. Also, episode six will be a flashback episode taking place during Chuck’s college days.

On how the show will divide its time between Chuck saving the world and working at big-box store Buy More: “It’s pretty equal – although, it seems that he’s saving the world in Buy More as he's saving the world outside Buy More. The bad guys and spies are making their way closer to his home. There aren’t a lot of ho-hum Buy More scenes – which is not to say that there are any ho-hum Buy More scenes – but there are plenty of moments in the Buy More where you’re still feeling like his life is threatened, not just when he’s out on a mission.”

No sooner had Your Mayor discoursed on BlogWorld, a convention for bloggers, and vowed not to attend unless he was invited to appear on one of the scintillating panel discussions, did that invitation come through.

BlogWorld will take place in November in – where else? – Las Vegas, site of Britney Spears’ most recent spectacular flameout, a performance that took the “sync” out of lip-sync, so listless and ill-considered that the only debate seemed to be whether it was a train wreck or a car crash. Perhaps now her boyfriend illusionist Criss Angel Mindfreak can make her disappear.

So, where were we? Oh, right, BlogWorld.

Less than 90 minutes after posting my commentary expressing my feverish desire to roam the convention floor and visit all the booths offering comfy blogging slippers and bathrobes (“blogrobes?”®) and energy drinks with the vodka already mixed in and watch scores of nerds batting away furiously at their keyboards blogging about sitting around with other blogging bloggers and chatting about blogging and then blogging about chatting about blogging until the word “meta” was stripped of its meaning and ceased to exist, BlogWorld CEO Rick Calvert extended this invitation:

“OK David you are hereby invited to speak on a panel.

“Would you prefer the talk on allowing comments or blogging ethics?

“Thanks for the post. Looking forward to hearing from you.”

I’m not sure what the argument against allowing comments is, unless it’s just to spare the blogger the untold hours it takes to machete through all the spam comments offering medicines without prescriptions, Asian porn and downloads of crappy rock bands (these days, it seems I kill out 150 of those things to every 1 actual comment, all in the service of you, the Good People of Television). I know of only one popular blog that doesn’t allow comments, so I can’t say that I would bring much new or fresh to the party on that subject.

As for blogging ethics, I was shocked to discover that any standards exist, this being the Wild West cyberworld and all. But, in fact, ethics do exist (rule No. 1: “Never plagiarize.” Duh), and I’m happy to report that it looks like I’m an ethical blogger, except, of course, for all those times I make stuff up out of whole cloth and then, every once in a while, it gets reported as fact.

So I’m thinking maybe I can do this; it certainly is an honor, and then I see this at BlogWorld’s website: “There are hundreds of speaking opportunities at BlogWorld & New Media Expo. With keynote presentations, moderators, panel members, product presenters and press conferences, anyone who is in the “know” of the new media will be speaking at the Show.”

Ah. They’re giving a platform to anyone with a laptop and a tin foil hat. So I wouldn’t be that special after all.

Anyway, somewhat shockingly, BlogWorld has its own blog. And, there’s a magazine for bloggers, too. And it has a print edition!

Well, this could’ve gone better: BrandWeek is reporting that the kerfuffle over “Lord of the Flies”-lite, child-enslaving reality show “Kid Nation” is drowning out any noise that CBS’s other new shows might be making, but scarcely has helped it lure advertisers.

“On Sept. 5, Yahoo listed Kid Nation as the most searched show among new fall series,” the magazine says. But then it quotes someone at a TV Research group rather ominously named Human Insight (who will co-opt that for their show’s sinister, secretive organization first, “Heroes” or “Bionic Woman?”) saying, “Clearly, the interest among bloggers to write about the show has not only increased, but eclipsed interest in writing about any other CBS show.”

CBS wanted something controversial, and they got it. And now, it’s time for them to yet again relearn the fact that you can’t put the toothpaste back in the tube.

Meanwhile, and speaking of which, what better way to commemorate the sixth anniversary of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 than by attending a workshop on “Writing the Reality Show:”

“From the multi-million-dollar series of broadcast television to the low-budget niche shows of cable, reality programming dominates television,” burbles the sales pitch. “But are reality shows really ‘reality?’ How much planning and production goes into unscripted storytelling? And, most importantly, how can you get in on the action?”

And then, they promise: “We'll explore how to structure your reality pitch and get it to the right people. … Whether you're a writer, producer, or host, reality television's waiting for you.”

