April 2003 Archives

So I'm watching Mr. Personality -- lord help me -- and they keep playing back the guys' heartfelt confessions. Halfway through their statements, the show cuts to the speaker in full mask. "I'm lonely," says a guy with a freakishly bumpy green head. Whaaa?

And then it hit me: this would all work much better if these guys were dressed up as different "Star Trek" aliens. There's Will, Internet developer, in full Klingon regalia! Jim, the graduate student, is dressed up as a Horta, the silicon-based life form from planet Janus IV. And Brian, a lawyer with the ceremonial headdress and robes of the Andorian star empire.

Now that would be a show.

So it's Sunday night at the Casa de TeeVee and I've just witnessed an episode of The Simpsons where Lisa Simpson subjected everyone to her usual against-the-grain moralizing, followed by an episode of Six Feet Under where Lisa Fisher subjected Nate to her usual guilt trips and sulking. And it crossed my mind: why must these women -- these awful, whiny enemies of fun -- why must they have my name?

Sure, Lisa was a popular name in the 1970s; I went through school as Lisa S. so I wouldn't be confused with Lisas B., C., M. and U. I can understand how the name Lisa would percolate through the rosters of pretend people on television. I can also understand how Lisa Simpson is largely admirable: she takes reasoned stands of conscience instead doing the easy thing, no small feat given her home life and hometown. However, Lisa Simpson is also something of a hectoring killjoy. As is Lisa Fisher, who actually succeeded in making Brenda Chenowith -- the perpetually-stoned, sex-addicted Brenda Chenowith -- look like the One Who Got Away on Six Feet Under.

It was bad enough when Douglas Coupland used the name "Lisa" as shorthand for PR flacks in Microserfs, but to be slapped with the wet blanket label courtesy of television -- that really hurts.

Is there a Lisa plot? A Hollywood movement to discredit the name? Lisa Ling certainly seems like a smoking gun.

So I'm turning to you, the TeeVee readers. Help me uncover this covert entertainment conspiracy to besmirch my name -- or give me evidence that Lisas Simpson and Fisher are only two statistical blips in an otherwise sterling entertainment record.

Send in examples of Lisas on television who are either not guaranteed to be the downers in the crowd, or are the life of the party. Note: Lisas Rinna and Bonet do not count, unless they play characters named Lisa. I'm talking about examples of arguably fun Lisas like the one Pamela Anderson played on Home Improvement. Okay, so that Lisa the Tool Time Girl isn't necessarily my idea of fun, but she's undoubtedly someone else's.

Hook a Lisa up, readers. Send in your examples today.

If you ever need proof that television is a powerful medium, forget about breaking coverage of a major news happening, a program with the ability to both educate and inspire, or even a landmark televised event that draws a massive audience from across racial, gender and socio-economic demographics. No: You want incontrovertible evidence of television's ability to captivate, to enthrall, to turn its audience slack-jawed with dumb wonderment, then look no further than ESPN's coverage of the NFL draft.

In theory, the NFL draft should be eye-glazing, well-nigh unwatchable television -- hour after hour of slightly overweight middle-managers and pencil-pushers barking orders into helmet-shaped phones while a parade of increasingly obscure college seniors is trotted up to the podium and handed a baseball cap decorated with the logo of their new employer. Occasionally, we're treated to an interview with the head coach, who heaps general platitudes upon the young man who he's just going to wind up cutting after the first week of training camp in August. But mostly, the NFL draft is a mind-numbing string of especially meaningless statistics -- 40-yard-dash times mixed with endless reports on intangibles and high ceilings and other draftnik jargon. It's five minutes worth of action crammed into 17 hours of coverage spread out across two days. Counter-program the draft against the sight of paint drying, and you'd be hard pressed to say which event would make for more compelling television.

I know all this about the NFL draft -- the monotony, the tedium, the unending and ultimately fruitless discussions about the merits of selecting a punter from Georgia Tech over a interior lineman from Texas A&M -- and yet I cannot turn away. Every now and again on Saturday, I flicked on the TV, flipped over to ESPN just to see if I could get a score or something, and noticed the draft coverage. I'd sit down just to watch a few minutes, and the next thing I knew, a baker's dozen of picks would fly by, Chris Mortensen and Mel Kiper would be arguing about the wisdom of the Patriots drafting another cornerback, and I'd hear myself saying things like, "What about his 40-yard-dash time? Dear God, how are we supposed to process this information without his 40-yard dash time?"

And then I would feel shame. And then I would keep watching.

Maybe it's the tickers. ESPN festooned the screen with crawling news tickers dispensing draft-related information the way CNBC tells you that Cisco dropped three points. A rolling ticker at the very bottom of the screen recaps who's been picked lately. A ticker on top of that tells you what team is picking now and how much time it has left to make its selection. And then, a third ticker scrolls vertically down the left of side of the screen -- Can tickers scroll vertically? Doesn't this defy the laws of physics? -- showing team-by-team picks and dispensing draft factoids. This is the third year the Cleveland Browns have selected a running back on the draft's opening day. The Oakland Raiders received their next pick as compensation from the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. Hey, buddy... want to know some 40-yard-dash times?

Maybe it's the sheer volume of the coverage. In addition to the eight dozen anchors, reporters, talking heads and hangers-on live at draft central in New York, ESPN had a studio's worth of analysts jibber-jabbering from Bristol, Connecticut, another pair of commentators blathering on from outside of Washington and still more weighing in with their very deep thoughts from an ESPN Zone restaurant somewhere. Times Square? Anaheim? Roanoke? The Quad Cities area? I'm not sure -- none of ESPN's tickers would say. And, just to ensure that this draft received more comprehensive coverage than most presidential elections, the ESPN crew interviewed assorted head coaches and general managers using video phones -- jumpy, wavering images that made it look like San Diego Chargers coach Marty Schottenheimer and Houston Texans exec Charlie Casserly were conducting their draft day operations while embedded with the 101st Airborne outside of Mosul.

Maybe it's NFL draft guru Mel Kiper Jr. and his alarming ability to speak definitively about hundreds of college football players who are probably unknown, even to the universities who enrolled them. And if you're not wowed by Kiper's savant-like gift for instantaneously distinguishing between Dejuan Groce (cornerback out of Nebraska, good on bump-and-run coverage) and Jordan Gross (Utah offensive tackle, versatile blocker), then consider the man's hair. Look at his hair! The sheen! The luster! The immaculately manicured widow's peak! To stare directly at it is to know, just for a second, what sets apart a first-round draft pick from a mid-third rounder.

Yes, the NFL draft is television at its absolute finest -- an orgy of overkill, trivia and white noise, and, really, aren't those the things that make for memorably surreal viewing experiences? And yet, in the same way that art aficionados mull if Da Vinci truly achieved perfection with the Mona Lisa, that students of music contemplate the impact of changing one note in Mahler's ninth, the way film critics debate whether Welles spends too much of "Citizen Kane" focusing on the sled and not enough time showing off some skin, I wonder if it's possible for ESPN to improve its draft coverage any -- to take this masterpiece and make it better.

After giving the matter considerable thought -- and drinking a considerable amount -- I am willing to go out on a limb and say that the answer is yes. Yes, it is.

Take the clock, for example. Each team gets 15 minutes to make a selection; when the time expires, the next team in line gets to pick whether the first team is ready or not. This year, there was a considerable foofaraw in the first round when the Minnesota Vikings -- apparently still trying to come grips with their four Super Bowl losses in the 1970s -- allowed their 15 minutes to elapse without ever drafting anyone. That prompted a mad scramble, as each of the teams drafting behind Minnesota dashed up to the podium to announce their draft pick, lest the logy Vikings awake from their slumber and draft a player somebody else wanted. When all was said and done, two teams managed to make their selections before the Vikings pulled the trigger. All 36 ESPN announcers on the scene seemed quite excited by this dramatic turn of events.

Which got me thinking, why not extend the clock to other aspects of the draft? In addition to giving teams 15 minutes to select a player, why not give them 15 minutes to sign him, too? Audiences would thrill to the breakneck speed of negotiations, the rushed decisions and the bitter recriminations afterwards. Lives and careers hang in the balance, with everything wrapped up in a quarter-of-an-hour. It'd be just like those old shopping-spree game shows Lifetime used to air. Only without those discomforting commercials for hygiene products.

