January 2008 Archives

R.J. Johnson, a reader (and SAG member) sent me this missive regarding an incident at the recent SAG awards:

“Note to: SAG President Alan Rosenberg

“According to published reports from her publicist, you raised your voice to Sally Field during a discussion about the writers strike. Alan, you don’t yell at Sally Field. You don’t try to bully Sally Field. It’s just plain wrong. Pick on someone your own size. Let’s have a chat!”

According to Field’s publicist, “She thought talks should have begun sooner and was trying to relay information from other actors that contract negotiations should begin sooner rather than later, and he became incensed. She had to raise her voice to be heard over his. She has every right to express her opinion to him."

I asked R.J. if he minded if I posted his outrage at Rosenberg. He replied, go ahead, adding:

“Sally Field is 5' 2" and 61 years old. Some second banana on a sitcom like Rosenberg is going to bully her. No!”

Actually, I believe Ms. Field is more than capable of holding her own. As I can attest, as she put me in a headlock once when I asked her if she had any interest in doing a “Flying Nun” reunion show.

Nikki Finke, the go-to source for strike-related rumors of every stripe (except when the DGA reached an agreement with AMPTP while she was on vacation), says there’s encouraging progress in the talks between writers and producers.

Hey, if Nikki Finke says it, it must be true. Or not.

Meanwhile, here’s a little snapshot of how some writers are trying to avoid going slowly mad. One, a young writer hired by “Saturday Night Live” just a couple of months before the strike began, notes, "I have slightly more picketing experience than actual writing experience."

Despite the fact that a lot of people find celebrity website videographers obnoxious louts who encourage confrontation, stuff like TMZ.com and TMZ TV remain curiously addictive to the masses. But what if everyone were subjected to that same sort of random, hectoring scrutiny?

At Presidential press conferences

PRESIDENT: ... and I want to thank Congress for working with me in a spirit of bipartisanship to implement these policies that will help great numbers of deserving American lobbyists. Now, I'll take your questions.

REPORTER 1 (belligerently): Did you say something racist?

PRESIDENT: What? When? Just now? What are you talking about?

REPORTER 1 (faux genially): I saw it on a website somewhere.

REPORTER 2 (belligerently): I read it on a blog.

PRESIDENT: No, that's absurd -

REPORTER 3 (belligerently): Are you a racist?

PRESIDENT: No, of course not. I'm here to serve all Americans. I don't pick and choose.

REPORTER 1 (belligerently): Well, what about that website? You calling it a liar?

PRESIDENT: I don't know what website you're talking about, but certainly you should know by now that a lot of misinformation is disseminated on the Internet.

REPORTER 2 (belligerently): Don't like the Internet, huh? I work for the Internet. Does that mean you don't like me?

REPORTER 3 (belligerently): Yeah, and she's a woman, too. Does that mean you don't think women deserve equal rights?

PRESIDENT: This is absurd.

REPORTER 1 (belligerently): You want to hit me? You do, don't you? Go ahead - do it! Do it!

REPORTER 3 (belligerently): Go for it! Go for it!

At the doctor

DOCTOR (belligerently): Why are you so sick?

PATIENT: Wha - ? What do you mean?

NURSE (faux genially): Are you on drugs?

DOCTOR: Are you drinking again?

NURSE (faux genially): Are you combining drugs and alcohol?

ORDERLY (belligerently): Are you cooking up crystal meth? Your face looks blotchy.

PATIENT: No, none of those things. Don't you remember? I was diagnosed with esophageal cancer!

ORDERLY (belligerently): Who've you been sleeping with to get esophageal cancer?

DOCTOR (belligerently): Yeah, who?

NURSE (belligerently): Don't you use protection?

PATIENT: What the - ? Look, I've got cancer. You can't get that from sexual contact.

DOCTOR (belligerently): Oh, yeah? Who's the doctor here?

PATIENT: You don't need to be a doctor to know you can't get cancer from sex.

DOCTOR (belligerently): Oh - you want to hit me? Go for it! Go for it!

At book signings

FAN 1 (faux genially): Hey, how's it going? I hear you don't really sign your whole name, you just kind of scribble.

AUTHOR: (Chuckles) Well, most of my name is there. My penmanship isn't the best. Good thing I don't write my books in longhand.

FAN 1 (belligerently): What, you saying your fans don't deserve your entire signature?

FAN 2 (belligerently): Yeah, what's up with that? Do you hate your fans?

AUTHOR: No, no; of course not. It's just that I write literary fiction and I think my fans are more interested in the ideas in my novels than the autograph on the title page.

FAN 3 (belligerently): Oh, so you're all uppity, with all your big ideas, and your fans are all too stupid to appreciate a legible autograph, is that it?

AUTHOR: No, that's not it at all -

FAN 4 (belligerently): Do you abuse your children? Because fans want to know if you do.

AUTHOR: What? I don't even have any children? What is wrong with you people?

FAN 1 (belligerently): Oh, you want to hit us, don't you? Go for it! Go for it!

At a coffee shop

(An ordinary guy exits a coffee shop with his drink.)

PASSER-BY 1 (faux genially): Hey, so what you drinking there?

ORDINARY GUY: What?

PASSER-BY 1 (faux genially): It's a simple question. What's in your drink?

PASSER-BY 2: Is there crack in it?

PASSER-BY 3 (belligerently): Yeah, are you back to smoking the crack?

ORDINARY GUY: Who are you people? Why are you bothering me?

PASSER-BY 1 (belligerently): Hey, how's your marriage going? You and your wife still not talking?

ORDINARY GUY: What? Who do you even think I am?

PASSER-BY 3 (belligerently): So, you're dodging the question, eh?

ORDINARY GUY: No! Well - you know, every marriage has its ups and downs, but - wait a second! What is your problem?

PASSER-BY 4 (faux genially): Someone reportedly saw you readjusting your package - any comment?

ORDINARY GUY: Why can't you just leave people alone? Why don't you people just get real jobs?

PASSER-BY 2 (faux genially): Hey, a guy like you gets a mocha/caramel frappucino, rearranges his package, I think people want to know about that sort of thing.

(Ordinary guy tries to retreat back into the coffee shop; the passers-by storm in after him, scattering tables.)

ORDINARY GUY: Why are you people doing this to me? I'm just a private citizen!

PASSER-BY 3 (belligerently): I heard you're not really a private citizen. Is that true?

(Ordinary guy tries to make his way into the restroom; passers-by try to push in behind him.)

ORDINARY GUY: What is wrong with you? I'm trying to go to the bathroom!

PASSER-BY 1 (faux genially): Oh, you got something to hide, eh?

PASSER-BY 2 (belligerently): Some sort of drug problem?

PASSER-BY 4 (belligerently): So you don't want people seeing your package, is that it?

PASSER-BY 3 (belligerently): What? You want to hit me? Go for it - go for it!

Seems like a day scarcely passes without my receiving a missive from a cable network trumpeting its highest ratings for a night/week/month in its history. By contrast, Variety gets all gloomy-Gus with us, reporting the latest in the downward spiral that is the broadcast-network ratings landscape, particularly in wake of the writers strike (all percentages are measured vs. the networks’ ratings in the same week last year):

ABC: Down 23%
CBS: Down 26%
NBC: Down 7%
Fox: Down 15%
The CW: Down 50%

You look at NBC there and think, “Well, that’s not too bad, is it? That Ben Silverman really has rescued this network!” But Variety even rains on that parade: NBC hardly had the furthest to fall, since its ratings last season sucked something awful, and it has so far responded the most aggressively by spackling over its depleted lineup with reality shows.

As a result, NBC’s engaging in some pretty severe belt-tightening (just make sure it’s your belt and not your necktie, guys), including scaling way back on producing pilots (to just about zero) and instead ordering a number of episodes of a scripted series that they really, really like from the get-go (which’d help keep the network from having to pay actors money for nothing to keep them on retainer until they decide whether or not to pick up their pilot). (This is a little closer to what cable does in keeping its costs down.) They’re also, as we’ve previously noted, thisclose to killing the traditional May upfront where the network introduces its fall schedule to advertisers and the media.

“It's not about making less programs; it's about making less waste,” declared NBC’s CEO/Waste Management Expert, Jeff Zucker (isn't "make waste" what moms call baby poo?). “We're not going to do worse than the figures I cited for the last two years.” Which sounds about as close to raising a white flag without actually raising a white flag.

Anyway, none of this comes as a surprise, since all these things were discussed at that double super-secret background luncheon with NBC last month. If memory serves, NBC Entertainment co-chairman Marc Graboff said, “That’s a good question” to one of my questions. If memory serves, my question was, “Are you going to eat that Cornish game hen?”

As for The CW: Is it still on the air?

My heart lept with joy when I read this headline:

SARAH JESSICA PARKER TEAMS WITH MAGICAL ELVES TO EXPLORE THE WORLD OF ART

I think we’d all agree that that’s something we’d pay to see, right?

Ah, but then I read further into the press release, and my heart plunged back into its usual depths of despair: Magical Elves is the name of some production company, which, contrary to its moniker, in fact has no Magical Elves on its payroll. And all this thing is, is, yes, of course, another reality competition show. And Parker’s just an executive producer, not appearing on the show on any regular basis that the press release mentioned.

So, yeah: Group of artists all competing for a gallery show and a tour of their work. Each week, they do something different – painting, sculpting, photography, etc. – so most of what they’ll do won’t be in their genre and therefore not necessarily representative of what they do. So good luck with that. Though one week they pretty much have to be assigned to do a portrait of Parker – can’t wait to see them all get into that cubist face of hers.

Anyway, what an idea – the art world is so bitter, vindictive and simultaneously self-promoting/self-loathing it makes stand-up comics seem reasonably sane by contrast. Also, there’s no small amount of pretension, there, as well: Anyone who even auditions for the show will automatically be dismissed as a sell-out, except for the one genius who’ll do it as an act of performance art, hoping to undermine the show and reveal basic-cable reality-competition TV as the soul-draining horsesh!t that it is, but here’s betting the producers will be able to divine that individual’s true intentions ahead of time and keep him/her off the show, and so the show’ll proceed just like all these shows proceed and the winner will end up getting commissions from hotels in search of easily ignored paintings for their guestrooms.

Oh, wait: Forgot to include the requisite publicist-ese press-release quote: “We are excited to make the art world feel approachable and relatable, and are fortunate to collaborate with someone who is as passionate about art as Sarah is.”


No title yet, but I think “Watching Paint Dry” would be kind of great.

My review of HBO’s latest effort to get you hooked on Zoloft, “In Treatment,” was missing a couple of key paragraphs in print and apparently never made it to the Daily News website (maybe I got banned from all the Internets, not just my blog), so I’m going to reprint the whole thing here.

And if you don’t have the time to watch every night (and who does?) but are a little interested, the Wednesday night storyline (described below) might be the one to follow.

*

HBO’s grim new psychotherapy drama, “In Treatment,” is much like its last grim psychotherapy drama, “Tell Me You Love Me,” except without all that sex.

So why watch? The question occurred to me, as well, but soon, I had watched more than 13 hours of the series – more than five weeks in the show’s run. And the simple answer is, it’s just pretty compelling and astonishingly well acted.

Based on a hit Israeli series, “In Treatment” focuses on psychotherapist Paul Weston (Gabriel Byrne) as he treats a cross-section of his patients. The series airs in a unique fashion – a new episode with a different patient every weeknight. Some episodes (and patients) are compelling; others are pretty irritating, but the cumulative effect can be fairly overwhelming.

Every Monday, Paul meets with Laura (Melissa George). She’s slept with a lot of men but has fallen in love with Paul. The upside of these episodes is, they’re the most titillating; the downside is, it can’t end well – either he’ll betray his professional standards or the denouement will be anticlimactic.

On Tuesdays, Alex (Blair Underwood), a charismatic Navy pilot with no shortage of swagger, co-opts Paul’s counsel to justify decisions he has already made. These episodes will draw you because of Underwood’s galvanizing performances; they may lose you because they feel contrived – Alex fairly telegraphs that he’s concealing secrets that he’ll dribble out as the show’s dramaturgy requires.

Wednesdays, Sophie (Mia Wasikowska in a virtually nonpareil performance), a precocious teenaged gymnast who may or may not have tried to kill herself, consults against her will with Paul. These episodes may be the show’s most complex and heart-wrenching, as we watch the witty and seemingly fragile Sophie evolve into something approaching a monster.

If it’s Thursday, it must be time for Amy (Embeth Davitz) and Jake (Josh Charles) to drag their horrific marriage into Paul’s office. Five minutes into their first session, it’s obvious this marriage is a mess; five episodes later, you’re still left with the same conclusion.

And on Friday, Paul, battered by the brutal vicissitudes of his profession and his own unhappy home life (Michelle Forbes plays his brittle, unfaithful spouse Kate), meets with Gina (Dianne Wiest), his heretofore estranged mentor, for therapy of his own. These episodes feel superfluous, a sort of (ital) “Previously on ‘In Therapy’” (end ital) update, at least until Kate joins Paul for couples therapy with Gina.

As Paul, Byrne gives an exquisitely measured performance of a preoccupied, insular guy too lost inside his own head to notice that his real world has gone rudderless. Two weeks into the series, and you’ll likely think him an ineffectual therapist; four weeks in, you might even find him incompetent, as he attempts to shoehorn his own peccadilloes into his clients’ woes. In week five, he grows a pair and stands up to his patients, only to be utterly emasculated by Kate in front of Gina. He’s the last sort of character you’d expect to anchor a TV series, which some will consider genius and others folly.

So what (ital) is (end ital) “In Treatment,” anyway? Stripping episodes across the week makes it look like a soap opera, except that soaps are all about fantasy, not the grimmest of realities.

Perhaps it’s just a postcard from civilization and its discontents, a humane reminder that every person we see on the street has a complex backstory we simply cannot fathom, a notion that our inability to truly connect with one another is what ironically connects us all.

*

And, as with “Tell Me You Love Me,” “In Treatment” would seem to deserve its own drinking game. I’ll get back to you on that one.

- "In Treatment:" Weeknights at 9:30, HBO.

This one was inevitable: Our good friends at the Parents Television Council are going all Ed Anger at CBS because, in order to fill its schedule while the writers strike is ongoing, it will air the first season of Showtime's "Dexter," starring Michael C. Hall as a serial killer who works as a forensics specialist for the Miami Police Department.

"(T)he series compels viewers to empathize with a serial killer, to root for him to prevail, to hope he doesn't get discovered. 'Dexter' introduces audiences to the depths of depravity and indifference as it chronicles the main character's troubled quest for vigilante justice by celebrating graphic, premeditated murder," the PTC sputtered with indignation. "(N)ow CBS intend(s) to air material that effectively celebrates murder?

"We are putting CBS, its affiliates, and every potential sponsor of Dexter on notice: Parents will not tolerate this type of disturbing content on the public airwaves," they further blah blah blahed. Well, no: Responsible parents will simply not let their children, who should be in bed at that hour anyway, watch the show. It's the PTC that can't tolerate anything but "Jeffy McFeeble's American Gospel Hour" on their TeeVees and is hellbent to prevent anything that might contain nuanced, mature and difficult themes from reaching the minds of American adults.

And while the show indeed "compels viewers to empathize with a serial killer," the PTC is being condescending to an astonishing degree (even for them) with their implicit suggestion that viewers somehow don't realize that they're watching a TV drama and not a how-to show or Satan's version of "The Purpose-Driven Life." "Dexter" has been on for two seasons now and is a bona fide hit by cable standards, and I haven't seen any uptick in the number of vigilante serial killers running amok in our country. (Well, maybe in Florida, but hey: It's Florida.)

