ABC Folds

It actually happened.

ABC and Disney caved - not to Trump, but to public pressure.  After people started canceling subscriptions to Disney+ and Disney-owned Hulu or stopped watching the network's programs, the alphabet network allowed Jimmy Kimmel to return to work as the host of its late-night talk show.  He returns tomorrow night.

So the people do have the power, after all.

This is a great victory for Kimmel, his fans, and free speech in general, but it's a personal loss for me - I already deleted recorded but unwatched first-season episodes of Tim Allen's sitcom "Shifting Gears," and now if I tune into his show at the start of the second season, I won't know what's going on unless I seek out the first-season episodes I haven't seen - i.e., most of them - and pay to binge-watch them.  Ahh, I was never a fan of Kat Dennings anyway.

Jimmy Kimmel

Jimmy Kimmel didn't deserve what happened to him.

What Kimmel said on his ABC late-night talk show was perfectly accurate.  In lamenting Charlie Kirk's assassination, Kimmel said that MAGA supporters were doing all they could to deflect blame for Kirk's killing to others even as the murderer - who is now believed to have shot Kirk for his transphobic comments at a time when the murderer was falling in love with a woman making a transition from the male sex - came from a pro-gun, pro-MAGA family.   But Kimmel likely wasn't suspended from his show for saying that.  More likely, ABC suspended him for joking about Trump's nonchalant response to Kirk's death, pivoting from that topic to the subject of the obscene White House ballroom, the construction of which is getting underway.

When Kimmel made fun of Trump, Trump and his minions overreacted accordingly.  TV station owners Sinclair and Nexstar, right-wing media companies that own many ABC affiliates between them, demanded that ABC pay for Kimmel's arrogance, and Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr let Disney, which owns ABC, know that their ABC affiliates were ready to revolt and hold ABC accountable for Kimmel.  This was because Sinclair and Nexstar were discussing a merger and Carr planned raise the limits on the number of stations a single company can own in so many markets to allow the merger to happen.  And Sinclair and Nexstar didn't want ABC to nix this deal.

Disney chairman Bob Iger could have stood up to the threats from the ABC-affiliate owners and to Carr.  Now in his seventies, Iger doesn't even have to be in charge of Disney.  He has a comfortable life, lots of money, and a beautiful wife - former model Willow Bay, a one-time spokesmodel for Estée Lauder (did I happen to mention that the Lauder family is part of the American conservative establishment?) and a journalist who is now the dean of the Annenberg School of Communications at the University of Southern California.  Iger, as one of the most innovative and most respected entertainment moguls of the past fifty years, cemented his legacy when he retired a few years ago but just had to come back to run Disney again because he missed the power.  So, instead of standing up to Uncle Charlie (the old truckers' term for the FCC) and doing the right thing, Iger went ahead and suspended Kimmel.  Kimmel is on indefinite leave and, given that the owners of the ABC affiliates are trying to force him into an apology for what he said about Kirk (he said nothing about Kirk) and making a donation to Kirk's organization (though it would make far more sense for them to make Kimmel donate to Trump's ballroom, which would make him one of several donors, I'm led to understand), he will likely be fired altogether.

If you wondered when the right to free speech would be nullified, we've reached that point - at least in broadcast media, anyway.  The only question now is when all free speech will be curtailed and when Trump will make dissent against his regime a capital crime.

In the meantime, people are already expressing their displeasure with Kimmel's suspension-cum-dismissal with their wallets.  Folks are canceling their subscriptions to Disney-owned Hulu and Disney+.  They've already stopped watching ABC programs like "The View," so even if Whoopi Goldberg says anything critical of Trump, no one will ever hear it because no one will be tuning in.  Me?  I actually found a present-day sitcom I actually like - "Shifting Gears," starring Tim Allen, which, like previous Allen sitcoms, airs on ABC.  Tim Allen is an American comedic icon, not unlike Jimmy Kimmel, but I can't watch his new sitcom now, because it's on ABC, and it kills me to have to do this to Allen.  (Allen himself is reported to be pro-Trump, but I have a feeling that his support for Trump may be lukewarm at best.)   By the way, with Jeff Bezos kissing Trump's' posterior more frequently, I have to cancel my subscription to Amazon Prime, especially when I can't think of anything else I want that I can't find anywhere else.

