Al Pacino as Joe Paterno

Commercial television programming alert

I don’t watch that much commercial television: major sporting events (like the current NBA finals), Pardon the Interruption, The Rachel Maddow Show and that’s about it. It’s not that I have anything morally or even aesthetically against commercial television. It’s simply the fact that I personally feel it’s a waste of what little time I have left on this planet to sit through the "commercials" that are, by definition, the backbone of "commercial television." I don’t even watch those programs I mentioned above as they are being televised. I record them and watch them later that same day or evening so I can fast-forward through the commercials. It takes me an hour and 45 minutes to watch an NBA playoff game. The broadcast length of each of those games is between two hours and 30 minutes to three hours. That to me is a significant amount of time I am reclaiming for other uses.

As far as television series I am enamored of, and there are many, I prefer to stream them or rent/buy the season DVDs and watch them commercial-free. I recently completed watching the entire run of both The West Wing and 30 Rock and am now finishing up the second season of the 19-season Law & Order.

The very next commercial television series I am setting my recorder for begins Sunday evening and runs throughout next week. That’s O.J.: Made in America. Everything I have read about this is laudatory. Everyone I’ve talked to who has seen it either at the Sundance or the Tribeca film festivals has absolutely gushed about it. I’m hearing universal praise for this series unlike anything I have ever heard before about a commercial television program.

So for those, like me, who definitely want to see this 464-minute program, it will be shown in five parts. Here’s the schedule so you can either gather round the television or set your recorders (all times central):

• Part 1, Saturday, 8 p.m., ABC
• Part 2, Tuesday, 8 p.m. ESPN
• Part 3, Wednesday, 8 p.m., ESPN
• Part 4, Friday, July 17, 8 p.m., ESPN
• Part 5, Saturday, July 18, 8 p.m., ESPN

I imagine it will also be available soon on Blu-Ray or for streaming. In the meantime, you can watch the trailer here:

A few (unpleasant) thoughts about ‘The X-Files’ reboot

It seems difficult to believe, for me at least, Chris Carter launched The X-Files close to a quarter a century ago, on Sept. 10, 1993, to be exact. I was a big fan of the show through it’s first five seasons and one of the things I loved about the program was the way it was winking at the viewer. "Hey, don’t take any of this seriously," the show seemed to be saying. "This is simply a bunch of all-the-wall writers sitting around coming up with all these far-fetched ideas, attempting to be as outlandish as possible, and we hope you get as much a kick out of watching them as we did creating them."

I also loved the fact that David Duchovny as FBI agent Fox Mulder always approached his role as though he was in on the joke. "Isn’t this a lark?" he seemed to be saying each week. Wink, Wink, And Gillian Anderson, as his partner FBI agent Dana Scully, was Duchovny’s perfect foil, the ideal female variation of "the straight man."

Perhaps my favorite bit during those first five seasons were the "oily eyes," and if you’re a regular follower of the series you know exactly what I’m referring to. You talk about feeding the paranoia?

I also often wonder what direction the show would have taken had Anderson not become pregnant during season 2. To cover for her absence during the latter stages of her pregnancy, Carter cooked up this scenario in which Scully is kidnapped by alien abductee Duane Barry to be his sacrifice to the abductors. I never cared for that side trip and it took the show off into unfortunate areas that too often bogged it down.

But those episodes not involving Carter’s going-nowhere conspiracy theories provided some of the best drama to be found on television during the ‘90s, episodes such as "Humbug," "Clyde Bruckman’s Final Repose," "War of the Coprophages" (which contains my all-time favorite line in the history of the series when Scully says, oh so deliciously, "Bambi? Her name is Bambi?"), "Jose Chung’s From Outer Space," "Quagmire" (in which the writers allowed Scully’s cute little dog to be eaten by a water monster — trust me, it’s funny), the unbearably frank and raw "Home," "Leonard Betts," "Small Potatoes," and "Bad Blood." And Season 5's "The Post Modern Prometheus," filmed in black and white as a modern-day re-telling of the Frankenstein monster story, improves with each viewing.