Price of the seminar: a mere $65. And one soul.

ABC’s airing its takedown of NBC’s “To Catch a Predator” tonight, but why wait? Here’s a taste.

*

The mind reels: “BlogWorld will be the first ‘big tent’ industry-wide event and will attract thousands of the most influential bloggers, vloggers, podcasters, and Internet radio and TV broadcasters in the world.”

You mean these people will have to put on clothes and interact with the public? And what would actually occur at such an expo, except everyone sitting around blogging about how they’re at a blogging convention until the whole thing collapses into some black hole of omphaloskepsis.

And, of course, no convention is complete without panel discussions. At BlogWorld, they’ll ruminate over whether bloggers should invite comments to their blogs as well as on blogging “ethics,” and blogging about popular culture. That sh!t should be riveting.

Unless I’m invited to be on a panel, I’m not going.

As some of you may know, Your Mayor has a real, full-time job that sometimes supercedes his blogging skills, and this week, I was particularly busy manning the phone, providing tech support for people in India with computer problems. It’s tough mastering that accent, let me tell you.

So I’ll just hack away at a few of the things that I’ve missed in short order.

* For a guy who’s ostensibly so charismatic that he broke into showbiz by getting hired to play himself in a movie, Fred Thompson, the Republican’s putative best hope for retaining the White House next year, seems awfully damn somnolent for someone announcing his intentions to run for President.

Even the venue for the announcement was lazy, cribbed from Ahnold’s campaign strategy. Discussing Iraq with Leno, dude didn’t seem like a guy who wanted it very much. The studio audience was just sitting there, waiting for an idea or sense of passion to applaud – because, after all, that’s what studio audiences do – but he refused to accommodate them until he popped off the usual “greatest country in the world” line and the audience, figuring that would have to do, gave it up. Odd, because he can be an engaging interview. That, coupled with how he waited until the heat drifted off him to declare, not to mention that Newsweek article, doesn’t instill a lot of confidence. Step it up, Fred; make this a horserace.

* No one’s watching television anymore. Every network achieved almost historic low ratings last week. NBC averaged 4.2 million viewers in primetime, meaning, roughly, 1/75th of the country watched NBC, an ostensible broadcaster. Univision almost had as many viewers.

It’s getting to the point where you practically can’t give TV programming away: Apple is hacking off the industry – as we’ve noted, NBC’s already bolted – by suggesting selling downloads of episodes of TV shows at iTunes for a mere 99 cents, which is what they charge for a single three-minute song. Apple says more people’ll buy ’em, so you’ll make more money, TeeVee people say well yeah maybe but then we won’t be able to sell those handsome DVD boxed sets that make us all that money.

* Oh, goodie: Another reality show featuring someone who’s famous for being famous. Tila Tequila, whose predilection for eschewing outerwear has transformed her into the reigning queen of MySpace (which, according to the New York Times Magazine and Rick Rubin, is officially over), is getting her own TeeVee gig. MTV’s doing “A Shot at Love with Tila Tequila,” a dating show that’ll feature both men and women trying to woo the retiring wallflower. It already has a sponsor: Single Day FAMVIR.

If this is how MTV thinks it’s going to regain its lost glory, well, words fail.

* And while our minds are in the gutter: All these stories about squeaky-clean “High School Musical” star Vanessa Hudgens’ nasty, bad, naughty photo online, and yet no word on where you can find it? Or who took it and/or leaked it? (We’ve got our eye on you, Zac Efron.) America wants answers, dammit!

There’s a lot of talk in the TV industry about programming compatibility, about “flow.” That’s the idea that the sensibility of one show is not at loggerheads with that of the show that follows it, that a viewer of one show might reasonably want to stick around for whatever comes on next.

“Chuck” into “Heroes” at NBC is a good example of flow. “CSI” into “Without a Trace” on CBS is an excellent example of flow. ABC’s “Ugly Betty” into “Grey’s Anatomy” isn’t bad flow. You get the idea.

But, like they like to say at HBO, it’s not TV. It’s HBO.

Hence, on Sunday, you will witness the most emotionally whipsaw evening of television in, well, ever.

First up is the new series “Tell Me You Love Me,” which got everyone’s panties in a twist at TV Press Tour because the wardrobe budget seems to be awfully small so the actors are naked a lot, and we all know what actors do when they’re naked, and that activity turns up on screen an awful lot. But it’s not what you think – it’s about relationships and feelings and communication and marriage.

