March 2003 Archives

I was thinking today -- yes, it was my day on -- and it came to me that Gulf War II shows how much my information sources have changed since the Gulf War I.

I was in college during the last war, during Bush I's reign. Dawn and I would lie in my bunk bed in my dorm room and watch the war on broadcast TV every afternoon or so. I had a PC in my room hooked up to the Internet, but this was in those dim dark days before the World Wide Web; we mostly used the Internet for making sexual innuendoes with strangers, goofing on the occasional MUD, and downloading random things using FTP. All of our information about the Gulf War came from the television and radio. It was a dim time, indeed: Everything we knew about the war was pre-packaged and summarized.

Today I've seen almost no TV coverage of the war. In fact, I'm realizing I get almost none of my information from the TV these days. I'm finding that I use the Web as my main information source. And I'm finding that I'm just as in the dark about this war as the last one -- but this time it actually hurts.

In the last 12 years, I now know, I've come to expect information at my fingertips. I expect to be able to go on the Web and find up-to-the-minute photos, audio, video, and text explaining in context whatever is going on, pouring information into my head. I expect to be able to check a site every hour and find some new tidbit of information, some new piece I can fit into the puzzle.

And there's plenty of war stuff on the Web. But it's curiously distant. It's muffled, like I've got cotton in my head. It's not as up-to-the-minute as I expect, and it's strangely disconnected. The fog of war, or maybe the fog of disinformation. I heard, for example, about the video footage of American casualties and POWs. I'd expect to be able to find these on the Web, but instead all I can find is a page explaining why the American site which had them up was taken down by its ISP. The site has found a new host, yes, but it's not back yet.

I can find a few first-person accounts of living in Baghdad. Mostly they talk about being afraid and buying vegetables. It's interesting and important but very limited, of course. And naturally there's government-approved video and photos and everything on sites like CNN.com. But there's something pre-digested about all of that. I want to know what's really going on.

Maybe it's just me. Maybe the war is as transparent as it can be. Maybe I'm just not paying enough attention. What amazes me, though, is how much of an information bath I've come to demand.

[Editor's Note: Like Chris, I've found that my information needs have changed dramatically in the past 12 years. I rely on the Internet for far more news than I used to; I also rely on TV a lot less. But... unlike Chris, I find that for war coverage, TV reporting is much more interesting than Web coverage. So much of the interesting developments in this war are either live shots from embedded reporters out in the desert, or new breaking information that's immediately mentioned on the air on network broadcasts.

Meanwhile, CNN.com has been really lacking. Normally I really like CNN.com, but clearly it's a site geared toward small, chunky stories -- the equivalent of TV packages on its sister network. The New York Times and Washington Post coverage has been better, but still pretty slow on the uptake and lacking the punch of watching it on TV.

So I guess what I'm saying is, I find myself watching TV news far more than I have in years. And watching live TV on the TiVo more than ever, too. Yes, what I get on CNN is largely nutrient-free -- it's still TV crack -- but it's enthralling. I'm watching a lot of it, morning and night.--Jason Snell]

On the Spot is a new show on the WB. It stars this one guy, and another guy, and a woman I sort of recognize. And Tim Conway.

Remember the live episodes of The Drew Carey Show? Where there was sort of a plot, but occasionally the show would degenerate into Whose Line Is It Anyway-style improvisation? Like when this smarmy guy would wander into the scene and demand that the actors do a song of a style chosen by the audience?

Right. Well, this show is just like that. It's even got the same smarmy guy.

Anyway, there's a plot, I guess. This guy is manager of a hotel populated by wacky employees. And there are guest stars. If Lisa Loeb, Andy Dick, and Brian Doyle-Murray count as stars.

That's really all there is to it. Semi-improvised comedy on the WB. I think Drew Carey might have something to do with it.

Oh! And the band is led by Dweezil Zappa, which means that the improvised songs have much better accompaniment than usual. Frankly, I'm just watching it for Dweezil.

I've watched hardly any of the war coverage. There are two reasons for this, the main one being that I'm just not as interested as I ought to be. I don't know what's causing that, but I'm just not interested in getting constant information about it. Fine, so there's a war going on. Just go get on with it.

The other reason is that I'm increasingly convinced that 24-hour coverage is a terrible way to get any information about what's going on. As soon as a network commits to talking about something constantly, regardless of whether there's any new developments, they essentially turn into the Home Shopping Network.

Okay, I'll explain that analogy.

You know how on the Home Shopping Network, they have to talk about each object for a certain amount of time? So the anchors bring out, say, a tennis bracelet and then have to wax enthusiastic about its many fine properties for twenty minutes. Except they quickly run out of properties and are reduced to just vamping on how shiny it is. The desperate improvising is pretty painful to watch sometimes, because there's only so many times you can repeat the same things.

Constant news coverage is a lot like that. When something happens, they have something to talk about. And then it might be twelve hours before something new happens, so they're stuck talking about the same thing for twelve hours. Frankly, I'd rather wait until the whole thing is over and then read about it in some kind of overall context.

Two things really annoyed me about the war coverage on TV last night. Not the pictures -- despite my colleague Steve Lutz's complaints, I found the live videophone coverage of tanks rolling through the Iraqi desert to be an amazing use of modern technology, even if it was about as exciting as taking a long car ride to Grandpa Saddam's house.

No, what got my goat were a couple failings of journalistic integrity. One is specific: Walt Rodgers of CNN narrated his live tank-driving video by announcing that he was making television -- no, make that journalism -- history. Somehow history-making announcements carry more weight when they're not being made by the person who claims to be performing the historic act. Humility, Walt. Focus on your story, not your place in the history books.

My other complaint is minor, and every journalist is doing it: Constantly referring to the forces waging this war for our side "coalition forces." With the occasional exception -- Australians here, Brits there -- this force is largely American. In fact, "coalition" is a term that the Bush administration has emphasized as a way to make people forget that this is a much smaller group of allies than we had during the last war. Lazy journalists who use "coalition" as a synonym for "American" aren't doing their jobs.

So at one point today, during CBS's live coverage of Gulf War II: Shock & Awe, the network was broadcasting video of the Baghdad skyline provided by al-Jazeera while it carried the audio from a Sky News reporter stationed in the Iraqi capital. In other words, what was once the greatest news-gathering operation on network television -- the descendant of Murrow, Cronkite, and Severeid -- was now picking up audio and video from networks based in the Middle East and United Kingdom, respectively. Meanwhile, the programming CBS was supposed to be broadcasting at the time -- the NCAA basketball tournament -- had moved over to ESPN.

Which raises the question: why does CBS even exist anymore? Other than to serve as a repository for Survivor and the growing number of CSI knock-offs?

Once again, another televised war with Iraq has disappointed me. Man, they hyped this thing like it was gonna be Ali-Frazier IV, and it's more like Holmes-Cooney II. If this were a pay-per-view boxing match, I'd complain: "I paid $50 for this? The fight didn't even last 30 seconds! I didn't even get to finish my beer!"

This was supposed to be the next-best thing to Armageddon. I mean: a mad dictator with chemical weapons. Perfect! So what happened? Even the Taliban put up a better fight than this.

I feel so used. I invested so much emotionally in this whole war, and what am I left with? A vague distaste for the French. I don't know -- I think the next time we have a war with Iraq, I'm not even going to bother to watch. It's just not worth the effort.

At least there's still North Korea...

Fathful readers will recall just last week when I waxed all kinds of angry at the worthless, spineless, belly-crawling money-grubbing little bastards at the networks who stick their large and stupid promotional advertisements into television shows.

Apparently the creeps at NBC read TeeVee, and they've declared war. During last night's Scrubs -- a show I am only slightly less devoted to than Boomtown -- the official NBC three-note chime was sounded and the Scrubs image shrank to accomodate a crawl along the bottom of the screen saying -- can you guess? Do you think it was a storm warning or news from Operation Iraqi Freedom or news of an earthquake? Of course not! IT WAS AN AD!

IT WAS AN AD FOR MUST SEE TV WHICH WE WERE ALREADY WATCHING!

Just in case this hasn't sunk in yet: This time it wasn't just a little watermark in the corner of the screen; it wasn't a slightly larger animation in one corner; it wasn't the baffling, beaver-like mug of Tom Cavanagh; this was announced by an actual sound and took over easily ten percent of my TV screen.

Forget waxing angry, I am now officially apoplectic. I am not one to boycott things, but I'm already nearing getting on the bandwagon to keep commercials out of movie theaters. And if NBC keeps this up, they will become MUST NOT WATCH TV in my house.

And if you think that I love Boomtown, Scrubs, or any other shows on that misbegotten fleabag network so much that I'll continue to put up with being treated like a dirty rag used to mop up NBC's commercial jizz, you're very wrong.