And "Dexter" "celebrates murder?" Well, it depicts murder, as does every other TV cop show on the planet, but Dex isn't exactly popping open the Champagne after each kill. He's kind of struggling with his damage - not winning, naturally, otherwise there's no show - but his mind is fairly preoccupied with the horror he has wrought.

(Oh, and the PTC folks might want to look in their Bibles: God did a good deal of smiting Himself - Sodom and Gomorrah, the Egyptians' first-born, the Pharaoh's soldiers - etc. Here's a thought, PTC guys: Maybe Dex is just emulating the Old Testament God of wrath? Does that make you like him any more?)

"Family Guy" creator Seth MacFarlane, a favorite whipping boy for the PTC, had this to say about them: "I've read their newsletter, I've visited their website, and they're just rotten to the core. For an organization that prides itself on Christian values - I mean, I'm an atheist, so what do I know? - they spend their entire day hating people. They can all [not a dirty word unless used in this context] my [not a dirty word when used as a gentleman's name, which it isn't here, so it's pretty dirty] as far as I'm concerned."

In other news, the PTC also assailed the children's song "Pop Goes the Weasel" today. "The very notion that children should delight in exploding weasels is troubling, to say the least," it declared in a statement. "Evidence has shown that children take cues on how to lead their lives from monkeys, and if monkeys will sadistically pop weasels, we are rapidly and uneasily approaching the day where children will en masse be placing weasels in microwave ovens to replicate their simian friends' behavior."

You may have noticed a curious lack of posts over the past few days. This is because, I have been told by The Mayor of Television’s Technical Support Staff©, my “IP address has been blacklisted by the server.”

Boy, everyone’s a critic.

Obviously, it seems to be working now. But I can take a hint.

Chad Nackers and Joe Randazzo, a couple of the guys responsible for the Onion’s latest literary effort, “Our Dumb World: The Onion’s Atlas Of The Planet Earth (Seventy-Third Edition)” (Little Brown, $27.99), showed up out of the blue this evening at Skylight Books in Los Feliz and started imposing this educational slide show about the globe on the store’s patrons. It was terrifying.

Suffice it to say, “Our Dumb World” – an exhaustive (if not always accurate), country-by-country evisceration of our fair planet – finds multiple ways to find even African genocide funny, so it probably belongs on your bookshelf or coffee table.

Afterwards, during the Q&A (first question: “Who are you guys and why did you just try to educate us?”), Nackers and Randazzo estimated that the Onion staff wrote somewhere around 400,000 jokes for the book, in addition to maintaining their popular satirical website. (I think about 300,000 of those jokes survived to make it into the book – really, there’s a gag on virtually every square inch of every page of the book (except, you know, the endpages, the title page and the page with all the publishing information on it) (they contend only about 35,000 jokes made it into print).)

Other fun facts:

* The Onion’s first book of original material, “Our Dumb Century,” an inspired stroll down the 20th century’s memory lane, was originally going to be published by Hyperion, a Disney imprimatur. Until, that is, their editors censored about 75% of the book – anything political, anything about sex, anything about Walt Disney being cryogenically frozen, etc.

* Believe it or not, a few topics can be in such bad taste that the Onion won’t even go there, or their lawyers won’t let them.

One story that never made it online: A report on how when “To Catch A Predator’s” Chris Matthews enters a nominally popular national chain restaurant, everyone inside, patrons and employees alike, flee in terror. As hilarious as it sounds, lawyers nonetheless killed this one out of fear of legal reprisals from said restaurant chain. (And yes, they said which restaurant chain.)

Two other stories that did run were eventually deleted from the Onion’s online archives when the celebrities parodied in them – Janet Jackson and Michael Bay, respectively – got huffy.

Anyway, the point of all this is that they seem like a couple of decent guys and their book is funny, so you should buy it. Unless you're poor, in which case save your money.

AMC and Lionsgate threw a pre-SAG-Awards party for "Mad Men" Friday evening at the Chateau Marmont for the cast, writers, directors, set designers, composer and others who worked on the Golden Globe winner for Best TV Drama. Somehow, I managed to get in, as well.

Creator Matthew Weiner was there, and he actually recognized me. Of course, I recognized him, too, but his achievement was far more impressive and unexpected because he saw scores of critics at July's TV Press Tour and I saw only one creator of 2007's best show.

Weiner doesn't really have to do this, as he actually went to the trouble of creating a really cool show and not just writing about it, but he told me that he had read everything written about the show - "Sometimes, that's not such a good idea," he said self-deprecatingly - and added that he believed that critics were instrumental in keeping the show in the public eye, even when viewers weren't exactly sure how to find AMC on their cable or satellite-TV provider.

I asked him what Lionsgate's interim deal with the WGA meant for his show, and he disclosed perhaps the best news 2008 has heard to date:

"I go back to work on Monday," he said. The plan at this point is that new episodes will air by late summer.

OK, you got me. There is no TV Press Tour this January. But if there were, this is the sort of thing you’d be reading right about now:

Brooke Shields on her upcoming series, “Lipstick Jungle:” “It’s about the journey of these three women, actually, and while going on this journey the women make choices just as an actor makes choices, so I’m finding I really relate to my character.”

Jeffrey Tambor on his upcoming sitcom, “Welcome to the Captain:” “I really had to dig deep to find this character. He may be a sort of generic sitcom eccentric, but he has levels of depth that are truly exciting to explore and discover as I go on this journey with him.”

Carrie Ann Inaba on “Dance Wars: Bruno vs. Carrie Ann:” “The excitement of this show is in watching these dancers as they go on this journey, to discover things within themselves that perhaps they didn’t know were there. That’s exciting for them, and that’s exciting for me, and that’s exciting for the viewers, too, I hope.”

Craig Bierko on his new sitcom, “Unhitched:” “I think there’s a lot of anxiety out there right now amongst thirtysomethings regarding relationships – will I ever meet the right person, will I ever be happy, that sort of thing. And at its heart, that’s what our show is exploring – our characters are on this journey of discovery – and then, of course, there are the monkey-sodomy jokes.”

Kyle Chandler on “Friday Night Lights:” “Yeah, people still aren’t watching. I don’t know why. But it’s been a privilege to explore this character and find out what makes him tick. He’s a man who is on a journey and I’m taking that journey with him, and I’ll do it until NBC pries my last paycheck out of my dead, cold hands.”

Executive producer Richard McKerrow on “Baby Borrowers:” “It truly is a social experiment. We’re following teenagers as they go on a journey to discover deep and profound things about themselves, and we’re doing it while trying to make money off of them at the same time.”

NBC Entertainment president Ben Silverman: “I’m very excited about our lineup during the strike. I think that what we’re putting on the air is as good as what we’d be putting on the air if there wasn’t a strike. But maybe that’s the problem.”

Lionsgate has signed an interim deal with the WGA, which means we’ll have “Mad Men” back ahead of the pack of scripted shows that’ll arrive once the writers strike is finally resolved. So I’m good.

Hey, you wouldn’t be blogging much if you had just sat through more than 13 hours of HBO’s upcoming week-nightly drama “In Treatment,” either. Talk about mad men, and women. On which, more later.

Oh, how we laughed and laughed when Heath Ledger and Brad Renfro died, right?

Oh, right: We didn’t.

Nonetheless, E!’s trying to wring entertainment from similar suffering by celebrities in a Saturday special, “25 Most Sensational Celebrity Meltdowns.” No doubt the show’s concept was conjured before these most recent buzzkill events, but it was announced after them, which makes E! look really gross and predatory.

Per their press release:

“These days it seems the only story generating more ink than a celebrity's meteoric rise to success is the headline when they inexplicably melt down. Hollywood celebrities can be notorious for their excessive and often scandalous behavior, but when these stars really lose control, their mistakes become headline news around the world.”

So here’s the countdown (no commentary needed, really, except that they clearly didn’t look beyond the past three years and how much fun can this be these days, anyway?):

25. Naomi Campbell
24. Rosie O'Donnell vs. Elisabeth Hasselbeck
23. Winona Ryder
22. John Stamos
21. Russell Crowe
20. Pat O'Brien
19. Director Lee Tamahori
18. Matthew McConaughey
17. Mariah Carey
16. Robert Downey Jr.
15. Mike Tyson
14. Paris Hilton
13. Anne Heche
12. Martin Lawrence
11. Tom Cruise

(Top 10 in random order, (as if there’s any real drama as to who’ll be named No. 1))
David Hasselhoff
Isaiah Washington
Don Imus
Mel Gibson
Britney Spears
Lindsay Lohan
Dave Chappelle
Alec Baldwin
Michael Richards
Kanye West

The Screen Actors Guild thoughtfully issued a sheet of factoids intended to inspire we mere plebes to “ooh” and “ahh” over the attention to detail that’s going into preparations for Sunday’s SAG Awards. So, here are a few highlights.

* 16,476,145 square feet of red carpet adorn the arrivals area. To put this into perspective, that’s 16,476,145 square feet more than at the recent Golden Globes.

* 700 feet of steel tubing will support 120 running feet of 22-foot-high set walls onstage, punctuated by eight gold and ivory fluted columns. Two stepped deco arches will be accented by 30 feet of translucent etched fins. To be honest, I have no idea if that’s really impressive or not, but there are a lot of numbers thrown in there, not to mention the words “fluted,” “accented” and “translucent.” Those add up to "classy," don't they?

* 3,300 gold-rimmed glasses, 2,200 pieces of gold cutlery, 1,100 gold-rimmed fluted white china chargers and 1,100 black napkins made from 200 yards of chiffon, all on 86 dinner tables. After the event, it will be down to 87 pieces of gold cutlery.

* This is an outrage: There will be but two beverage bars and two wine-tasting bars. Given how long the lines will no doubt be there, actors are encouraged to sneak in their own booze.

* Floral arrangements will be designed in a multi-pieced glass configuration lined in sensuous black velvet fabric reflecting a contemporary/organic vibe with textured elements of moss green reindeer moss, succulents and equisetum contrasting over 2,500 white orchids, 3,000 white roses, 100 white phalaenopsis orchids and 1,500 yellow calla lilies. Again, not sure as to how impressive this is, but if they had supplied a few more bars and wine-tasting sites, the “sensuous black velvet fabric” adorning the tables might’ve gotten a bit of a workout in the more tucked-away areas.

* The menu has all sorts of stuff that sounds really fancy, but probably translates into “you’re deathly allergic to it:” Tuna Niçoise with devilled eggs, black olives, haricots verts, pesto and tomatoes; Chicken Bisteeya with figs, mizuna and pomegranates; Poached Lamb Loin with basil mousse and lentil salad; Grilled Vegetable Terrine with sherry and dry cured olive focaccia. 75 pounds of almonds will be spread over the spread (so, yep, I am deathly allergic to it), as well as three gallons of Ruby Port (but that’s just for Lindsay Lohan) and six gallons of Extra Virgin Olive Oil (that’s just for William Shatner).

* Roughly 3,296 mentions of the writers strike are expected.

To help non-writers financially crippled by the writers strike, “TV Takes the Stage” will offer a weekend of one-acts by writers from shows like “The Wire,” “Desperate Housewives,” “Grey’s Anatomy,” “Sex and the City,” “Law & Order,” “NYPD Blue,” “My So-Called Life,” “Invasion” and “Tell Me You Love Me, among others.

There’s a couple of different sets of shows (no titles were provided, unfortunately, because clever, quippy titles are always a good lure for an evening of one-acts). Aaron Tracy, striking writer and executive producer/creator of “TV Takes the Stage,” promises, “The plays range pretty widely in subject matter from the night Marie Antoinette and King Louis first shared a bed, to the chat-room entrapment of child predators. We have sixteen writers from sitcoms to dramas to HBO shows, so you're going to get a little of everything. We’ve got sitcom writers trying finally to earn their Tennessee Williams yearbook quotes, and we’ve got Pulitzer finalists bored with starting every script with a dead body.”

Cast members include Bonnie Somerville, Troy Evans, Kari Matchett, Reid Scott, Melissa Sagemiller, Ben Feldman, David Greenman – all of whom you actually may have seen on your TV. The one-acts – some of which will be staged, others just presented as readings – will be performed Thursday, Jan. 31 through Saturday, Feb. 2 at 8 p.m., Saturday at 2 p.m. and Sunday at noon at Macha Theatre, 1107 N. Kings Rd. West Hollywood.

Order tickets ($25-$20) at the link above or call (323) 960-1052.

Ever the folks to draw a smiley face on tragedy, TV Guide has taken it upon itself to divine the winners in the writers strike. As opposed to the rest of us, who are clearly the losers, TV Guide trolled around and found some folks who are benefiting from the lack of original scripted material:

* “American Idol.” Even though its ratings are actually down a little bit from last year, they might be down even more if it had any competition.

* Politicians. “The 2008 race for the White House has become the most compelling unscripted drama on TV,” the magazine suggests. (They must not be watching “Celebrity Rehab,” an even bigger trainwreck.) It’d be nice, though, if TV’d spend more time on the issues than the horserace, but that's probably another reason to put the pols in the winner's circle. Also, politicians are getting face time on the late-night shows, and with Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert not at full speed, their missteps aren’t getting eviscerated as pointedly as they might otherwise be.

* Shows “on the bubble.” With development season all but kaput, struggling shows like “Reaper,” “Life” and “Back To You,” TV Guide surmises, might be brought back for a second season as there won’t be enough new series to replace them.

* Internet TV: More people drifted to online sites like YouTube in the wake of the strike. Now that even more people realize they can watch whatever they want whenever they want, are TV schedules trudging that much closer to becoming extinct dinosaurs?

* Reality TV. So far, the reality shows replacing scripted series haven’t tanked, or, at least, haven’t tanked any worse than many of the shows they’re replacing. In fact, NBC’s “American Gladiators” is scoring higher ratings than any of the scripted shows the network premiered this season.

Again: If those are the winners, then we really are the losers.

"I slept in, because, you know, I was tired. And there's not much buzz in categories like mine. And no one called me and woke me up, because I spend my days alone in darkened rooms hunched over reams of little pieces of film trying to put them together in some comprehensible order, so I don't really have that many friends. So, about midday, I went over to the Oscar website and noticed that I was nominated, and then I went back to what I was working on. Oh, and it's a real honor."

-- Juliette Welfing, nominee for Achievement in Film Editing, "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly"

"Well, it was a challenging assignment, because we were in this big room filled with old car parts and hammers and stuff, and we had to smash them together at random and shout out 'Ka-Pow! Ka-Pow!' and 'Bwoooosh!' and 'Shpeeee-oooooo! P-Tang!' all day. So it's nice to see all that effort geting recognized."

-- Ethan Van der Ryn, nominee for Achievement in Sound Editing, "Transformers"

"I would say that it's an honor just being nominated up against these other four supremely talented individuals. I would say that, but I can't, because I've never heard of any of them except Colleen Atwood - doesn't she pretty much win every year? And I'd say it's really quite unexpected and lovely, except that's not quite the case, either - you work on one of these big costume epics and you're pretty much a lock for a nomination."

-- Alexandra Byrne, nominee for Achievement in Costume Design, "Elizabeth: The Golden Age"

"To be honest, I worked on that so long ago I don't really remember anything about it. But I must confess, I'm ashamed of being the person responsible for the phrase 'the Oscar-nominated film "Norbit."'"

-- Rick Baker, nominee for Achievement in Makeup, "Norbit"

Looks like Fred Thompson left “Law & Order” for no good reason, after all: He has dropped out of the Presidential race.

Thompson, apparently mistaken for the lovably gruff D.A. he played on “L&O,” was called upon by many to join the race nearly 10 months ago. He was seen by more than a few people as the potential savior for a Republican Party beset with a fairly lackluster group of candidates, but took his sweet time to enter the race, not announcing his candidacy until September, after his popularity in polls had already crested. Thompson announced his candidacy on “The Tonight Show with Jay Leno” but his heart didn’t really seem to be in it – I think he actually put himself to sleep with the somnolent responses he gave to Jay’s softball questions.