The NFL also drops the ball by breaking up its draft into two days. Instead, the league should switch to a continuous format, and ESPN should adopt round-the-clock coverage, and forbid its anchors from leaving the set for food and bathroom breaks. If you think the NFL draft is compelling now, imagine the fun of turning on the set at 4 a.m. Sunday when Chris Berman and Chris Mortensen are barely able to remember their own names, let alone whether the Packers just drafted a kid out of Duke or Duquesne. And if Mel Kiper Jr.'s total recall of the quirks and idiosyncracies of every college-football-playing college senior in the country is impressive now, imagine how astounding it will be when he's delusional from lack of sleep and nutrition. As an added bonus, ESPN could even allow viewers to submit fake names in a sort-of "Stump Mel" segment, just to see if the NFL draft guru can be tricked into spouting off made-up biographies of non-existent players. Anyone who successfully stumps Mel gets an ESPN prize package. A t-shirt, maybe, or a chance to bid on the Anaheim Angels.

And if it does nothing else, there's one change ESPN should make in time for next year's draft: take the green room where all the top draft picks wait to see which team picks them and place it 40 yards away from the podium where they're handed those logo-bearing ballcaps. I'm as curious as anyone to see how accurate those 40-yard dash times really are.

BAGHDAD, Iraq (Associated Press) -- Home videos of Saddam Hussein shot many years ago show fleeting glimpses into the private life of the longtime dictator and his first wife, Sajida. The four tapes, showing benign scenes of Saddam's private life in the late 1980s, were obtained earlier this week by CNN from an Iraqi who said he took it from Sajida's house.

More disturbing to U.S. officials, however, was a trio of videocassettes found Thursday and shown on Fox News that depict another, darker dimension to the deposed Iraqi leader.

In the first video, Saddam is seen addressing a contingent of advisors and military personnel when suddenly, an object -- thought by State Department analysts to be a golf ball or quite possibly a colorless rock -- strikes the Iraqi dictator in the groin. Saddam then falls to the ground wailing in agony, as his advisors suppress chuckles. Moments later, Saddam looks off camera. "Did you get that, Odai?" he says in Farsi, apparently to his eldest son behind the camera. "Saget's $10,000 prize will be mine at last."

A State Department official, speaking on conditional of anonymity, said the video could have been a message from Saddam to stiffen resistance among his top loyalists or a message to Iraqi citizens to warn them against assisting U.S.-led coalition forces. "Or he could be trying to get on America's Funniest Home Videos, the official added.

In the second videotaped aired by Fox News, Hussein sings a passable rendition of "You Light Up My Life," adding a particularly tremulous vibrato on the refrain. "Let us see the infidel Simon Cowell use his forked tongue to defile that performance," the Iraqi leader remarks, in what appears to be some sort of audition tape.

The most chilling of the three videos features Hussein meeting with advisors and planning a chemical gas attack on Kurds in an apparent attempt to recreate a stunt he saw on Jackass. A spokesman for Viacom, which airs Jackass on MTV, noted that the show usually contains several disclaimers reminding viewers that the stunts on Jackass are performed by trained professionals and that the episode featuring a VX nerve gas attack was no exception.

It's hard enough to create one superb television show. Imagine how tough it is to capture lightning in a bottle twice, forging a spin-off and building a whole new show on supporting characters from the original. For every Frasier, the airwaves are polluted with the numerous shows the likes of AfterMASH or Joanie Loves Chachi.

History was hedging its bets against Joss Whedon four years ago when he created Angel, the offspring of his phenomenal Buffy the Vampire Slayer. But Whedon was one of the few that managed to beat the spin-off curse. Now, as Buffy heads into the homestretch of its seven year run, it's clear that not only is Angel a superior TV show compared to the current incarnation of Buffy, but the child has grown as good as the parent ever was, if not better.

Angel has never received the kind of acclaim or pop-culture buzz Whedon's signature show had received from the very beginning. I had some serious doubts about the spin-off myself: Sarah Michelle Gellar is a true star, her supporting cast was terrific and the Buffy writers had managed to strike a perfect balance of humor and relatively sap-free emotion. David Boreanaz, who played Buffy's vampire boyfriend Angel for three years before launching the new show, was always fairly vanilla on the original. His one chance to shine had been the second half of the second season which he spent as the evil Angelus. It was easily his best work, but the new series was supposed to focus on Angel the hero and up to that point Boreanaz hadn't shown a fraction of the champion's charisma his former leading lady displayed every week.

Angel's first year was a bumpy ride, but surprisingly good. Charisma Carpenter, another Buffy refugee, transformed her Cordelia Chase character from the popular rich girl who tormented the Slayer gang in Sunnydale to a credible hero in her own right. Whedon had promised the new series would be even darker than the original, a tough guarantee to make considering Buffy had already killed her own boyfriend and blew up her high school.

Angel's creator lived up to his word, staging most of the show underground or at night and sharpening the edge on his leading man. This hero didn't have an ancient, sacred calling like the Vampire Slayer to justify his actions. Sure, he was a tortured soul fighting for redemption for two centuries of his own evil, but the old vampire was always lurking just under the surface. When things got messy, Angel spent a lot more time getting vicious and less time navel-gazing about the morality of it all then Buffy usually did..

The comparisons to the original were helped that initial season by Buffy's sudden fourth-year stumble. Since then, the shows have been moving in different directions, with Angel substantially improving every season while Buffy plummeted into last year's embarrassment. Buffy has apparently found its second wind just in time for the end of the series and can still put on a great show, as this year's "Conversations with Dead People" episode proved. But season four of Angel has been the most entertaining collection of network television hours I've seen in years.

The most impressive facet of the show is how Whedon, series co-creator David Greenwalt, and current show producer Jeffrey Bell have managed to break almost every cardinal rule for avoiding bad TV. For instance, the transformation of comic relief characters into genuine heroes. Along with the title character and Cordelia, former Buffy bit-player Wesley Wyndam-Pryce was brought onto Angel. On the old show, Wesley was an uptight, prissy Brit with a girlish scream and a penchant for fainting at the sight of blood. After a couple of years on Angel, Wesley is one of the biggest bad asses in all of primetime. The amazing thing is that the writers and actor Alexis Denisof managed to pull off this goofy-to-gallant makeover in completely convincing fashion. Compare this to the utter disaster of Buffy's Willow becoming the most powerful human on Earth, then trying to destroy it last year. The Buffy writers could have learned a thing or two about subtle character development by watching their sister show.

There don't seem to be any television clichés the writers and producers of Angel aren't willing to twist to their own advantage. Cordelia returned from another dimension earlier this year with amnesia and the result was an episode funnier than just about every sitcom on the air. It wouldn't be a fantasy show without a malevolent super-evil about to destroy the world, only this one's Cordelia's daughter and a hippie free-love guru to boot. There even was a dream episode that featured an inspired "Raiders of the Lost Ark" homage.

The biggest trap any show can fall into is the baby trap. So when it became clear Angel was going to end up a father last season, all sorts of warning bells started clanging off around the TeeVee office. The bells were quickly silenced however, once the mother, an old vampire girlfriend of Angel's, killed herself so the baby could be born. Then just as Angel started getting all sappy about his role as a new father, the boy was kidnapped by dad's pal Wesley and given to an old vampire hunter nemesis to be raised in a demon dimension. Before you could say "Holy crap," the baby reemerged from the other world as a superhuman teenager sworn to kill his father. Family Ties this isn't.

The biggest surprise here may be Boreanaz. While rarely given the kind of big emotional speeches Gellar gets to plow through almost every episode of Buffy these days, Angel's leading man manages to carry the weight of the world just as forcefully, if less verbally. The man has mastered the art and science of brooding, but is truly funny as well. Even better is his ability to go cold blooded, pretty-boy image be damned. A recent story arc had Angel reverting to his evil alter-ego Angelus for a few weeks and Boreanaz made the leap to over-the-top homicidal killer as well as anyone on the small screen this side of Joe Pantoliano.

The supporting cast is excellent as well, despite its enormous proportions. When Whedon expanded Buffy's ensemble to J.Lo-entourage size, it went straight downhill. His recent Firefly failure was probably caused by its lousy Friday night time slot, but its confusing ensemble of 256 main characters didn't help much either. Somehow each Angel character has managed to find his or her own niche, and there are very few times when someone's floating around aimlessly. These writers are every bit as sharp and funny as Buffy's and much less apt to get bogged down in the ponderous us-against-the-world monologues that seem to drag down so many Buffy episodes these days.