I watched Fox News Channel's war coverage for several hours last night, but I finally had to turn it off when I felt myself slipping into a coma.

As I hit the power button on the remote, Fox anchor Brian Wilson proudly announced, "We've been seeing some just astonishing pictures tonight." He had evidently been watching a different program. The pictures I saw could be better described as... what's the opposite of astonishing? Mind-numbingly, heart-stoppingly, bowel-emptyingly dull? Let's just say that my astonishment level would not be less high had Wilson spent the evening reading from St. Augustine's City of God in the original Latin.

The footage I'm referring to is coming from inside an American military vehicle as it advances toward Baghdad from the southern Iraqi border. Through the magic of modern technology, the video feed is being beamed back to the United States via satellite. Which sounds pretty cool, except that the satellite dish is evidently connected to the Fox studios by a 56K dial-up line. And some Fox intern is currently using most of that bandwidth to download a Creed album.

To say the picture is grainy would be an understatement. The image jumps and shimmies, bits of it freezing for seconds at a time while the rest continues to move jerkily, like ten minutes of porn packed into a two-megabyte MPEG. Much of the time, the entire screen is an indistinguishable mosaic of blurry, beige squares, as though Fox is airing a recreation of the war that some shut-in spent weeks animating with Lego bricks.

But even if the whole thing didn't look like Doom running on a 286, I would be hard-pressed to find much of interest in Fox's coverage. That's because for almost three hours that coverage consisted entirely of a picture of the side of an armored vehicle. I believe the vehicle was moving, based on the indistinct grey squares that periodically slid past its treads, but that's not quite enough to elevate the image to "astonishing picture" status. Robert Mapplethorpe with a whip up his ass pissing on a midget is an astonishing picture. The profile of an M-113 as it rolls through barren dessert, not so much. And no amount of Brian Wilson effusing about how fascinating he finds it will convince me otherwise.

Of course, the reason they're reduced to this level is because our government reneged on its promise that there would be shock and awe. The news team had to spend much of Wednesday night explaining to the viewing public that the two or three puny flak blasts in the skies over Baghdad were not, in fact, shock and awe, and they're clearly bitter about it. So all the while the screen displayed the side of an armored personnel carrier as it bounced and jiggled and turned into squares, the news staff was chanting the hypnotizing litany of "shock and awe, shock and awe." The effect was mesmerizing, like some kind of Dadaist experiment in journalism. I found myself transfixed, drifting gently in and out of consciousness.

My trance was broken when coverage suddenly shifted to an unexpected press briefing. Donald Rumsfeld was addressing the media with his usual stern demeanor. "As I have previously explained," he said, "we intended to begin this campaign by demonstrating to the Iraqi military the dramatic extent of our capabilities. That effort is now at hand."

"Approximately fifteen minutes ago, we set into motion a powerful show of Chaka Khan the like of which the world has never seen. Even now she is making her way toward the presidential palace in Baghdad, where she will launch into a barrage of devastating R&B hits. In response to those who were confused as to whether our earlier attacks were a part of the Chaka Khan operation, I will simply state, you will know Chaka Khan when you see her."

"If this alone does not convince the Republican guard of the sheer force of our will, we are prepared to send in Rufus."

That was when I woke up and turned off my set.

So I was watching CNN yesterday, and they were talking about how some Iraqi troops began surrendering before the war started. It was kind of funny -- the American soldiers actually turned them away and told them to come back after the war actually started. Of course me being me, I began wondering what that scene must have been like:

IRAQI SOLDIER: We wish to surrender.

MARINE: I'm sorry, sir. I'm going to have to ask you to come back tomorrow.

IRAQI SOLDIER: But we wish to surrender!

MARINE: My orders are specific, sir. First you must be shocked and awed. Then you can surrender. The shocking and awing doesn't happen until tomorrow. Until then, please enjoy these complimentary sodas and sandwiches back at your base.

IRAQI: But I--

MARINE: Move along, sir.

IRAQI: But--

MARINE: I said "good day!"

Last night Dawn and I went into Manhattan to see Better Than Ezra play Irving Plaza. I dig Better Than Ezra -- their latest CD, which has been bought by approximately nobody, is really fantastic power pop, and if power pop is your bag, I suggest picking it up.

Going into Manhattan last night took us a bit of courage. I've been living at a low level of anxiety for a long time now, like a lot of people since September 11. The fear comes and goes, and it peaks and valleys, and it's a wholly new feeling for me, because I was never a fearful person before. It's been working its way up again starting with the night Dawn came home and said she heard on the radio that everyone was being told to buy duct tape and plastic sheeting to make their homes airtight against a biological or chemical attack. The whole duct tape thing is a joke now, something we can ridicule and mock in late night monologues, but that night on my couch at 11 o'clock, the kids asleep upstairs, a frozen hand closed around my heart and hasn't let go since, not entirely: Is this it? Have I done what I can to keep my family safe? Will I look back and curse myself for not being better prepared?

And I did what I guess a lot of people my age do when confronted with fear: I turned on the TV to see what it had to say. To be reassured. And the local news did reassure me: Mayor Bloomberg got on and told us all to stop with the duct tape thing, and that everything was going to be okay, and we shouldn't go crazy. This was reassuring somewhat, even if he was lying; I figured, either he was right, and we would be okay, or he was lying about the threat, in which case we were all in for it anyway. Either way I felt a little better. But not entirely.

The night before last, thinking about the concert on 15th Street in the city, and the fact that George W. Bush's ultimatum to Saddam Hussein was up at 8 o'clock our time, and that's when the doors open at Irving Plaza, it suddenly seemed very likely that Dawn and I would be at a new Ground Zero, maybe a much bigger one. And I didn't want to die for Better Than Ezra. I might risk death to see Rush, but not Better Than Ezra.

In the morning, of course, such fears seemed a little silly. So I decided we would go: After all, if we stay home -- say it with me -- Then The Terrorists Win.

We went. And I don't know if it's because it was a Wednesday night in the city or because people really did stay home or if I imagined the whole thing, but it seemed like there was almost no one in New York. The drive through the Lincoln Tunnel is almost always about a half hour, often longer; last night it took minutes. We passed the police officer in armor at the toll booths. The streets were empty. We found street parking next to Union Square.

The concert was good. Loud. One day I'll remember to bring earplugs.

On our way home Dawn turned south and drove us down to Ground Zero. There was no traffic. We parked across from it. The plywood walls which were up the last time I paid my respects were gone, replaced by tall fences and an official memorial. The dust was still in the cracks in the sidewalk. We didn't get out of the car. We drove home listening to the radio and the reports of the first missiles to hit Baghdad. The radio station ran a feed from CNN -- I haven't seen or heard Christiane Amanpour since the last war in Iraq.

During the concert, the lead singer, Kevin Griffin, said this to us: "I really appreciate you all coming out on a Wednesday night to see us. You made a conscious decision. You could have stayed home watching Married By America, but you said fuck that shit! I'm going out! I'm not even going to TiVo that shit, that's how dedicated I am!"

It was good to go out.

I flipped around the dial tonight, sampling war coverage on each of the three networks plus CNN and the unintentionally comical Fox News. Apparently, all war coverage will consist of the same shot of the same part of the Baghdad skyline while the lead anchor and the designated correspondent/military expert/talking head blather on in the background, swapping theory and conjecture. Occasionally, over on Fox News, a trained news professional will read what AP and Reuters are reporting.

Oh, and I wish I would have bought stock in whatever company invented those crawling news tickers that have spread across the news channels like a rash on a fratboy's bottom a week after spring break.

Fox News -- which we must remember is fair and balanced and, therefore, unintentionally comical -- jazzes up its news ticker with minute-by-minute updates of our nation's terror alert status. I don't know about you, but I find it especially soothing and not-in-the-least-bit unsettling to see the words "TERROR ALERT: HIGH" scroll across my screen every 60 seconds or so in bright orange type.

Oh, thank you, Rupert Murdoch, for taking the soft, deft touch you brought to reality programming and extending it to news coverage!

A while back on Without a Trace, Agent Taylor (Enrique Murciano) showed up at a crime scene with a leather jacket and ruffled hair -- which prompted a colleague to ask if he'd been on a date when the call came in. Indeed, his hair made it apparent that his date had reached a critical juncture. As the episode progressed and the team closed in on the kidnappers and brought them to justice, reuniting the sundered family, Taylor's hair never recovered.

After that, there was a run of episodes where Murciano's hair was presentable again, but it wasn't meant to last. In recent weeks, the character looks more and more as if somebody turned him upside down and tried to use him as a pencil. Perhaps his constant bedhead is telling us that he's been very busy making up for the day Uncle Sam made him take a cold shower.