So make room for the Ron Paul juggernaut that’ll no doubt grab for Thompson’s votes.

You can’t watch a sporting event on television without being subjected, in virtually every commercial break, to the spot where the guy’s driving along in his SUV and a bunch of animals jump in through the sunroof and start singing along to “Rock Me Gently,” a ditty that no doubt scored Andy Kim scads of groupies when he’d sing it on tour but Jesus does it make my ears bleed. (Here’s how bad this commercial is: Even though I’ve seen it far too many times, I don’t really pay that much attention to commercials, so not until this last airing did I finally notice that it’s for Jeep. For some reason, I always thought it was for Toyota.)

Anyway, my point: I don’t think it’s a very realistic premise. It seems unlikely that animals living in the wild would have had a chance to have heard the song enough times to have memorized its lyrics.

Kiefer Sutherland was released from jail at 12:05 a.m. today. He was reportedly a “model prisoner.” Well, of course; he had plenty of experience in those 18 months of sadistic captivity at the hands of the Chinese.

Still, kind of odd that Kiefer did a full stretch of 48 days while Lindsay Lohan put in no more than 84 minutes for all her car-jacking/cocaine-possessing craziness. Maybe if Sutherland had additionally shot a guy he could’ve gotten his sentence down to a tidy 86 minutes.

As part of my community-outreach program, Your Mayor is beginning a Volunteer Celebrity Driver Program wherein You, My Constituents, offer to taxi a besotted celebrity home after an evening of too much brain-addling merriment. Sign up in the comments section below: List the celebrities you’d be willing to chauffeur and the days and times (preferably midnight-5 a.m.) you’re available. A brief and spotty background check may be necessary. TMZ employees and paparazzi need not apply.

As part of its green initiative, NBC is recycling props and wardrobe from its sundry shows into cash to keep it afloat during the writers strike. An auction begins today at 4 p.m. (PCT) and continues through Jan. 30.

Some of the stuff they’re auctioning off includes reproductions of Tim Sale’s “Heroes” art, a Dwight Schrute bobblehead autographed by Rainn Wilson, a “Me Want Food” T-shirt from “30 Rock” and a football playbook from “Friday Night Lights” signed by Kyle Chandler.

So if you’ve ever dreamt of adorning your living space with a print of Hayden Panettiere sprawled out on an autopsy table, well, the gods are smiling upon you. NBC says “a portion of the proceeds” will go to United Way.

In 1975, songwriter Neil Innes joined the members of Monty Python's Flying Circus onstage in New York and memorably declared: "Ladies and gentlemen, I've suffered for my music. Now it's your turn."

Brady Barr, too, suffers for his art. And now it's our turn, if we can keep from laughing.

Barr's the nutcase herpetologist who, Steve Irwin-like, pointedly blithers headlong into dangerous situations and, when the inevitable happens, screams like a girl and says "I've got a bad, bad bite!" 25 times in two minutes. And that bite came courtesy a python, which lies in Barr's area of expertise. So how's he gonna fare when he mixes it up with hippos?

We discussed "Dangerous Encounters with Brady Barr: Undercover Hippo" upon its initial announcement because the concept was so arrestingly blinkered. And the show does not disappoint (except for all the blah-blah-blah before the final 20 minutes, when finally): Barr gussies himself up in a 200-pound, Kevlar-wrapped hippo outfit hand-smeared with hippo dung and approaches hippos in the wild. There's a reason for this, just nominally convincing, but what's great is the spectacle of Brady in his hippo costume lumbering laboriously and clumsily about like a lush on St. Patrick's Day. (He's tried the same trick in a crocodile costume, too. These decoys recalled another Monty Python reference: The Trojan Rabbit in "Monty Python and the Holy Grail." Apparently hippos and crocs have really bad eyesight.

So much to enjoy: Barr picking up "hippo poo" in his bare hands to smear on his Worst Halloween Costume Ever, then, once inside, opining, "The stench is just overpowering in here ... It's eye-wateringly bad," and coughing and spitting for effect. And you're surprised ... why? (Barr also manages to work the phrase "fecal spraying" into the show for our edification.)

"If that hippo attacks, I'm gonna have to rely on the structural integrity of my suit," Barr intones grimly at one point. Structural integrity is about the only integrity that thing has.

Generally, though, he addresses the audience as if he's speaking to extremely dim children: "I'm in position on the Hippo Highway," "These are the most horrifying live sounds ever heard from any animal," etc. etc. For all this silly behavior and expense, the conclusion is pretty anti-climactic and the only educational tidbit I retained from it is, hippos sure can bite hard.

Here's a clip but be patient: You don't get to see the suit until three minutes in, and even longer to see him move around in it.

- "Dangerous Encounters with Brady Barr: Undercover Hippo," 9 p.m. Sunday, National Geographic Channel.

Quite the 2007 Adult Swim’s “Aqua Teen Hunger Force” had. First, boyoboy did they get in trouble with the City of Boston, which flew into an absolute panic when some viral-marketing Lite Brite boards plastered around town were mistaken for a terrorist plot to destroy the city. Good times.

Then, they released a movie that was pretty much incomprehensible to most critics and was in general too long to sustain the show’s Dadaism, which is just fine in short 11-minute bursts. The movie made all of $5,520,368, enough, however, for an Adult Swim press release to call it “successful.”

And now they’re back where they belong, on late-night basic cable. “ATHF” returns for a new season Sunday, except that Master Shake, Meatwad and Frylock are nowhere to be seen. Instead, their neighbor Carl sells their home to a family of box-shaped robots (motto: “The universe is our bathroom”) with the requisite complications.

But the really interesting episode will air Feb. 3. It’s entitled “Ridiculous.” I will recap its plotline sans commentary herewith, and allow you to decide which is stranger: This episode or the astonishing string of comments left by one Jose Garcia on a recent post (you’ll have to scroll down a little past all the invective, but, really, it’s worth it – for a while, at least; is it actually David Foster Wallace off his meds?).

Anyway, “ATHF:” “Ridiculous” (oh, and: SPOILERS): Master Shake puts Meatwad’s kitten in the microwave; it explodes. Meatwad is sad. Meatwad will later put Master Shake’s kitten in the microwave with similar results. As Frylock presides over a feline funeral in the backyard, they notice Carl riding a space-ship-y-looking and loudly buzzing machine called “Re-Dick-U-Lous,” with a large tube strapped to his phallus. Said machine’s purpose is to enlarge and pleasure male genitalia. Frylock, who has had his fair share of misadventures with Carl, hypothesizes – correctly, it turns out – that a lamentable consequence will result. And indeed, Carl’s groin and fecal matter begin to glow, something Carl attributes to “minor side effects.” Carl eventually becomes concerned enough to call the company help line, where he gets what anyone gets when they call a company help line. Carl’s feces, which he has liberally left in the “ATHF’s” backyard, reanimates the menagerie of dead pets buried there into a zombified army of pleasure-seeking, STD-addled beings. Master Shake avails himself to the pleasures offered by Meatwad’s dead-now-zombified pet ape and contracts a zombie STD. Frylock attempts to kill Master Shake by separating his brain from his spine with an axe. It doesn’t work. Frylock laments that he should not have trusted Wikipedia for information on how to kill zombies.

I swear: That’s the plot. So now you’ll either tune in or spend the rest of your life wondering how something like that got on Television.

- “Aqua Teen Hunger Force:” 11:45 p.m. Sunday, Adult Swim.

They’re calling it the End of Western Civilization (unaware that Western “Civilization” called it quits long ago), and you can be part of it!

Well, sort of. You can subject yourself to the embarrassments forthcoming on “The Moment of Truth,” Fox’s upcoming reality-game show in which contestants are strapped to a lie-detector gizmo and asked really humiliating questions while family and friends watch. A “Truth Booth” will be tooling around town Friday through Monday.

You can check it out Friday 9 a.m.-4 p.m. and Saturday noon-6 p.m. at Hollywood and Highland, and Sunday and Monday 11 a.m.-5 p.m. on the Third Street Prominade between Banana Republic and Barnes & Noble.

On an episode of the Colombian version of the show, a woman admitted she had hired a hit man to off her husband (the show was thereupon yanked from the air): What kind of question provoked that?

Maybe they’ll ask it of you when you enter the “Truth Booth.”

Media Matters for America, a media watchdog group or, if you’re Bill O’Reilly, a “far-left smear website,” has abandoned O’Reilly for the time being to go after MSNBC blowhard Chris Matthews. Specifically, Matthews’ creepy, condescending sexism, particularly when he’s discussing Hillary Clinton, a problem Matthews acknowledged on his show today.

Matthews’ finest moment as a repellent lech came, memorably, last August when he was interviewing CNBC reporter Erin Burnett and got waaay off-topic:

MATTHEWS: Could you get a little closer to the camera? … Come on in closer. No, come in -- come in further -- come in closer. Really close.

BURNETT: What are you -- what are you doing?

MATTHEWS: Just kidding! You look great! Anyway, thanks. Erin, it's great to -- look at that look. You're great.

BURNETT: I don't even know. I'm going to have to go look at the tape here. I'm in a strange location. …

MATTHEWS: No, you're beautiful. I'm just kidding. I'm just kidding. You're a knockout.

But Matthews steps up his woman-hating to an impressive degree in his obsession with Clinton, which does not derive from her being a “knockout.” He hateshateshates her, and Bill as well, for that matter. Nothing too wrong with that – plenty of people do – but Matthews rarely if ever criticizes Hillary for her policies; what sticks in his craw is that she’s a woman.

Matthews hit the trifecta last week when he demeaningly pinched Hillary’s cheek like some pervy old uncle with an adolescent before the New Hampshire primary, declared he’d never underestimate Clinton again after her win and, the very next morning, insisted, "Let's not forget -- and I'll be brutal -- the reason she's a U.S. senator, the reason she's a candidate for president, the reason she may be a front-runner is her husband messed around. That's how she got to be senator from New York. We keep forgetting it. She didn't win there on her merit. She won because everybody felt, 'My God, this woman stood up under humiliation,' right? That's what happened."

When was the last time you voted for someone out of pity?

Anyway, something of an anti-Matthews bandwagon has been firing up since late last week, and now, Media Matters’ top dog David Brock today sent NBC News president Steve Capus a public letter asking, basically, “WTF with Matthews?” (Interestingly, Brock was a prominent hit man for conservatives in the ’90s, writing a book attacking Anita Hill during the Clarence Thomas hearings and the Troopergate story that nearly took down the Clinton Administration, before the scales fell from his eyes and he took to atoning for his sins by pointing out cases of bias in reporting.)

Brock begins with a laundry list of some of the idiotic stuff Matthews has said, then gets to the point:

“Why NBC apparently believes such conduct and speech to be informative, appropriate or responsible broadcasting in the public interest is a question for you and for General Electric's management and Board of Directors.”

Then gets off it again, if a little amusingly:

“In this regard, I should note that gender-based attacks have also been ... on MSNBC's show ‘Tucker,’ hosted by Tucker Carlson. Carlson invoked Lorena Bobbitt to claim that Clinton is tapping into women’s anger toward men, and ... said of Clinton: ‘[W]hen she comes on television, I involuntarily cross my legs.’ During a discussion of how gender might play into Senator Clinton's candidacy, Carlson's right-wing guest Cliff May said, ‘At least call her a Vaginal-American.’”

Then gets back to it again:

“(P)rograms like ‘Hardball’ define wider media narratives and agendas and shape public perceptions about public affairs, especially, as is the case now, when the nation is poised to make critical choices about its future direction. Given Matthews’ record detailed above, I fear that he will continue to insult, misinform, and ultimately disserve the public as we continue to engage in a basic process of our democracy in the coming months.

“Mr. Capus, during the controversy last spring surrounding Don Imus' racist and sexist remarks broadcast on MSNBC … we commended your acknowledgement that NBC has a responsibility to protect the network's trusted reputation for fair and equal coverage and to ‘continue the dialogue about what is appropriate conduct and speech’ on its air. In the case of Chris Matthews, I implore you to once again consider the gravity of that responsibility.”

A letter from women’s leaders such as Gloria Steinem and NOW president Kim Gandy also landed on Capus’s desk today, saying much the same thing:

“Matthews’ history proves that when discussing prominent female figures, he is prone to overt sexism rather than civil political discourse.”

The thing is, just about all TV punditry is showbiz disguised as analysis. You can be brilliantly insightful but if you’re dull, you’re going to lose your airtime to a colorful idiot (which explains why Ann Coulter’s on news shows and not relegated to Chuckle Huts in the deep South).

If Matthews is going to weave “My mommy didn’t love me enough when I was little” or “Pretty girls wouldn’t talk to me in high school” through his narrative threads and people are still going to pay him heed, then Capus probably isn’t going to do too much. Time and again Matthews has said things that should pretty much discredit any opinion that leaks from his brainpan out through his mouth, but there he is, still on the air.

So Brock has diagnosed a symptom, not the disease.

Interestingly enough, there’s speculation out there – from pundits! – that Matthews’ antics have actually helped Hillary, that they’ve underscored, in harsh relief, the bozo-kind of coverage that has dogged her campaign from the beginning. And voters with real-world concerns are sick of hearing about her cleavage or her weird laugh or whatever peccadillo pundits are picking at today and finding the bulk of her policy ideas to be fairly sane. Compared, at least, to Matthews’ rabid misogyny.

As I was writing this, Matthews issued a mea culpa on the air:

“Some people whom I respect, politically concerned people like you who watch this show so faithfully every night, people like me who care about this country, think I've been disrespectful to Hillary Clinton, not as a candidate, but as a woman. …

“Was it fair to imply that Hillary's whole career depended on being a victim of an unfaithful husband? No. And that's what it sounded like I was saying and it hurt people I'd like to think normally like what I say, in fact, normally like me. As I said, I rely on my heart to guide me in the heated, fast-paced talk we have here on ‘Hardball’ -- a heart that bears only goodwill toward people trying to make it out there, especially those who haven't before.

“If my heart has not always controlled my words, on those occasions when I have not taken the time to say things right, or have simply said the inappropriate thing, I'll try to be clearer, smarter, more obviously in support of the right of women -- of all people -- the full equality and respect for their ambitions. So, I get it. … Saying that Senator Clinton got where she's got simply because her husband did what he did to her is just as callous, and I can see now, it comes across just as nasty, worse yet, just as dismissive.”

After a mere five days of talks, the Directors Guild of America and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers have agreed to a new contract. A joint statement was issued:

"The agreement between the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers and the Directors Guild of America establishes an important precedent: Our industry’s creative talent will now participate financially in every emerging area of new media. The agreement demonstrates beyond any doubt that our industry’s producers are willing and able to work with the creators of entertainment content to establish fair and flexible rules for this fast-changing marketplace.

"We hope that this agreement with DGA will signal the beginning of the end of this extremely difficult period for our industry. Today, we invite the Writers Guild of America to engage with us in a series of informal discussions similar to the productive process that led us to a deal with the DGA to determine whether there is a reasonable basis for returning to formal bargaining. We look forward to these discussions, and to the day when our entire industry gets back to work."

Said contract gives the directors what the writers have wanted, including residuals for online usage of their material.

So why wouldn’t AMPTP give the same to the writers?

Of course, the Writers Guild of America has a couple of other sticking points, such as reality TV. Reality TV is directed, so the DGA is good to go there, but it’s ostensibly not written. So we’ll see if the writers hunker down on that one.

LOS ANGELES (AP) – Gil Cates, producer of the upcoming Academy Awards ceremony scheduled to air on ABC on Feb. 24, revealed some of his contingency plans to ensure that the broadcast will run smoothly: Writers outsourced to Bangalore and celebrity impersonators on the red carpet.