The writing continues to improve despite Greenwalt's departure, somehow straddling the thin line between fantastic and ridiculous. Earlier this year a giant demon made of rock visited Earth to block out the sun. On any other show, this recycled Simpsons plot would end up laughable, but with the subsequent turning of Angel to the evil Angelus, the ludicrous mixed perfectly with the dark and violent.

That continuing darkness is the real key to Angel's success. True to his word, Whedon has made this show a brilliant bit of gloom. Angel's son Connor entombed his father at the bottom of the ocean to end last season and this year began with Wesley keeping a woman chained up in his closet. Cordelia, who had an affair with Angel just starting to heat up, slept with his son and ended up giving birth to the demon to end all demons. Several of the fight scenes this year were enough to make John Woo proud, and more intense than anything else you'll see on a broadcast TV network -- 24 included. And what other show would have its leading man, the supposed champion of champions, turn into a murderous monster for month?

This is simply a brand of TV you'll not find anywhere else. While it may not pack the emotional wallop the finest early Buffy episodes, this year's Angel is more fun and better pure entertainment than its parent ever was.

I've begun to notice a certain pattern on these dating shows like Mr. Personality and The Bachelorette. There's always one token black dude. And generally the token black dude gets eliminated in the first round. On Mr. Personality, everybody has to wear masks, right? But there are little spaces on the masks for the eyes and the mouth. And the token black dude, you can totally see he's black. It's like he's already totally been exposed and the game hasn't even started. The black dude is at a total disadvantage because he doesn't get to display his personality.

Anyhow that got me thinking, they need to have a dating show called Am I Black or Am I White? And the woman wouldn't even get to see their faces. All she'd have to judge the contestants by would be the sound of their voices. That would certainly make things more interesting for the black dudes.

So I saw this commercial the other day for Honda's new SUV, the Pilot. It featured a family camping with all of the amenities -- a trailer, a campfire, and a DirecTV satellite dish. I remember shaking my head and thinking that this commercial said everything about this country of ours: "Hey family, let's get out to the great outdoors-- so we can watch some TV."

Is this what we as Americans have become? So glued to our TV sets we can't even go camping without one? I can only wonder what the pioneers would thought of all of this. Would they have looked at us modern Americans, with our creature comforts with more than hint of disgust? Probably. Somehow I think they would look at us and see a bunch of... wusses.

"What happened to you guys?" they'd say. "We didn't cross the Great Divide so you people could sit on your asses all day, eating Doritos and watching extreme dating shows! What happened to rugged individuality and manifest destiny? My God, we slaughtered all of the Indians for this?!"

That you did, pardners... that you did.

Two items that crossed my desk here at TeeVee HQ got me thinking about the importance of "diversity" in casting TV shows. This all came up because of the apparent cancellation of Ed, a show that featured a man in a wheelchair, a fat kid, a fairly large adult woman, and several other not-quite-pretty characters.

Now, the reason Ed may be getting the axe is not because of this casting, but because creatively it's lost its way. But be that as it may, now's the time when people are coming out of the woodwork to point out Ed's diversity and beg for its life.

Reader Michelle Davis sent us a very polite e-mail in support of aid, which said in part:

One of the admirable things about Ed that wasn't mentioned in your column is the ground-breaking casting of "non-pretty" people. It takes guts these days to cast actors who don't fit in Hollywood's stereotypical mold of a beautiful/sexy man or woman... This reason alone is sufficient reason to hope Ed is not cancelled. We need all the representation of physical diversity on television that we can get.

Oh, do we? Frankly, we need all the decent plotting and characterization on television that we can get. "Diversity" is in no way an entertaining substitute for a show that's actually compelling to watch. Not that the producers of Ed made a big deal over the composition of their cast, but the point remains: bean-counting for underrepresented constituencies isn't sufficient reason to keep a show on the air, nor does it make up for a lack of entertainment in the show. Moreover, who in their right mind wants diversity-in-casting associated with a show that's painful to watch and tanking in the ratings?

Then the New York Daily News weighed in:

With "Ed," we like the characters, too - partly because they look more like us than do the rest of prime-time TV people... The core cast of "Friends," set in a major city, consists entirely of thin, glib white people. The cast of "Ed," set in the heartland town of Stuckeyville, incorporates almost all sizes, shapes, ages and articulation skills.

The Friends argument is horse puckey for any one of a number of reasons. First of all, when did NBC air the claim that Friends was representing social clans across America? Second of all, has anyone else run across those irritating articles in the alternative media describing how twenty- and thirtysomething people are forgoing nuclear families in lieu of "urban tribes"? You could actually make the argument that Friends merely reflects the reality of smug Urban Outfitters types glomming on to one another as they go to the local upscale market and debate the merits of black tellicherry peppercorns versus white ones.

However, I prefer to think that Friends is so firmly removed from reality as to qualify for fiction illustrating the perils of social engineering. Think about it: over the course of the show's run, these six people have run off nearly every other social contact they have, sabotaged their own or their alleged friends' romantic relationships whenever a friend threatened to stray outside the sextet, married and/or divorced and/or impregnated each other, and played musical residences. Because this takes place in Manhattan, this is cool; if this took place in West Virginia, it would be a intrafamily hillbilly soap opera.

Yet despite Friends' profound alienation from non-sociopathic human culture, people apparently love the show enough to justify paying the six actors salaries roughly equaling the GNP of one of those wretched war-torn countries the New York Times only reports on somewhere in the middle of the A section. Are people watching Friends for its realism? Hell, no. They're watching it for escapism.

The same goes for Ed. This is a show where everyone living in Stuckeyville not only knows everyone else, they're fond of them too. It's cozy and insular -- yet despite a set-up where seemingly generations of Stuckeyvillians have grown up, found jobs in, then apparently expired in Stuckeyville, the good citizens are neither provincial, nor violently inbred, nor taking their ideas for community-building activities from a Shirley Jackson story. That should indicate that we're treading in the land of the optimistically imaginative. Stuckeyville sells a fantasy of friendly small-town life to an audience that probably commutes to a job, lives far from friends and family post-college, or doesn't know who lives next door.

Ed is as much a fantasy as Friends. Not that there's anything wrong with this -- plenty of people tune into to decidedly unrealistic shows all the time, as Aaron Spelling and the Gene Roddenbery Empire can attest -- but the magical nature of Stuckeyville more or less blows any "Ed is realistic" argument out of the water. At the end of the day, you're left with a diverse cast -- who, by the way, seem diverse in appearance only, what with the majority of them being Stuckeyvillians born, bred and bound by their common experiences -- in the middle of a fantasy show.

Is that enough reason to save Ed? No. Nor is the diversity enough of a virtue to save Ed from the ax. There are other shows out there that do what Ed does, quietly rotating in people not quite like the Friends crew and declining to make a big deal about it. The difference is, a lot of those shows are still watchable, and Ed is not.

So Fox, having failed in its mission to lay waste to our most cherished social institutions and religious sacraments with Joe Millionaire and Married by America, gives it another try on Monday, with the latest in its series of reality programs conceived and pitched by Lucifer himself -- Mr. Personality. Part of Fox's ongoing attempt to figure out the lowest common denominator to the 12th decimal point, Mr. Personality is your typical modern-day dating show, in which a woman with a pleasant face and a respectable set of knockers hopes to find her one true love from a collection of would-be suitors hand-selected by disdainful network production assistants wondering why they couldn't land a job on Fastlane. Only this time, the twist is that our pleasant-looking, adequately-stacked heroine won't be able to see the faces of her potential life partners -- Fox has outfitted each one with a colorful mask, so that it looks like the woman has gone trawling for a mate at a Lucha Libre match. Which is why I suspect that the surprise twist at the end of the series will be that the woman winds up betrothed to Mil Mascaras.

(Mr. Personality, incidentally, is hosted by Monica Lewinsky. Man -- who'd she have to blow to get that job?)

Since Fox cannot actually come clean and admit that the only reason it airs this senseless drivel is to find out how idiotic the network's programming has to be before viewers will start clawing out their eyes, there's some desultory rumblings from Fox executives about how Mr. Personality is really part of some grand social experiment -- a way to find out whether it's physical beauty or less tangible qualities that win a person's heart.