And then there's CBS, which bent the knee to Trump to allow its parent company Paramount to merge with Skydance.  The network's news division, the TV news department that gave us Murrow, Cronkite, Moyers, Rather and Kuralt, now has an ombudsman to make sure that nothing that offends Trump gets on the airwaves.  Meanwhile, the fifty-eighth season of "60 Minutes" begins soon.  Will I tune in?  If I do, it will be the only CBS show I watch.  I'll keep an open mind about "60 Minutes," the season premiere of which airs a week from tomorrow, but if, after a couple of weeks, it turns out that it's all celebrity interviews and Anderson Cooper travelogues, that will likely be it for me.

P.S.  Please note that I never said anything derogatory about Charlie Kirk in this post.  (Yes, I heard what Vance said about going after people who disparage Kirk's memory.)

P.P.S.  I posted the following comment on Willow Bay's Instagram page: "Your husband is a coward.  There, I said it."

Roseanne's Reboot Is Booted

Roseanne Barr had it all.  A successful comeback.  A reboot of her late-eighties/early-nineties sitcom.  Eighteen million people watching.  A cash cow for ABC.  Then Barr wrote a racist tweet about former Obama adviser Valerie Jarratt and blamed it on medication.

What prompted Barr to lash out at an adviser to a President who left office in January 2017 is unknown.  But I don't think it was Ambien.

This isn't the first time Valerie Jarratt was on the receiving end of a spew of hatred that came out of nowhere.  When she was on Bill O'Reilly's Fox News show, as you will recall, to talk about helping young black men get ahead, Billo went on an anti-rap rant even though the topic had nothing to do with rap. 

Just like Roseanne's racism has nothing to do with over-the-counter sleep medicine.  (Oh yeah, O'Reilly is long since gone for an unrelated incident.)

Quite frankly, I don't know why ABC wanted to give the most vulgar and the most unlettered comedian in these United States a reboot of her old TV series when the network knew she was a loose cannon.  But then, controversy draws viewers to TV, and more viewers mean more ad revenue, and ABC was profiting handsomely from the reboot of "Roseanne."  ABC could have stood behind her and accepted her non-apology - and kept making all of that money from her show - but the network did the right thing and got rid of her.  

In a bizarre twist of fate, this comes less than three decades after Jackie Mason's sitcom "Chicken Soup" premiered on ABC and earned solid ratings because it followed . . . "Roseanne."  It was produced by the same production company that gave us "Roseanne" as well.  Then Mason, campaigning in the 1989 New York City mayoral election for Republican nominee Rudolph Giuliani, referred to Democratic nominee David Dinkins, aiming to become the first black mayor of New York City,  as a "shvartzer."  Accused of racism, Mason, a Jew, explained that "shvartzer" merely means "black man" in Yiddish and was not meant to be disparaging.  Jews who spoke Yiddish and who peppered their English-language speech with Yiddish words defended Mason, but the fact that Yiddish-language ethnic references are sometimes used disparagingly - in Yiddish, the word "Americaner," for example, is a disparaging term for an Americanized Jew, I've been led to understand - didn't help his case.

On the same day Dinkins was elected mayor of New York, in November 1989, "Chicken Soup" had its last serving.  A few days later ABC canceled it with the official explanation that the network realized the show was only getting good ratings because it followed "Roseanne."  Everyone knew what the real reason was (and by the way, "Chicken Soup" was a substandard show, but had Mason not opened his mouth, it would have stayed on for as long as its ratings were respectable).  This time, "Roseanne" was itself canceled, and there was no sugar-coating the reason why . . . and Mason's "shvartzer" comment seems harmless by comparison.  Ironically, the negative publicity Roseanne Barr received overshadowed the series finale of ABC's "The Middle," which ended its nine-year run following . . . "Roseanne."

Oy vey.  

Back in 1989, no one felt sorry for Jackie Mason, whom New Jersey Star-Ledger TV critic Jerry Krupnick said "shot himself in the mouth."  While I feel sorry for Barr's co-stars, who distanced themselves from her like vampires from garlic, I don't feel sorry for Roseanne herself.  She shot herself in the tweet. 

Tuning In

I thought I'd never again write about television, as I don't watch much of it these days, but I have been watching a couple of shows during the 2016-17 season, and I have a few things to say about them, plus a couple of others, on this Christmas Eve.  I would have gotten to it sooner, but the election (which is finally over) kept getting in the way. 