“The Oscars are a rite, a tradition that all of America and, indeed, the world share in, and therefore cannot be disrupted by anything so petty as a writers strike,” Cates declared defiantly. “And so I promise movie fans everywhere that there will be a pretty darn good, close approximation of the usual pageantry and pomposity, nothing like that Golden Globes debacle.”

To that end, Cates has outsourced the writing duties for the ceremony, to be hosted by Jon Stewart, to a group of comedy writers based in Bangalore, India, currently employed as telephone agents fielding complaints about Delta Airlines service from American passengers. Additionally, if stars decline to cross the writers’ picket lines, Cates will hire celebrity impersonators to attend the ceremony.

“There are a number of companies in Los Angeles that provide celebrity impersonators for parties,” Cates noted. “Why shouldn’t they attend the biggest party in the world? And if you think one Jack Nicholson is a lot of fun, just imagine how much more fun four of them would be!”

Navinchandra Mohapatra will serve as head writer. Mohapatra, who goes by “Dennis” when speaking with irate Delta customers, promises that viewers won’t notice much of a cultural difference in the humorous references.

“In Bangalore, we have a crumbling infrastructure that has led to traffic gridlock,” Mohapatra said. “I understand that Los Angeles suffers from the same problem. So our jokes about oxcarts tying up traffic will certainly resonate with the Hollywood audience!

“Additionally, I have heard about the clashes between the writers and the producers, and they are very similar to those we have in India between Christians and Hindus,” he continued. “My friend Suresh has a very funny line about the recent skirmishes in Kandhamal district when lower-caste Hindus were forced to convert to Christianity and several people were killed on Christmas Eve, sending hundreds to relief shelters. I’m sure that with just a little tinkering, we can work that into a joke about the writers strike.”

Mohapatra’s chief concern, he said, was that “Delta needs to be more competent. We’re deluged with complaint calls and, let me tell you, that really cuts into our writing time!”

Here's something you likely don't have to deal with: Invariably, when a cult show gets cancelled, I’ll get somewhere between a handful and a sh!tload of Emails from fans ranging somewhere between saddened to outraged and vowing some sort of campaign to resurrect said show and asking my help (as if I have any sort of influence over the networks, but if they seem sane and/or have a clever plan in place, I’ll mention their efforts).

Sometimes – well, once – the campaign worked (“Jericho”). Usually, however, they don’t.

But that doesn’t stop people from trying, and the latest barrage of Emails have come from fan(s) of Disney Channel’s animated “Kim Possible.” Someone scored a mailing list of TV critics without bothering to learn anything about them (such as, if they’d care, what they write about and who they write for), perhaps hoping the writers strike has left us idle so we can waste our energy trying to save a kids show.

Below, a mere sample of one such Email – I’ve received missives from Nigerian princes offering me scads of cash that were more coherent. Try to make your way through it, because some of it is transcendentally misguided.

It opens with the guy hoping Disney will renew “KP,” “cause to me its more than just a show, its inspiring” (sic) – inspiring because “(t)hey set a good example on doing the right thing and not let bad things get you down that happens in this world” (again, sic; BTW, the author of the note professes to be 21).

Yes, despite this revolutionary concept of showing Disney characters “doing the right thing,” the show is apparently kaput after four seasons (of “South Park,” the fan writes, “a show like southpark shouldnt even be aloud to be made let alone be on a 10th season”).

Our man with a mission - who hails from England - sees a long and bright future for Ms. Possible, including her coming to England to visit him specifically. He outlines a dozen seasons or more (all sic):

“(P)lease give kp the chance of a legendary run, like the simpsons for example; the simpsons is now gone on for 18 seasons, and its still going strong, but the plots and the jokes dont really move on that much; but just imagine on what kp could achieve if it went on for that long... eg. seasons 1-4 highschool, seasons 5-7 college, seasons 8-10 university, seasons 11- plus marriage, jobs, and possible kids. If you think about it the seasons in college and university wont be very differant at all, just a different social setting, and with kim narrowing her college choices to 3 outside of usa she still has her hyperspeed car, so she'll be back to middleton to see her family in a flash; and as for ron, now that hes into football, he could do a football scholarship in the same college/uni as kim. Mr barkin could be transfered to the same college and teach their, and the other cheerleaders are the same age as kim, so bonnie and the others can go to the same one too. … (A)s the kp characters get older, their characters will grow and develope, and people can relate to them, which the simpsons certainly can not.”

This guy thinks Disney Channel viewers will tune into a cartoon about a middle-aged super-hero coping with the demands of suburban, middle-class existence. Genius! (Did I mention this guy’s 21? Does he really think he'll be watching this in his 30s? From his parents' basement, no doubt.)

Dude, if you get all worked up by cartoon chicks in catsuits, just watch those TV commercials with the cartoon girl saving the world from high auto-insurance prices. She’s pretty much the same thing, and without the grossly phallic naked mole rat popping out of some guy's pants pocket. Just don't drag me into your demented fetish.

Entertainment Weekly conducted an amusing survey which found that one in five Americans apparently believe the Women’s Golf Association is on strike.

Only 2% have actually been following the strike. 44% say they’ve been watching less TV while 25% say they’ve been watching shows they ordinarily wouldn’t. 16% say they’re bored more these days, while 9% say they’re having more sex and 4% say they’re fighting with their spouse more.

So the strike has actually benefited 9% of the population.

Meanwhile, Writers Guild of America president Patric Verrone was on the Fox Business Channel today, and he kind of answered some questions, while others he just resorted to the usual boilerplate.

On whether the end deal will make up for the money lost during the strike:

“We’re on strike here for the future, particularly new media. And, what we earn back or what we’ve lost in earnings over the past few weeks – sure, you can weigh that pound for pound, dollar for dollar against the cost of the strike – but because we’re striking for the future, because we’ve got the entire wave of writers, actors and directors being paid in new media on the line, it’s incalculable.”

On whether a deal between the Directors’ Guild and producers will put pressure on the WGA:

“We’ve been just as anxious as you to hear news from the Directors’ Guild talks. We hope they make a good deal, and when they close their deal and it does become public, we’ll take a look at it very, very carefully but our strike doesn’t end until a deal is made with the writers.”

“The deal we make has more influence not only on writers but on actors down the road so there has to be a settlement that ends all of this for everyone. We’re the ones out on strike right now. We’re the ones who have to go to work before anyone does.”

On the WGA’s decision to approve the NAACP Awards:

“It’s a wedge. It’s a way to create competitive pressure. The purpose of all of this is to get a contract – to get a good contract – and by making the decisions that we’re making, we’re hoping that, strategically, the conglomerates come back to the table.”

On whether the Oscars will go on:

“I hope so. I want to have a chance to win my Oscar pool in my office too. But at this point, we need to make a deal with the conglomerates.”

And Variety’s Brian Lowry takes a mid-strike pulse-check of the industry, and makes a couple of observations that we’ve made here, as recently as yesterday (of course, Lowry is a trained professional, so when he says it, you’re to take it seriously, whereas when I say it, it’s just the gibbering of a chimp trying to fill blog space):

“Inevitably, the writers will rue many aspects of this work stoppage, which of necessity forces networks to keep throwing unscripted concepts against the wall, and some of those (such as NBC’s “American Gladiators”) will stick. Not many of these series will possess the staying power of “Cops” and “America’s Most Wanted” -- which the 1988 strike birthed -- but writers bitching about a lack of staffing jobs before will almost surely return to find fewer of them. …

“The truth, though, is that an over-reliance on reality by the major networks represents a one-way ticket to deflating parity with basic cable, eradicating the advertising premiums that separate NBC and CBS from A&E and GSN.”

Finally, here’s the Official Countdown to Armageddon, the count of how many original episodes of scripted series remain. This month will see the final original episodes of “Criminal Minds,” “Without a Trace,” “Chuck,” “Brothers & Sisters,” “Ugly Betty,” “Boston Legal,” “Private Practice,” “ER,” “Big Shots,” “Moonlight” and “Ghost Whisperer.”

That, alone, is 11 hours or TV that will have to be replaced by the likes of “Celebrity Hoedown,” “Extreme Makeover: Entertainment Industry Edition,” “Celebrity Panhandling,” “Are You Stingier Than an AMPTP Member?” and “Celebrity Hobo Makeover.”

Well, no, not really. Sorry to get your hopes up. I mean, Paula Abdul may be, but the show, it is what it is. Still.

But the show drew only 33.2 million viewers, its lowest debut in four years, and so entertainment journalists, understandably looking for any remotely interesting story during the writers strike, have opted to focus on the relatively small ratings decline.

True, the show dropped 4.2 million viewers from its premiere last season and dropped 13% in the all-important 18-49 demographic. But networks generally hope for something less than a 20% drop from a series’ premiere episode to its next, so a 13% skid in a year is hardly worrisome from Fox’s standpoint. And, even if “AI” were to lose 4.2 million viewers every season, it’d still remain a viable show for at least five more years (and, depending on how low ratings will be for the broadcast networks at that point, probably longer).

Consensus seems to be that Simon and the others were nicer than usual, and there weren’t as many aspiring contestants in need of haloperidol. Of course, how the show fares as the season progresses depends on who makes it to the dirty dozen; the show slipped in the ratings last year when the nation shrugged as one at the finalists.

So, though you may deplore the Juggernaut That Eats Up And Spits Out Your Favorite TV Shows, consider this a public service: As much as you may want “AI” gone, your heart could be broken if you believe the “Idol’s slipping” hype, and we don’t want that.

Her own show, her own magazine, her own website – all too small potatoes for Oprah Winfrey. Now, come 2009, she’ll have her own cable network (currently named Discovery Health): OWN, for, of course, Oprah Winfrey Network.

“Fifteen years ago, I wrote in my journal that one day I would create a television network, as I always felt my show was just the beginning of what the future could hold,” said Winfrey in a press release. “Eight years ago, I wrote in my journal that I would single-handedly push a man into being voted President of the United States. Five years ago, I wrote in my journal that I would control the planet. So, you know, fair warning.”

“There is no stronger voice than Oprah Winfrey in engaging, motivating and connecting people to live healthier lives,” said David Zaslav, President and CEO of Discovery Communications. “Oprah has inspired me personally, and through this new venture, Oprah’s talent and drive will have a dedicated multimedia platform to empower, engage and connect with people on-air and on-line. Although, I must say that bit about controlling the planet worries me a little.”

In addition to providing her name, talent, and personal commitment, Winfrey – who will serve as Chairman of the network – will have full editorial control over the joint venture and will be responsible for OWN’s programming, branding and creative vision.

Here’s a tentative schedule of OWN’s daily programming:

6:30 a.m. “Oprah Explains Breakthroughs in Dental Hygiene”
7 a.m. “Oprah Samples Delightfully Healthy Breakfasts (With an Occasional Slice of Bacon!)”
8 a.m. “Oprah Multi-Tasks as Her Driver Chauffers Her to Her Office”
9 a.m. “The Unwashed Try to Touch the Hem of Oprah’s Garment as She Enters Her Offices”
9:30 a.m. “Oprah’s Personal Assistant Recalls Her Favorite Anecdotes Underscoring Oprah’s Magnificent Beneficence”
10:30 a.m. “Oprah’s Executive Producer Explains How Oprah Can Be So Talented”
11:30 a.m. “Oprah News Update”
Noon: “Oprah’s Health-a-licious Lunch Recipes”
1 p.m. “Empowered by Oprah: Past Guests on ‘Oprah’ Relate How She Changed Their Lives”
2 p.m.: “Oprah’s Fans Explain Why Oprah’s So Great”
2:30 p.m. “Oprah Prepares For ‘Oprah’”
3 p.m. “Oprah”
4 p.m. “Oprah Unwinds From ‘Oprah’”
4:30 p.m. “The Pope Kisses Oprah’s Ring”
5 p.m. “Oprah News Update”
6 p.m. “Oprah Checks in at Oprah Magazine”
7 p.m. “Oprah Consults with Those Running Oprah.com”
8 p.m. “Oprah’s Most Glamorous Red Carpet Moments”
9 p.m. “Oprah is Apprised of the Rest of the Entertainment Industry’s Well-Being”
10 p.m. “Oprah News Update”
10:30 p.m. “Oprah Receives a Buss on the Cheek from Steadman”
10:32 p.m.-6:30 a.m. “The Best of Oprah”

“10 Items or Less,” TBS’s semi-improvised sitcom about the doofuses (in Latin: doofi) who work in a small, struggling grocery store, returns for a second season tonight by cribbing (sort of) a plotline from last season’s “Desperate Housewives:” People with guns take the store hostage. At least they’re not borrowing from “Rules of Engagement.”

It starts when affably clueless Greens & Grains proprietor Leslie Poole (series co-creator John Lehr) decides to bring in a blizzard-of-bucks booth as a store promotion. (The episode begins by suggesting – but not following through on – what I always thought would be a good gag, a blizzard-of-coins competition in which participants are pelted into submission by violently swirling coins.)

So a couple of gunmen show up trying to steal the cash in the booth – “If you come in tomorrow, you can walk in and take the money without a gun,” Leslie helpfully suggests. But no: One enters the booth and his mask is blown off, revealing him to be an employee of the rival Super Value Mart, a Greens & Grains goes so deeply Stockholm-Syndrome that she’s torturing her own colleagues and it’s all typically Murphy’s Law-ish.

Next week’s episode is funnier, until it isn’t. Amy (Jennifer Elise Cox), Super Value Mart’s grocery-natrix, is fired for being caught having sex in her store on a surveillance camera, and Leslie, who’s always had a thing for her despite her utter contempt for him, hires her: “Come make love with anybody you want in the employee lounge,” he, again, helpfully suggests.

But ever-driven Amy molds Leslie into her brand of sadistic manager; the other employees try to deprogram him in the basement of a character who still lives with his mom (“You’re deprogramming him? Can I watch?” mom inquires) and Leslie sees the light.

“10 Items or Less” veers with whiplash-triggering speed between droll one-liners and over-the-top buffoonish behavior; the episodes usually end with some idiocy-induced slapstick that kind of makes you feel a little foolish for kind of having enjoyed the thing to that point. Now, I’m tolerant (to a point) of imbecilic behavior, but not so much when it dissembles to no-human-being-on-the-face-of-the-planet-is-this-stupid behavior.

Anyway, following tonight’s episode at either 8:30 or 11:30 PT, there’ll be some kind of webcast where the show’s cast and creators happy-chat up their creation. That kind of thing is usually reserved for Electronic Press Kits, which I assiduously avoid, but hey, if you’re starved for entertainment (and given the writers strike you may be), have at it.

- “10 Items or Less:” 11 tonight, TBS.

Do we really want to live in a world where “Deal or No Deal” can crush cyborgs previously thought unstoppable? Yes, “Deal or No Deal” had 15 million viewers last night, while the second episode of “Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles” had only 10 million, down more than 8 million from its Sunday debut.

Worse, in its first half hour, “Terminator” was also beaten by a repeat of “2.5 Men” and the last bit of “Dance Wars.” It handily beat “Rules of Engagement” and “Notes from the Underbelly” in its second half hour, but then, those shows are so lame that any series that can’t beat them deserves instant cancellation.

You’d expect better from one of the most expensive shows on TV to produce. Especially up against cheap reality programming. Based on this head-to-head battle alone, here’s guessing that even if the writers strike is ever resolved, there’s going to be less and less swinging for the fences with big scripted shows, because why bother if dumb reality crap can beat it without breaking a sweat?

Lisa del Giocondo and Agostino Vespucci, renowned child therapists who have claimed credit for the proliferation of Ritalin, have written a pamphlet for parents entitled "How To Explain The Writers Strike To Your Child."