But, then, Carter offered a bridge between seasons 5 and 6 with the first X-Files movie and things went downhill from there. I think Duchovny belatedly realized Carter was drinking his own Kool-Aid and that’s why he effectively left the series the last two seasons.

Which brings me to the 6-episode series concluded last night that’s being billed as Season 10. Except for parts of the third episode, "Mulder & Scully Meet the Were-monster," this was an unmitigated disaster. I understand the ratings were good, but I think, much like a Donald Trump rally, this was more the result of curiosity than support. It also allowed Carter to film additional hospital bedside scenes. Has anyone ever counted the total number of hospital bedside scenes contained in the 10 seasons of The X-Files?

But here’s the deal. I realized during the last two episodes, this had nothing to do with extending the stories of Mulder and Scully (and both Duchovny and Anderson acted like they wished there were doing something else), but it was simply a marketing ploy by Carter who wants to reboot the concept featuring the agents Einstein and Miller. Does anyone really want to see those two in an X-Files-type series? Hey, I like Lauren Ambrose, the actress who plays Einstein. She has acquitted herself well in a number of Law & Order guest appearances. But she lacks the gravitas of Anderson, unless Carter plans on the Einstein character taking on Mulder’s personality playing against Miller’s foil. But Robbie Emell, the actor portraying Miller, has all the magnetism of a wet, dirty wash cloth.

Shame on Carter. A move like this could irreparably sully the reputation of what, for five wonderful seasons at least, was some of the best television to be found.

Best TV dramatic series of the last 25 years, and the winner is …

A couple of days ago I wrote about a discovery I made about this Web site or magazine or whatever that was staging a matchup of 16 lauded television dramas to determine the best TV drama series of the last quarter century.

Each day or so two shows were pitted against one another and a noted television critic was asked to decide which of the two was the best.

I loved the whole thing because it finally came down to my two favorite TV shows of all time The Sopranos and The Wire. Matt Zoller Seitz, the television critic of New York Magazine, was tabbed to pick the winner.

Seitz used six criteria on which to base his decision. The Sopranos won two of them, The Wire won two and two he judged ties. But ultimately he chose The Wire as the best dramatic series of the last 25 years. Here’s why.

The Greatest TV Drama of the Last 25 Years

I just ran across this gimmick that a publication or a Web site (I’m not sure which) called Vulture is doing. It is conducting his own NCAA-tournament like playoff to determine the greatest TV dramatic series of the last quarter century.

It began the tournament with 16 contestants: The Sopranos, Six Feet Under, The Shield, NYPD Blue, Breaking Bad, Friday Night Lights, Twin Peaks, Battlestar Gallactica, Lost, Mad Men, Deadwood, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, West Wing, The X-Files, My So Called Life, and The Wire. (I was somewhat dismayed he didn’t include one of the Law & Order franchises, but so be it.)

Each day, the outfit has a notable television writer decide the winner between the two playoff contestants. I don’t know which show is the winner yet — New York Magazine TV critic Matt Zoller Seitz, no less, is expected to make that decision sometime later today, but it looks like it’s going to be a contest between my favorite two shows of all time: The Sopranos and The Wire.

Anyway, a second round of this tournament featured a contest between The X-Files and The Wire with critic Marc Bernadin deciding the outcome. I found this essay Bernadin wrote on the subject to be a particularly good read and I especially recommend it for the multitudes who have yet to discover the sweep, the grandeur and the Dickensonian overtones of The Wire.

Good night, Cliff

Cliff Robertson in The Best Man

Piper Laurie and Cliff Robertson in Days of Wine and Roses

I have been waiting a while to offer any kind of tribute to Cliff Robertson for a number of reasons. I have always held it against him (unfairly, perhaps, because it was not really his fault) that he won the best actor Oscar for Charly in 1968 when the award should have gone to Peter O’Toole for A Lion in Winter. For another, I have spent the last couple of days searching for a clip of what is really Robertson’s finest performance on film, but now I have given up.