The correct answer, incidentally, is neither. It's cash followed closely by liquor, as any doughy guy who has ever spent any reasonable length of time in a bar will tell you.

But let's take the duplicitous Fox network executives at their word and pretend for a moment that Mr. Personality really is about finding true love and determining just how big a part inner beauty plays in the process. If so, the network is going about things all wrong with Mr. Personality, and the show is doomed to fail. True, thanks to the masks, the female contestant cannot actually see the faces of her luchador suitors, so it's quite possible that when Mr. Right unmasks in the series finale, his girlfriend-to-be will discover that she's given her heart over to someone who's hideously ugly -- a sunken-eye, buck-toothed amalgamation of recessive genes and generations of especially reckless in-breeding, scarred by acne and industrial chemicals and beautiful only in the eyes of the Lord. And while that would admittedly make for great television, it's highly unlikely. Because while the suitors' faces are covered by masks, the rest of their bodies are completely visible. So the pleasant looking young lass can make her selection confident that while she may be picking someone who's been hit a couple of time across the face with the ol' Ugly Stick, her final choice will at least be tanned, toned and conspicuously free of any third arms sprouting out of his back.

No, if Fox really wanted to test the limits of human affection, the network would have commissioned a show where the would-be suitor is locked in a crate and can only communicate with his lady love through a narrow slit in the side of his four-by-four-foot prison. Love in a Box, they could call it, and each week, the happy couple could get to know each other through a series of conversations and physical challenges. Win the challenge and the woman gets to see a single body part of her choosing (and since this is Fox, we know which parts she'll be encouraged to pick). At the end of the series, the woman gets to choose -- open the box and free her true love inside or move on without ever setting eyes on this wonderful man she's gotten to know in front of a national TV audience.

The surprise twist, of course, will be that all that time in a hot, sweaty box will leave the suitor with an untreatable skin condition. Still, it's all in good fun, unless someone dies. Then, it's mostly in good fun.

• Michelle tells Tony that it's crucial he get some information to the President right away. Tony responds with a several-minute-long smoldering stare.
• Kim comes across an alien spaceship and asks the aliens if she can come in and use their shower.
• Jack gets his ass kicked.
• The President heightens the dramatic tension by creating an entirely artificial deadline.
• Kim is attacked by hipster '80s vampires, one of whom looks remarkably like her father.
• CTU catches fire. Michelle and Tony make out.
• Jack notices that something very dramatic seems to happen at 59 minutes past every hour. He muses on this coincidence while getting his ass kicked.
• The President is completely trusting of his Chief of Staff despite the fact that the camera lingers on him when scenes end.
• Kim is attacked by an angry and slightly larger-than-average vole. She and the vole fall in love.

We know this news could possibly throw your entire world into disarray, and yet, we feel honor-bound to pass along the news, as disturbing and upsetting as it may be. You might want to sit down before you read the next paragraph and the world-altering information contained therein. The faint of heart should scroll away. After this, there is no turning back.

According to MediaWeek, cable channel TNN is changing its name.

I guess, upon further reflection, this news is not exactly shocking. TNN, after all, leads the league in name changes, having its letters stand for The Nashville Network back when the penny-ante cable channel was airing country music videos and tractor pulls to The National Network when the still penny-ante cable channel "upgraded" to airing Dukes of Hazzard reruns and tractor pulls. Once professional wrestling and Miami Vice reruns entered the mix, TNN decided to leave its hillbilly past completely behind when it redubbed itself The New TNN. The fact that the name change meant the cable channel was now referring to itself as The New The National Network, while grammatically imprecise, was not nearly so disturbing as the network's insistence that it was still The New TNN several years after the name change. And now, upon realizing after everyone else in America that The New TNN is pretty much The Same Old Lousy TNN, the brain trust running the drooling basic cable stepchild of the vast Viacom empire has changed the name of the channel once more to -- hold on to your hats, now -- Spike TV.

Those of you who had bet friends and loved ones that there couldn't possibly be a more idiotic name for a cable TV channel than The New TNN, please settle your debts.

Spike TV -- ponder it, behold it, swirl it around in your mouth like a flavorful yet impertinent cabernet before discharging it into the spit bucket. What does it mean? What does it stand for? Just what exactly does the new moniker presage about the tectonic shift in programming we can expect from the cable channel formerly known as TNN?

Shows about the Trans-Pacific Railroad and the metal rods used to connect the rails? Exciting reality programming about heartless editors putting the kibosh on substandard articles? All volleyball, all the time? A block of shows about pretty, pouty bleach-blonde vampires with faux British accents?

Oh God, no. Let's turn the podium over to TNN president Albie Hecht to explain just what the heck is going on.

"Spike TV captures the attributes and essence of what we want the first network for men to be," Hecht told MediaWeek. "It's unapologetically male; it's active; it's smart and contemporary with a personality that's aggressive and irreverent. This is a first major step in our journey to super-serving men in a way no one has done before."

Now, I hate to contradict Albie, a man who has clearly risen to the top of his profession through a combination of brains and guile, but I hear the words "Spike TV" and I don't think "unapologetically male," "active," "smart," "contemporary" or any of the other buzzwords some tool-using primate in the Viacom marketing department strung together. No, the words I associate with Spike TV are more along the lines of "pathetic," "sputtering," "horrible focus-group-derived thinking" and "vaguely sad." Also, I'm not exactly sure what Albie means by "super-serving men" but I think there are some movies dealing with the subject behind the red curtain in the back room at my local video rental store.

But really, I want to help Albie, not hurt him. And if I'm going to take the time to heap well-deserved ridicule and derision upon his network's new name, the least I can do is come up with an alternative that meets the twin objectives of promoting Spike TV's male-focused programming while sparing the network the embarrassment that comes from a having a name that sounds like it was selected at random during a game of Boggle.

Now my first choice, Your Home for Baywatch Reruns, certainly captures the spirit of Spike TV's programming mission. But it lacks the punchiness and pithiness that looks so good on T-shirts and souvenir coffee mugs. Likewise, Grunt and Scratch TV -- GSTV, for short -- shouts out "Young males, tune in!" but I worry that viewers might easily confuse it with HGTV and tune in expecting to see Martha Stewart decorating a credenza only to find The Rock smashing a folding chair over the head of Bill Goldberg. Not that the two programs aren't similar, but still, confused viewers might be easily disappointed.

So I was about to throw up my hands and admit that maybe Albie Hecht was right. Maybe Spike TV was the best possible choice for a network trying to sate the public's hunger for episodes of Blind Date and Real TV. Then, just as things looked their bleakest, it hit me -- the perfect successor for TNN/The New TNN/Spike TV. A name that captures the network's spirit, its divine spark, its raison dêtre.

Ass TV.

Think about it. It's perfect. It's punchy. It says all there is to say about TNN's place in the cable universe. And it achieves three goals in one fell swoop: 1) It lures viewers in with the promise of partial nudity; 2) It more or less perfectly describes the channel's target demographic; and 3) If Albie Hecht is any indication, Ass TV does a pretty good job describing the people running the network, too.

I find HBO's decision to postpone the airing of Oliver Stone's documentary on Fidel Castro to be kinda silly. I mean, you do this documentary on an evil dictator, and then a month before broadcast, said evil dictator starts cracking down on the people in his country and stuff. All of a sudden HBO gets cold feet, as if they were saying: "Oh my God, this guy really is evil!"

Well, no shit, Sherlock. Was HBO thinking they were doing a documentary on Mother Teresa?

Evil dictators do evil stuff. If you aren't prepared for the possibility that the evil dictator may actually do evil, maybe you shouldn't do a documentary about an evil dictator.

Okay, everyone stop voting for Carmen now.

No, I mean it.

I just spent nearly an hour watching Cruel TV. The channel listing said it was MTV, but I know better.

Every year in the spring MTV turns into Cruel TV -- for me, anyway. The channel starts transmitting reality shows from this other planet, a planet I've never been to, where all the guys have to clean between their abdominal muscles with cotton swabs and the girls take their tops off at the slightest provocation. Every day is sunny, every beach is peopled with tan and sculpted beauties, every bar is crammed with sweaty extras from a Nelly video. Every year around this time, MTV turns its cameras on Spring Break.