"With issues in the strike so complex that many adults don't fully grasp them, we decided to help parents bring to their children an elementary understanding of this most thorny of subjects," del Giocondo explained in a statement. "Children deserve to know why they may never see a new, original episode of "Hannah Montana" until it's renamed "Hannah Montana: The Retirement Years."

"Children are aware of the emotional climate in their televisions, and nothing is more distressing for them than tensions and discontent they cannot understand," Vespucci added. "Research has shown that, as difficult as it may be, it is beneficial to discuss the writers strike with your children."

Herewith, excerpts from the pamphlet:

Explaining the writers strike in simple English and similes even a child can understand

"Sometimes a man and a woman love each other very much, and when that happens, they get married. Sometimes, however, a man and a woman get pregnant, like your Daddy and Mommy did, and have a wonderful child like yourself, and even though they don't like each other all that much, they try to make it work in order to make their baby happy. And the Producers and the Writers are like your Daddy and Mommy: They never really loved one another, but they had this precious and beloved thing together called the Entertainment Industry. And so the Producers and the Writers tried to stay together to make it work, but then they realized they hated each other too much for the Entertainment Industry to remain happy.

"Remember the time when Mommy and Daddy came home from that party, and Mommy was mad because Daddy had done something bad, and Mommy slapped Daddy? That's what the Writers are trying to do to the Producers. And remember when Daddy responded by sending Mommy to the hospital? That's what the Producers are trying to do to the Writers.

"And just as you were the person who was collateral damage in your Mommy and your Daddy's messy divorce, the Entertainment Industry is getting reamed you-know-where because the Producers and the Writers can't get along."

Honesty might work

"Children are often smarter than they look - hell, they'd just about have to be - so sometimes it's best just to level with them: 'Look, this just means you'll have plenty of time to listen to those directors' commentaries you've been meaning to get to on your Wiggles and Strawberry Shortcake DVDs - hey, who wants ice cream?'"

Dealing with a child's difficult questions

"While 'I don't know' or 'Ask your mother' is always a valid response to a child's queries, in the case of the writers strike, it's important to be more forthcoming. So, if your child asks, 'What has happened to my favorite shows?', do not tell him or her that 'It's just sleeping right now' or 'It's just taking a little rest,' for that could make the child fearful of laying his own head to his pillow, thinking that he too may never return from oblivion.

"Instead, tell your child: 'Remember when Grandnana died after months of getting skinnier and skinnier and calling everyone "Sebastian?" Like her, your favorite shows will never return, either. But, just as you will always have pleasant and fond memories of Grandnana, you'll also have happy memories of going to movies and sitting for hours in front of the television, watching fresh and original quality scripted material. And you'll cherish those memories.

"But, slowly but surely, those memories will dim. And by then, you'll be an adult, and the economy will have collapsed, and the environment will have been devastated by the effects of global warming, and militarized viruses will have wiped out seven-eights of the Earth's population, with feral gangs of rabid zombies feeding with an unprecedented bloodlust upon those unlucky few who still remain, and you won't have time for nostalgic memories of Grandnana or quality original scripted material. So lighten up already.'"

WASHINGTON, D.C. (AP) – President George W. Bush, in an effort to ameliorate a $9.2-trillion deficit, announced today plans to allow commercial companies to “sponsor” certain government properties, as well as create opportunities for goods manufactured by corporations to declare themselves the “official” specific product or service “of the United States of America.”

Noting that television productions and the world of sports had profited handsomely on such sponsorships, Bush introduced the first of many corporate/government sponsorships: The Red Bull Energy Drink State of the Union Address©.

“These sponsorships will help pay for a few hours of the war in Iraq, will chip away at the deficit and help keep my tax cuts for the wealthy permanent,” Bush said in making the announcement.

Also renamed were the Sour Cream Tostitos Lincoln Memorial©, the ExxonMobil National Park© (formerly Yellowstone), the Cheez Whiz Department of Justice© and the Depends Adult Undergarment Constitution of the United States©.

In all future news stories, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi must now legally be referred to as Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas for PlayStation and Xbox Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi©. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid is now Pepto-Bismol Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid©.

In addition, Bush announced a number of corporations allying itself with the government to further their profile. Mattel is the new Official Distributor of Chinese-Manufactured Toys of the United States of America. Kaiser Permanente Health Insurance is the Official Health Provider of the United States of America.

Campbell’s SpaghettiOs is now the Official Canned Footstuff of the United States of America. The AutoZone Liberty Bowl is the Official College Bowl Game of the United States of America. Halothane anesthetic, sold commercially to veterinarians as “Down Boy,” was named the Official Euthanasia Agent of the United States of America.

And, after the fiercest of bidding wars, the title of Official Television Show of the United States of America went to “Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader?”

Just a thought (a pretty sneaky, weasely thought, but anyway): The writers strike continues unabated. Some writers, actors and plenty of crew people are hurting. No one wants to watch “Secret Talents of the Stars” (see post below). Being a voracious and insatiable species, viewers’d like a modicum of original scripted programming.

Fact: “Pencils Down” doesn’t apply to animation.

Solution: Create new episodes of TV series via rotoscoping, which is basically just putting cartoon colors over stuff shot in live action. Richard Linklater made a couple of movies – “Waking Life” and “A Scanner Darkly” – using rotoscoping; currently, there’s a series of commercials for some investment company that has rotoscoped people complaining about their brokerage firms (what do people in investment-company commercials do except complain about their brokerage firms, anyway? Are there any reputable financial corporations out there?).

And rotoscoping couldn’t possibly take as long as single-cell animation or be as costly as CGI, since it looks so half-assed anyway, so turnaround on episodes wouldn’t likely take as long as getting the producers back to the table. So the writers who are particularly hurting could gang-write some episodes, the actors could return, some crew members come back, and voila! Paychecks for almost everyone, some really funky-looking new episodes for viewers and the producers have more cash to roll around in naked while they chortle sinisterly about keeping the little guy down.

And even though rotoscoping just barely qualifies as animation and, to be honest, just kind of looks weird, some shows would seem to lend themselves to the rotoscoping technique rather easily: “Pushing Daisies” and “Ugly Betty,” for example, as they already boast fanciful, cartoonish visual sensibilities, as does “American Gladiators” (oh, wait, that one doesn’t cop to using writers). “Chuck” and “Reaper” would work. “Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles” would probably actually cost less to produce this way, as they could just wreck toy cars and blow up cardboard miniatures instead of resorting to expensive CGI. “Scrubs” is really itching to do its series finale and it’s already over the top, so there’s another candidate. A part of me that I strive to keep deeply concealed would like to see a cartoon David Caruso whip off his sunglasses and make a bad pun as he stands over a cartoonishly mangled corpse, so count “CSI: Miami” in. Animating “Tell Me You Love Me” might take some of the dreary edge off of all those whining couples, plus the sex’d be even creepier to watch.

And, lastly, a cartoon version of “According to Jim” would at least look funny, so that show might finally get a laugh or two.

I’m surprised no one at any of the networks has been devious or desperate enough to consider this.

You can’t have CBS without BS: That’s the message behind the three upcoming reality shows the network announced today.

“Secret Talents of the Stars” (the title just rolls off the tongue, does it not?) features what CBS insists will be “celebrities” competing in a “tournament-structured format” (see, that makes it sound like some actual thought was put into the show when in fact we all know better). “Professional judges” – hey, I bet Judge Larry from the Anna Nicole Smith custody trial will be glad to offer his services – will be on hand to pad the show with their blithering and blistering commentary. Want to watch C- and D-listers sing, dance, do magic tricks or acrobatic tumbles? CBS has heard your prayers!

“Game Show in My Head” is just another show aimed at humiliating its participants. It’s a hidden-camera deal where contestants wander around town until they’re instructed to do something really stupid via an earpiece. Then they do it, and everyone around them stares incomprehensibly at them until maybe a cop arrests them on drunk-and-disorderly charges or something. They get money, or they don’t. Anyway.

Then there’s “America’s Top Dog” (I thought that would be The CW’s “Crowned: The Mother of All Pageants”). Again, not much thought went into this one: People and their pets live together under one roof, train their dogs to do tricks and then there’s a competition. The winner is anyone who chooses not to watch.

AMPTP: Stop the madness now!

Those were the numbers for NBC’s lamentable efforts to make Jonestown Lemonade from the crushed and bitter fruit of a cancelled Golden Globes ceremony: 4.4 sat through the “Dateline” “show” (Jesus, people, “Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles” was premiering! What’s wrong with you?), while 5.8 endured the production announcing the winners (you could’ve seen the same thing, in half the time and sans commercials and Billy Bush, on E!, TV Guide Network and, in L.A., KCBS).

A sizable 18.3 million watched the aforementioned “Terminator.” An average 15.75 million watched CBS’s miniseries “Comanche Moon,” though it lost more than two million viewers over the course of the broadcast.

Of NBC’s Globes coverage, Defamer may have put it best:

“ABC, hope you were taking notes. If any of your ideas for The Oscars resemble any of the ideas that NBC utilized tonight in their sham of a ‘press conference,’ your federal broadcasting license will be revoked.”

Hey, Jon Gerund did a handsome job on the Daily News’ interactive “Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles” site, but even though you can go there for video, photos, background and a quiz, you won’t get this stuff from the cast and consulting producer of “T4,” Fox’s new, kick-ass spinoff.

Summer Glau (Cameron, the Terminator)

On playing a diminutive but unstoppable Terminator: “I was daunted by the idea when I first read the script. I didn’t want to go to the audition initially, because I thought I was definitely not even a girl version of a Terminator. I thought they would cast someone statuesque and imposing and strikingly beautiful.

“I went to the audition anyway, and [series creator/executive producer] Josh Friedman explained to me that the whole idea of choosing a teenager-looking girl is that she’s supposed to be able to infiltrate perfectly. They wanted someone who could blend in and be John’s bodyguard without anyone noticing. That was what drew me the most to this character, that she is steel underneath but she has to be a little more complicated.

“Also, Josh explained that she’s supposed to be the most sophisticated Terminator yet. My Terminator is the best so far at mimicking humans. In my test for this role, I had to cry, and I found that interesting, that I played a Terminator that can cry. Cameron is extremely interested in all things human.”

On her evolution from ballet dancer to kick-ass action heroine: “I pictured myself being an actress when I was a little girl and I had an idea of what I wanted to do, but my obsession was always period films and Westerns. That’s what I dreamed about, and when I got out here, I don’t know, my physicality led to really action-oriented roles. Going from dancing all day long, being very physical, it’s a great transition because when you act, it feels like 90% of your job is waiting. You wait for the cameras and lighting to be set up, so getting to put physicality into your role is really nice.”

On her amazing action sequences in “Serenity:” “When I met the stunt coordinator for the feature, he created a sort of fighting technique for me that would use my ballet. Mainly because it wouldn’t be realistic for a young girl to take on all these different men, so he said, ‘I want you to look natural in whatever you do; I want you to look proficient and really comfortable.’ So he did a lot of lyric movements for me.

On her action sequences here: “When I met with our stunt coordinator here, it was a different plan of attack, because Terminators don’t use finesse; they use brute force. So it was a nice break for me, because martial arts was one of the most difficult things I’ve ever done in my life. Playing a Terminator, they create all these breakaway walls and things for me; it’s really fun.”

Cameron and the Connors: “It’s really complicated, my relationship with both John and Sarah. It’s sort of like a dysfunctional family. Before he knew I was a Terminator, he might’ve thought something different about me, and now he feels a responsibility to me because in the future, he sent me back to protect him. Sometimes that makes his life really hard. That’s a great part of our relationship – it’s not brother and sister, and it’s not anything else that can be defined yet.”

Cameron as comic: “I can’t believe how funny they’re making Cameron. She gets a lot of punchlines. She’s so naïve to this reality. She’s come from the future, so she’s really tough and makes a lot of mistakes, and that turns out to be really funny. I get a lot of really funny things to do.”

Thomas Dekker (John Connor)

On his character as the series begins: “John’s keeping his head down and coming to terms that it’s [pursuit from Terminators] not over and is trying to grapple with this again. In the next episode [airing Monday], they haven’t gotten their new aliases yet, so he’s having to literally be housebound. Once he gets out of the house in episode three, John definitely ends up making more of an effort than I think even Sarah would really like.”

So viewers are watching the evolution of a badass: “That’s the direction – he’s trying to build the army himself. Even in the second episode, there’re glimpses of this happening.

“It’s nice. I kinda want to get there, already, doing karate and shooting guns and all that fun stuff. It’s the part of a lifetime – it’s a pop-culture icon, it’s kind of terrifyingly nerve-racking to shoot but it’s also an honor.

“I’ve been acting for 14 years and every role I play is either the weirdo or the murderer or the best friend or the sidekick. So playing the heroic character is new for me, I’ve always done the weird thing.”

Being surrounded by gorgeous strong women: “It’s such a great thing, I think, having these two really strong women and this boy. John feels these women – one was made to protect him, and John has a certain guilt over the lack of a life that Sarah has had due to him. It’s not his fault, but it’s something he hasn’t even proven that he’s been able to do yet. She’s given everything up for him.”

On his relationship with Lena Headey, who plays Sarah, his mother: “Lena and I are like best friends, which is awesome. I never would’ve expected that I’d be hanging out all the time with the actress playing my mom.”

Lena Headey (Sarah) responds: “I don’t know what he’s talking about. I think he’s an idiot.” (She’s joking.)

Headey on the “Terminator” films: “I saw the first one years ago as a teenager. It scared me. I recently watched ‘T2’ with Thomas, which is the most relevant to where we are on this show. I loved it. I found it really emotional and for the sci-fi genre, it was really involving.”

On having to live up to the films: “It didn’t daunt me. It’s a new thing. It’s a TV show; it’s not the movie. Linda Hamilton created something brilliant. But it’s changed a little bit of course.”

On acting during action sequences: “Acting is instinct and if you have a physical instinct and you follow that, people believe you. And I believe it – I really love working on all the fights and I want to make sure that this is believable as a woman who’s physically active. I don’t want to look clean. The one person in the world she’s here for is John, and it’s kind of animalistic in a way, that she will put herself in front of him at any moment and fight tooth and nail.”

Wardrobe decisions – making Sarah sexy vs. making her realistic: “I always ask for that – I’m a bit of a realist and I don’t want Sarah Connor to look like a joke. I want it to look good but I want her to look real when she’s doing the physical stuff. She’s a scrapper. So I ask for something I can move in and we always have to put some pads in.”

James Middleton (consulting producer)

Evolution of the show: “There was a way to take the situation that was presented at the end of ‘T2’ and deal with this character, Sarah Connor, and you wouldn’t need to duplicate the chase sequences that constitute the movies. You could see what her likes and dislikes were, how she was trying to raise her son, what her morals are, that sort of thing. Because that character was so interesting, there would be a way to create a series that had action but not dependent on action and was more about the drama between her and her son in an incredibly dangerous situation.”

On creating Cameron as John’s protector: “One of the formula elements of the franchise is the protective Terminator. And we like to have the protective Terminator come from unexpected places, as an infiltrator. And we went in the opposite direction from the Arnold, the predator type and created a teenage female Terminator. That could be just as interesting as an Arnold.”

So, John from the future is helping current-day John get lucky?: (Laughs.)

Why didn’t Future John send along an ID kit for Sarah to locate in bank vaults? (A key plot point in episode two): “They were in a hurry. That might have been in there, but they were chased by the antagonist Terminator, so that’s my answer to you. (laughs). Maybe in one of those bank boxes there was an ID kit, but they didn’t get there.”

On Headey: “We were taken aback by her charisma and strength and presence. And she did a very good American accent that made us comfortable with her doing this. She has to create a character that is more extensive than the character in the movies. We only saw her character in the movies for four total hours. Lena is recreating Sarah Connor, not emulating her. The other thing is, she’s tough. She’s a former boxer, so she loves the fight sequences. She’s asked for more.