Most of the tributes to Robertson in the last couple of days have focused on Charly, because he won the Oscar for it; P.T. 109, because it was his first starring film role and because, as legend has it, he was personally picked for the part by President Kennedy; and the Spider-Man films, because they were his final screen appearances after an extended absence from films.

But, to me, Robertson’s finest big screen performance was as Joe Cantrell, the opportunist presidential candidate — a combination of Joseph McCarthy and Richard Nixon, with a Kennedy veneer — in the 1964 film The Best Man.

His second best performance came on television, in Playhouse 90's version of Days and Wine and Roses (1958). I know some may consider this heresy, but Robertson actually did a better job of portraying Joe Clay than Jack Lemmon did in the later screen adaptation. Unfortunately I could not find a clip of that one either.

So I guess I'll just have to go with the above photos.

End of the soaps

I am not a fan of soap operas and admittedly not that knowledgeable about them. However, ABC's announcement that it is cancelling All My Children and One Life to Live seems to mark the end of an era, as far as I'm concerned. I guess that makes General Hospital the last of the dinosaurs.

Here's Johnny again

According to this story, more than 3,500 hours of Johnny Carson's Tonight Show has been digitized and will soon be available on-line and possibly, at a later date, on DVD. This got me to thinking about what might happen if a television network programed this material opposite Letterman-Leno et al on late night television. My gut tells me it might have higher ratings than any of them.

Some thoughts on "Law & Order"

Because I spend just about all of my waking hours (which are becoming fewer in number the older I get) working, writing, watching movies, reading, playing with my granddaughter, spending quality time with close friends, observing a major sports event and the occasional household chore, I don't have that much left to watch episodic television. I could not get all that excited about the final episode of Lost because I never saw any of the other episodes. I have never once seen a so-called "reality" show. Not that I have anything against Lost or 24 or Dexter or Mad Men or any of the other television programs folks tell me are extremely well done. It's simply a choice of what I prefer to do with my daily allotted 24 hours.

I did make it a point, however, to see Law & Order whenever I could even though I must admit that "whenever I could" usually meant when it was shown on cable channels USA or TNT. What I liked about the show was that it provided a slight twist on the normal television courtroom drama in which, before Law & Order, the heroes were always the defense attorneys. In fact, there was even a short-lived series in 1963 called Arrest and Trial that had a similar format to Law & Order, except in this one Ben Gazzara played a police officer who arrested a suspect and, in the second half of the show, Chuck Connors played the defense attorney who proved the suspect was the wrong person. (Here's a scene from that show featuring Connors and Peter Fonda.)

I did lose interest in Law & Order by the end of its 15th season, which is when Jerry Orbach, who played detective Lenny Briscoe, and Elisabeth Rohm, who played the latest in a long line of assistant district attorneys, left the show. The chemistry among the various actors who were featured in seasons 16 through 20 wasn't as potent as it was during the first 15. I must also admit I was disappointed that the show didn't make better use of that fine actor Steven Hill, who played district attorney Adam Schiff for the show's first 10 years. Hill, one of the founders of the Actors Studio, was reduced, it seemed to me, saying nothing more than "Make a deal" during this last couple of years on the show. Do yourself a favor and rent the excellent 1988 movie Running on Empty if only to see this beautiful, emotionally-charged scene between Hill and Christine Lahti. It's one of my all-time favorite movie scenes -- ranking right up close to the taxi scene in On the Waterfront. Not many folks remember that Hill also played Daniel Briggs, the original leader of the Mission: Impossible crew, when that show premiered in 1966. He left after one year because, as a Jewish actor, he refused to work on Saturdays, and was replaced by Peter Graves as Jim Phelps.

All that being said, I was rooting for the show to air for one more year just so it could have become the longest running episodic show in television history. Now it shares that distinction with Gunsmoke, a western I liked much better as a radio show than on television. The radio program seemed more realistic. I remember episodes in which Matt Dillon (played by William Conrad, who in the 1970s was the lead in the television show Cannon) performed an emergency amputation on someone who died anyway and another one in which he arrived too late to prevent a lynching. In another he saved a young woman from a gang of rapists yet couldn't stop her from becoming a prostitute. And, speaking of prostitutes, the radio show left no doubt as to the profession of Miss Kitty. Although James Arness was fine on the television version, when it expanded from 30 to 60 minutes in its seventh season it de-evolved from a western to a soap opera.