This is a planet I sure would like to visit, but let me tell you: I've never even been in the same solar system. I went to an engineering school. The only people there with tans were Indians and African-Americans -- and even some of them were pale. The only girls who were willing to take their tops off at the slightest provocation were the kind you wished would put on a heavier wool overcoat. We may have needed Q-tips to clean our sulci, but our muscles needed help. Not for nothing was our standard chant at lacrosse games, "That's all right, that's okay/You're gonna work for us some day!"

So for many years now MTV has become Cruel TV for me and the people from my planet. But last week it became Cruel TV for its own citizens when it aired the two reality shows Burned and One Bad Trip.

Burned is high cruelty. Any male will wince at this description: MTV and some guy's best friend set up this sap to have a ridiculously gorgeous girl show interest in him while hidden cameras and microphones record the whole thing. The girl and the sap make conversation for a while; the girl makes some pretense to leave for a bit; the sap's best friend shows up and gets his pal talking trash about the girl. Then the girl returns to invite the sap to a party the next night, said party turning out to consist of fifty more ridiculously gorgeous girls who all watch the sap's attempts to schmooze his way into the pants of the first girl. Everyone laughs, the sap's will to live is destroyed, commercial for blue jeans comes on.

The episode I saw consisted of three poor saps being preyed upon by MTV and three hopelessly, endlessly beautiful would-be starlets, who are I guess trying to get back at some man in their early lives what done 'em wrong. Maybe one was dumped when her high school boyfriend realized her cleavage was the deepest part of her personality; maybe one wasn't cast as the lead in the school play because of her enormous horse teeth. Maybe one of them is a space vampire intent on sucking humankind's collective will to live. I sure don't know. But whatever it was, these three hussies really worked the poor saps over. One guy performed an entire monologue from "Jerry Maguire," another guy admitted he shaved "downtown." Just imagine, guys, what you'd do while talking to the prettiest girl who has ever given you the time of day: How big of an idiot would you make of yourself? These guys did no worse.

Admittedly, the guy who told his best friend that the starlet was "on his fucking dick" was not the nicest guy.

But what are we to expect from these guys? They're on Spring Break! They probably spent every year since starting junior high watching MTV and learning therefrom how one behaves on Spring Break. So they show up at the beach, all chiseled muscles and tanned skin, rippling and flexing their way around town just like they're supposed to, and at some bar up walks the smokin' hottie they've been waiting for all week, and the hottie makes all friendly (keep in mind that these women are of easy enough virtue to get paid to sucker unassuming men using hidden cameras), and when the men respond as expected -- as they've been told to do by years of MTV Spring Break video training! -- the same organization that made them what they are snaps the trap and crushes their spines.

This is simply cruel. Bad enough MTV had to make me feel bad about being flabby and dough-colored and pimply and sexless every year, now they've gone ahead to wreck the springtime for the good-looking and bronzed.

The second show, One Bad Trip, was both better and worse. In this one they found some handsome young man heading to Cancun for Spring Break and gave him and his friends video cameras along with the slight prevarication that they should record what they were doing for an MTV Spring Break special. At the same time MTV got the young man's parents and ex-girlfriend to come to Cancun also, where they were given all sorts of spy equipment, cameras, and a make-up staff so they could see what their young man was doing throughout his vacation weekend.

What did he do? He did what any red-blooded American MTV-watcher would do: He went to contests where he competed by dancing lewdly with a girl with large and freely waving funbags; he went to a bar and did body shots off some other hot chick; he and his friends got a limo and went to a club and picked up some more young women of negotiable virtue; and fill in the rest.

Meanwhile, his ex-girlfriend from home, apparently the kind of psychotic nutjob your mother warned you about, dressed up as a club chick to follow him into the bar and got all pouty when he made out with his erstwhile cupholder, then got gussied up as a jaded Goth chick to glare at him while he competed in a "sexiest kiss" contest at a hotel pool. In both places video footage was supplied by the Sony Spycam hidden in her glasses.

His mom and dad watched him dance in another contest using binoculars from their hotel window. Then his mom went undercover as a hotel maid and came through her son's room after a night of debauchery, finding him and his two friends passed out in bed with a girl between each of them. Lastly, his dad played limo driver, accompanying his son and pals to the club and then back to their hotel with a car full of club babes.

This is all plenty creepy enough, especially watching the dad try really hard to appear vaguely disapproving about all this when he's so obviously jealously pleased at his son's good time. But then the comeuppance, of course: The parents surprise their son with their presence in Cancun, show him the tapes of his carousing, and confront him with his ex-girlfriend. She's the one clearly hurt by all this: She says that she wondered what kind of guy he "really" was, and now she knows how he behaves when she's not around. And she is tearfully ready to get on with her dating life, now that, I suppose, the entire country knows her to be an insanely possessive harridan of an ex-girlfriend. I can only imagine how she would have felt if they'd still been dating. How did she manage to convince herself that this one weekend in Earthly Paradise showed who he "really" was? How sad can one get over watching an ex-boyfriend pick up girls?

The guy, for his part, takes this all as well as could be expected, and even bashfully admits his love for his ex, admitting before the world that he didn't actually have sex with those hotties he woke up next to. But there's one Spring Breaker who'll think twice next year before he gets up onstage with another topless chick!

I understand that in these dark days entertainment media eats it young, that this is the way MTV has chosen to do business. But I find it disturbing. How can MTV pour shame and derision on these young men who are only doing its bidding? Aren't these the kinds of people MTV makes its living from?

Of course they are. Handsome young men and beautiful young women, preferably in small swatches of expensive designer clothing, are what MTV is all about. Either you are them or you want to be them, that's how MTV wants to break down the world: Either you're the product in the music video/commercial/reality show or you're buying the product in the music video/commercial/reality show. Because you want to be the product.

And these young men -- and the young women, who are not directly humiliated by these shows, although they clearly are humiliated by being involved with them -- are executed after being born and raised, all services provided by MTV, where the M stands for Medea.

Actual conversation from an actual Oakland Athletics telecast, as Chris Singleton legs out an infield single and momentarily mulls turning it into an infield double:

Ray Fosse: Oh, to have speed. The speed of Chris Singleton forced the play, forced Brett Boone to charge to try and make a spectacular play... that's just the great speed that forced the issue. Love to talk about it, never had it.

Greg Papa: Count is 1-0 on Miguel Tejada. You never had speed, even when you were a young guy, huh?

Fosse: First year.

Papa: First year as a rookie?

Fosse: And then I lost it.

Papa: You mean when you were this young good looking guy back in 1969 (showing Fosse's rookie card on the screen), you had speed?

Fosse: Yes. (awkward pause) Until Pete Rose crippled me.

OK, he didn't say that thing after the awkward pause, but still.

I hate Wayne Brady, and I hate his show. I don't know -- I guess it's because he so happy all the time. He's always singing and dancing or something. Maybe it's because I can no longer see the good in the world. Maybe I'm just a glass-is-half-empty kind of guy. Whatever the reason, Wayne Brady makes me sick inside.

He reminds me of this time me and some buddies went to Applebee's, and the waitress was like relentlessly cheerful. Every five minutes she's coming over and asking us how things are going. She just won't leave us alone! How can a man eat that? You can't! Every time I'd try to get into some kind of eating rhythm, she'd be back checking up on us. And it was always at a moment you'd least expect it. You'd have mouthful of chicken-fried steak when she'd come out of nowhere and scare the bejeezus out of you. I swear to God, I almost choked to death three times.

See, the sad thing is, she thought she was making us happy customers. But every act of kindness and consideration on her part was just making me hate her. That's fucked up, I know. But it's just that I don't trust those who are too happy. What right do they have to be so happy and why do they have to impose their happiness on me? I'll admit it, I'm miserable son of a bitch. But the thing is, I'm happy being a miserable son of a bitch.

Anyhow, we never went to Applebee's again, that's for damned sure.

The third season of Ed is over. Word on the street -- or anyway word as it leaks into the TeeVee offices -- is that this was probably the last season of the series, although we haven't heard anything formal yet. But this season finale sure smelled like a series finale, so we shouldn't be surprised if Tom Cavanagh and his bedhead and Julie Bowen and her smirk have been retired from series television, at least for now. Not that it would matter around our watercooler here -- or around the whiskey cabinet, for that matter -- since most of the staff pulled Ed from their TiVos halfway through this disastrous year.