“Her emotional intensity matched by a physical presence. She has a star quality. You can’t take your eyes off her.”

On John’s evolution: “We’re watching him learn how to be the future leader of mankind. What those lessons are provides us with great drama. Not only does he need to be a great military leader, not only does he have to be strong, but he has to be smart. And to be creative. This future war is not something that can be won militarily or in an asymmetrical-warfare kind of way. He is going to have to come up with a brilliant way to save mankind. It’s not just about him learning to drive a stick or fire a gun.”

Bible and sword! While NBC is sticking with its plan to air its Golden Globe package in primetime on the West Coast, E! and the TV Guide Network will offer the press conference announcing the winners live, at 6 p.m. on the West Coast. (NBC opened the press conference up to all media today, meaning anyone who wants to can air it live.) So you can get your awards fix over early and have already forgotten who won by the time NBC airs this sorry excuse for an awards show on the West Coast.

Are you a conniving, ambitious floozy content to get by in life on your looks? Well, you’re in luck! There’s a beneficent soul out there willing to help you live the dream!

Patti Stanger, star of Bravo’s upcoming reality trainwreck (just guessing) “The Millionaire Matchmaker,” will be rubbing elbows with “(l)adies looking for love and advice on landing a millionaire” Monday, Jan. 28 around noon at Sephora at Hollywood and Highland. Maybe if you’re lucky she’ll put you on her TV show. (Idea for a spin-off show: “Celebrity Golddiggers,” in which Bai Ling, Courtney Peldon, Phoebe Price and Kim Stewart try to bag big-bucks producers who’ll put them in high-profile projects rather than the crap that just barely keeps getting them invites to red carpets around town.)

Anyway, I’m not completely sure about this, but I think some of Stanger’s millionaire clients have included O.J. Simpson, Phil Spector, Robert Blake, Christian Brando, Michael Skakel and Robert Durst. Good luck ladies!

A while back, I applauded the Hallmark Channel for its revolutionary publicity tactic of actually inviting members of the public to date the star of one of its TV movies.

Alas, that scheme was apparently too ambitious, or ended badly, because for their upcoming movie, “The Good Witch,” they’ve scaled back; of course, they’re inviting all media outlets to scale back on their credibility, as well.

Their latest gambit: Sending out ready-written features on Catherine Bell, that “Good Witch” in question.

THE FOLLOWING ARTICLE IS APPROVED AND AVAILABLE FOR ALL PRESS USES reads the top of the story. And its lead promises one of the most staggering puff pieces in the history of entertainment journalism while at the same time being utterly tedious and unrevealing, and that’s saying something.

Here’s the story – or, at least as far as I was able to get into it:

“By David Martindale *
“Crown Features Syndicate

“Catherine Bell is one of the most successful and beloved actresses in TV today. ** But to her way of thinking, she’s still just a work in progress.

“‘I think if you don’t improve in life, you tend to do worse,’ she says. ‘Things never stay the same in nature.*** They either get better or they get worse.

“‘So I like to aim for better in career, better in life, better as a person, better in all things.***’*”

* Is this a real person? Or the name Hallmark Channel gave its Bland Robo-Publicity Generator 3.0 word-processing system?

** Using this as an opening sentence will get you fired from most newspapers on the planet, or at least consigned to fetching coffee for editors.

*** WTF? Things stay the same all the time. Under which pop-psych loon’s spell has she fallen?

**** Aww… Isn’t that precious? Couldn’t you just pinch her cheek – in a nice way, not a creepy way like Chris Matthews?

I’m sure Bell went on in the piece to more thoroughly analyze the Second Law of Thermodynamics, but at this point I had already plucked out my eyeballs. At any rate, I wish Mr. Martindale good luck in his future career melding celebrity profiles into the stuff of greeting-card bromides.

Bible and sword!

No, it’s not the Republican Party’s new campaign slogan: It’s Captain Inish Scull’s (Val Kilmer at his most eccentric, covered in fright wigs and funny old-timey mustaches) favorite epithet in CBS’s upcoming miniseries “Comanche Moon,” a prequel to Larry McMurtry’s “Lonesome Dove.”

Far as I can tell, it’s a period-sounding, FCC-friendly cousin of something along the lines of “No sh!t” or “Well, f@#& me,” intended to convey exasperated surprise. And it kind of takes you out of the story every time he says it (not that you’ll mind, nor is it the only thing that takes you out of the story).

Expect to see it turn up here for a while until I get tired of it. Like, right now:

Bible and sword! TV Guide is reporting that Paula Abdul will perform at the Super Bowl! Unfortunately, her performance will consist of a song or two, not a recreation of her most recent meltdown at LAX.

Since the announcement of the Golden Globe winners will fall this year under the auspices of NBC News, why do West Coast viewers have to wait until 9 p.m. for it when it’s being made at 6 p.m.? Isn’t this being posited as a breaking news story, and isn’t NBC News in the business of presenting breaking news in a timely fashion?

“News” like this will be old at that point: Anyone who still cares about the Globes will have found the winners on the Internets by 9 p.m. It’s not like this will have much in the way of entertainment value as awards shows ostensibly do. Yet more strike-related confusion from NBC, desperate to fill its primetime hours with something, anything.

I'm going to do something here I never thought I'd do: Defend Jay Leno. Of course, I'm going to defend Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert and the other late-night hosts who have opted to perform their own scripted material, as well, so that absolves me in my own mind, at least a little.

Jon Stewart was a little slicker and a lot funnier Tuesday on his second night returning to "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart," as he returned to what he does best - political satire. (Stewart seemed to cross the line even further, recruiting British correspondent John Oliver for a short, not terribly funny bit about the picket lines, until Oliver explained that if he didn't work, labor laws insisted upon his deportation.) Colbert was faster out of the gate on Monday and didn't falter Tuesday. Both shows depended, as I predicted, on acutely edited sequences underscoring political and news-reporting idiocy and hypocrisy.

Still, they're clearly writing a lot of material on their own, as is Leno, who's been offering nightly monologues ostensibly penned by him and him alone. Which the WGA insists is contrary to union rules, and so they're decreed bad guys, and something more than a wrist-slap is impending.

They're doing this not for their own gain - they're wealthy enough to withstand a strike - but for the benefit of their staffs, for whom they have this weakness: They care for the well-being of their co-workers, who'd be up sh!t creek if these shows weren't on the air.

So, let's put you in something akin to their shoes, and let's not even lay the additional burden of the well-being of co-workers upon you. Let's say you work for bosses with whom your own sensibilities don't gibe, which isn't, shall we note, an uncommon occurrence. What do you do? Roll over and do what, to your mind, is mediocre work in order to appease your bosses but in your mind humiliates yourself to the people expecting better from you?

Like hell you do. You acknowledge that the exigencies of your current situation may diminish your work, but you do your best anyway. After all, it's your name, not theirs, on the final product, and you aren't going down, in the same fashion at least, with those champions of mediocrity.

So the late-night guys working overtime writing their own material without the benefit of vast writing staffs are doing the Lord's work, to my mind - they're doing what they can to ensure that, once (or if) this strike is resolved, their shows will still have at least a modicum of the same sort of credibility that they had before the strike began, that their writers will actually have something of value to return to.

We've all worked for people who didn't quite appreciate what we brought to the party, who considered us too recherché or too coarse or too this or too that to contribute capably and profitably to their bottom line, who've threatened us with our very livelihoods if we didn't adhere more closely to the corporate ideal. And you either molded to their demands or you didn't, and you either hated yourself in the morning or you didn't.

And right now, the late-night hosts are getting it from both sides - from corporate uberlords demanding product, any product, and from their writing brethren demanding they withhold their best work.

But each individual's sensibility and idea of perfectionism, each person's notion of what defines their value and their ability to rewardingly contribute to society, is as innately ingrained into their DNA as their height and hair color. Simply put, Stewart, Colbert, Leno et al are compelled to put forth their best work, under breathtakingly difficult circumstances, to America.

As a writer (albeit one who earns exponentially less than a working WGA scribe), I'm naturally far more sympathetic to the WGA's cause. But, as a writer who has frequently toiled under circumstances that demanded (or resulted in) diluted work I considered less than my best effort, I can only be sympathetic to guys who are trying to be funny under circumstances that are anything but.

The WGA is more or less pressing these guys to give less than 100%. Giving less than 100%, it seems, has resulted in sh!t like "According to Jim" and all the other shows that have allowed reality TV to emerge as a viable alternative that has prolonged this strike.

So before you hit these guys with the "scab" label, consider what you'd do under their circumstances. And if you'd fold, I wonder what your A-game would look like in the first place.

Other opinions, of course, are welcome...

Remember back when the writers strike was fun, those heady early days of November when there were striking babies, theme days and concerts for engaged strikers featuring pop stars performing "L'Internationale?"

Those days are long gone, my friend, now that Hollywood is being denied its annual birthright of distributing trophies to celebrities and "American Gladiators" is eating up huge chunks of primetime real estate as increasing numbers of scripted shows go dark or into premature rerun mode. It's shaping up to be a long, cold, bitter winter, indeed, and what with having to post frequent strike updates and the strike losing some of its inherent humor value and having failed to pace myself, burning up all my best material early on, I've pretty much run out of amusing takes on the thing.

So, in fond remembrance of those halcyon days (and in a bald effort to increase my residuals for this blog) (oh, wait: I don't get paid anything to do this blog), I present to you this collection of ultra-witty strike-related entries. Enjoy, in that sort of bittersweet way that you did when the folks who did "The Dysfunctional Family Circus" were ordered by Bil Keane's attorneys to shutter their site but powered on to 500 entries nonetheless in their last hours.

* How different TV shows would handle the writers strike:

"Dexter:" Those involved in the talks go missing for months, until their dismembered corpses are found stuffed in garbage bags on the ocean floor. Once the identities of the victims are revealed, the community rallies behind their killer.

"Tell Me You Love Me:" Between rounds of joyless yet explicit lovemaking, the writers and producers whine to one another about how disconnected from the relationship they feel.

"How I Met Your Mother:" They never meet the mother, and never resolve the strike.

* Bogus Day One updates:

Writers eventually capitulated to all of AMPTP's requests, but AMPTP, incapable of dialing back on the bluster, issued the same boilerplate statement: "It is unfortunate that they choose to take this irresponsible action."

* Bogus Day Two updates:

NBC, neatly dove-tailing its "green" initiative with its belt-tightening strategy, announced today that in response to the strike it will be recycling scripts in a new anthology series, "Public Domain Theatre." Episodes of shows that neglected to renew their copyrights, such as the 1962-63 season of "The Andy Griffith Show," will be recast and shot anew. NBC's also readying "DVD Commentary Playhouse," which will feature the stars of NBC's most popular shows (all three of them) discussing their complex acting choices while their favorite episodes play in the background. ...

The CW has already pushed "Emoticon Valley" into production, a reality-competition show that, per its press release, "goes behind the dramatic, tension-filled scenes as contestants vie to create new and inventive emoticons to add to Emails." If that show is successful, The CW will greenlight "The Great ROTFLMAO Challenge," in which teens attempt to come up with ever more obfuscating abbreviations for IMs and text messages in order to confuse their parents.

* Excerpts from the (as-yet) unproduced script "Force Majeure," which transforms the strike into a conspiracy thriller:

Nerdy Writer #4 (or #2 again, if AMPTP wants to save money on cast members): "I know! Let's dip into our Discretionary Fund and hire the best private detectives to dig up the dirtiest of dirt on these guys! Have them find every mistress, every coke deal, every tryst with Larry Craig! Then leak them to the press and their wives will divorce them and get half their fortunes! More importantly, it will humiliate them publicly!"

WGA Hero Character: "That's brilliant!"

Nerdy Writer #3: "But what if they decide to do that to us in turn?"

Nerdy Writer #1: "So what? We're writers - who'd amongst us rates a really hot mistress?"

MONTAGE SEQUENCE: A private detective tails a fat-cat AMPTP member as he goes whoring at his private club, snorting cocaine off his mistress's quivering torso, and other things that'd no doubt really upset the MPAA.

SMASH CUT TO: A screaming headline on the front page of the Los Angeles Clarion Eagle: "HEAD OF BLACKWATER PICTURES TIED TO THAI CHILD PROSTITUTION, DRUGRUNNING, MONEY LAUNDERING, TRYING TO POISON OPRAH'S MINERAL-WATER SUPPLY - AND MAKING CRAPPY MOVIES"

PULL OUT to reveal the story being read by ashen-faced AMPTP members.

TITLE CARD: "WEEK 42"

AMPTP Goon #1: "Those fools! Did they really think this would work?"

AMPTP Goon #2: "Well, it worked on you. Though I can assure you, Halliburton Entertainment is clean as a whistle. (pauses to take the temperature of the room; finding it lukewarm) Though I can't say that similar measures wouldn't work on others in this cabal."

Shrugs all around.

AMPTP Goon #1: "Let's do the same to them!"

AMPTP Goon #2: "If people saw what a writer's mistress looked like, they'd feel even more sorry for them."

* AMPTP's New Economic Partnership revealed:

Item 1: Upfront profit participation. As this is a bold new initiative, we the producers are offering as part of our partnership the opportunity for you the writers to invest in the projects in which you participate. If the production doesn't make any money, well, welcome to our world. If, on the other hand, it does become wildly successful, we will graciously reimburse your investment to you.

Item 2: New media profit participation. Not many people know this, but your home computer or laptop is actually an ATM machine. To collect any profits from all online ventures and downloads, simply go to the website or iTunes store in question. If there are any profits due you, they will be ejected from the disk-drive slot in your computer in the form of crisp $20 bills. If not, well, be patient; we're bound to make some money off your writing eventually.

Item 3: DVD profit participation. We will give you a copy of any DVD you have a writing credit on, free of charge. If you already have a copy, you can take it to Amoeba for a handsome payout of $3 or $4.

* Scoop: An agreement is in sight:

LOS ANGELES (AP) - The spokespresidents for the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers and the Writers Guild of America - Nick Counter and Patric Verrone, respectively - have agreed today to settle their differences in a winner-take-all duel with pistols. ...

Together, AMPTP and the WGA issued a joint statement: "We anticipate moving forward to reach an agreement in a spirit of gritted-teeth unity and tense and awkward silence."

* A modest proposal (one that NBC no doubt wishes it had taken me up on now): Transform awards ceremonies into reality-competition shows:

Simon, Paula and Randy could berate the nominees:

"Kiera Knightly, you're a very lovely young woman, but would it kill you to eat a hamburger?"

"Nikki Blonsky," you're a very lovely young woman, but would it kill you to pass up on a hamburger?" ...

"Javier Bardem, very chilling, but the goofy haircut thing is so Sanjaya."

* Not related to the strike, but I thought it was funny: A tribute to Norman Mailer, recalling the night our paths crossed:

"You think you know women, don't you, Mailer?" I asked rhetorically. "You stabbed a broad once, am I right, and that imbues you with insight into the spectral majesty that is our fairer sex? Well, do you see that dame over there - " and, here, I pointed to a specimen of inordinate pulchritude at a nearby table trying desperately not to make eye contact with me - "do you see her? You do, don't you?" I pulled a revolver tucked into my belt in the small of my back and shot her in the clavicle. "Well, now I think I know a little bit more about women than you do!"

Over the weekend, Dr. Phil infamously inserted himself into the once-funny-now-not-so-much spectacle that is Britney Spears’ life. Say what you will about Ms. Spears – that she needs a lot of medication or a whole lot less – but at least she’s still coherent enough to recognize an opportunistic hack seeking a ratings bonanza by exploiting someone else’s pain. (That, or she just had no idea who he was. Either way: Points to her.)