But then I have found that most television shows lose their creative energy by their seventh season. That Law & Order maintained its energy through 15 and its spinoff, Law & Order: Special Victims Unit continues to be strong through 11 seasons is miraculous. In fact, I have always found the writing for SVU to be superior to that of the original and SVU actress Mariska Hargitay has always been a revelation.

I understand that a new Law & Order show, called Law & Order: Los Angeles (I think),  is set to premier this coming fall. Dick Wolf, the creator of the Law & Order franchise and its executive producer, really blew it with this move. What he should have done is to simply pull a Johnny Carson, who, you may recall, moved his Tonight Show to Burbank, Calif., in May of 1972 after 10 years of hosting the show in New York. But it was still essentially the same show, only the location changed. If Wolf had just moved Law & Order to a new location, even with a new cast, and still called the show by its original name, he would have had his record.

One final thought: A couple of days ago I was in a conversation with My Hero and we were trying to recall who preceded Paul Sorvino as the lead detective on the show and it finally came to me it was that greatly under appreciated actor George Dzundza who played detective Max Greevey. Interestingly enough, the reason Dzundza left after one season to be replaced by Sorvino was that the commute from his home in Los Angeles to the set in New York became too strenuous for him. Dzundza is 64 now and I would like to see the Greevey character reprised in some way on the new show.

NBC has the em-FAZZ-is on the wrong sil-LAH-bull

Conan and Jay in happier times

Jay Leno attracting just about the same number of viewers at 9 p.m. that he did at 10:35 p.m. Trouble is, television moguls approximate four times as many people are watching television at 9 p.m. than are watching at 10:35, so those Leno numbers are not good. What makes matters worse is that these same moguls know that viewers don't change channels after that 9 p.m. show; they just watch whatever news comes on the same channel they were watching at 9 p.m. Now local channels make a lot of their income selling advertising during that 10 p.m. news slot and the more viewers they have, the more they can charge advertisers. Translated, that means that all those local stations whose news comes on after Leno aren't exactly thrilled that he's only attracting just about the same number of viewers at 9 p.m. that he did at 10:35 p.m. Once more, they have made their feelings known to the Big Kahunas that run Leno's network, the once-hallowed National Broadcasting Company.

So what are the NBC Big Kahunas doing? It appears to me they are doing nothing to help the locals. They are, instead, deciding to declare Leno's 9 p.m. show bankrupt and move him and his faithful viewers back to 10:35 p.m. But what to do about Conan the Barbobrien, who inherited that sacred spot once occupied by (insert a moment of revered silence here) Johnny Carson? Well, the Big Kahunas have decided to let Conan start his Tonight Show 30 minutes later, at 11:05 p.m. (in most markets his show will actually start the following day, five minutes after midnight). Now Conan may rightfully feel that this is an insult and, more important, a demotion, a penalty placed on him just because for the first time since Steve Allen started this late night talkshow silliness 56 years ago (Does the name Skitch Henderson ring a bell?) , The Tonight Show finds itself behind in the ratings to CBS and David Lettermen, who bolted NBC when he wasn't given the position of host of The Tonight Show. And if Conan does have his feelings hurt so badly that even $24 million per year can salve them (that's massive hurt feelings, folks), he may just follow Letterman's lead and bolt as well. The Fox Network is drooling at that prospect.

So the Big Kahunas are working desperately to find a way to make everyone happy after 10:35 p.m. All I have to say to the Kahunas is this: "10:35 AIN'T THE PROBLEM!!!"

The local stations aren't complaining about what comes after their news. Sure, I would imagine most of them would prefer Leno there over Conan the Barbobrien, but that's not the issue. It's what comes before their news that they are worried about. Are the Big Kahunas doing anything at all about loading the 9 p.m. slots Mondays through Fridays with solid programming? If so, I sure haven't heard a word about it. There are just so many different versions of Law & Order to go around and even those shows are showing signs of wear.

