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About a week ago, I went on a rant about the depressing nature of the CBS network. For a company so comfortable in first place, it seemed to refuse any risk-taking whatsoever. This was, of course, especially true as rumors about the cancellation of How I Met Your Mother began to circulate. Well here we are a short time later, HIMYM is safe and CBS’s fall schedule adds the most ambitious (if smallest number of) new shows of any network.

While I wouldn’t by any means say I’m going to become a regular viewer of CBS programming come the fall (look, I don’t like police procedurals), I’ll certainly be checking out more of their new programming than the other guys. Why? Because they took some risks and that’s about all you can (or should) ask from broadcast television. I have the CBS vitals after this break…

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ABC is a funny network. In the early 90s it was the epicenter of the lousy-but-popular sitcom boom. NBC eventually edged it out with quality, but that period of time after The Cosby Show lost relevance and before Seinfeld and Friends exploded, ABC is what people watched when they wanted to laugh. Home Improvement was the Emmy favorite (as well as a favorite in the Pecoraro household), but as an 11 year old in 1991, it seemed that TGIF and its crop of non-threatening family comedies was all anyone ever talked about (I ran with a pretty hip crowd).

Those years are obviously long gone. Audiences want drama instead of comedy on their television sets, which is why I wasn’t shocked yesterday when NBC announced only one new comedy was being greenlit (as of now it doesn’t even have a home on the network). ABC seems to be holding out hope that audiences will eventually want to laugh again, explaining why the network has picked up four new comedies (of course it only renewed one of its existing crop, and no, it wasn’t According to Jim). The full breakdown is available after the jump…

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I can’t say for certain if this is one-hundred percent true, but it seems that in the history of modern television slow and steady has never won the race. This automatically makes me respect NBC a little more than the other networks. For a place that refused to believe television would ever change, they’ve certainly done a good job of transforming themselves into a home for innovative programming and as an alternate to cable over these past two seasons. If only audiences were actually watching. The FULL rundown of NBC’s 2007 fall lineup after the break…

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Just read me the news, dammit!
A recent Gallup poll shows that one-third of Americans have a negative view of Katie Couric, anchor of the CBS Evening News. I suppose it’s hard to get ratings when people simply don’t like you. Her competition, Brian Williams at NBC and Charles Gibson at ABC has much lower negative ratings and were more or less tied in likeability (and in ratings).
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They would just talk and talk and talk…
Gilmore Girls, the long running, quick-talking drama that began airing seven years ago on the WB, has been cancelled by the CW. This news should come as a surprise to few as the departure of the series creator last spring (and more important the dwindling audience) more or less left the writing on the wall. Given the performance of most of the CW’s line-up this year, it’ll be interesting to see if the network renews anything at all.
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I assume many, many people, tuned in to the NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams tonight to see what they would air of the “multimedia manifesto” sent to the network by Cho Seung-Hui, the man who murdered 32 people at Virginia Tech on Monday. I was one of the people who watched.

I’m no ethicist, but it seems journalistically irresponsible to air the ravings of a madman. Yes, even if the video is delivered to your doorstep. Would NBC (or any network, really) air a tape if it was sent to them from Osama bin Laden? Actually, they probably would.

I guess that’s the big question. At what point is a news organization providing legitimate information and at what point are they giving a platform to someone who absolutely doesn’t deserve it?

I’m of the opinion that in the current climate of “all media all the time,” everything should – and eventually will – be released for public consumption. That being said the platform has become more important than ever. I’m not saying that NBC shouldn’t release this content, but television is the widest possible audience and is a closed format. The viewer doesn’t have the choice of to what they’re being exposed. They either watch or don’t. Releasing the content on the web, however, gives the viewers and users alike the option of seeking out the information that they want without giving the creator of that content the satisfaction of knowing that the message was carried out as planned.

The thing is, there is certainly news in this story. The fact that those two hours between the first shooting and the second are now accounted for is worth broadcasting the story. But that story can be told without, in essence, giving a murderer an audience of twelve million people.

I’m curious what the newscasts would have looked like if the package was sent to all three major networks? Would some have taken the stance that they wouldn’t air the photos and videos?

Decide for yourself if you want to read (and see) more at MSNBC.com

The interactive cable channel Current TV came to Britain on Monday in what former Vice President Al Gore hopes to be an effort toward democracizing the television industry. For those unfamiliar with the channel, Current TV is comprised of short 3-8 minute Pods (really?) covering current event topics, with a least a third of the programming user viewer-generated (one submits their *cough* Pod, which is then posted on their website and then voted on by viewers users. The highest ranked Pods are played in rotation on the cable channel).