Perhaps the brightest and most endearing new show of the 2106-17 season is "This Is Us," an NBC drama about an extended family.  In case you haven't been hiding under a rock lately, "This Is Us" follows a young white couple, Jack and Rebecca Pearson, two fraternal twins named Kevin and Kate, and a black man named Randall, who was adopted by a family after being abandoned in a firehouse by his birth father.   Everyone knows the twist by now: Jack and Rebecca are the parents of the twins and the adoptee, and flashbacks reveal how they grew up, with Kevin becoming a television actor, Kate dealing with a weight problem (and finding a boyfriend, Toby, who's also dealing with a weight problem) and Randall becoming a New York trader and living in a posh neighborhood in northern New Jersey.  We see how the family members love each other and deal with crises and moments of truth, like when Randall finds his biological father, and other plot twists you don't see coming that seem to leap out of nowhere.

One unresolved plot twist so far: Jack turns out to have died many years ago, but we don't know when he died or what he died of.  We only know that Kate keeps his ashes in her apartment.

I have to give a shout-out to Mandy Moore, who plays Rebecca, the family matriarch.  People who remember her as a teen pop singer at the turn of the millennium already know that she was one of the few teenage stars of the time who had genuine singing talent, and they probably knew she could act as well, but in "This is Us," she gives some heartwarming and winning performances that demonstrate just how much she's matured the sixteen years since she turned sixteen.  (Yes, Mandy Moore is 32 now.  Doesn't that make you feel old?)

Is  "This Is Us" the new "Parenthood"?  Not really - for one thing, it's darker and more unsettling than Jason Katims' much-missed show about the Braverman clan - but it's definitely a satisfying and even spellbinding series, always ready to surprise you once you think you have it figured out.

One show I wish I had time for - I don't have time for it because I'm writing this blog - is ABC's "Designated Survivor," starring Kiefer Sutherland as a low-level Cabinet secretary in Washington  who suddenly becomes President of the United States, when his predecessor and the rest of the Cabinet are killed in a terrorist attack during the State of the Union address.  My mother likes it.  I'll have to binge-watch it through On Demand in the near future.  One ABC show I could do without is "Speechless," about a nutty mom whose life revolves around accommodating her children and especially her older son, who suffers from cerebral palsy and needs a typewriter keyboard to communicate.  Minnie Driver plays the mom, and she somehow fails at being a sympathetic character; moreover, she seems to be re-creating her hovering-mother persona from her role in "About a Boy" (a much better show, but Nielsen families decided otherwise) to the point of phoning it in.  And this is Minnie Driver - probably one of the best British actresses of her generation - that we're talking about.

And old ABC favorites?  I'm still a fan of "The Middle," but "Modern Family" got so tiresome and predictable,  I just stopped watching.  I haven't been compelled to catch up on it.  I have a job that requires me to periodically work on Wednesday nights, so I miss "Modern Family" a lot anyway, but when I have the opportunity to see it on On Demand, I just can't be bothered.  Both "The Middle" and "Modern Family" are both about family units that get into unenviable situations, but you sympathize with the Hecks on the former show because they're lower-middle-class Midwesterners without many prospects.  The Pritchetts and the Dunphys on the latter show are upper-middle-class elitist Southern Californians who exhibit all the smugness that applies, and it's hard to laugh when they get into trouble when you know they still live well in the end.  

Or to explain it in a political way, the Pritchetts and the Dunphys behave like centrist Democrats, while the Hecks are blue-collar populists.  And we all know who won that battle.                        

Time Slot For Rent

I thought it was settled. Although ABC had made numerous changes in its Wednesday night lineup, it seems that the network finally had one that would be stable enough to last for awhile. Not so fast - "Don't Trust the B---- in Apartment 23" debuts tonight on ABC at 9:30 PM Eastern, displacing "Happy Endings" in the process.

Actually, the premise of this sitcom sounds interesting. June (played by Dreama Walker) is a budding investment broker from Indiana who lands a job in Manhattan at a big Wall Street firm, only to be laid off on her first day when the company goes down in a big scandal, as well as lose her apartment. She needs a roommate - fast - and gets to share an apartment with Chloe (played by Krysten Ritter), who is the bitch in the censored title. Chloe's plan is to fleece June out of extra rent money and drive her out to make room for another patsy. But June makes it clear that she intends to stay and that she isn't going to go anywhere without a fight. The show will eventually depict them forming an unlikely friendship, and Chloe is expected to reveal a soft side under her hard-candy exterior.