But I feel something should be said about the show. We here at TeeVee were all over Ed at its inception, reviewing it favorably; and we even gave it our 2001 Best New Show Award. More recently we mentioned the show a couple of times, just to keep interest up, because it looked like the creators were going to pull the series out of its nosedive. And I watched until the bitter, bitter end, I sure did.

Let's look back on Ed's three seasons, shall we?

The show began on the ancient and rickety premise of Will They or Won't They. Which probably meant the show was doomed from the start, because any show based on Will They or Won't They must eventually answer the question, and pretty much after that all interest drains out of the show. Most of the time interest drains out of the show long before that, actually, since viewers stop giving a crap pretty quickly. But Will They or Won't They remains a popular premise because it's easy at first, and here it was again: Will Ed and Carol get together? That was the whole show for a bit.

But I held out hope that Rob Burnett and his team would be smart enough to find a way around the Will They or Won't They dilemma. The show was pretty smart, after all. And after the initial episodes of playing with the premise, it began to look as if Ed's creatives might have the talent to skip around the problem. They might even solve it, this Fermat's Last Theorem of TV.

After a few more episodes, though, they began to slip. For a while there it looked like Ed might get together with Molly -- does anyone remember the moony eyes Molly used to make at Ed? -- but that kind of fell off the script radar. The writers, who had worked so hard to get rid of Carol's first obnoxious boyfriend, invented a new obnoxious boyfriend. But then the writers got back on the wagon and they began to humanize the boyfriend and settle into a groove.

And I started thinking that Ed was going to turn around. After a season and a half of Will They or Won't They, it would explore in a mature way the development of a friendship between a man and woman who are not romantically involved. New territory! Well, new for an hour-long sitcom, anyway.

Then the boyfriend began to act like a jerk again, and I thought, crap, there it all goes. Then they got Ed a new girlfriend, and my hopes were raised. Then she turned out to be the crazy Kelly Ripa, and my hopes were dashed. I mean, she already had steady work, no way she'd ever rise above that "guest starring" credit.

As of the end of the second season, things were not looking so good. Instead of the mature exploration of friendship I had hoped for, Ed became downright creepy, with Ed becoming nastily fixated on Carol. By the last episode, I was pretty sure Ed was going to follow Carol and Dennis off on their vacation and kill them in some lonely arroyo in New Mexico.

The third season deserved my earlier use of the word "disastrous." The first half of the season saw the plots devolve to terrible depths of stupidity as the writers tried to keep mining the Will They or Won't They vein. At long last, it collapsed, as the writers shuffled Carol's boyfriend off unceremoniously and in two miserable episodes dragged loyal audience members through the worst slurry of Ed and Carol's dementia imaginable.

But then things picked up. Apparently realizing they had screwed the pooch on this one, Burnett and his team took a totally new direction, getting Ed a real, new girlfriend and finding a steady course of decent plotting as we watched their relationship develop.

And then here's what I think happened. I have no reason for thinking this, no inside knowledge, nothing to go on but the show. Here's what I really hope happened: Word came down that Ed was on the bubble. NBC started looking a little askance at the show. Trigger fingers got itchy. And Ed's creators, knowing or sensing that their show was in trouble, decided to wrap up the Will They or Won't They with extreme finality.

That meant, for the last few episodes of the season, deliberately sabotaging their efforts to turn the show around. Suddenly Carol had to decide that she really did love Ed, three seasons' of shows to the contrary. Suddenly Ed had to be ambivalent about his relationship with his new girlfriend. And suddenly his new girlfriend needed to get upset about Ed's previous relationship to Carol.

Script pages flew out windows in a flurry of rewriting at this point. That's what I'd like to think.

What we know, though, is this: They wrapped up the season, and possibly the series, finally getting Ed and Carol together. The end.

Not the mature end, not the best end, not the unpredictable end. Just the usual solution to the Will They or Won't They premise, after which the show is supposed to fold.

My only question is this: What if Ed isn't cancelled?

During its three years on the air, Ed sure has been disappointing. But the disappointments are in contrast to its high points. I mean, I don't ever tune in to Just Shoot Me and get more than I expect, and I never get less. I just don't expect a whole lot out of it. It performs. But Ed could be disappointing because Ed could be really, really good. It could be very funny and it could be touching. It could bring back memories and it could light up insights. Granted that Ed was never high art and a lot of its sentiments were more cloying than a religious Hallmark card; but it was good entertainment, entertainment we didn't have to feel guilty or cheap about enjoying. Those sentiments were sincere, and I'm glad someone is sincere in this world of hip irony.

I'm not ashamed to say I enjoyed Ed, right up to the end, right along as it was disappointing me, falling into the traps I'd hoped it would skirt. Right as it blundered into the ending we'd all been waiting for but which I, for one, had hoped would never happen in quite that way.

If Ed does return, hopefully it will be with a renewed sense of purpose. There's still time for Rob Burnett and company to turn it around, to turn the lead of Will They or Won't They into television gold. If Ed does return.

And if Ed does not return, well, I'll miss it.

You know, back when Ed was first airing, I wanted to live in Stuckeyville. It seemed to me that Stuckeyville was just what I wanted in a town: A nice main drag, a bowling alley, a park in the middle, nice neighbors. A pie shop, a bar. What a great place to live! Where could that be, I wondered? Not L.A., certainly, and not New York, because the color of the air was all wrong. Some place in Ohio or Illinois, I figured, just where the fictional Stuckeyville was set.

Then I found out Ed was filmed in my home state of New Jersey. Holy crap!

You know that shot in the opening credits sequence, the one where Ed is pulling into Stuckeyville and the camera cranes up and up, looking down this beautiful perfect American main street? That's Westfield, New Jersey, and about five inches to the right is Route 22, possibly one of the most congested highways in this great state -- and that's saying something. Houses in this wonderful slice of Americana, by the way, run easily up into the $2 million range. You can get a three-bedroom shack starting at $220,000. Ed's house, I find myself shouting at the TV, is probably over half a million bucks.

So it turns out I can't afford the American nirvana so effortlessly portrayed on Ed, at least not in this state.

Once I had the idea of performing an Ed pilgrimage, going to find Stuckeybowl (I got the street address from the Web) and visiting locations. A friend of ours, she knew a guy who drove a truck for the production company or whatever. I was going to pull some strings, find out when they'd be around, maybe try and catch up with the filming. Like that.

But then the show stopped being worth that kind of effort.

You know, I'm just a short distance away from being one of them loser fanboys.

Hello, TeeVee readers! This is James Collier reporting live from Baghdad. As has been recently reported, the U.S. and Britain have just launched a new TV service for the Iraqi people. I'm here speaking to everyday Iraqis about what they would like the coalition forces to broadcast. Sir, what is your name?

My name is Tariq al-Shara.

And Tariq, what would you like to see on Coalition television?

I would like to see the entire run of 'Freaks and Geeks'!

You, sir, what would you like to see?

I would like to see the final episode of "M.A.S.H." I was in Saddam's torture chamber when it was broadcast. I need closure. Tell me, did the people of "M.A.S.H." finally get to go home?

Everybody got to go home... but it's a shame what happened to Colonel Potter.

Did he die?

No, worse -- "AfterMASH."

You, ma'am, what would you like to see?

Saddam bad! George Bush good! I want my MTV!

And what about you? Is there anything you'd like to share?

Yes, President George Bush, for the love of Allah, no Jim Belushi! And please send American whiskey!

Well, there you have it: No Jim Belushi, and send American whiskey. I don't know about you, but I think the Iraqis are gonna be all right. This is James Collier, reporting live from Baghdad.

The night my father-in-law died, my mother-in-law got a call from the hospital sometime after midnight from a polite young man working for the hospital's organ donation program. He was properly respectful and circumspect, speaking in a voice that he no doubt imagined was soothing and empathetic but, in actuality, made him come across as menacing and unnerving. "I'm so sorry for your loss," he groaned in the same sepulchral tones that Vincent Price would use in a 1950s B-movie right before flourishing his cape and grinding up the doomed hero into hamburger. "Would you mind donating your late husband's organs?" Understandably, she hung up the phone.

She got a call the next morning from another person -- a less creepy person -- who explained, succinctly and non-ghoulishy, the merits of organ donation. My mother-in-law agreed, arrangements were made, and the woman on the other end of phone thanked her for her time. Which is when my mother-in-law asked about the macabre, off-putting young man who had phoned the night before.