What's worse, the problem is spreading. Eric Close's Agent Fitzgerald now looks like he spends his time between takes putting on a wool stocking cap and trying to screw it onto his head as tightly as possible. In a more recent episode, even walking shampoo commercial Poppy Montgomery wasn't safe; from some angles it looked like she'd just finished playing the prom queen's "hair in the door" scene from Sixteen Candles. On the other hand, she was probably relieved that her character, Agent Samantha Spade (yes, we know) didn't have to go "undercover" again in a Velma Kelly wig that looked about as convincing as an infomercial.

Series lead Anthony LaPaglia may also want to get a stylist on his personal staff. His short, no-nonsense look features a couple of square inches of restrained tousle at his widow's peak that must be a continuity nightmare. At this rate, it's only a matter of time before somebody on the show's crew either mows it down with a Flowbee or gels it into a "There's Something About Mary" tidal wave. And if that happens, the real FBI is probably going to be searching for Without a Trace's hairstylist.

Random thoughts on the first installment of Frank Herbert's Children of Dune on the Skiffy Channel:

• They canceled Farscape for stuff like this?
• Considering most of the movie goes: "Establishing shot, interior shot, exposition, exposition," an awful lot of confusing stuff happens.
• Either my memory is bad is or the only actor returning from the last Dune TV movie is Alec Newman. (IMDb says I'm about half right.)
• New drinking game: Drink every time Stilgar says, "Let me take [his/her/its/their] water!" and Paul tells him no.
• Princess Alia is a major hooterific battle babe! Gotta dig her workout scene. But you'll need the IMDb to look up her name or you'll just keep thinking, "Who's that babe?" every time she appears.
• It's been a long time since I've laughed at a singing midget in a funny hat.

We have a fine tradition of rewarding success in this country. A Robert Redford, a Tom Hanks, even a Kevin Costner stars in enough box-office smashes, eventually some studio will give them a chance to direct. Jason Giambi racks up gaudy home-run totals and takes home a Most Valuable Player award while plying his baseball wares in a small market like Oakland, eventually someone like the New York Yankees will come along and offer him the chance to play first base in the Big Apple in exchange for a dump truck full of money and the deed to his immortal soul. George W. Bush puts in six serviceable years as governor of Texas without the state winding up as a Mexican possession at any time during his tenure -- well, why not make him president, Mr. Chief Justice?

The same holds true in the otherwise random, unpredictable world of television. Say a producer manages to take a flimsy premise, some questionable casting decisions and a script of punch lines pieced together from back issues of Cracked and, against all odds, shepherds the project to critical and commercial success, well, of course, that producer will never have to hunt for work again. Oftentimes, in fact, the network will be so grateful for the high ratings, the wheelbarrow full of awards, the newspaper articles free of scorn and derision, that it will give that producer an open tab. "Anything you want to do is fine by us," the network toadies will smarm. "And anything you need, you can have. Pre-war Scotch, contraband cigars, a cushy time slot after Friends -- yours for the asking. A roomful of pretty young girls, with a couple cabana boys waiting in the adjoining suite? Anything that helps gets those creative juices flowing is all right with us. Any star you want to cast, any premise you want to develop, any cockamamie idea that hatches in that wondrous bean of yours -- all of it's greenlighted. Just so long as you keep the magic coming."

Ah, but therein lies the difficulty. Because if magic could be churned out with machine-like regularity, it wouldn't be magic -- it'd be mass production. Because if creative inspiration and artistic achievement could be flipped on and off like a switch, there'd be a lot more of those sidewalk sketch artists enjoying showings at the Guggenheim. And if it was so damn easy to make a successful TV show every time you sat down with a yellow legal pad and a copy of Final Draft, then more people would be doing it. Yes, Hollywood's home to a lot of lazy, no-talent hacks, but most of them have gigs at UPN. The bottom line: just because you've enjoyed success with one hit show does not necessarily mean you're ever going to do it again.

The financial world has a pithy way of saying this, in an eye-straining caveat they stick at the bottom of every ad for mutual funds and brokerages so that you can't easily sue them when your nest-egg disappears into the vapor -- past performance is no indication of future results. This quarter's record profit could be next quarter's catastrophic loss followed up with a document-shredding party as the CEO relocates to a climate with a more liberal attitude toward extradition treaties. And what's good enough for the Enrons of world is certainly good enough for Les and Jeffrey and whatever other network executive is trying to capture lighting in a bottle one more time.

Even a passing familiarity with the history of television reveals that even the best producers fail critically and commercially more often than they succeed. Perhaps no producer enjoyed a greater run of success in the early 1980s than Steven Bochco, who had a hand in creating both Hill Street Blues and L.A. Law, so it's understandable why ABC inked him to a multi-series development deal. Bochco repaid the network's confidence with Cop Rock and Capitol Critters. And yes, while he did manage to assemble NYPD Blue -- still, inexplicably, on the air -- Bochco played out the string with ABC by developing the contractually obligated clunker Total Security, which starred Jim Belushi and, thus, paved the way for the aggressively unfunny branch of the Belushi family to star in the painfully laughless According to Jim. Even now, charges against Bochco are being drawn up at The Hague.

You might best remember the Kaufman-Bright-Crane triumvirate for its stellar work on Friends, both in creating the popular sitcom and wringing a decade's worth of shows out of a combination of the same dozen tired sex jokes. NBC was certainly impressed and handed the trio carte blanche in the late 1990s. In return, Kaufman-Bright-Crane produced Veronica's Closet and Jesse, two shows which managed to remain on a network schedule for two seasons apiece out of sheer force of will or because someone at NBC really hates America or some combination of the two.

Then there is the puzzling case of David E. Kelley, the mopheaded uber-producer who's managed to pull the ol' switcheroo on two different networks. A few years ago, Kelley created The Practice for ABC, thus keeping the number of lawyer-centric prime-time programs from dwindling below 83. A grateful ABC handed over the keys to the network sports car to Kelley, who promptly drove it over the cliff with Snoops, a show about sexy female detectives that you've probably managed to block from your subconscious until now. Meanwhile, over on Fox, Kelley was generating plenty of viewers and revenue for the network with Ally McBeal, the show that made it OK to hate ambitious, single career women again. Fox immediately reupped with Kelley, and while the producer managed not to set himself on fire with the gaseous Boston Public, he was not so lucky with this fall's Girls Club. Fox shitcanned the show after two disastrous airings.

My point? That David E. Kelley is a talentless toad who miraculously cozens one network after another into airing his derivative drivel? Well, yes, normally. But I think my overall gist here is that the highways and byways of network television are littered with the wreckage of producers trying to duplicate past successes and that despite abundant evidence to that effect, network executives drive forward whistling happily as they smash at full speed into the Jersey barrier.

Which brings me to Max Mutchnick and David Kohan.

Mutchnick and Kohan are the show runners responsible for Will & Grace, the very popular NBC sitcom, which, despite its devoted audience, critical plaudits and parade of Emmy awards, really isn't my bag. I like the show well enough, I guess. It's workmanlike and competent, and if that doesn't sound like much of a compliment, that still makes Will & Grace better than about three-quarters of what winds up on the airwaves these days. The acting is certainly pleasant and the setup-punch line patter is better than what you'll find on the WB on any given evening. It's just that, setting aside the lead character's sexual orientation for a moment, what passes for comedy on Will & Grace isn't that much different from the one liners Jack and Janet and Chrissy and Mr. Furley were trading down at the Regal Beagle nearly a quarter-century ago. But that little bugaboo with originality is my problem, not Mutchnick's and Kohan's, so who am I to begrudge their success?

NBC certainly can't complain. Once a sitcom kingmaker, the Peacock Network fell on hard times in the late 1990s, with snide, snotty-nosed little punks not unlike myself constantly reminding everyone that NBC hadn't launched a hit sitcom since Friends debuted in 1994. Now, thanks to Will & Grace with an assist from Scrubs, it's launched two. Look for NBC to maybe score the hat trick sometime before 2007.

Naturally, NBC is very grateful to Mutchnick and Kohan for taking some of the sting out of all those Suddenly Susan and Stark Raving Mad barbs. So the network did what grateful networks are prone to do -- it offered Mutchnick and Kohan another chance to whip up some magic. And Mutchnick and Kohan did what producers offered such a chance often wind up doing -- serve up pure, unadulterated swill. Though you may recognize by its street name of Good Morning, Miami.

Good Morning, Miami takes place on one of those Live with Regis and Kelly-type happy-talk morning shows that are slowly but surely causing an entire nation to snap. In the case of this particular morning show, it's set -- rather appropriately -- in Miami, which we can tell thanks to the numerous Miami Heat posters on the walls and the fact that the exterior shot of the studio appears to be stock footage of the old Miami Vice headquarters ("Coming up after the break, Sonny Crockett on sports, but first, here's Lt. Castillo with a look at the Dow Jones Industrial Average...").