So, yes, I might want to see this one, but I don't know if I'll become a devoted viewer. For one thing, the show promises a fair share of crude sex jokes (did I happen to mention it was first offered to Fox?), the kind that would have been too distasteful for "Three's Company" (which starred John Ritter - no relation to Krysten). And the show's title, inexplicably censored at a time when the only person who can't say "bitch" is Barbara Bush, suggests that this series is likely to pull as many punches as it throws. So, yeah, I might go ahead and check it out for myself. I just wish ABC would settle on a more permanent Wednesday night schedule once and for all.

And fans of "Happy Endings" need not worry; the show has been renewed for the 2012-13 season.

Oh yeah, former "Dawson's Creek" star James Van Der Beek plays himself - and Chloe's friend - in this show. 

Wednesday Night Television

ABC now has four consecutive sitcoms on Wednesday nights that don't rely on a laugh track. And the newest of the lot, "Suburgatory," may very well be the best new sitcom of the 2011-12 season.

As the title suggests, "Suburagatory" (on at 8:30 PM ET, after "The Middle") sounds like just another piece of entertainment depicting how much the suburbs suck. But it's more than that. The suburbs here are not a Levittown on Long Island or in Bucks County, Pennsylvania but a fictional upper-class Westchester County (New York) enclave. The perspective of this upper-crust suburbia is not that of a cynical punk rock burnout but that of a savvy high school girl wise beyond her years who has lived in Manhattan and knows there's more to life than an upper-class subdivision.

Tessa Altman (played by Jane Levy) is the high school girl, uprooted from New York City by her architect father, George (Jeremy Sisto) who decides to move to Westchester County after finding a box of unopened condoms in Tessa's drawer. The lure of illicit behavior has convinced him to move himself and his daughter to suburbia so that Tessa can have a better life. Actually, Tessa is worse off, cast in a sea of shallow phonies and complacent conformists she has nothing in common with. Her father George is hoping she'll be able to reach maturity in a safer and more comfortable environment, but it turns out he's the one who needs the comfort of the suburbs. He's a single dad who can't relate to his daughter and is learning by experience how to raise a teenager. And, it turns out she's savvier than he is; he's still finding his way in the world, trying to navigate his way around this alien culture Tessa can see right through. He's also having a hard time finding true love; Frasier Crane had better luck with women by comparison.

As Dallas Royce, a seemingly shallow housewife with an absent husband and who only hints to George that a love interest is possible, Cheryl Hines gives a sense of substance and warmth underneath her character's plastic persona. Even more interesting is the friendship between Tessa and Lisa Marie (played by Allie Grant), a nerdy but sweet girl who's embarrassed by her family. The various twists and turns that ensue - along with Tessa's attempts to adapt to or at least cope with her surroundings (with the pain of having to deal with Dallas's glamour queen daughter Dalia) are fascinating.

So, yes, I'm a fan of this show, which replaced "Better Than You" in ABC's 8:30 PM ET time slot. And after several trial-and-error program schedulings, it looks like ABC finally has a solid Wednesday night lineup. This includes "Happy Endings" at 9:30 PM Eastern (after "Modern Family"), a sitcom that's definitely an acquired taste, plus the one-hour drama "Revenge," with Emily VanCamp, at 10 PM Eastern. I haven't seen that, but it appears to have succeeded where at least three ABC dramas in that same time slot have failed in as many years.

I watch the first three shows in ABC's Wednesday night lineup regularly, and that's actually more shows than I watch on NBC for the whole week. I believe I'm not alone in that respect.

(Aside: NBC is debuting a new series produced by Steven Spielberg [who famously graced NBC with the series "Amazing Stories" in the eighties] about staging a Broadway musical, "Smash", which, I'm led to understand, is basically a scripted version of talent contest shows [or a "Glee" ripoff]. It's about a musical based on the life of Marilyn Monroe and stars Debra Messing - Debra Messing - as one of its writers. Debuting this coming Monday at 10 PM Eastern, it displaces Brian Williams' newsmagazine "Rock Center," which will go against "Modern Family" and "Happy Endings" at 9 PM Eastern on Wednesdays. Next Wednesday: an interview with yet another woman who claimed she was seduced by John F. Kennedy. It's official: NBC is beyond desperate.)