There was a pause on the other end of the line, followed by a heavy sigh. "Oh, that," the woman said, in a tone of voice that suggested she had been asked a similar question before and was getting kind of tired about supplying the answer. "That was Carl. We've asked him not to talk to people like that. He thinks he's being reverent."

I thought of Carl recently and his gloomy, funereal way of soliciting organ donations when I caught a few moments of CBS's war coverage featuring Dan Rather and his gloomy, funereal way of delivering the news. And I can't help but wonder if the folks at CBS are getting as exasperated asking Dan not to talk that way as the higher-ups at the organ bank were getting with poor, misguided Carl.

It was the morning the U.S.-led forces were launching their much-hyped Shock & Awe Tour 2003 on Baghdad. CBS, which had begun the morning broadcasting the first round of the NCAA basketball tournament, cut away wisely, if somewhat abruptly, to footage of the bombing as narrated by Our Man Dan. Rather spoke in hushed, somber tones, trying to achieve that elusive mix of you-are-watching-history-unfold and oh-the-humanity! in his delivery that would convey the gravity of the situation. Rather sounded grim. Rather sounded stricken. Rather sounded...

Well, frankly, he sounded unhinged. Seriously.

I have no idea what's waiting for us when we shuffle off this mortal coil and head for the light. But after hearing Dan Rather solemnly and glumly reporting on the latest Gulf War, I'm convinced that his disembodied voice will be waiting for us on the other side, greeting us in the afterlife.

And because of that chilling realization, I now fear the Reaper.

Rather wasn't doing himself any favors on this particular morning, thanks to his understandable yet ultimately misguided decision to pause at every explosion so that the viewer at home could marvel in terrorized wonderment at the full might of U.S. air superiority. The result was a halting, spastic delivery full of pauses so pregnant you could run to the kitchen and make yourself a sandwich in the time it took Rather to complete a sentence. Nothing wrong with that, I suppose -- so long as you're not really trying to come across as a competent, composed professional, but rather an unfocused, raving lunatic who's on the verge of filling one of those pregnant pauses with a torrent of profanity and gibberish.

In Rather's defense, there are worse ways to anchor the news, and most of them are on full display over on the Fox News Channel, where the presenters cover the war with the same gusto John Madden shows for a midseason Cowboys-Redskins game. I guess I'll take stumbling, gloom-filled gravitas over gung-ho, chattering gasbaggery most of time, though truth be told, I'd probably just turn off both and read the morning paper.

But that doesn't address the central dilemma facing CBS. If we accept the premise that a TV news anchor is basically just a glorified newsreader whose major job requirement is to appear reassuring and authoritative as he or she mouths the words flitting across the TelePrompTer, then what do you do if your glorified newsreader has the look and demeanor of a haunted madman? Or, more to the point, are high ratings still a good thing if the only reason people are tuning into your network news coverage is to see if this is the night Dan Rather loses it on the air and comes back from a commercial break wearing his pants on his head as he begins relaying the transmissions from his home planet?

Because that day is coming, and it's coming soon.

Forget for a moment the cottage industry that has sprung up among Web sites and right-leaning advocacy groups attempting to document Rather's alleged bias by charting the number of times he makes lemon faces while interviewing Dick Cheney. The major problem with having Dan Rather helm your network's newscast is the alarming frequency with which he loses his shit. It's never a good sign when you ask someone if they remember "that crazy thing Rather did" and the first response isn't, "What did he do?" but instead, "Which crazy thing?"

Before his insanely bold artistic impulse to narrate the leveling of Baghdad as if he were the Angel of Death, the CBS anchor was stumbling through the most recent big news story of the year, the Columbia disaster. Interviewing an expert on space exploration about what would happen to the astronauts onboard the international space station, Rather's line of questioning became increasingly agitated and unsettled. Are the astronauts trapped up there, Rather wanted to know. No, the expert explained, because if worse came to worst, there was an onboard escape capsule they could use. But that's risky and untried, Rather exclaimed. Well, not really, the expert calmly countered, since astronauts do train and prepare for such possibilities. And on it went -- Rather sounding hysterical and the expert doing his best to soothe him. Good thing, too, or the interview might have ended with Rather asking when we should surrender the space station and its astronauts over to the forthcoming horde of alien conquerors while Ed Bradley prepared off-camera to subdue the anchor with a tranquilizer dart.

It was an upsetting, devastating moment, the space shuttle disaster. I know it knocked me for a loop, and I'm pretty sure that I couldn't have pulled myself together enough to go on network TV and form coherent sentences. Trouble is, neither could Dan Rather, and that's what he's supposed to do.

Look, Dan Rather's had a hell of career. Most people would be fortunate to enjoy a fraction of his success, the hack writer of this sentence included. He rose to his present position by taking on a thankless task -- replacing the most beloved and trusted network news anchor in history, and doing at a time when the influence and relevance of network news was depreciating on a daily basis. He kicked up an appropriate level of fuss whenever his network seemed bent on squandering its legacy as a news-gathering organization, and -- brief flirtations with Cobs sweaters and bizarre, off-putting sign-off lines aside -- he managed to comport himself with a reasonable level of decorum.

Managed. Past tense.

Dan Rather's a big boy. He doesn't need the likes of me telling him that it's time to hang it up. He's been sitting in that anchor chair for 20-plus years, and I don't imagine he's going to leave it before he's good and ready or before Sumner Redstone pries it from his cold, dead fingers. But I also don't imagine he would relish the notion that a growing percentage of his audience is tuning in expecting him to sing train songs or use sock puppets to illustrate some arcane point of national policy or some other crazy thing. And he shouldn't relish it... because that audience sure is.

For the last four years, maybe more, I have been beset by this Sears commercial. I assume it doesn't run throughout the country, but here it does run, all through the summer, all during Nickelodeon's children's programming. In it a couple of happy homebodies are sweating out another scorching summer day and decide to call Sears for a central air conditioning system, and the very next instant they are happily freezing their secondary sexual characteristics off while, presumably, less perspicacious couples are dying of heat stroke in each other's arms.

The commercial itself isn't unpleasant or offensive in its own low-rent way, but it is ubiquitous. It airs just about once an hour every daylight hour for the entirety of May, June, July, and August, at least, and very probably for most of April and September, too.

Last summer I realized I had been living with this couple and their indoor environmental concerns for most of the life of my eldest son. Not long after that Sears, apparently cued by their Advertising, Division of Telepathy Department, started running a new commercial for the winter months. This new commercial was very nearly the same only the reverse: A couple is unhappily freezing their secondary sexual characteristics off and they order a new heating system. See the difference?

This commercial ran all winter much the same way the previous commercial ran all summer, about once every hour, until I became friends with this new environmentally challenged couple.

Perhaps Sears commercials are now run on some automatic switching system, because last month the heating commercial went away and was replaced by the old favorite, cooling commercial.

The only problem with this: Three days ago it was snowing.

One of the more bizarre moments during Shock & Awe, Live from Baghdad: Laurie Dhue was questioning Fox correspondent Rick Leventhal, who as we all know is embedded with some Marines, providing Fair and Balanced coverage. Forget for a moment that Leventhal, apparently high on wacky juice, asked two separate Marines, "Are you enjoying yourself?" Both paused for several seconds, obviously contemplating whether to answer, "Am I enjoying killing masses of foreigners I've never met in a distant country I'll never visit again, all whilst getting shot at and never knowing if I'm going to see my wife and kids again? Is that your question, you blithering ass?" before simply answering, "Uh, no. I'd rather be home."

No, instead there was the interview when another Marine learned Dhue was in the studio and began to wax poetic. "Aw, gee, Rick, we're huge fans of Laurie. We think she's really pretty, and she's got a great smile, and..." Being the professional he is, and clearly opting to side with the celebratory high-fives and cigar lightings in Fox's broadcast booth over Dhue's nervous chuckles, Leventhal immediately piped in: "And just think, she lives next door to me!"

There you go: "Fox News Channel -- Fair and Balanced Coverage, Slightly Lacking in Professionalism. Only Two Restraining Orders Since 2002."

I spent the past weekend in my parents' full-time motorhome. We had a nice time -- there was plenty of good grandparent-baby interaction. But there was also plenty of unfortunate television.

