How the mighty have fallen

Here we were, all convinced that if anyone’s bullet-proof in the Television industry, it’s Les Moonves, and then along comes this story about someone who sounds even more bloodthirsty than CBS’s COO: Philippe Dauman, who wants to rule Viacom once Sumner Redstone keels over or steps down or whatever it is media moguls do to create raging turf wars.

Recently, Viacom-owned Paramount Pictures flipped Les the bird, refusing to take his lowball offer for showing its movies on Showtime and announcing its own cable-TV channel. (They may have been hacked off by Les’s announcement of a CBS Movies division that obviously hasn’t come to anything yet.) CBS and Viacom split up their assets in 2005, but Dauman want’s to … well, let’s let the New York Post explain.

“(D)auman's ultimate goal, which factored into the Paramount-Showtime negotiations, is to continue driving CBS' stock price down to the point where Redstone can justify booting Moonves. … ‘Dauman's dream is to get rid of Moonves and put Viacom and CBS back together again,’ said one source who has worked with both execs.”

Chinks in Moonves’ Tiffany-encrusted armor have been showing in the past year. As with all the networks, ratings are down, pretty seriously; CBS hasn’t had a new hit in a while (the one new show from this past season that has been renewed for 2008-09, “The Big Bang Theory,” has sort of limped along since returning from the writers strike) and it recently had a show, “Secret Humiliations of the Stars,” cancelled after but one airing. And we probably don’t have to bring up that whole Katie Couric thing again.

So time to hire that food taster and get someone besides your chauffer to start your Town Car, Les. We’d prefer Les to stick around, even if he does keep “Big Brother” on the air, because he’s good with the insults aimed at his competition.

*

You know what else may be in trouble? “American Idol,” that’s what. Well, not really, but people do like to be drama queens and so any downtick in the ratings for such a colossal ratings behemoth apparently merits a measure of hand-wringing.

But also, it’s a pretty significant downtick – in past seasons, the show generally got, like, 30 million or so viewers an episode; last week, just a hair under 23 million watched the world’s splashiest amateur hour. These days, if a lot of network shows lost 7 million viewers, they’d have negative ratings, so that’s a fairly significant drop. Nonetheless, it’s still the most-watched show on TeeVee, so it won’t be going anywhere anytime soon. Your call as to whether that’s a good thing.

*

Finally, The New York Times tries to divine some meaning, some bigger picture, some essence of the Zeitgeist out of George W. Bush’s appearance on “Deal or No Deal” last night, and fails. But it was a fool’s errand to begin with – no one could find meaning in Bush or “Deal or No Deal.” Let’s just say America has become its own self-parody and be done with it.