Still, there are some highly public lapses in judgment and examples of monumental dysfunction that we wouldn’t mind watching Dr. Phil wade into headlong. To wit:

* The Writers Strike

Patric Verrone: You’re a jerk.

Nick Counter: No, you’re a jerk.

Dr. Phil: This relationship needs a hero.

* Republican front-runners

Mike Huckabee: I don’t believe in evolution and think women should be subservient to their husbands. Vote for me!

Mitt Romney: I wear magic underwear and believe Gitmo should be twice its size for twice the torture. Vote for me!

John McCain: I’m a straight-talking maverick who defends the President’s policies. Vote for me!

Rudy Giuliani: 9/11 9/11 9/11 9/11 9/11. Vote for me!

Dr. Phil: I must have 'stupid' written on my forehead!


Fred Thompson (resigned sigh): Really, I want to be President.

Dr. Phil: I want you to get excited about your life.

* Democratic Presidential candidates

Barack Obama: I’m the candidate for change.

John Edwards: We’re the candidates for change!

Dr. Phil: This is gonna be a changing day in your life!

Hillary Clinton: I’ve been changing for the past 35 years!

Dr. Phil: Let's just call a spade a shovel.

Bill Richardson/Dennis Kucinich: We haven’t dropped out yet.

Dr. Phil: How's that workin' for you?

* The Bush Administration

W: The war in Iraq is a just war.

Dr. Phil: Did you fall out of the dumb tree?!!

W: Alberto Gonzalez is a good and decent man. So are Scooter Libby, Tom DeLay and Jack Abramoff.

Dr. Phil: If you're gonna talk to me, you're gonna have to be honest.

W: If waterboarding is torture, which it ain’t, then we’re not torturing.

Dr. Phil: You can't change what you don't acknowledge.

W: Warrantless wiretapping doesn’t subvert the Constitution, and if it does, we can write laws that make it legal.

Dr. Phil: I didn't just ride in on a load of turnips.

W: No one could have anticipated the breaching of the levees, but: Heck of a job, Brownie! We’ll do whatever we can to restore the great city of New Orleans to its previous splendor.

Dr. Phil: Get real!

W: The jury’s still out on global warming. And evolution. And our economy. And Iran’s nuclear program.

Dr. Phil: Are you stupid?!? What are you thinking?

Why?

* No idiotic questions from vapid red-carpet hosts, of the where’d-you-get-that-insanely-expensive-bracelet or when-did-you-know-this-role-was-something-special varieties or otherwise.

* No lame entertainment-industry inside-baseball jokes that you laugh at only to prove to the others in the room that you get the Sumner Redstone/Steven Spielberg reference, not because it’s actually funny.

* No awkward celebrity-presenter banter, followed by the inevitable “I didn’t write this stuff” when it falls flat.

* No pretentious, embarrassing and/or lamentably choreographed musical numbers.

* No death montage where some people get a lot of applause, others, not so much, reducing even death to a popularity contest.

* No time-wasting, irrelevant montages, period.

* No self-aggrandizing or faux-modest acceptance speeches with tedious laundry lists of shout-outs to agents, attorneys, publicists, significant others, other people you’ve never heard of, oh, and God, who in His mercifully just wisdom singled the winner out over his/her competition but continues to allow those massacres in Africa.

* No orchestra to rudely play winner offstage mid-speech.

* 25 awards announced in a brisk 60 minutes, rather than three excruciating hours.

(Warning: for those with no access to Comedy Central's East Coast feed, this contains nothing but spoilers for tonight's episodes of "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart" and "The Colbert Report.")

For a late-night TV host, there's a thin line between making it clear you're delivering an inferior product because you have no writers and humiliating yourself, and no one wants to cross that line. Perhaps inevitably, then, did Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert fudge a little - well, probably a lot - when it came to the "pencils down" edict. ("But we didn't use pencils!" They'll protest. "We used laptops! There's no 'Laptops Closed' campaign!")

Jon Stewart is renaming his show "A Daily Show with Jon Stewart" until the strike is resolved - and clearly prepared a bunch of material in advance. Same with Stephen Colbert, who decided also to rename his show, to "The Colbert Report," only now the "t's" are pronounced.

You can guess some of what happened. Stewart, who opens each show scribbling on his script, was instead jotting on his desk. "That's me drawing on what should be a script." (Colbert did a similar thing, announcing, "Which brings me to tonight's 'Word,' and, of course, not having one, punted. Saw it coming a mile away, but what a nice distillation of what real scripts actually bring a show.) Colbert, I'd say, did a measurably better job than Stewart, but probably because he can play his blustery @sshole of a character all in favor of a strike while Stewart has to be his regular avuncularly smart-alecky self.

Rather than a strike beard, Stewart sported what he called a unibrow. "I hope this is the symbol of solidarity that catches on," he said. Most of his other material was similarly wan, with very short bits on Huckabee winning Iowa and "American Gladiators" and, shockingly, nothing about all the amazing political idiocy that transpired in the two months he's been off the air.

Discussing the strike, he resurrected a trademark "Daily Show" joke when evoking the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, "or NAMBLA." A pause. "That joke is grandfathered in."

Much as David Letterman did on his first night back, Stewart explained as best he could the strike. He was sympathetic to the WGA, but obviously miffed that his show didn't get the same waiver Letterman's did.

"This is a dire situation but let's have a little perspective here," Stewart said. "This really is a math problem." The last time the late-night shows went dark all at once was after Sept. 11, he noted, and the shows were gone for about a week. "So, if I'm doing my math right, the writers strike is now nine times worse than Sept. 11."

He brought up his snubbing at the hands of the WGA to his guest, Ron Seeber, a professor of labor relations at Cornell (the interview consumed about two-thirds of the episode). "Are they being arbitrary, denying some shows that would willingly (meet the WGA's terms)?" he asked, notably blanching. "Why would you turn something like that down? ...

"Is it anti-Semitism?" he asked, milking the hurt over his spurning. "The whole reason I got into this business is because I thought we controlled it."

Perhaps anticipating the sort of beating Jay Leno is taking for writing his monologues, he closed by imploringly asking Seeber, "Do strikes ever end with hugs?"

Despite his best efforts, Stewart's show clearly was compromised; Colbert's not so much (Colbert doesn't rely upon reports from correspondents like Stewart does). "The Daily Show's" biggest laugh came when Stewart cut to Colbert, sporting a strike beard that would make the guys in ZZ Top look like pimply adolescents and feeding scripts into a paper shredder. "I'm very alarmed by how prepared you were," Colbert scolded Stewart.

Colbert's show felt a little more like an ordinary episode of his show. He opened his show in the usual melodramatic fashion: "Tonight (pregnant pause) - then (pregnant pause) - plus (pregnant pause) - this is 'The Colbert Report.'"

He directed his audience to pad the show with its applause, resting his feet on his desk and reading the paper while the cheering continued past any reasonable moment.

He made more use of clips from previous shows, including Huckabee's three appearances in which Colbert was offered the Vice-Presidency and a montage of moments in which Colbert engaged in screeds against labor unions. He brought in two guests, conservative columnist Andrew Sullivan, championing Barack Obama, and author Richard Freeman, championing the American worker. (Colbert, in his own parlance, nailed Freeman but good, asking him for his final question if the author was a member of a labor union; he confessed he wasn't. Colbert beamed, triumphant.)

But these strike shows are a marathon, not a sprint, and tonight's first installments underscored just how difficult it is to bring A-level material on a nightly basis. And the two guys will probably enjoy this even less if the WGA comes down on them in the same way they did on Leno for writing his monologue.

* UPDATE: Never mind. What was left of the ceremony and the parties has now been scrapped, though NBC will apparently try to wring sh!t from a goose and still provide some sort of Golden-Globe related programming, including that thrilling presenter- and accepter-free “news conference” announcing the winners.

On Sunday, the night of the Golden Globes, NBC will air … well, something.

Whether it’s anything anyone might actually want to watch, of course, is another question.

The booze-drenched ceremony is out. Instead, NBC has announced this bulletproof schedule in a desperate hope that celebrities will attend something, somewhere, a party, maybe:

7 p.m.: “Dateline” interviews with and clips of nominees. (It’s news, see, so back off, writers!) (A two-hour version of this is scheduled for Saturday, a night most people don’t watch Television.)

8 p.m.: A one-hour retrospective/clip show from Dick Clark Enterprises. (Which, apparently, won’t be written. But you can relive all those memorable moments from Globes shows past, like, uh … don’t interrupt my train of thought; I’m sure I’ll come up with something … oh, yeah! Like when Christine Lahti was in the ladies room when she won her trophy! That was rich, no? Geez, this’ll be a slow hour.)

9 p.m.: If you can still bring yourself to care about the Globes, this’ll be the pulse-pounding hour you’ll want to tune into: A press conference covered by the intrepid journalists of NBC News announcing the winners.

10 p.m.: An “Access Hollywood”-style show checking out the swanky parties – which still likely won’t have many celebrities in attendance.

Honestly, given the flop-sweat-drenched imagination it took whoever to cook up this high-octane evening of televised material (one hesitates to use the word “entertainment”), would it really kill the producers to go back to the table and employ the same imaginative skills to cook up a lame counter-offer to the WGA’s current demands? At least that way the talks begin anew and future embarrassments such as this might be averted.

The networks seem to be having trouble convincing people that their shows aren't already primarily in reruns, given the semi-desperate tone of the "All new!" promos I've seen. (Forget whether it's any good, the spots suggest - the important thing is, you haven't seen it before.)

So last night, ABC premiered "Cashmere Mafia" while NBC debuted its loudly touted "American Gladiators," and the numbers were, like everything else affected by the strike, mixed. "Cashmere Mafia" had 10.7 million viewers, but retained only 54% of its "Desperate Housewives" lead-in and lost 12% of its audience from its first half-hour to its second. "Gladiators," on the other hand, was pumped-up: No. 2 from 9-10 p.m. (against "Desperate Housewives") and No. 1 from 10-11 p.m. (against "Cashmere Mafia"), building viewers from one half-hour to the next in both hours, averaging 12 million viewers overall.

Elsewhere on the strike front:

As expected, CBS will air episodes of Showtime's great serial-killer drama "Dexter," beginning Sunday, Feb. 17 at 10 p.m. They'll air the first season, when Dexter (Michael C. Hall) was engaged in cat-and-mouse games with a serial killer even more twisted than he. CBS says it'll edit the series for broadcast, which means some episodes, emptied of their gore and cruelty, will probably only be a half-hour long. Nonetheless, a frothing-at-the-mouth Email from the Parents Television Council will be hitting my Email in-box in 3 ... 2 ...

Oh, and The CW has rearranged the deck chairs, moving its comedies back to Sundays, where they failed spectacularly last season but not nearly as horribly as what's in those time slots currently. They'll juggle wrestling, repeats and reality (more Pussycat Dolls, plus a thing called "Farmer Wants a Wife") for the rest of the season. (Friday's wrestling is the only night they didn't tear up.)

Low-rated "Gossip Girl" is moved to Monday, without a lead-in; low-rated "Reaper" is moved to 8 p.m. Tuesday, and then to Thursdays following "Smallville" repeats. Somehow, that'll bolster these shows with some much-needed juice. You'll just have to take The CW's word for it.

Spoiler alert: There will be blood spoilers. Though there will be, blood, as well, as this is a cop show we’re talking about.

I spent the holidays up North – Bodega Bay, Sebastopol, Mill Valley – and was asked by friends who hadn’t seen much of “The Wire” what San Francisco Chronicle TV critic Tim Goodman was thinking when he mentioned “The Wire” on his 2007 Best-of-TV list, particularly since HBO aired no new episodes of the series in 2007. (My friends are fans of “Mad Men,” “Flight of the Conchords” and “House,” so they’re obviously pretty savvy when it comes to TV.)

Goodman said “The Wire” is the best TV show in history, my friends noted – can that possibly be true?

My question: Can that possibly be measured?

“The Wire” has as many things going for it as it does going against it. One, it really is brilliant and smart and textured and pretty much closer to reading a great novel than anything else ever on TV (this is a show you want to watch on DVD so you can watch episodes back-to-back-to-back-to-back). On the other hand, it’s really not conducive to the TV template, where you tune in once a week and watch the show and then have your whole life happen to you for an entire week and then return and watch another episode: “The Wire” pretty much insists that you pay attention, because it’s not going to blithely recap anything for you when an incident in episode six was set up by something that happened in episode two. And, kind of by definition, TV shows absolutely cannot demand that kind of attention from its viewers. So: If you can’t even run to the kitchen to grab a beer without possibly missing a narrative thread that could confuse you for the rest of the season, does that make “The Wire” great television or utterly inept television?

To be sure, “The Wire” has serious things on its mind: The whole of the series has been about how the ostensible War on Drugs cannot be won, for about a million reasons, many of which the show assiduously notes, which include but are hardly limited to lack of police resources, the government not directly addressing the myriad reasons for drug use in the first place (people live horrible lives that they try to keep themselves from remembering, etc.) and the fact that dealing drugs is, for many impoverished people, the quickest, best way to escape their ignoble origins.

Upon that, each season has, with insightful precision, examined other sociological ills: Season two explored the crumbling middle-class; season three looked at how even idealistic politicians were sodomized and compromised by real-life exigencies; season four grappled with the disintegration of the educational system and the new season, debuting tonight on HBO, eviscerates the media for its refusal to seriously cover issues that affect people and things that people should care about more than Britney Spears’ latest meltdown (while noting that budget cutbacks, not reporters’ instincts, are a huge reason for lame journalism). “The Wire” doesn’t coddle its viewers by assuring them that everything’ll be OK; in fact, it pretty much warns us that barring serious changes, things will continue to get worse.

So: Most Realistic TV Drama ever? Hands down. Most Astonishingly Well-Cast and –Acted Show in TV History? You got it. TV Show That Most Treated Its Audience As Intelligent Adults? Without a doubt.

Best Show Ever? (Like, what about "The Sopranos?" Well, "The Wire" was far more consistent...) I know a bunch of shows I’ve enjoyed watching more (“The Wire” doesn’t get you to laugh a whole lot, for one thing, and I like to laugh), but I can’t think of any that’ve addressed so many crucial issues that I shouldn’t be allowing myself to be distracted away from and does so in a way that doesn’t at all feel medicinal.

Clearly, when the history of the Emmy Awards is written, the TV Academy’s utter refusal to acknowledge “The Wire” (beyond a rote nomination here and there) will no doubt be considered a huge embarrassment if not a compelling reason to write them off completely.

Which brings us to this season, which is “The Wire’s” last season. It actually begins with an audience-pleasing stand-alone comic sequence (Baltimore cops induce a guilty plea from a perp by duping him into thinking he’s taking a lie-detector test on a copying machine), setting up the season’s theme: “The bigger the lie, the more they believe.”

It’s the first season that features a plotline that seems like a TV-show plotline (oh, and here’s where the spoilers come): Detective McNulty (Dominic West), exasperated that budget cutbacks have eviscerated Baltimore Police’s ability to investigate past crimes, cooks up a fictitious serial killer so that the local politicians pretty much have to free up money for overtime for investigations. He’s aided, without seeking said assistance, by an ambitious Baltimore Sun reporter (shades of Jayson Blair) who’s been making up stories in order to further his own career; their separate agendas neatly dovetail into something that helps out the police temporarily but soon threatens to spiral out of either’s control.

(An aside: “Wire” creator David Simon worked for the Baltimore Sun before moving on to his TV career. The city of Baltimore has always considered “The Wire” something of a double-edged sword: While it brings tons of money into the city, it scarcely brings it anything resembling good p.r. The Sun knew this, but allowed Simon’s show to film in their offices nonetheless, realizing they’d probably end up looking pretty crappy. And they do.)