"Work It" Out

You know a TV show is spectacularly bad when it airs on ABC for only one or two episodes, because even NBC, which no one watches, has aired shows that have lasted longer than that. But, as it happens, "Work It," a sitcom about guys who dress as gals to get jobs in a bad economy, was canceled after two episodes, ironically putting everyone involved with that show on unemployment.

An attempt at reworking the formula that produced "Bosom Buddies," the cross-dressing sitcom that introduced us to Tom Hanks, "Work It" turned out to be the most offensive sitcom in recent memory, with many critics finding it too broad (no pun intended) and aiming too much for cheap laughs. As someone who remembers "Bosom Buddies," I don't recall that show being either broad or cheap. And in these more sensitive times, the sensitivity and relative subtlety of the earlier show could have come in handy for the producers and writers of "Work It." The show offended homosexual and transgender activists as well as Puerto Ricans, when one Puerto Rican character said that his ethnic background gave him a natural ability to "sell drugs" for a pharmaceutical sales job. It also offended the unemployed by making fun of jobless folks who have to humiliate and degrade themselves just to put food on the table if they're even lucky enough to work.

The funniest thing about "Work It," apparently, was that ABC was promoting it as a "new hit comedy" after its initial airing. So much for truth in advertising - there was nothing accurate about that claim.

ABC attempted to present sitcoms that explored (explored? explored? a pretentious word) men holding on to their masculinity in a feminized America, but the network's efforts with three such shows fell far short of the mark. Tim Allen's "Last Man Standing," according to Star-Ledger TV critic Alan Sepinwall, has morphed into a clone of his earlier (and inoffensive) sitcom "Home Improvement" after it tried to be a latter-day "All In the Family," with Allen's character very misogynistic and mildly racist. But anyone who's seen Tim Allen knows that he has more in common with Archie Andrews than Archie Bunker. "Man Up!" was canceled. (I covered that show already.) And now "Work It" is gone. It all makes sense. Pussy-whipped men are not funny, and the idea of men complaining about being pussy-whipped (especially when they're really not) isn't funny either.

Anyway, ABC, having inexplicably shelved "Cougar Town" despite its solid and solidly loyal audience, is bringing it back and inserting it in the 8:30 PM Eastern time slot on Tuesdays, in place of the two failed sitcoms "Man Up!" and "Work It" and following the now appropriately titled "Last Man Standing," beginning February 14. Meanwhile, it appears that the alphabet network finally has a solid Wednesday night lineup. I'll comment on that in another post.

Playboy Clubbed

NBC, having spent seven seasons at the bottom of the broadcast television food chain, has tried to shake things up with a controversial show that, true to form, has generated more controversy for NBC than ratings.  "The Playboy Club," a "Mad Men"-style ripoff set in the original Playboy men's club that opened in Chicago in the early sixties, has drawn fire from an unlikely (until you consider their arguments) alliance of feminists and cultural conservatives for its exploitation of women.  The show's cast members have defended it for celebrating those females who worked as "Playboy bunny" waitresses in these clubs as self-empowering pre-feminist types who found a way to command respect in a male-dominated society.

Good grief, even the Tea Party offers up more believable Orwellianisms than that. 

Anyway, Gloria Steinem, who once worked undercover as a Playboy bunny in the New York club, presented a much more persuasive argument against it than the anyone involved with the series have to able to produce in its favor. The series, Steinem says, "normalizes a passive dominant idea of gender. So it normalizes prostitution and male dominance."

Meanwhile, the politically arch-conservative Parents Television Council - no supporter of feminist theory - has panned "The Playboy Club," joining Steinem in advocating a boycott and calling  it "a blatant attempt to obliterate any remaining standards of broadcast decency." Meanwhile, KSL-TV, NBC's affiliate in Salt Lake City, has refused to air the series.  KSL-TV pretty much serves the entire state of Utah, whose largely Mormon population frowns on anything sexually explicit. 

Calls for a boycott may have helped the show's detractors before it was even aired.  A mere five million viewers tuned into watch "The Playboy Club" when it debuted on September 19, and more than 20 percent of that audience didn't bother to see it again the following week.  Astonishingly, NBC is keeping it on for now, thinking it just needs time to find an audience.