Mutchnick and Kohan apparently drew on real life experience when NBC came a-calling, waving wads of money in each hand. Before Mutchnick and Kohan got rich off of setting Sean Hayes loose on the scenery each week, long before the two of them made it in network TV, they apparently worked as producers on one of those Live with Regis and Kelly-type happy-talk morning shows. The stint was a rather brief one, since, according to Mutchnick and Kohan, the show they worked on sucked rocks. "We were at the lowest point in our careers," Mutchnick told Entertainment Weekly for its fall preview issue. And that may well be so, but it still doesn't answer the question that pops into your mind after watching a handful of Good Morning, Miami episodes -- why take it out on the rest of us?

Much like the happy-talk morning show which apparently scarred Mutchnick and Kohan more than their loved ones imagined, the show-within-the-show at the center of Good Morning, Miami happens to be the worst morning show on the worst station in the country -- the two anchors (Matt Letscher, Tessie Santiago) are a pompous blowhard and a vacuous airhead, respectively; the station manager (Jere Burns) is a twitchy nincompoop; the weather report is provided by a bug-eyed nun (Brooke Dillman). In real life, a morning news show this bad would be canceled post-haste, with everybody involved forced to appear in porno or snuff movies if they ever wanted to work in show business again -- well... except maybe for the nun... she'd just be ex-communicated. But since Good Morning, Miami takes place in a fictitious part of South Florida, a morning show staffed entirely by incompetents merely serves as the launching pad for wacky hijinks to ensue.

Good Morning, Miami also is one of those shows that would be over in about five minutes if the lead character wasn't a blithering moron who repeatedly makes choices so idiotic, lab monkeys cringe. The blithering moron in question is played by Mark Feuerstein, who, as Jake Silver, is an up-and-coming TV producer stopping at the terrible Miami station for a courtesy job interview. He's about to turn the job down cold, of course -- the weather girl is a flippin' nun, for crying out loud -- when he catches sight of the station's pretty hairstylist (Ashley Williams) and decides to turn down more lucrative offers and accept this dead-end job just so he can hang around Dade County mooning at her. The fact that she's happily dating the morning show's anchor -- the pompous blowhard, not the vacuous airhead -- does nothing to cool his ardor.

Now, I will confess that in my bachelor days, I frequented a coffee shop where the house coffee was flavorless swill just because the girl behind the counter had a pleasant smile. And, in those feckless times, I was known to linger at bars staffed by particularly winsome cocktail waitresses. And while it was all very silly the-heart-has-its-reasons-blah-de-blah of me, here's one thing I never did -- consign myself to a lifetime of servitude in a rotten job alongside a visibly twitching Jere Burns, just because one of the gals working there was kind of hot. By the end of the first episode of Good Morning, Miami, you're already left to despise and/or pity Feuerstein's character. Either that, or you're speculating whether he suffered some sort of brain injury we're only going to learn about as part of a May sweeps cliffhanger.

(Lest it appear that Feuerstein's character underwent a one-time-only brain-fart, in a subsequent episode, he pretends to be a recovering alcoholic to win the sympathy of the pretty hairstylist since the pompous blowhard of an anchor she's dating also happens to be a recovering alcoholic. After 25 minutes of playing fast and loose with this woman's emotions, he subsequently confesses to the charade. Surprisingly, the episode does not end with his brutal beating at the hands of his co-workers, but rather, everyone learning an important life lesson -- don't pretend to be a recovering alcoholic since treachery doesn't impress the chicks.)

All of this would be bad enough -- the idiocy of the characters, the wispy-thin premise, the grating opening credits where the actors wink and mug and grimace for the camera while an Up with People Tribute band wails lyrics like "You keep on movin' but your own life's waiting" and "You take your chances on the game you're playin'." But Good Morning, Miami manages to rise above the mere level of forgettable pabulum and into the rarefied air of fury-inducing bilge thanks to what it does to poor Suzanne Pleshette. Maybe you, like me, have happy memories of Pleshette from the old Bob Newhart Show. If so, avoid Good Morning, Miami at all costs, since your warm reminiscences of a funny woman on a great show will, like mine, be quickly replaced by images of sorrow and regret. Pleshette plays Feuerstein's grandmother, who, as the NBC promotional material informs us, "provides him with unlimited love, mixed with candid insights about his life." This is another way of saying that granny mixes crude, leaden put-downs with trite, empty aphorisms about these crazy things called life and love. "Why aren't you getting laid?" she demands of her grandson in one scene while the Good Morning, Miami laugh-track howls and hoots in delight. And then, in another scene, Granny lets us see through her tough-but-hilarious exterior with pearls of wisdom like, "If all you have is your career, you're only half a person. You need love in your life." Just watching it makes you wince and squirm uncomfortably and consider writing unsolicited letters to Suzanne Pleshette about how you realize there's a paucity of work for actresses old enough to remember the Ford administration, but really, if she needed the money, she could have just asked. Instead, you just weep. Or change the channel.

None of this is really the fault of the actors. Suzanne Pleshette does what she can with the nonsense she's been asked to say. Feuerstein and Williams are pleasant to look at, at least, even if they barely have enough chemistry between them to generate an extra free radical. Matt Letscher is actually quite good as the pompous, blowhard anchor, throwing himself into the role with enough gusto that you'd actually like to see more of his work in a program that didn't make you bleed from your eyeballs. Jere Burns -- well, the script calls for him to be twitchy, so twitchy he is. You can't fault him for following stage directions. Tessie Santiago is decent enough; so is Constance Zimmer, who plays the assistant at the station. And Brooke Dillman is... well... bug-eyed and unpleasant, but it's not like the fortunes of Good Morning, Miami are rising and falling on the likability of the woman playing the weather-forecasting nun.

No, what ultimately sinks Good Morning, Miami is the same thing that's torpedoed so many shows before it -- bad writing. The jokes are of the thunderously obvious variety, peppered with innuendo and single-entendres, since thinking up a second entendre would apparently require too much effort. There's a line addressing the sad social life of Feuerstein's character in which one of his co-workers refers to "a 1,000-night date with your palm," and there's another scene with salty, sailor-talking grandma talking about her pelvic exam. And you just listen to this garbage, and you feel tired and bored and just a tad depressed that someone reviewed the script and said, "Yeah, this is good enough to go on the air." If Good Morning, Miami was assembled by a bunch of neophytes -- overmatched show-business newcomers, 14-year-old-boys on a summer internship, recent immigrants unfamiliar with our language and strange customs -- it would almost be excusable. But Good Morning, Miami isn't -- it's spearheaded by Mutchnick and Kohan, who have been involved with enough decent programming to know better. And if they don't know any better, well then, what are they doing with multi-show development deals in the first place?

Then again, there's not really much to get worked up about here. NBC was more interested in who was producing one of its sitcoms than in the kind of sitcom that was being produced, so the network got what it was looking for. It can't purport to be disappointed by the results. Mutchnick and Kohan have nothing to complain about -- yeah, Good Morning, Miami was absent from NBC's lineup for February Sweeps, since the point of Sweeps is to actually attract viewers, but that's unlikely to stop the show from getting renewed for a second season just to keep the producers happy. The cast gets steady work, so you won't hear any carping about the horrible punchlines they're forced to mouth. In short, as terrible as Good Morning, Miami is, everybody involved with it comes out a winner.

Well, not anyone who actually watches the show. But if you make a habit of watching network sitcoms, you're probably used to the disappointment by now.

Even if you don't watch Six Feet Under, I urge you to watch this week's episode. I turned to my wife part way through and said, "I guess this is going to be one of those go-nowhere episodes," and it was: Even this great show has its episodes where it's spinning its wheels, advancing a plot thread here, cleaning up a loose end or two, and essentially doing nothing interesting, especially if you don't follow the show. And this was one of those.

But this week we were introduced to Olivier Castro-Staal, Claire's latest art teacher. And let me say that this man -- who as far as I know is entirely fictional -- has said some of the most profound and wonderful things about making art I have ever heard.

Tune in this week as HBO repeats this episode eleventy-million times just for Olivier. He's the best.

It's been about a month since I've implored New York's Fox 5 to improve its televsion signal. And you know what's happened since? Not only has Fox 5's signal not improved, but Channel 2 (CBS) and Channel 4's (NBC) signals have actually gotten worse!

So now I have three stations I can't watch.

Don't think I don't know what's going on. Anytime a black man speaks out against injustice, The Man always finds a way to stick it to 'em. I know what you're thinking: "Oh Collier, you and your crazed paranoia -- the Man isn't out to stick it to you! It's mere coincidence!"

Oh yeah? Well why is it that when I go to all of my white friends' homes they all have perfect televsion reception? Huh?! Huh?! And don't fucking tell me it's because they all have fucking cable either!

Oh wait... that's right. Um, never mind.