I'm not one of those people with parents who are addicted to JAG and CSI and various other three-letter shows that air on CBS, even though my parents have the capability -- they've got a satellite dish and can watch anything they damned well please. My parents have, for whatever reason, gotten off the undesirable-demographic-drama gravy train at some point between the airing of Matlock and Touched by an Angel.

Instead, they've gone on a binge of the worst sort of reality programming: 24-hour cable news. See, my parents are a Fox News Channel household. They've got the dish pointed right down the maw of Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes' brainchild, and so the entire weekend I got to be exposed to the channel that gives you "Real Journalism, Fair and Balanced" -- and isn't afraid to tell you so repeatedly.

Although my parents are much more conservative politically than I am, this is not a rant about Fox's conservative leanings. I am a moderate who has voted Republican more times than not, and my lengthy experience in journalism circles has taught me that in general, the news media is populated by far more Democrats than Republicans, and the Republicans who surely must exist somewhere tend to make themselves as scarce as Iraqi critics of Saddam Hussein. But while I do think that Fox News Channel lays their conservatism on a bit thick, I don't have a problem with that.

What I have a problem with is that Fox News Channel is simply awful. It's poorly produced and -- what's worse -- full of terrible, terrible journalism.

This is not to say that CNN and MSNBC are beacons of brilliant journalism. Generally, this 24-hour-a-day war coverage has been non-nutritious, full of seemingly exciting imagery that means less and less as you watch it until you realize you've lost any grip on the context of the situation. You stay tuned hoping to see a moment that's remarkable and defining -- and occasionally, as with the first live glimpse of tanks rumbling through the desert on a pixelated videophone, or with the first live firefight in Umm Qasar, you get it. Momentary shocks of adrenaline serve to keep you hooked -- as did the first reports, last night, that the U.S. had once again found a "target of opportunity" against the Iraqi leadership.

But if I find the live coverage on CNN to be enthralling but empty, at least it's reported fairly well. Aaron Brown, when he can be troubled to haul his ass off the golf course and into the studio, is brilliant: skeptical, serious, fair, and most importantly, not afraid to admit when he doesn't really know what a new piece of information really means.

This is in stark contrast to our good friends at Fox News Channel, many of whom must have skipped over Journalism 101 on their way to Fox's Global News Headquarters in New York City.

Because while Fox News Channel may be conservative politically, they are hardly conservative when it comes to jumping to conclusions. During this war, the conclusion-jumping has come fast and furious. Last weekend, we watched as the network reported a chilling find: hundreds of boxes full of human remains in a warehouse in southern Iraq. Evidence of more horrible atrocities by the brutal regime of Saddam Hussein? That was the first thing to pop into my head, and Fox News Channel's various anchors gave voice to those worries. The problem is, they stated their worries as facts. Over the course of several hours, this warehouse grew a second room featuring "meat hooks where people were tortured" and a menacing series of bullet holes, "head high."

Pretty creepy, except I managed to spy something on the annoying Fox News Channel ticker (Terror Status: High!) -- an item that said the Iraqi government claimed that these were bodies of soldiers who died in the Iran-Iraq war back in the '80s whose bodies were only recently returned by Iran.

A fact that Fox's anchors didn't mention for hours, despite its presence lurking on their channel's own ticker. After all, why let messy possible explanations spoil a perfectly good story about Iraqi crimes being uncovered by our troops?

The next day, the story was completely different -- now with tales of meat hooks and head-high bullet holes gone, replaced by confirmation that the bodies were indeed from the Iran-Iraq war.

In an atmosphere where even the kooky Iraqi Information Minister gets his statements reported, it seems a little ridiculous that a plausible explanation for those bodies would be ignored. Let's not forget Fox News Channel's credo -- "fair and balanced." That means, if someone offers an explanation for dead bodies in a warehouse, you report that explanation. That's balanced. It's not fair if you jump to the worst possible conclusion, no matter who you're reporting on -- the U.S.-led forces, the Iraqis, Mother Teresa, Hitler. Anyone.

Fox News Channel's anchors jump to a lot of conclusions. In fact, most of the anchors offer so little restraint, it's almost laughable. I've seen local newscasters with twice the gravity of some of Fox's anchors. Perhaps that's why Fox News Channel is playing a game of three-card monte with its anchors during this war (called "War in Iraq" by CNN, but by the government-created slogan "Operation Iraqi Freedom" -- complete with swooping patriotic eagle! -- by Fox). On CNN, Aaron Brown seems to be on the air for six hours at a shot, anchoring the prime-time and late-night coverage. Meanwhile, Fox apparently changes anchors on an hourly basis. Look, there's cutie anchor Laurie Dhue! Nope, she's gone. Now there's Jon Scott! My parents met his parents at the Rose Parade. But no! He's gone, replaced by another miniskirted cutie, Kiran Chetry! And so goes the Fox news wheel, switching anchors rapidly so you won't notice the lack of credibility.

This is not to say there aren't good journalists at Fox. Their embedded reporters have had some amazing stuff, including the exclusive coverage of the first tank sweep through Baghdad and live broadcasts from a just-taken presidential palace. (Of course, as soon as we leave the embeds and head back to the studio, the anchors are crowing about how "we've taken the presidential palace!", their use of the word we turning them into the sort of cheerleader that plays well with midwestern baseball audiences -- "we win!" -- but isn't acceptable for national journalists.)

Again, Fox News Channel's slogan is: "Real Journalism -- Fair and Balanced." Forget the arrogance of having a slogan like that. Let's boil it down to the basics: before you can get to fair and balanced, you've got to practice real journalism. This weekend I didn't see any of that going on at the Fox News Channel.

Now if you'll excuse me, I've got to get back to CNN. Some guy is driving a tank somewhere, in footage I've seen 30 times before. Riveting stuff, I tell you. Riveting.

What's really great about this war coverage is watching the CNN and MSNBC embeds talking about how their units aren't in Baghdad yet and they have no idea when they're getting there. Chip Reid on MSNBC was asking a colonel about their plans for Baghdad and you could tell he was an inch away from getting down on his knees and begging, "Please, please, colonel, sir, can we please go to Baghdad now? Fox is getting all the good shots!"

INT. Palestine Hotel, Baghdad - Day

INFORMATION MINISTER: I just want to say, we are killing the Americans at every turn. The Tigris will run red with the blood of American crusaders!

REPORTER: What about the reports of tanks in the city?

INFORMATION MINISTER: Tanks? There are no tanks!

[An American TANK bursts through the back wall of the hotel, showering debris. We lose track of the information minister.]

INT. Underneath a desk in the Palestine Hotel, Baghdad - Day

INFORMATION MINISTER: We will fight the Americans at every turn! They will never conquer us! [turns to other person under the desk with him.] Any more questions?

GEN. TOMMY FRANKS: No, that about wraps it up for me.

There's a commercial that's been getting heavy-play during the NCAA basketball tournament, and, as a result, it's now seared onto my brain, replacing several particularly haunting childhood traumas. You've probably seen it -- guy arrives at a party, espies his wife across the room and starts heading toward her. But the poor schmoe can't walk five steps without someone blocking his path and demanding to know what's different about him. Lose some weight? Dye your hair? Get a new job? The guy demurs and keeps walking, only to be stopped by another prying busybody. New clothes? New glasses? New exercise routine? No, no, and no, Scoop. Buzz off. So the guy finally reaches his wife and lets her, and by extension us, know why he was late to the party -- he stopped by the doctor and picked up that prescription for Viagra she's been nagging him to get.

I understand the point of the commercial. Once you screw up your courage and ask your doctor to prescribe you some of that Viagra, the commercial is saying, friends, colleagues, and passersby will be awed and dumfounded by your now effusive confidence and virility. I get it, OK, Pfizer?

Or at least, I would understand the point of the commercial if I didn't have the mental capacity of a seventh grader. Because each time I see that commercial -- and have I mentioned I see it a lot? -- I keep waiting for the same exchange.

"Hey, Bob. New diet?"

"Nope."

"Been working out lately?"

"Nope."

"Have you switched to contacts?"

"Nuh-uh."

"Suntan?"

"Nah."

"New haircut?"

"Nope."

"Oh. Because I couldn't help notice your raging erection..."

"Um..."

"And that's, like, totally new for you."