In other words, it’s depressing as hell. Only one couple in the show is happy and they don’t really seem happy, just resigned to one another. Even the couples ostensibly in love can barely stand one another.

So, yes, it’s realistic, but in 2007, “realistic” has sort of become a euphemism for “break out the wrists and straight razors.”

Following “Tell Me You Love Me,” naturally, is the sixth-season premiere of “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” Larry David’s gleefully ridiculous comedy about bad behavior that is so far removed from “realistic” as to exist on a separate plane. These shows will complement one another throughout their runs.

But on Sunday, it gets even odder. For, after Larry David has childishly kvetched his way through another improbably plotted half hour of wackiness, HBO premieres “Alive Day Memories: Home From Iraq,” a heartbreaking documentary about soldiers grievously wounded during their tours of combat and struggling to piece their lives together, even though they may be missing pieces of their anatomy. Needless to say, despite the resolve these valiant men and women exhibit, “Alive Day Memories” is even more depressing than “Tell Me You Love Me’s” fictitious characters who can’t get their sh!t together.

Which is not to say that any of these productions are bad – they, in fact, are all quite good to varying degrees. It’s just to recommend that if you watch HBO Sunday night, you might want to wear a neck brace to protect yourself from emotional whiplash.

We discussed NBC’s skirmish with iTunes, breaking a mutually beneficial relationship with the digital download giant because the network wanted to gobsmack fans of its shows by charging them $4.99 per episode and Apple said nope.

So NBC has taken its ball and gone home (ball, here, being a metaphor for all its TeeVee shows) – or, at least, over to Amazon.com’s Unbox service. Unbox is essentially a dinkier version of iTunes, but here’s the punchline – Mac users can’t access anything on it, and iPod and iPhone owners – the folks who helped save “The Office” in the first place – can’t download its content into their iGadgets. Take that, MacWorld!

Surprise: The Tribal Elders over at the Parents Television Council still don't like TV all that much. Given how badly their genteel eyes and ears were battered in the course of a new study ("almost 90% of the 208 television shows reviewed contained objectionable content"), it's a shock that their viewing habits of this televisual Sodom and Gomorrah hasn't turned them all into drug-addicted Satan worshippers.

Kudos to:

Fox, "the worst broadcast network overall, noting its 20.78 instances of violent, profane and sexual content each hour;"

ABC, declared the "worst network for sex" (meaning they depict a lot of it, not that its employees aren't good at getting lucky);

"American Dad," "worst series overall based on the alarming 52 instances of objectionable content that was packed into each hour of programming;"

"My Name is Earl," which "contains more than 16 instances of foul language every single hour;"

"The War at Home," "with 33 sexual depictions or references an hour" (and still, it got cancelled);

MyNetwork, deemed "worst network for foul language" (and yet no one watches it);

and "24," which "features a whopping 28 occurrences of violence each hour."

"In 180 hours of original programming," they grouse, "there were 2,246 instances of objectionable violent, profane and sexual content, or 12.48 instances per television hour." I clearly am not watching the right shows.

PTC is vague as to what constitutes an offense, though they're often accused of being a prickly, easily offended bunch (I think I made it up somewhere that they consider images of women not wearing pantsuits and sensible shoes a "sexual depiction or reference"). They're likewise part of the 13% of the country who hasn't allowed the notion of "if you don't like it, don't watch it" to sink into their heads, folks who champion pap like "The Singing Bee" simply because it's inoffensive (never mind the fact that it's idiotic), people who want to influence what you watch regardless of whether you subscribe to their beliefs.

And you really have to wonder about ostensibly sentient adults who would willingly subject themselves to MyNetwork programming, even under the guise of a research study.

Their avowed nemesis, First Amendment champion TV Watch, responded to the study: "Once again, the Parents Television Council, founder of online complaint campaigns, has produced a document that relies on faulty analysis, biased methodology and suspect omissions as part of an ongoing effort to influence regulators and lawmakers to take family viewing decisions out of the hands of parents and give them to the government."

Actually, given how well the government is running things these days, why not give them a shot? It'll only be a matter of time before HBO's "Tell Me You Love Me" is on during the family hour.

In order to get you into the mood to cozy up with its new Cuban-American family epic “Cane,” CBS would like to buy you a drink.