So I'm watching Boomtown. Anyone who's read this site in the last month or so knows I consider this a religious experience. So I'm watching Boomtown and deeply engrossed in the life-changing revelations beaming from Gary Basaraba and suddenly --

-- suddenly there it is --

-- appearing from nowhere --

-- taking up a vast amount of screen real estate at the bottom left of my TV, not warning me of some foreign invasion, not informing me that New York City has just vanished in a nuclear firestorm, not telling me that the moon is about to strike the Earth and I should say good-bye to my loved ones immediately, not actually there for any important purpose. No, this, the most annoying, stupid, obnoxious little animation I've ever seen, is an ad, an advertisement, for the most annoying, stupid, obnoxious little TV show I've never seen, Meet My Folks.

Not only has this mini-ad failed in its purpose -- to make me want to watch Meet My Folks -- it has, like the device in some Marvel supervillain's origin story, had the reverse effect: It makes me want to visit flaming and painful death upon whoever perpetrated this massacre of taste. All I want to do is watch Boomtown and yet I am forced, as if under hypnosis, to view this snotty little poorly computer-animated woman walk over to this slump-shouldered little poorly computer-animated man, turn around, and walk away again.

This reminds me of the travesty of the A&E "watermark" I saw back when Law & Order was still airing there. The usual A&E logo appeared in the lower right corner, then it went away, then -- wonderfully animated -- appeared the words "YOU ARE WATCHING" followed by "LAW & ORDER". Repeat fade in. Repeat fade in. Repeat fade in, like some cheesy Webpage banner ad. And suddenly I realized, no, I'm not watching Law & Order, I'm watching your fucking logo.

And on last night's Ed, what shows up? Tom Cavanagh's goofy face leering at me from the bottom right corner. Why? Was I not already watching Ed? Does Tom Cavanagh have some other show on NBC wherein he plays a dorky nut case with permanent bedhead?

I don't even know why the ghostly visage of Tom Cavanagh, like some Tyler Durden fever dream, appeared in the corner of my TV. I was too busy being puzzled and trying to split my attention between the show and the mini-ad with the result that my mind began to wander into realms of, yes, flaming and painful death. It's the kind of thing that can happen when you fuck with unfulfilled tech industry workers, you know.

So, whatever network jerkwads are involved in this, listen up: Stop. Go find your shame -- I'm sure it's around here somewhere, maybe you dropped it when you sold your grandmother for twenty-four dollars in beads-- and when you do, slap it back on and take a good look at yourself. Then get your filthy ads out of the content. Or someone might show up at your house to shove gasoline-doused Sanford & Son DVDs down your throat.

So yesterday, I'm flipping channels while trying to think of a new word to describe the distinctive non-bliss of a sciatic nerve in active rebellion, and there's a kid playing a monster bass guitar solo live on stage somewhere. Say what you will about bass solos: this boy's got groove; he's got speed; he's got phrasing; he's got tone; he's got funk; he's got the drummer by the short ones and is forcing him to follow a twisty, windy, percussive, melodic path through a couple different time signatures. Whoo hoo! (And he's a lot younger than me, which is kinda depressing, but I pretend I'm not noticing that part.) The rest of the band apparently expected a bass break, but not this kind of bass break: the kid keeps it going, developing, growing, doing clever funny things, and now he's jumping around, has a huge infectious grin on his face, then stops the drummer cold and pulls a really cool move by running through the changes of Giant Steps at about 1,000 miles an hour then detuning and slamming a low B flat and waiting for the rest of the band to realize, yes, he's done now, you can start playing your little dinky instruments anytime you like, if you feel you might have anything to add. The band's jaws remain agape; they don't resume whatever they were playing. One of the guitarists recovers his lower jaw and starts clapping. The crowd is whooping it up.

Now, see, since a roof leak in October, my TV is kinda unhappy: it doesn't display a picture very well, and rarely remembers its settings. But given the current economic climate, getting a new TV is what we call a "medium-term goal," so I've stopped using channel locking features to ban things like home shopping channels and CBS, because the TV never remembers anyway.

And I realize the most butt-kicking live bass solo I've heard in a year or more, played by a kid who's maybe old enough to be out past curfew, was just brought to me by one of the Bible-thumping evangelical channels probably best known for preachers with massive comb-overs, very special episodes of speaking in tongues, and healings-of-the-week.

I think it might be a sign of the Apocalypse.

"Talk Sex is on," says my wife, and the word "sex" causes me to actually hear what she's saying for a change.

"Sex?"

"Talk Sex."

"What's that?" I cannot, you see, hear the italics indicating a television show title.

"Put it on, put it on!" she says, and I do.

And on my TV appears this woman, a woman who appears to be nearing a hundred. She is facing the camera and talking, as if to me, but actually she is speaking directly to some viewer at home who has called her with a question. And immediately I am captivated.

The woman is Sue Johanson, the show is Talk Sex, the time is way too late Sunday night, the network is Oxygen. Sue Johanson takes calls and offers advice in what the show's official Website calls "a funny, informative and non-judgmental manner."

We say Sue Johanson makes Dr. Ruth Westheimer look like Kate Winslet. There sits Sue -- we'll be informal, because how can we not, when we've seen her mime using ejaculate as face cream? -- with her odd William F. Buckley rictus and strange accent -- Canada? Louisiana? Tibet? -- trying to tease out the details of some stranger's sexual hang-ups. She doesn't like giving you oral sex? Does she like it when you give her oral sex? Wouldn't it be egalitarian here if she did both?

It never ceases to amaze me how wildly ignorant Americans -- the Americans who call in to TV and radio talk shows, anyway -- are about sex. And also how twistedly deranged they are. Who cares if your man wants to come on your face? What's so bad about oral sex? WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU PEOPLE?!

So there's Sue, trying to work her way through someone's difficulties, and then... and then out come the dolls.

One red, one blue. Dolls.

Ineptly Sue manipulates them into the reverse cowgirl position to aid in visualizing one caller's conundrum. Alas, Sue apparently has not heard of the reverse cowgirl position and ends up calling it Kissy Toes. Also alas, the dolls are not anatomically correct. Perhaps there are budgetary constraints preventing Oxygen from getting good dolls, and also a host who's heard of reverse cowgirl. Maybe it's not the sort of thing they do in -- Canada? Louisiana? Tibet?

Fifteen minutes later I've had enough Sue. My sides hurt from laughing.

Not just at the show, either, but also at the commercials. Clearly Oxygen knows the target demographic for this show: Know-nothing, pathetic, sexually incompetent chuckleheads. And so the commercial for Vazoplex, the Intimate Feminine Moisturizer, which is -- for just $19.95 for 30 applications! -- the woman's answer to Viagra! Ladies, it will increase your sexual responsiveness and allow you to feel pleasure even if your man is an inattentive, overweight, hairy, smelly menace!

The commercial doesn't say that, but it should.

Thanks to our 57-thousand-channels-and-nothing-on world, my wife's joining of the scrapbooking cult (and remember, you can't spell scrapbooking without the crap!), and my TiVo's tendency to stay on the same channel for hours at a time, I have seen altogether too much lately of the DIY network.

I've seen a few episodes of Scrapbooking, which is exactly what you'd expect and just as interesting.

Yesterday I watched quite possibly the lamest cooking show of all time. Cucumber salad made with cucumbers, onions, vinegar, and celery seeds. Whoa! I never could've worked that recipe out myself!

Today I watched, no kidding, an entire half-hour titled Combating Household Mold.

Yes, we are just one nanometer away from the Paint Drying Channel.

Get an eyeful of this:

AOL Time Warner is introducing a personal video recording service where the only true word in that sentence may be "video." May be.

To me, the most interesting aspects of this article are twofold: first, AOL Time Warner recognizes that although personal video recorders don't have a huge market share among television watchers, it's not like it's possible to brainwash the 700,000 of us who do have them and turn back the clock to the Beginning Time when everyone apparently waited around the television set for the broadcast gods to favor us with Must See TV. I suspect Jack Valenti is currently entertaining memos on that possibility, but it's refreshing to see that Jamie Kellner's stomping grounds have moved on.

But then AOL Time Warner completely misses the point as to why PVRs are popular -- because they let people watch what they want on demand and store recordings for later. This new service, Mystro (which, by the way, sounds like a B-string evil mutant in X-Men:2), will apparently offer some of the technology and none of the convenience: it's a subscription service that offers a limited selection of shows for recording, it prevents its subscribers from making, storing, or sharing copies of the recordings, and if the pictures and promotional CD-ROM are to be believed, it also adds advertisements on the screen.

Wow, a subscription service that offers no competitive advantage over TiVo and doesn't let me make recordings? Where do I sign up?