Here’s where I call bullsh!t, sort of: McNulty is p!ssed because the city has shut down an investigation of 22 murders (from Season Four), which, it is explained, made national news. Couldn’t McNulty simply reveal that fact to the media, which would’ve been newsworthy enough, instead of risking his career by duping them with his obfuscations?

Also: A newspaper reporter willing to just make sh!t up at random is still, believe it or not, pretty rare. Still, “The Wire” does pretty create a situation in which such a reporter could flourish (blind quotes which can’t be double-checked, etc.).

And still: “The Wire” doesn’t come close to the cheap, manipulative sort of plotting that most TV shows resort to. It took what I considered minuses and got me not only to buy them but to be addicted to them.

Best TV Show Ever? That doesn’t even seem high enough praise.

But what is the best show? Please list your favorites – with convincing arguments – in the comments section.

- “The Wire:” 9 and 10:30 tonight and a sh!tload of times across HBO’s sundry platforms over the course of the week. Check your local listings; I can’t possibly do all your work for you.

In promos, NBC’s touting “The Tonight Show with Jay Leno” and “Late Night with Conan O’Brien” as being “Unscripted!” As if that’s a good thing.

Of course, that’s not entirely true: The Writers Guild of America and NBC are engaging in a p!ssing match over the fact that Leno’s writing his own monologue. Late yesterday, the network issued a statement more strongly worded than its initial response to the WGA’s gripe:

“NBC shares America's enthusiasm for Jay Leno's return. It is unfortunate that the WGA is contemplating plans to ‘investigate’ Jay's authorship of his Tonight Show monologue. The WGA agreement clearly permits Jay to create and perform his own monologue. The enforcement of strike rules against Jay in these circumstances would violate the Federal labor laws.”

Not good enough for the WGA, who darkly intimated that Leno has something worse than a slap on the wrist awaiting him:

“‘The answer is, he is not getting a pass,’ said Sherry Goldman, a spokeswoman for the Writers Guild of America East. She said that the action to be taken had not yet been specified.”

Meanwhile, since it’s kind of tough for the writerless shows to get big-name celebrities willing to cross the picket lines, Leno and Jimmy Kimmel are going to cross one another’s picket lines this Thursday to appear as guests on each other’s shows. Kimmel stuck up for Jay his first night back (Kimmel’s also doing a nice/smart thing, showing clips from previous shows that’ll get the writers some residuals).

And Leno has scored yet another Republican Presidential candidate willing to cross the picket lines: Ron Paul, the libertarian guy considered crazy by the other candidates because he’s against the war in Iraq and who famously has an army of Internet trolls terrorizing any political blogger that says something mean about him. Paul’s polling in the single digits and has no chance of winning, so going scab means little to him.

Paul, who’s appearing Monday, is hardly the get that Mike Huckabee was, who helped Leno to some 7.2 million viewers on Wednesday, the late-night shows’ first night back. But the initial interest in seeing what the late-night hosts were up to cooled quickly: On Thursday, Leno had 5.2 million viewers, while David Letterman had 4.6 million.

Depending on how long the strike proceeds, it might reach the point where you and I might be palatable guests on one of the late-night shows.

Oh, you’re missing quite the party. We’re really celebrating here. You should see it, honest. My Staff and I are in Aruba or somewhere, smoking Cuban cigars and heckling the locals. This is how you commemorate a landmark achievement like a 1,000th blog entry.

Did you notice that that last headline was slyly naughty but still utterly faithful to the content of the story? Good one, me!

Remember when this blog rarely actually had much to say about TV and wasn’t particularly newsy because I was too busy making up stuff about assassinating Les Moonves and rewriting transcripts of serious interviews about Iraq and waterboarding to make them seem like they were about television and rewriting speeches by Winston Churchill to make them ratings reports and crap like that? I miss those days.

I think I really stepped up and made this milestone entry really special, don’t you?

You’ll just have to trust me on this, but I chatted with Marjane Satrapi, the creator of “Persepolis” the graphic novel/memoir about her childhood in Iran and writer/director (with Vincent Paronnaud) of “Persepolis” the movie, that’s been winning all sorts of awards since its debut at Cannes. (You have to trust me because although the story ran in the Daily News today, no one apparently has seen fit to put it online.)

Anyway, in the book, Marjane’s grandmother offers her a little beauty tip: Put jasmine petals in your bra and they’ll smell oh-so-nice.

In one of my prouder interviewing moments, I asked her if it actually worked. Oh, yes, she declared; “Lots of women are doing it.

“I also put (my breasts) in a bowl of ice-cold water every day for 10 minutes,” she added, referring to another of her grandmother’s helpful hints. “It works, as well. It’s better than plastic surgery. It costs less and it looks natural.”

So now you know. Let it never be said that this blog does not dispense useful information.

We also discussed the fact that George W. Bush continues to rattle his saber in Iran’s direction even though a National Intelligence Estimate found that the country scuttled its program to build a nuclear bomb back in 2003. Satrapi has a couple of things to say about Mr. Bush.

“George Bush is an idiot and a mean man and a dangerous person. Just because you have a tie and a suit doesn’t mean you’re not a terrorist. When you use weapons and behave like a cowboy, this is terrorist behavior. He says these things because he is out of his mind. I don’t know how anybody who is sane and who has seen what has happened in Afghanistan and Iraq could want another war. It’s just craziness to just think about this.

“They destroyed the two biggest enemies of Iran in the region – the Taliban and Saddam Hussein. Now they’re in big trouble.

“Who are they going to send to fight this war? What a f@&%ing idiot, this guy.”

Not much you can add to that.

Writers or no writers, Jay Leno and Conan O’Brien beat David Letterman and Craig Ferguson in the ratings Wednesday night. But how long will it last, as word gets out about which shows have stronger (or actual) comedy material?

Particularly given that meanwhile, the WGA took umbrage to Leno going to the trouble to write his monologue (perhaps he shouldn’t’ve admitted doing so in the middle of the monologue itself):

“A discussion took place today between Jay Leno and the Writers Guild to clarify to him that writing for ‘The Tonight Show’ constitutes a violation of the Guilds’ strike rules.”

NBC issued a statement: "The WGA agreement permits Jay Leno to write his own monologue for "The Tonight Show." The WGA is not permitted to implement rules that conflict with the terms of the collective bargaining agreement between the studios and the WGA."

Leno most assiduously tried to make his show look like business as usual, understanding just how little the rest of the country care about or understand the strike and therefore not wanting to give them much of a social-studies lesson. It’s hard to imagine that he’s going to sacrifice his precious monologue after a mere sentence-long scolding from the WGA.

Writers strike be damned, Jay Leno, Conan O’Brien and Jimmy Kimmel, refreshed by imposed two-month vacations, returned to the trenches tonight and participated in some glorified busking. David Letterman and Craig Ferguson returned, as well, though they had their writers in tow and therefore were ostensibly able to put together more polished programs.

Locally, of course, the big news was Leno’s return, with his big-get guest, Republican Presidential candidate Mike Huckabee, who crossed the very line Democratic hopeful John Edwards joined in solidarity with the writers, and on the day before the Iowa caucuses. Leno wrote his own monologue – potentially a violation of WGA rules, depending on how they’re translated (NBC clearly believes itself to be in the clear) – and it wasn’t all that different from any monologue on any other given night. Of course, he had plenty of time to prepare this and the next few; no doubt they’ll feel more strained or much shorter or both if the strike continues for a protracted period of time.

True to form, Leno took a hot-button topic – the strike – and turned it into shtick: “It’s already cost the town over a half a billion dollars – five hundred million dollars! Or, as Paul McCartney calls that, ‘a divorce.’” Not a bad line, pretty good in fact, but it’s interesting how Leno was able to utterly sterilize something that’s affecting him personally.

But then, Leno, staunch professional that he is, was determined to make his return look as well-oiled as any of his performances. Huckabee came across as at least as affable and droll as any A-lister Leno might host, Emeril Lagasse and Leno traded not so thinly veiled d!ck jokes while whipping up some pepper steaks (“Take your tool and grab your meat”), and Leno was quippy as ever while taking questions from the studio audience, a bit one imagines we’ll be seeing a lot of over the ensuing weeks.

Leno told a surprisingly personal story about meeting up with his high school sweetheart many years later; when he came out of a break pretending to be on the phone with his wife, his band leader Kevin Eubanks popped what may have been the line of the night: “Did your wife ask if your old girlfriend was still hot?”

By contrast, O’Brien made no effort to mask his discomfort with working without the net his writers provide, and pointedly killed a lot of time with decidedly not-ready-for-primetime (or, even, late-night) antics. Still, he may have been funnier.

He entered sporting a beard he grew during the strike, then compared it via side-by-side images to the one sported by the young Kris Kringle in the cartoon “Santa Claus is Coming to Town.” There was a montage of shots of Conan’s beard, he danced atop his set’s desk (then, acknowledging the limited entertainment value of his hoofing, imitated a Blofeldian producer, demanding, “Give the writers what they want!”), saw how long he could spin his wedding ring on his desk (for 36 seconds, short of his personal record – when someone in the audience implored him to give it another try, he replied, “Trust me – there’s plenty of time to do it again”), took a sip from his mug and declared, “That’s good water,” paused and noted proudly, “Killed some time!” hosted a tour of his office, displaying some of the gewgaws cluttering it, and played the video game “Rock Band” with some staff members.

Some of it was funny enough, but the undeniable subtext was, throughout, we wouldn’t be doing this crap and wasting your time were it not for the writers strike.

Interestingly, however, the most pointed attack on the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers came from Letterman’s show, which actually has the benefit of their writers. It opened with dancing chorines hoisting Writers Guild picket signs; Letterman, like O’Brien, came out with his strike beard, saying: “I know what you’re thinking: Dave looks like a missing hiker.” Bits were interrupted to make pleas on the behalf of the Writers Guild; intentionally lame segments showed what the show would’ve been like without having the writers around; the Top 10 list featured striking writers from other shows (including “The Daily Show,” “The Colbert Report” and, most intriguingly, “Late Night with Conan O’Brien”) listing comic demands.

All well and good, but you know what? Most of it was more strident than funny, as admitted in some of the material. At one point, stage hand Biff Henderson interrupted Dave’s monologue:

Biff: “When are the writers coming back?”

Dave: “They’re back, Biff.”

Biff: “Oh. (Laughs condescendingly) Sorry.”

And consider No. 2 on the Top 10 list, delivered by “Conan’s” Chris Albers: “I don’t have a joke – I just want to remind everyone that we’re on strike, so none of us are responsible for this lame list.”

… and that’s not what “Late Show with David Letterman” needs to be right now. Letterman needs to kick the living bejeesus out of shows without writers at this point and prove their worth instead of insisting upon it so incessantly.

Ferguson’s show opened with a nicely absurdist sketch featuring Ferguson as a shepherd in his native Scotland, tight with a very special sheep, followed by his promise in the wake of speculation that his show would get better guests than his competition: “This show will be the same lame crap we’ve always been. I make this pledge to you, people of America – this show will not be better!”

Conan vs. Ferguson seemed to be defined thusly: Conan's show went for 25 straight minutes without a commercial to prevent viewers from defecting to Ferguson, but Ferguson responded by having his show be heavy on scripted bits throughout, thereby trying to wrest viewers from Conan. Ratings reports ultimately will tell us who won this particular p!ssing match.

Meanwhile, over on “Jimmy Kimmel Live,” Kimmel promised, “If you’re looking for a train wreck, we’ll be back with Andy Dick.”

As the writers strike continues, you won’t need Andy Dick for your train wrecks for these shows.

Playwright Jon Robin Baitz, recently “ousted” (his word) creator of “Brothers & Sisters,” purged every ounce of his soul’s dread and remorse and vitriol about Los Angeles and the TV business for the edification of Huffington Post readers today.

He goes on for nearly 5,000 words, eviscerating the industry’s amoral mores, simple-mindedness, striving for mediocrity, lack of giving a sh!t about the rest of the world, superficiality, idiot entertainment journalists, impossible social expectations, etc. etc. etc. I have thoughtfully condensed them to their choicest bits:

On Michael Ausiello, tvguide.com’s gossip columnist, who broke the story of Baitz’s departure:

“The writer of the … cutesy blindish item had been digging at the story like a fey Tuscan truffle pig on the hunt, pointed in the right direction by a sly studio farmer. … Like many of the people I met who write about TV, (most of whom can be bought for the price of a single commissary crepe-suzette, a keychain with the show's logo on it, and a set-visit with its grimacing star), he was possessed of the winning duo of wild arrogance and a staggering un-athletic ignorance of all life outside of prime time, the culture of which depends on low-rent journalistic toadies penning breathless wooze in exchange for future favors and future keychains, and handshakes with future stars.”

On Los Angeles and socializing:

“LA is the world capital of loneliness. In the age of isolation, this is a very special achievement. … [Internet dating] used habitually … can easily turn romance into renting, with boys queued up like your movies … on Netflix.”

On superficiality and ageism:

“But perhaps most disheartening to me, a man who adores women, is the daily LA visual horror show of how they are discarded there, no matter how desperately they try to cling to youth. LA hates and fears aging, and especially despises the revolting notion of women aging. And in LA, more than anywhere I know, women of a certain age, who should know better, are complicit in their own degradation, going to desperate lengths to dodge what should be taken for granted. [Note: This past sentence is no doubt already seared into ‘B&S’ star Sally Field’s eyeballs.] … Women should hate LA, and I will never understand why they endure it all. Why? If I were a woman, I would burn LA to the ground, and spread salt on the earth where the men all gathered. (I may do that anyway.)”

On his stymied artistic vision of his show (there was a bunch of stuff on network notes I’m leaving out):

“However, I cannot help but dream about what my version of ‘Brothers & Sisters’ would have looked like, had I been given the chance to try it my way (in an alternate universe). Perhaps not on a network, my version would fly. On Showtime or HBO or FX.”

Despite all this, Baitz holds out hope that the producers still on the show will still ask him to write an episode or two or three in the future. Based on this spectacular bridge-burning, I wouldn’t wait too long by the phone for that call, Jon.

“Law & Order” begins its 38th season (give or take a couple of decades) tonight, against diminished competition thanks to you know what. Tonight, they’re unveiling two episodes and, rather than the tried-and-true torn-from-the-headlines episodes the show has always trucked in, “L&O” is offering up stories torn from old clips in newspaper libraries.

The first offers a variant on Jack Kevorkian’s controversial assisted suicides. Maybe it’s just me, but shouldn’t cops concentrate their efforts on the murders of people who didn’t want to die? What’s up with forcing people who don’t want to live to continue their miserable slog? Just think if everyone who’s suicidal were allowed to off themselves: Then the country could uncork a new tagline: “America – Now 30% More Cheerful!”

Tonight’s second episode spins the incident when Enron stuck it to California by pretending there wasn’t enough power then jacked up the rates by obscene amounts, only here, a murder is involved, and it’s karmic payback of some sort. (A lot of “L&O” shows based on true events offer a kind of wish-fulfillment justice.)

A couple of new developments for the new season. Jeremy Sisto joins the cast as Detective Cyrus Lupo (after this long on the air, they must be running out of credible names), Ed Green’s (Jesse Martin) new partner, and Sam Waterston seems to be getting less screen time now that he’s the newly appointed District Attorney (what with Fred Thompson glumly shlumping – er, stumping – for President). He’s basically consigned to scenes where everyone who’s doing the heavy lifting on the investigation comes in to discuss how tough the case is and then he says, “Let’s nail this bastard.” Or some variation thereof. It’s like he’s “Law & Order” Cast Member Emeritus, and not much is asked of him anymore.

There’s not much point in reviewing “Law & Order” anymore. Everyone knows the drill. They’re still doing it. You’ll still watch it.

- “Law & Order:” 9 and 10 tonight; NBC (Channel 4).