Anyway, if I were one of the Kahunas I would be searching for something solid for the 9 p.m. slots before worrying about negotiating a peace treaty between Jay and Conan.

So Fox, so good

Just made a brief tour of some of the Fox channels brought into my home by Time Warner cable and they are all on. I haven't heard any official announcement of a settlement between Fox and the cable company, however, but I felt confident enought to set ther digital recorder to record the Sugar Bowl later this evening.

By the way, Fox is asking Warner to pay it $1 per subscriber, which is absolutely ridiculous. My advice to Fox: Take between 50 and 60 cents, declare victory, and walk off into the sunset.

Update: Later in the day, I ran across this announcement of a brief, perhaps one-day, extension. Sugar Bowls' in; the Fiesta Bowl, not so much.

After the Fox

It appears, unless negotiators pull a rabbit out of someone's hat in the next 48 hours, subscribers to Time Warner Cable will lose a number of Fox channels. The issue is the amount of money Fox wants to charge Time Warner for the rights to carry those channels versus the cable company's desire not to loose subscribers with a forced rate increase. I would actually welcome losing the Fox News Channel, but I would miss the Fox Soccer Channel and particularly Fox Sports Southwest, which carries at least 50 percent of the Mavericks games (Why isn't Mavericks owner Mark Cuban stepping up to the plate here?).

The question, however, is KDFW, Channel 4. Fox says it will deny Time Warner Cable subscribers access to Channel 4 along with all the other Fox channels. If Fox has its way, that means no telecast of the Sunday Cowboys-Eagles game to cable subscribers. Unlike most, that doesn't bother me. What does bother me is the possibility of not seeing two of the only three college bowl games that interest me this year -- the Sugar Bowl (Florida vs. Cincinnati) and the Fiesta Bowl (TCU vs. Boise State) -- both of which are to be carried by Fox. (Fortunately the Texas-Alabama title game is on ABC.)

Time Warner Cable is arguing that a federal rule mandating that cable companies "must carry" all local stations to its subscribers means that Fox can't include KDFW. Fox, however, says a loophole in its contract with Time Warner supersedes the "must carry" rule and it can and will pull the plug on Channel 4.

I may be overly optimistic, but something tells me the rabbit will be pulled before the plug is.

Hollywood Reporter's 10 best of the decade

The Hollywood Reporter is ranking (and I know everyone loves rankings) all kinds of show business top 10s for the decade just about to end. Here is its list of the Top 10 movies of the decade:
1. Letters from Iwo Jima
2. United 93
3. No Country for Old Men
4. The Fog of War
5. 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (My choice as the best film of 2008)
6. Far From Heaven
7. Divine Intervention (a movie unfamiliar to me)
8. Cache
9. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
10. The White Ribbon

Top 10 TV Shows of the Decade:
(Shows that premiered in or after 1999, "judged on their artistic merit and overall contribution to the medium, not on their ratings or profit margins.")
1. The Sopranos
2. The West Wing
3. Curb Your Enthusiasm
4. The Shield
5. Damages
6. Mad Men
7. 30 Rock
8. 24
9. Lost
10. Modern Family

The Top 10 Biggest Sleeper Movie Hits of the Decade:
(Based on budget compared to box-office receipts)
1. Paranormal Activity
2. Napoleon Dynamite
3. My Big Fat Greek Wedding
4. Saw
5. Juno
6. Jackass the Movie
7. March of the Penguins
8. Slumdog Millionaire
9. Diary of a Mad Black Woman
10. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon

Top 10 Movie Flops of the Decade:
(Based on "lofty expectations dashed and high profiles brought low.")
1. The Adventures of Pluto Nash
2. Battlefield Lost
3. Land of the Lost
4. Gigli
5. Town & Country
6. Catwoman
7. The Invasion
8. Rollerball
9. Grindhouse
10. The Spirit

If you want to know the reasoning behind all these choices or to see other Reporter rankings for the decade, you'll have to go here.