In a way, this reminds me of the furor that's surrounded -- and continues to surround -- the whole MP3/streaming music/subscription service thing on the Web. Instead of asking themselves, "How can we use this technology to cultivate new properties that could open revenue streams?" -- see also the recent CNN article on how many box-office bombs do well in the video store because two different audiences, the curious and the embarrassed, rent like crazy there -- they're all, "How can we ignore the technology that seems custom-made to accommodating acquisitive, independent customers?"

And people wonder why radio listening, runaway CD purchasing, and broadcast television ratings have plunged?

I'm not exactly fond of the phrase "they just don't get it" -- in a past life, it was all-too-frequently invoked by would-be hipsters as they strained to establish a hierarchy of dot.cool, and it's got all the logical insularity of a conspiracy theory -- but in this case, I think it might apply to AOL Time Warner. (Yeah, I ranted about this in a Station Break; consider this the extended riff.)

Here's why AOL Time Warner doesn't get it: because they -- and nearly every MegaMediaCorp in the entertainment industry -- fail to grasp what we, the customers, want.

We don't want to keep you in business. We don't want to keep you employed. We don't want to keep you from being crucified by your stockholders or pilloried by your sui generis billionaire ex-employees. We want products and services that meet two things: collectibility and convenience. That's all it takes.

What do people consistently pay for? One, they pay for collections -- people spend insane amounts of money to have a personal library of MST3K tapes, Who albums, Evil Dead DVDs. When people pay for collections, they pay for the means to that collection -- be it access to collectible items (this is how fan clubs make bank) or methods to store and expand collections. Jesus, there's an entire scrapbooking industry out there where people are evidently collecting the things necessary to... collect things.

Two, people pay for convenience. We all believe our time is worth money, and we'll pay so we don't have to be at the mercy of a time-intensive task or a schedule that's out of our control. This is why we have 24-hour Wal-Marts, Shout Wipes, Netflix and Swiffer -- because we'd rather pay money than spend time.

Any sort of recording technology that meets both the first and second criteria is embraced precisely because it lets people put a whole season of 24 on the TiVo and watch it at their leisure. You can collect your shows, and watch them when you want: it beats being chained to FX during "24 Hours of 24."

And instead of looking at business models that would have the fanboy/fangirl audience in fits of frenzied spending and efficiency freaks singing the hosannas of this new tool, the companies are trying to cling to some bizarre model of "You'll buy what we want you to buy when we want you to buy it, and you'll like it!"

It's not going to work. There are too many entertainment options available for any one industry to stamp its little foot and demand that we all do things their way, and there are too many obvious business models out there for us to buy into MegaMediaCorp's insistence that the business has to work a certain way.

What are these business models? Consider the collector. Given that fan conventions draw people by promising blooper reels and DVD manufacturers beguile people into purchasing a disc by promising deleted scenes, it makes sense to bring that behind-the-scenes footage to a digital distributor, charge for the download, and boom! Revenue stream. Alternately, go to a commercial-free rerun-on-demand model: for $10, a PVR user can order and view a 48-minute episode of E.R. (although, at this point, God knows why they'd want it), and for $20, they can keep the recording longer than 48 hours, and possibly transfer it to video tape. You could tweak this model depending on the show's longevity -- for shows in season 1 or season 2, you pay a little more per rerun and the option to record on-demand episodes to your own hard disk or tape isn't made available; for longer shows, the earlier season reruns are fair game.

Alternately, you could tweak the fanboy/fangirl audience even more by offering new episodes on demand -- say, Buffy on Monday at 9 p.m., only for $50, without the ability to record to your PVR's hard disk or to fast-forward through commercials. That way, the audience for the network broadcast isn't significantly diminished by what they're not getting earlier and the just-can't-wait audience gets the thrill of a sneak broadcast without the attendant TiVo-type perks.

This sort of rerun-on-demand thing works well for building viewership in lower-rated shows too -- offer a promotion like "Download CSI and we'll throw in two episodes of Robbery Homicide Division free." The practice of fandom is pretty much the same from genre to genre -- a fantastically detailed and emotional attachment to a particular show -- and most fans follow more than one show. How else can you explain the godawful CSI: Miami's top-20 ratings? Or Angel's continued existence? Why not cultivate fanbases as audiences for similarly-themed or related-by-production-company shows? Those fans will spend over the long run.

As for the time-management crowd, provide the ability to program their PVR on the run, be it from their cellphone or via a web-based interface -- but provide that ability for a fee. Alternately, consider bulking out TiVo's search capabilities so users can set up searches and wishlists with Google-style search queries. By and large, people hate reading straight television listings (the attraction for things like Entertainment Weekly's listings or Laurel Krahn's is the infusion of personal, editorial judgement and commentary), so charge 'em for the privilege of not having to click through endless menus to see if anything good is on HBO Plus.

Whatever you do, don't consider a subscription model.

Yeah, it works for cable -- to a point. But that point is defined by what's broadcast, and we're not talking about that anymore. Forget broadcast cable subscriptions -- for most people, cable premieres are nice if you're interested in something, but the real beauty in cable is its endless capacity for rebroadcasts. You missed Six Feet Under on Sunday because, for some inexplicable reason, you got into Sue Thomas: F.B.Eye? Then you can pick up on Monday, Tuesday, Friday or Saturday. That's one of the reasons we really like cable -- because we know that some time, somewhere, someone will be rerunning Miami Vice and if we miss the episode where Julia Roberts plays a drug moll, well, it'll be on again soon. Schedule is only marginally relevant on cable; what we pay for is access to a pool of content we can enter at any time we choose. That's what makes the money.

So bag the subscription model -- it didn't work for music, because, as others have pointed out, there are plenty of ways to get MP3s for free and nobody's offering the All-U-Can-Download service that lazy people really want. It's not going to work for PVRs because people will either skip the service in favor of what they can get for free, or work around it.

Forget trying to convince television watchers that TiVo is the great Satan who's trying to take Friends from you -- if it's on for much longer, Jennifer Aniston and Courteney Cox will have dieted themselves into oblivion and who's going to pay Lisa Kudrow and the boys a grillion dollars an episode for Three Guys and Phoebe? People who watch television aren't buying the idea that one technology is going to topple an industry. Besides, it's way too easy to draw parallels between the current breast-beating over PVRs and Jack Valenti's contention that VCRs would be the death of the movie industry.

Finally, let go of the completely facetious argument that supporting an industry's revenue model is eminently moral and fair. Your typical customer couldn't give two shits about corporate "rights," and probably thinks most corporations already have the deck stacked in their favor. Telling them to do the right thing isn't a selling point. If these MegaMediaCorp-type companies could just let go of the fiction that they're just honest operators trying to make a buck, and start appealing to people's greedy, lazy natures, then they'd have a lot more success.

The most appalling thing about AOL Time Warner -- other than their continued employment of anti-PVR blowhards -- is that they honestly think they're doing something smart with Mystro. They've managed to completely miss what the viewer wants in the interest of placating advertisers and propping up a business model that's already four years out of date.

This isn't the kind of business I want controlling my options for watching television. I want a business that gets it -- and as of now, AOL Time Warner isn't it.

I've been meaning to tell you guys to give Ed another chance.

Ed's really picked up lately. I'm not sure it's quite made up for how bad it got, but it's still getting better. Ed's new romance with Twiggy or whatever her name is is a nice change of pace from Carol; they've handled the Mark gastric bypass pretty well, given that they were lamentably forced finally to dump their weight-blindness when actor Michael Genadry got the operation in real life; and the return of Dr. Jerome, easily one of the most amusing characters on TV for the last three years, has made most of this season forgivable.

And Stella, Carol's sister and Warren's new lady friend, makes up for a lot, being the most amazingly beautiful wonderful twinkly happy hot mama ever on TV ever.

Aside from the Valentine's episode, which had me wishing flaming death upon Warren as much as ever, Warren has only shown up minimally. Long enough to get the girl and go away again.

And I don't care if it is Warren -- Stella is so awesome, I'll cheer for anyone who can seduce her. Go Warren! Go Warren! [author does out-of-date cultural touchstone Cabbage Patch dance] It's your birthday! Use catchphrase!

Okay, so I sound like a doctor's receptionist trying to explain why I changed the TV to Port Charles when you wanted to watch the second half of SportsCenter. So be it! Ed has built that much goodwill in this viewer, there's still some left.

Poor Rikki Woodring wrote to Viewers For Quality TV yesterday. "The show 'Ed'... is in jeopardy of being canceled at the end of its third season. 'Ed' has a very large intelligent fan base and the fans are outraged at this prospect. I am turning to your organization for help because I know you care deeply about quality television and honestly all of quality television is in jeopardy with the current trends."

Let me just say that I think that VQTV is the perfect place to write to solicit help for Ed, a show I removed from the Season Pass list on my TiVo in December after it finally stuck deep in the ground following a yearlong nose-dive.