Let me say first of all that I am for this. I think the channel/site/company provides an excellent way for people to get their projects shown to a largish audience without having to go through the regular nonsense involving, what I assume to be a panel of network executives and chimps in suits. I know people (people who sometimes read this site) who have gone through the process and seemed to have been pleased with the outcome.

That being said, I’m not entirely convinced the system casts a big enough net. Outside of this post, and the increasingly rare occassion of people flipping through channels (really, if you have digital cable, why would you ever flip?) when do you hear about Current TV? It seems like part of the problem is the sites inability to offer embedded video. In a post-YouTube world (especially one in which Google has its own section on Current.TV) it seems preposterous that they wouldn’t let you put the content on your blog on your MySpace page or in your erotic newsletter. They will let you link to it but who clicks links anyway?

I don’t know, maybe I’m being closed-minded.

Read more on Current TV going across the pond

Vincent Pastore quits this season’s Dancing with the Stars saying he “didn’t realize just how physically demanding it would be.”

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Here are the following questions that I thought to myself while watching last night’s airing of The Half Hour News Hour on Fox News:

-Why didn’t they hire comedy writers?

-Who is the target audience for this? And does that audience actually exist?

-Does Fox News still harp about all of that “Fair and Balanced” nonsense, and if so does putting a comedy show on a news channel finally dispel those thoughts that they aren’t, in fact, a right wing mouthpiece?

-Have the creators of this show ever seen The Daily Show?

-Why is it that actually having a real live audience still can’t make it sound like real live people are actually laughing?

I didn’t think FOX could ever produce something as unfunny as Happy Hour. Now I just don’t know what to think. It was so monumentally awful writing anything about it just seems unnecessary. Did anyone else watch? What did you think?

Cable news that doesn’t involve a dead stripper.
CNN’s American Morning with Soledad O’Brien has started a new weekly series entitled “Children of the Storm.” In the series, 11 kids from all over New Orleans were given video cameras and told to document their lives.

Filmmaker Spike Lee was brought to the project for a little added motivation. “Let them know what’s happening down here, that everything isn’t okey-dokey,” he said.

The series will run until the second anniversary of hurricane Katrina with the first installment having aired last Friday morning.

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Yeah, but wait until you see Matt Lauer run the option!
Former New York Giant Tiki Barber is now a peacock. The running back is the latest addition to NBC’s Today show and perhaps more obviously, as a commentator on NBC’s Football Night in American, when the program returns next fall.
Starting in April Mr. Barber will be a corespondent at Today reporting on things from technology to health to parenting, and all while silently reminding us that he’s way more talented than we’ll ever be.

He isn’t new to broadcasting. He’s spent the past few years as a correspondent on FOX’s morning show Fox and Friends. He also has two shows on Sirius Satellite Radio.

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I seem to be writing about NBC a lot lately, though the network is in such disastrous shape it begs discussion. Here’s what we all know: NBC is in last-place. Because of this, and because parent company G.E. is responsible to its shareholders for increasing the value of its stock, NBC recently had to fire 750 employees in a massive restructuring move that included moving MSNBC from its current home in New Jersey to Rockefeller Center with the rest of NBC news. With hindsight we’re able to ask the always important question, “Jersey?”

Additionally, NBC has decided to remove all scripted comedies and dramas from the 8 o’clock hour in lieu of cheaper game shows and reality fare. This will affect the bottom line initially, but one has to wonder if Howie Mandel is really the best choice for a lead-in (over and over and over again).

This restructuring is suppose to put more of a focus on NBC’s digital properties, because, if you haven’t heard, this ‘digital’ thing might really take off. The problem is that even if this is true, someone still has to program at least 21 hours worth of prime-time television each week. After the jump, I think I’ve figured out how to do it…

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I work for a local news station. We were live last night– election night– until midnight. This is, obviously, not unheard of in the world of television news. I didn’t get home from work until well after 2am. The first thing I did was watch The Daily Show and The Colbert Report’s special “Midterm Midtacular” on my DVR. The Daily Show side was mostly funny, but the Colbert Report half was nothing shy of brilliant.

After watching, I flipped around the cable-news channels a bit to see what was happening at 3:30 AM in the land of über-news. All three networks, FOX, MSNBC, and CNN, were live. This is not a surprise as there are still two senate races that are too close to call. What was interesting was that MSNBC still had the “A” team on the set. Chris Matthews, Pat Buchanan, Bob Shrum, etc, all sitting at a desk commenting on what I can only assume they had been commenting since yesterday morning (fact: I watched Buchanan and Shrum in the exact same positions talking with Joe Scarborough yesterday afternoon around 2). Keith Olberman had been on set as late as 2:30 AM. The obvious question: “Why?”