But it can’t, of course, so they’ve cooked up a little scheme: a “multi-sensory campaign” that will set “a new standard for innovative marketing and brand differentiation:”

In the upcoming issue of Rolling Stone, CBS is offering an ad featuring “Peel 'n Taste® flavor strip technology” that “tastes like a non-alcoholic lime Mojito.” Non-alcoholic? What’s the point of that?

“We're confident that this latest concept will not only appeal to Rolling Stone readers, but engage them to get a true taste of ‘Cane,’” said some marketing guy.

The phrase “creative environment for marketers to conduct innovative, never-been-done-before advertising initiatives that break new ground and generate buzz” was also in the press release, but I refrained from tearing out my hair.

Honestly: Who wants to lick anything inside a magazine? You don’t know where it’s been!

Round three of our weekly update of Emmy presenters, as sorted in our own patented® branding fashion:

This is Mutually Beneficial: Ali Larter, Mary-Louise Parker, Vanessa Williams.

I Need Help Promoting My Show: Joe Mantegna, Anthony Anderson, Neil Patrick Harris.

I’m Doing You a Favor: Hugh Laurie, Eva Longoria, Glenn Close. (Close has a side order of This is Mutually Beneficial.)

And, a new category:

Hey, I’ll Appear on Anything: William Shatner.

And yet another new category:

My Show’s Doing Fine, But You People Have Never Exactly Treated Me as Cool: Mark Harmon.

As we reported last week, advertisers saw an episode of “Kid Nation” last week, apparently didn’t hate it, but didn’t love it enough to buy lots of commercial time in it.

"A cautious approach from some advertisers to a show generating this much attention is very common,” some CBS mouthpiece told Advertising Age. “We believe that the issues raised about Kid Nation will be resolved when the viewing public sees the first episode on Sept. 19."

That sentiment was echoed by the show’s embattled executive producer, Tom Forman, as the network circles the wagons and says damn the torpedoes and takes the plunge and insists the show must go on and engages in other clichés.

“Everybody’s questions about the show will be answered when it airs,” Forman told the New York Times. Amazingly, they’re talking about a second edition – perhaps set in Mexico, where life is cheap and men die like dogs and yet more clichés occur. “Nothing is off the table,” Forman told the Times.

And since “Kid Nation” is working out so well for CBS image-wise, NBC has plunged into a reality show featuring babies!

“Baby Borrowers” feature teen couples considering becoming parents. For three days each, they’re charged with caring for an infant, a toddler, a pre-teen, a teen and then, just because it sounds kind of cruel, an old person. The show shot in Idaho, where child labor laws are so slack they've actually made it legal for children to get trapped in deep wells to perk up cable news coverage during slow news cycles.

Of course, the show’s producers insist that not only is there nothing wrong with such an arrangement, and that the show may be the finest contribution to the television arts since “Queen for a Day.”

"We take extreme care and caution," Richard McKerrow insisted to TV Week. "It's an incredibly safe environment. ... It's safer than [daycare]." Which is just what parents about to enter their kids in daycare want to hear, that some reality show is better for their children.

“Baby Borrowers” debuted in January in England, and lest you think all the hand-wringing here over “Kid Nation” is just the result of a nation of simpering Americans who put the safety of children ahead of the needs of TV executives to create groundbreaking entertainment, well, the British show didn’t go over any better initially, either.

To be fair, the real parents are monitoring what the faux parents do and can remove their child if they don’t like what they see, which happened once in the British series. (The parents probably just decided to try to hold out for more money for their impending infant star.)

And McKerrow hits us with the money quote: “For all those people who think, ‘Oh God, it's another terrible reality show,’ I'd say it's got soul to it. It's got a real emotional journey to it.”

Of course he’d say that. I’d say, “Oh God, it’s another terrible reality show.”

Which show is the following line from, “Mad Men” or “Damages?”

“A man should want to be in charge. Now the trick is, making him feel like he actually is.”

The answer is “Damages,” which also features the line, “He had no ambition. He disgusted me.”

So tonight, Frobisher (Ted Danson) is thinking that maybe a memoir is the best way to clear his name. As the publisher is seeking a book about his rampant corruption, this doesn’t look to turn out too well. And Ellen’s (Rose Byrne) engagement isn’t looking too healthy, either.

And Patty (Glenn Close) does something mean, just because she can.

- “Damages:” 10 tonight; FX.