The funniest, smartest show on television is She Spies.

I don't expect you to take my word for this. If that was how things worked, there'd be a lot more Daria on television, and a lot less Oliver Beene. Not that I've actually watched Oliver Beene, you understand.

She Spies is a syndicated show, which means you'd have to get lucky to even hear about its existence (although it did appear briefly on NBC last summer). And if you've never seen She Spies, you've got two questions: what's it about, and why should you watch it? Well, it's sort of like Charlie's Angels, in that you've got three beautiful women fighting crime in transparent disguises that are, not infrequently, literally see-through. They even take their orders from a shadowy off-screen figure, who speaks through a Bosley-like surrogate. But the premise is actually more silly than Charlie's Angels, since these girls are felons, who are in some kind of work-release program.

It seems that Cassie, DD, and Shane were thieves who got arrested and put in prison. If they'd been the A-Team, they probably would have promptly escaped from a maximum-security stockade or something. Instead, a clandestine government agency came along and said they could get out of prison if they went on unlikely governmental missions. Kind of like the forgettable last season of The A-Team, except that there's no annoying explosives expert added at the last second. Which is good, as that guy always bugged me.

DD is a hacker, and she's the cute, naive one. Shane is the angry, butt-kicking one. And Cassie is a con artist who happens to be Natasha Henstridge. She's the leader of the team by virtue of having starred in big-budget Hollywood films. Incidentally, Carlos Jacott, who plays Jack, the Bosley stand-in, has done a lot of television, especially Joss Whedon television. He was the jerk who shot Kaylee on Firefly! He was that evil social worker in the Buffy episode "Anne," who lured homeless people into another dimension to become slave labor. He was a demon on Angel. He was also, if you insist, Ramon the Pool Cleaner on Seinfeld. You may also know him as the guy who sort of looks like the guy who wasn't Greg Kinnear on Talk Soup.

So at this point, you could probably draw up the episode guide yourself. The girls have to protect a baby, providing for wacky infant antics? Check. An episode's villain turns out to be one of the girls' ex-fiancee? Mais oui! The girls have to infiltrate a singles resort and lounge around in bikinis? Yup. A spy ring is being run out of a comedy club managed by Jon Polito? Sure, why not?

Wait. A comedy club? Jon Polito?

She Spies is a parody, done more or less straight-faced. It doesn't sound all that hard to parody shows like Charlie's Angels and, um... wait, I know there was another one. Oh! How about Foxforce Five? No, I guess that was the show from "Pulp Fiction" that Uma Thurman claimed to have done a pilot for. Well, there were probably other beautiful-female-spies-going-undercover shows I can't think of right now. Look, I know it seems like the genre comes pre-parodized for your convenience, but that's what makes the show brilliant.

What you've got, essentially, is smart characters trapped in formulaic plots. It's not at all uncommon for Cassie to comment on how they seem to save the world on a semi-weekly basis, or for DD to complain about the eerie sameness of all their villainous foes.

She Spies takes a clearly clichéd premise and considers some consequences. Like, if you adopt unlikely personas every week, isn't it possible that when you're in the middle of a case, someone will see you and want to talk about how you used to be on the same roller derby team?

Also, it's the only show I've ever seen where, when one of the characters wants to seduce someone, she plays Risk with him.

What makes it the funniest show on television? Well, because I laugh while I'm watching it. A lot. Humor's subjective; we all understand that. But I've seen all the sitcoms currently being aired, and the best they can usually do is to make me nod, thinking "yes, that was a funny joke. Well done." She Spies, by virtue of its sheer audaciousness, can usually get many more laughs out of me than, say, Friends. I only mention Friends because I came up with line I wanted to use: The only thing I find funny about Friends is the fact that it's still on the air. How was that? It's a pretty good joke, but I don't think I did a very good job of blending it seamlessly into this review. With any luck, when Bartlett's Familiar Quotations reprints it, they'll take out the context.

I seem to have gotten a little distracted. My point is this: the show is funny. Oh, how it makes me laugh.

There are two ways to look at She Spies. It might be a really, really dumb show with the occasional meta joke ("What's going on?" "It's a flashback. If we were on TV, there'd be those fuzzy little edges all around the picture."). Or it might be a brilliant parody of a really dumb show, in which the characters sometimes stop the opening credits because they want to resolve the cliffhanger right away.

And the thing is, it works. Most of the time, intentional dumbness immediately translates to real dumbness, and thence to real stupidity, like on Son of the Beach or The Black Scorpion. But very rarely, it works, and you get Sledge Hammer! or Police Squad! That's what you're looking at here.

Plus, there are beautiful women all over the place.

I can't honestly say you're missing anything vital if you don't watch She Spies. At best, it's throwaway comedy, something you watch for an hour, laugh at, and then forget about. But isn't that what television's all about?

I wasn't planning on reviewing Da Ali G Show, but I watched it, so I might as well review it in order to have some good come of it.

If you're even mildly interested in the show, you probably already know:

• Ali G is the alter ego of British comedian Sacha Baron Cohen
• Cohen doesn't break character during interviews or even while in danger of being arrested for some public stunt or other
• Ali G's show is a big hit in England
• Ali G has a new show on HBO, which is the subject of this review.

What you probably do not know is:

• He isn't very funny.

Alas, the sketch comedy show built around a single star has been in decline for, oh, several decades. The last good example I can think of is The Ben Stiller Show, which Fox didn't so much pull the rug out from under as started it on greased linoleum so they could replace it with... what? Repeats of Herman's Head? An expanded Woops!? I remember The Ben Stiller Show, but its replacement -- forgotten. Even after ten years off the air The Ben Stiller Show is one of the best shows on TV. And before Ben Stiller there was Carol Burnett, and before Carol Burnett there wasn't electricity.

Da Ali G Show is only barely a sketch comedy at that. Cohen's big comedic idea seems to be interviewing serious people (former U.S. Attorney General Dick Thornberg, former U.N. Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali) in character as an idiot. Which might have you pondering the question: If one starts out pretending to be an idiot, past what point is it no longer pretending?

Maybe no one passed the news onto Cohen, but this has been done before. I'm pretty sure Howard Stern had Stuttering John asking Napoleon about his "Little Emperor." Not only has it been done before, but now the serious people expect this sort of thing; and Dick Thornberg, anyway, apparently figured he'd look hip if he went along, smiled, and -- while certainly not indulging his interviewer in seriously answering such questions as "What's the difference between legal and barely legal?" -- at least looked like he got the joke. The result was not the knee-slapping, rib-tickling laughfest Cohen no doubt expected; instead, he looked boorish, while Thornberg looked gracious and accommodating. Which was definitely more than Cohen deserved. Given that this sort of ambush is only worthwhile if it really is an ambush -- and in these tired days of the early 21st Century, it can only ambush Australian aborigines, maybe -- Cohen really should have been told politely that there were some streets in need of sweeping and here are the keys to your Elgin.

There was only one small bright spot in the show, which came from the nigh-extinct genre of Ethnic Humor. See above re: 21st Century: Cohen couldn't put on blackface and say "Where all the white wimmen at?" and he couldn't say "I'ma gonna sing dis song a capella, which means, withouta my hat." No, these days you can't make fun of [insert humorous list of offensive slang for various minorities here], and over in England you probably can't even pick on Pakistanis or Indians like we do, so Cohen takes the long walk to find one of the last ethnicities open for abuse: the people of Kazakhstan.

Where's Kazakhstan? Never mind. All you really need to know is, it's far away and backward and people from there have accents. Whoopee! Now that's humor!

Well, I have a soft spot for ethnic humor, since there's so little of it these days, and Cohen's sketch as Borat, a Kazakstani learning the ways of America -- in the first episode, the complexities of dating American women -- made me smile even while I realized it wasn't as nuanced as a Yakov Smirnoff routine or as sensitive as Martin and Aykroyd's Two Wild and Crazy Guys.

Da Ali G Show wasn't a total waste of time, but that was only because I clipped my toenails while I was watching it. And there's this review -- so there, two good things from that half-hour of my life.

Perhaps the show will get better. I'd have to watch more episodes to see. But I leave that to more intrepid reporters than I.

Don't let anyone tell you that the era of good TV has passed. Today's TV contains lots of junk, sure, but there's so much bizarre genre-busting going on out there that there are bound to be a few pieces of brilliance generated completely by accident.

So I'll rave about british sitcoms Coupling and The Office, which would never see the light of day in this country without the existence of BBC America. But more importantly, let me rave about The Michael Essany Show on E!, which is one of the most bizarre concepts for a series -- and yet turns out to be sweet and funny and just purely entertaining. Basically, Michael Essany is a college kid with his own cable access talk show, which he hosts out of his house. E! supplies the guests, mom supplies the refreshments, and the whole thing ends up being a reality show about the talk show, mixed in with the show itself.