Sure, on the west coast, the time would be just after midnight, but who cares? There gets to be a point in these races where you reach a deadlock and simply need to give things a day or two to sort themselves out. There isn’t a reason to keep your top talent on the set for that long, especially if you’d like to use them the next morning, or at the very least the next day.

EXCEPT!

If you’re MSNBC and you’re the third ranked cable-news channel you can show up the competition by claiming that you delivered the most comprehensive coverage. One has to assume that the only person watching election results at three in the morning are the die-hards and television bloggers, and seeing familiar faces at such an ungodly hour would definitely keep you watching and might even win you over the next time you’re looking for information. It’s kind of an interesting political maneuver in their own right.

None of this answers the real quesiton of the night, “why do we need all of this coverage anyway?” Have we really learning anything that we couldn’t have just found out in the morning?

On a related plane, at what point does CNN’s election night set get its own AI, revolt and then reek havoc on greater Atlanta?

It’s contract time for the FOX News Channel. Approaching its tenth anniversary (has it been that long?), FOX’s contract with cable providers is about to expire. According to the Associated Press, FOX currently charges cable systems roughly twenty-five cents per customer to carry its programming. Now that they’re the reigning cable news champ, FOX is raising its asking price seventy-five cents to a buck a customer. If cable systems don’t want to pay this, they won’t be able to carry the station.

For a bit of perspective on the matter, CNN charges around fifty-cents per customer.

Cablevision’s contract with FOX runs out on October 7th. If the two can’t reach a deal, Cablevision might pull it from its systems—systems that happen to cover most of the suburbs in the New York metropolitan area. And they’ll do it too. This is the same company that pulled the Mets off the air last summer when it couldn’t reach a deal with Time Warner Cable about carrying its MSG network. The difference being, of course, FOX News is watched by exponentially more people than my poor Mets — especially last season (am I right, people?).

While its evident that a channel like FOX News draws viewer (and thus draws subscribers to cable systems), it seems unlikely they’ll get the full dollar that they’re asking. So will FOX News start to disappear (even temporarily) from cable systems across across America? I’m wagering that it won’t, but it sure would be interesting if it did.

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Look, I don’t want to turn this into a whole political thing, but something interesting happened this past Sunday in television news. For those readers of this site who don’t own a television (or read websites other than the one you are currently reading) this past Sunday Bill Clinton appeared on Fox News Sunday with Chris Wallace and depending on who you talk to he either totally put those FOX News assholes in their place once and for all, OR! completely collapsed under the most basic of questions proving that he is a liar and was horribly suited to run this country. Of course, there’s no way to know for sure exactly who won since anyone tuning into that interview was clearly bringing their own feelings to the table (even if they say otherwise).

Either way, it was good television. It might actually be great television because everyone, conservatives and progressives alike, seemed to find it wildly entertaining– even if it was for their own self-serving reasons. Unlike John Stewart’s awkward scolding of Crossfire from a couple years back when no one was screeming at their TV, “Yeah, you stick it to him Paul Begala!” the Clinton interview was curiously two-sided. The original FOX broadcast brought in the shows best ratings in nearly three years, and the clip on YouTube (which has since been removed) was viewed 800,000 times in just under a day.

Say what you will about FOX News and its nonsense masquerading as legit information, but those guys know how to sell a product. God bless America(n television)!

Or rather, he’s going viral (maybe both).

Last week during his show he filmed a segment where he twirls around in front of a green screen (a la ‘The Star Wars Kid‘), then asked his viewers to add the special effects and put it on the web. See:

Since then, the clip has been remixed hundreds of times. You can see a large selection of them by going to www.codebot.org/colbert.

This is why Stephen Colbert’s platform is just about perfect (for him and for the network). The Colbert Report’s format is so loose they can really do whatever they want under the guise of politics or Colbert’s vanity (often both) or whatever. Likewise, the show’s audience interaction (be it Wikiality where he asked people to change the Wikipedia entry for elephants, the Hungarian bridge-naming competition, and now these jedi videos), in this the age of the internets, creates a system in which fans of the show can actively contribute to its presence– and be recognized by the show itself. Click below for more Colbert Jedi Clips…

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Aaron Barnhart of the Kansas City Star publishes the ratings for the most recent late-night period. Check it out. It’s interesting. Especially the numbers for The Daily Show, The Colbert Report and Adult Swim– not exactly industry shifting figures (though it is the dead of summer).