Dude, this isn't exactly "Hill Street Blues." 

It's fine by me if "The Playboy Club" stays on for awhile, because that will make sure that Gloria Steinem and Brent Bozell, normally ideological opponents, work side by side.  And that, in and of itself, is more entertaining.

Meanwhile, ABC has tried to capture the formula of "Mad Men" and put it in its own bottle, and the Disney network's effort seems to have paid off.  "Pan Am," a series about stewardesses for the now-defunct airline of that name and starring Christina Ricci, has gotten much better reviews and much better ratings in depicting women in the early 1960s in the way "The Playboy Club" insists it does -  it depicts them as finding empowerment in the limited career opportunities offered them.  But then wearing a WAC-style uniform and serving drinks to male customers on a plane is always classier than wearing a bunny uniform and serving drinks to male customers in a club - or TV show - that never gets off the ground.

The Edge of Irrelevance

It's a sign of the times, I guess. And some would say it's an encouraging sign. ABC has canceled two of its soap operas (at this point I would owe Rita Marshall, the daytime drama producer played by Doris Belack in the movie Tootsie, a quarter for calling them "soap operas" instead of "daytime dramas") and is replacing them with talk shows about food and lifestyle.

The two soap operas (fifty cents) in question are "All My Children," on the air since January 1970, and "One Life To Live," on the air since July 1968. Both were created by soap opera (75 cents) developer Agnes Nixon and set in fictional towns based on Philadelphia suburbs.

The reasons for these shows going off the air ("All My Children" this September, "One Life To Live" in January) are quite simple: No one under fifty watches them. Younger daytime viewers simply prefer talk shows, which are cheaper to produce, and they likely find soap operas (a dollar) stodgy. The ratings for these shows certainly bear this out.

Susan Lucci, of "All My Children," is probably the most famous soap opera (buck-and-a-quarter) star, known for her beauty and glamour as well as a role or two beyond "All My Children"'s Erica Kane. The show was also notable for featuring Peter Bergman (not the guy from Firesign Theater), who played a doctor (Cliff Warner) but was not one, and then did commercials for Vicks cough syrup pointing out this fact. Although the intent of the commercials's tag line - "I'm not a doctor, but I play one on TV" - was to illustrate the point that people played doctor at home by using the wrong medicine for a cough and that this was far different from just playing a doctor on television, viewers thought the idea was to trust Bergman as a spokesman because he played a doctor, missing the point entirely. But it did lead to memorable parodies, such as a cartoon of Ronald Reagan with the caption "I'm not a president, but I play one on TV."

"One Life To Live" was less of a cultural influence.

Indeed, soap operas (buck fifty) are not the cultural touchstones they were when the late Elizabeth Taylor made guest appearances on "General Hospital" (still on the air, thank you, and the last ABC serial left) in 1981 opposite the characters of Luke and Laura, whom everyone knew about whether they watched soaps (buck seventy-five) or not. But, to be honest, I never liked soap operas. (Two bucks!) I never enjoyed the hammy acting, the melodramatic storylines, and the tragedies that occur on a regular basis. Such schmaltziness is an insult to the (mostly) female audience that has watched them over the years. It only makes sense that daytime shows have their own Emmy awards. How could they win an Emmy otherwise? But with reality being more dramatic and sorrowful than these weepy serials these days, why should we care about them? As it stands, there are to be only three other remaining shows on CBS and NBC besides "General Hospital."

Soap operas ($2.25) will fade away just as other touchstones of American life - sweet shops, drive-in movies, Burma-Shave signs - have. They may already have. When cable news channels pun on a title of a soap opera like "Ryan's Hope," which went off the air years ago, in discussing U.S. Representative Paul Ryan's federal budget plan, how many people get the joke? For that matter, how many people know who Paul Ryan is?

Like sands through the hourglass . . ..

By the way, I owe Miss Marshall two dollars and fifty cents. :-D

$2.75 if you count the tag. :-D

TV Guide

I've been meaning to comment on the new 2010-11 American television season since as the schedules from the four major networks were announced last month, but I haven't had the opportunity. With everything going on in the world today, I'd keep putting off such commentary if I didn't give myself time to do it, so why don't I do it now?