It is really remarkable television. I can't recommend it highly enough. Fortunately, E! will be rerunning each episode about 400 times, so you'll probably be able to give it a try without much fuss.

The Screen Actors Guild on Tuesday issued a press release warning against a "new blacklist" in Hollywood.

Quoth SAG: Some have recently suggested that well-known individuals who express "unacceptable" views should be punished by losing their right to work.

Who is "some"? The release doesn't say. It is similarly silent about which "well-known individuals" have been threatened with "losing their right to work" because of their "unacceptable" views. (Aren't sneer quotes fun?)

But that's fine, because I am prepared to reveal the identity ("name names," if you will) of the mysterious "some" in question.

It is:

Nobody. Not George W. Bush. Not Ari Fleischer. Not the feared and loathed John Ashcroft. At best—at best—SAG might be able to point to some cranky John Bircher on the Web, or possibly a radio talkshow host on the very fringes of the right. Which makes the statement that much more ridiculous.

But, by all means, read the full text of the press release for yourself. It is impossible to exaggerate its hysterical tone.

If anything, the more outspoken of the anti-war Hollywood Left stand to gain from the publicity. Janeane Garafalo has never been more famous. Marty Sheen will continue to work long after the creatively moribund West Wing retires to the Elysian Fields of syndication. One might argue that Sean Penn's career suffered because of his trip to Baghdad. But one could also point to the fact that his last couple of films were seen by all of two-dozen people. Three-dozen, tops.

(Also posted on the Claremont Institute's weblog, The Remedy.)

Actual news item: Oscar-nominated actor Edward James Olmos is close to signing a deal to star as Cmdr. Adama in the SCI FI Channel's upcoming four-hour miniseries and backdoor pilot Battlestar Galactica, the network confirmed.

What's next, I ask you? Dirk Benedict as Sonny Crockett in a "reimagined" Miami Vice? Philip Michael Thomas as Faceman a "reimagined" A-Team?

When will the madness end?

My wife and I were walking out of the local megapharmacy when, thanks to the in-store music, I found myself saying, "Who could it be? Believe it or not, it's just me."

"It might be the Greatest American Hero," Dawn said, "But it ain't."

Damn, I loved that show.

Have you caught that hot Fox series where a hunky guy has to navigate a snake pit of two-faced golddiggers and stupid bimbos to gain an ultimate prize? No, not Joe Millionaire -- I'm talking about 24.

There's no denying that, even without the nightmarish intensity of its first year, 24 is outstanding television. But after a season and a half, I'm starting to notice a disturbing trend among 24's sprawling cast of characters. All the women are duplicitous schemers, victims, or absolute morons -- or some combination of the three. A lot of the paranoia that drives 24 stems not from external threats, but from the tension between power-wielding male characters and the women who are either screwing up their efforts or trying to grab power for themselves.

The main men of 24 occupy a sliding scale of morality, none of them entirely good or evil. "Soul Patch" Tony Almeda is the closest 24 gets to an honest-to-goodness hero, but his compassion and sensitivity are also preyed upon by the women around him. Jack Bauer is a fundamentally decent guy, but also dangerous -- we breathe a sigh of relief when we realize he hasn't, in fact, ordered the murder of a terrorist's child, because we believed he really would have. President David Palmer's moral code gives him surprising strength of character, but also leaves him hamstrung to act at crucial junctures. And even though tragedy turns George Mason's weasely selfishness to sacrifice, he's still willing to deny an employee life-saving medical aid to get what he wants from her.

So far, so good. What about the characters without a Y chromosome? Kim Bauer is number one in the "stupid" category. Every 24 viewer I've met or spoken with seems to agree: Jack's daughter is dumb as a post, hurtling from one self-induced peril to another. She was recently trapped and menaced by a cougar. Elisha Cuthbert is easy on the eyes, but be honest: how many of you were rooting for the cougar?

Kim actually grew as a character during the show's first season, becoming a resourceful survivor. She wound up outwitting and outrunning the people holding her hostage. But the beginning of this season, had she taken any self-defense classes? Had she decided to carry mace, or a taser? Is she a more cool and logical thinker? Nope -- she's too busy lighting fires in the back seat of moving vehicles. She could have been rescued by CTU several times over by now, but for her own bungling. That faint "D'oh!" you hear is coming from Charles Darwin's grave.

In the "victim" category, look no further than the late Terri Bauer. When she wasn't wandering around all panicky and amnesiac, her few heroic acts had horrible costs. First she saved Kim from being raped -- by offering herself up instead. Then, she discovered the season's central traitor at work (completely by accident), and, sheeplike, allowed herself to get killed.

This season's biggest victim to date is Paula, the nervous computer geek who couldn't handle the pressure of possible nuclear annihilation. She had to be extensively coddled by Tony to get anything done, and then a bombing mortally wounded her. Mason had her dragged from the jaws of death just long enough to cough up some vital access codes. Her usefulness gone, the producers snuffed her.

The best-represented women on 24, though, are the schemers. The show can barely contain them all, each cozying up to unwitting male authority figures while hungering for influence.

Sherry Palmer, the president's serpentine ex-wife, has been clawing frantically for power from the show's very first episode. Last year, she contented herself with merely plotting to illegally cover up a murder investigation and driving her husband to infidelity. But this year, apparently having realized she was thinking too small, she's now exploiting insider knowledge of impending nuclear doom to worm her way back into her husband's inner circle.

Her only credible opponent to date has been Lynn Kresge, the president's aide. And Lynn mainly seems to be blocking Sherry's efforts because she feels that Sherry poses a threat to her own connection to the President's power. (Note that, while Lynn and Sherry mostly cat-fight, only Palmer is competent enough to finally kick Sherry to the curb -- without ever listening to Lynn.)

At CTU, Tony's aide-de-camp and love interest Michelle seems generally sympathetic and competent. But she's the first to notice George Mason's vulnerability as he succumbs to radiation poisoning. She beelines for Tony and urges him, Lady Macbeth-style, to rat out Mason and get himself installed as bureau chief. You can practically see the wheels turning in her head as she angles for a little of Tony's reflected glory. Now she's having some kind of spitting match with the woman replacing Paula, who used to be her boss and seems to resent the imbalance of power.

And it's hard to overlook 24's patron saint of manipulative witches: Nina Myers. Jack's trusted ally for nearly all of Season One, Nina turned traitor and murdered his wife. This year, she used her knowledge of the nuclear plot to win herself a pardon and, very nearly, a "get out of jail" card for murdering Jack. She's an admittedly fascinating character, mostly because she's willing to break more rules than the other female characters to get what she wants. The split-second of remorse on her face as she recalled killing Jack's wife almost made her Jack's equal for depth. But rather than explore her crackling new Tom-and-Jerry chemistry with Jack, the producers waited just long enough for her to fulfill her part, then hastily shuffled her offstage.

The one female character who might just get a square deal on 24 this year is the heroine, Kate Warner. She started out as an idiot, clumsily investigating her sister's harmless fiancee, then morphed into a blubbering victim when kidnapped by terrorists. (Have you noticed that there's an awful lot of kidnapping going on?) And Kate's still not too bright: Hey, there's my fugitive sister, who just killed two highly trained agents! I'll go after her, unarmed, without telling anyone! But her helplessness seems to be slowly waning -- she bravely defied her sister at gunpoint, and infiltrated a mosque to ID her erstwhile torturer. I'm keeping my fingers crossed that she won't go all stupid again.

So for positive, empowered women, there's Kate and... um... no one. Even the supporting characters can't escape the stigma. There's the infamous Naked Mandy, who shags a journalist in an airplane lavatory to steal his press pass, blows up the plane, then lets her stupid, greedy lesbian lover get murdered to save her own skin. Kim's bimbo friend, hit by a car and murdered in her hospital bed. The courageous rent-a-cop who helps Jack chase a suspect and gets shot to death for her trouble. The CTU computer tech betraying her comrades for cold cash. The frumpy waitress who sells fugitive Jack out to the cops. The speechwriter who lets Sherry push her into seducing Palmer. Palmer's daughter, a passive and fragile rape victim. The ball-busting harridan who takes over CTU when Jack appears to have gone rogue. The duped lover of a terrorist, who botches a CTU intelligence-gathering plan by wigging out and stabbing her beau half to death. The abused wife who employs Kim, found beaten to death in the trunk of her husband's car. Kate's brainwashed sister, who goes from idiot to schemer to victim at the drop of a hat.

None of the previous efforts of 24's phalanx of producers would suggest this deep-seated vein of misogyny. And with ten hours to go and a third season just confirmed, we viewers can only hope they get over their dim view of women at some point.

But for now, God help you if you're in Los Angeles, a clock is ticking, and you have ovaries.