… must be the San Francisco Register, as this fall it has placed two separate reporters on two different shows airing on competing networks.

Don Vassar (Kevin McKidd) is a local-government reporter for the Register in NBC’s “Journeyman.” He doesn’t seem to be a particularly good reporter – he keeps missing deadlines for his stories (his editor receives these blown deadlines with a shockingly unjournalistic equanimity) – but he has a valid (if bewildering) excuse: Like Kurt Vonnegut’s Billy Pilgrim, Don’s unstuck in time: He’ll just be motoring down the street and a white light’ll flash and he’ll wind up a decade or two in the past while his car goes careening off into traffic. Needless to say, this is a most inconvenient ability to possess – or affliction to suffer from, take your pick – so most of Don’s family and friends just think he’s a no-good reprobate drunk (hey, he is a reporter).

Cindy Thomas (Aubrey Dollar) works the crime beat for the Register in ABC’s “Women’s Murder Club,” but she, too, doesn’t seem to ever get around to doing any writing, mainly because she’s too busy helping her buddies, all professional crime-solvers, solve crimes.

Clearly, “Journeyman” and “Women’s Murder Club” need to do some crossover episodes, just so we can see how Don and Cindy vie for space on the front page of the paper for their assorted scoops and for further illumination into how serious journalism is truly practiced at the Register.

Which, naturally, doesn’t actually exist. Yes, the newspaper so cool as to have two TV characters working for it is the fictitious creation of two different show producers who didn't want to go to the hassle of using the words Examiner or Chronicle.

In the "Kid Nation" entry immediately below, Sally was the little girl cited as drinking turpentine. In fact, the girl was Bettany.

The Mayor of Television apologizes for the error and any confusion it may have caused.

ADVANCE TRANSCRIPT OF “KID NATION” EXECUTIVE PRODUCER TOM FORMAN’S ADDRESS TO THE FREEDOM-LOVING CITIZENS OF KID NATION, NEW MEXICO. DUE TO THE SPEED WITH WHICH THIS TRANSCRIPT WAS PREPARED, COMPLETE ACCURACY CANNOT BE GUARANTEED.

Monday, Sept. 3:

Good morning. Children, settle down. Josh, could you limp with more of a spring in your step when the cameras are on you? Great.

Sally, don’t drink that! It’s turpentine! Al, take that away from her, will you?

Freedom-loving citizens of Kid Nation, today is Labor Day. President Grover Cleveland created Labor Day in 1894 in attempt to quell unrest amongst the oppressed workers of the day. The year before, he had deployed 12,000 Federal troops to break a strike by the American Railway Union at the Pullman Company, and a couple of employees got murdered, so that was his little way of making amends. 1894 was an election year, see, and it didn’t really help because Cleveland was not re-elected, but for some reason Labor Day stuck, and so we recognize it today.

Work is a grand and glorious enterprise, my children. As you read daily on the ubiquitous banners papering this camp, “Arbeit Macht Frei.” As Abraham Lincoln said, “The strongest bond of human sympathy outside the family relation should be one uniting working people of all nations and tongues and kindreds.”

Of course, my children, as stated in carefully worded documents signed off on by your parents, you, in point of fact, are not laborers. You, as your contracts so specifically state, are youngsters engaged in fun activities, and the fact that your efforts are being filmed for the sake of televised entertainment so that I can get that new sun deck added to my mansion and buy a new Maserati while the best you can hope for out of this is to pay for a few hours of college does not materially alter that fact.

Hence, though today is Labor Day, traditionally a day for workers to take off and relax and guzzle a few brewski’s, since you are not technically employees of anyone you will not get the day off, except, of course, for this presentation, followed by a short break for ice cream which we will give you out of the goodness of our heart.

We have discovered a new vein of uranium in the nearby mine, and we need you to begin extracting it today – all in the name of fun, of course!

Now, children, settle down. Cheer up. We have iron-clad contracts with each of you, though of course as I’ve said you are not really employees. But as you shuffle off to the mine, recall the sage words of Lane Kirkland, who once said, “If hard work were such a wonderful thing, surely the rich would have kept it all to themselves.”

And as Molly Ivins memorably observed, “One thing that corporations do not do is give out money out of the goodness of their hearts.”

Thank you for your time, and now, get back to work – er, play! Get back to play!

And Al, make sure you take away their pitchforks, OK?