Kate Winslet as a TV Mildred Pierce?

I'm hearing from reliable sources that Oscar-winner Kate Winslet's next major project will be Mildred Pierce, to be written and directed by Todd Haynes (Far From Heaven). Since the project is intended as a television miniseries, I'm thinking it will be less a remake of the 1945 film for which Joan Crawford won her only Oscar and more a fresh adaptation of James M. Cain's novel. (Other Cain novels adapted to film in the 1940s included the classics The Postman Always Rings Twice and Double Indemnity). From what I hear, the only holdup to the Winslet-Haynes project is finding someone to pick up the tab. The leading contender right now appears to be HBO.

There's also talk that, because of the successes of Doubt and Julie and Julia, that actresses Meryl Streep and Amy Adams should find more films to co-star in together. One such talked about project is a remake of All About Eve, which would be a great career move for Ms. Adams (What else does Ms. Streep have to prove?). I'm hearing if the Ms. Adams is not available, Anne Hathaway would be a possibility.

For what it's worth: Last night's Top 5 rated television shows

1. So You Think You Can Dance, 7 p.m., Fox
2. The Mentalist, 9 p.m., CBS
3. CSI, 8 p.m., CBS
4. Big Brother 11, 7 p.m., CBS
5. Law and Order, 9 p.m., NBC

For what it's worth: Last night's Top 5 rated television shows

1. America's Got Talent, 8 p.m., NBC
2. So You Think You Can Dance, 8 p.m., Fox
3. Wipeout, 7 p.m., ABC
4. CSI: N.Y., 9 p.m., CBS
5. So You Think You Can Dance, 7 p.m., Fox

For what it's worth: Last night's Top 5 rated television shows

1. America's Got Talent, 8 p.m., NBC
2. NCIS, 7 p.m., CBS
3. America's Got Talent, 7 p.m., NBC
4. Big Brother, 8 p.m., CBS
5. Hell's Kitchen, 7 p.m., Fox

For what it's worth: Last night's Top 10 rated television shows

1. Two and a Half Men, 8, CBS
2. The Big Bang Theory, 8:30, CBS
3. C.S.I. Miami, 9, CBS
4. Dateline: NBC, 9, NBC
5. Law and Order: Criminal Intent, 8, NBC
6. Rules of Engagement, 7:30, CBS
7. How I Met Your Mother, 7, CBS
8. Great American Road Trip, 7, NBC
9. House, 7, Fox
10. Sugarland, Live on the Inside, 7, ABC

Never make my move too soon

For all those who just shelled out a ton of dough to purchase a plasma or high-definition television thinking "Whooo-weee, I'm set for life with the newest technology," better be prepared for the word that in a year or two all those contraptions are going to be obsolete.

At least that's what DreamWorks CEO Jerry Katzenberg told the Hollywood Reporter. Katzenberg says the next big thing is 3-D televisions, that monitors are already shipping and they should be in stores early next year.

In the beginning, Katzenberg said, consumers will require special glasses but that autostereo displays will negate that need "in a handful of years."

Show business notes

• Game 4 of the Lakers-Magic series was the highest rated television program last night.
• Only two R-rated comedies have had a higher opening week box office than The Hangover's $45 million and both of them -- Sex and the City and American Pie 2 -- were already franchises with built-in audiences.
• Speaking of franchises, Harrison Ford should be glad he's part of one. According to this story, Ford earned $65 million between June 2008 and this month as part of his revenue sharing agreement in connection with Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. That's far more than most of us real people will ever see in our entire lifetimes.
• One of the most controversial films of the year may be Creation starring Paul Bettany as Charles Darwin and Jennifer Connelly as his wife, Emma. It opens in the UK Sept. 25. The U.S. opening has not been scheduled yet.
• Woody Allen says he originally wrote Whatever Works for Zero Mostel and when Mostel died, Allen put the script away in a drawer, only to resurrect it when the writer's strike was looming. It was his casting director who suggested Larry David for the lead.