Please be aware that I'm only focusing on highlights, not a comprehensive overview of the network schedules.

CBS is going retro in its upcoming schedule, ordering a new version of "Hawaii Five-O" But contrary to what you might think, "The Defenders," another new show, is not a remake of the E.G. Marshall-Robert Reed drama of the same name. Jim Belushi and Jerry O'Connell play two Las Vegas lawyers with a passion for life and the law. Also, Tom Selleck stars in the police drama "Blue Bloods." Although it's been thirty years since "Magnum P.I." first debuted, I wouldn't count Selleck out; he's a very underrated actor, maybe in part for his good looks and conservative politics. You might disagree with me, but I saw him in a TV movie about D-Day as Dwight D. Eisenhower, and I thought he was very good in it, especially in his approach to the role, so I know better.

CBS's new comedies include "Mike and Molly," a new series about two unattractive people developed by "Two and a Half Men" creator Chuck Lorre, which I consider to be a red flag. Lorre has done more than anyone else of late to damage the genre of situation comedy; "Two and a Half Men" is sexist, moronic, largely prurient, and thoroughly unlikable. I was elated to hear that Charlie Sheen was asking for more money, because I thought it might lead to the show's early demise - it had been renewed through May 2012 - but they gave Martin Sheen's less talented son what he wanted, and so we're subjected to this witless continuing story of a hedonistic jingle writer, his nerdy brother, and his ill-mannered dim-bulb nephew for at least two more years.

On the other hand, I'm neither surprised nor sorry that Jenna Elfman's "Accidentally On Purpose" was cancelled, though I regret that the Julia Louis-Dreyfus show "The New Adventures of Old Christine" is gone. The former "Seinfeld" star had a respectable run with her own show, picking up an Emmy along the way, and the show may not be defunct; ABC might pick it up.

As for NBC, whose ratings have been in the toilet for six years . . . well, let's see. "Chuck," one of those shows I keep meaning to see, has been renewed, and new shows include "The Event," about an average guy who stumbles on a government conspiracy, and the somewhat more promising "Love Bites," a romantic comedy-drama anthology. "Parenthood" is back (yay!) after two hours of the reality show "The Biggest Loser," but the biggest loser may be Amy Poehler, whose "Parks and Recreation" sitcom has been relegated to a mid-season placement just as it was starting to get funnier. "Trauma" and "Mercy," shows that attempted to fill the 10 PM ET block left by Jay Leno's return to "The Tonight Show," are done. So is "Heroes." Hopefully Ali Larter still has a brilliant future ahead of her.

ABC has a few interesting shows up its sleeve. Dana Delany of "China Beach" fame returns to the network as a medical examiner in "Body of Proof," and in "Mr. Sunshine," Matthew Perry stars as the self-involved manager of a second-rate San Diego sports arena who begins to re-evaluate his life when he turns forty. I assume Perry won't have to do a lot of acting.

His former co-star Courteney Cox returns with "Cougar Town," and that show will still be called that, apparently, despite the sexism in the title. "The Middle" stays on Wednesdays but moves to the 8 PM ET time slot and frees up space for "Better Together," a marriage comedy that stars "Reba" alumna JoAnna Garcia. Oh, and "Modern Family" is back too.

Not back are "Flash Forward" or "Happy Town." One other new series, "Detroit 1-8-7," about the Motor City police's homicide unit, is a series I give only a couple of weeks because I feel that the last thing people want to watch is a series about murder in a dead city. How much do you want to bet that WXYZ-TV, ABC's Detroit affiliate (yes, those are the actual call letters, and there's even a radio station in nearby Ann Arbor with the call letters WWWW) won't show it? (You must see murder and mayhem on their local newscast every night. :-O)

And Fox? "American Idol" and "The Simpsons" continue, likely until the end of time, and they have two or three new shows that will likely be forgotten in two months. If they can't find a replacement for Simon Cowell on "American Idol" who can't measure up to his standard of nastiness, then that show (like most of its winners) might be quickly forgotten as well, and that's when I'll know the two thousand zeroes are really over.

Right, I'll comment more on current events - the news you need to know, the songs you like to hear, yada yada yada - tomorrow.

A Charlie Brown Correction

Okay, I'm officially no longer mad at ABC. Tonight they showed the special "A Charlie Brown Christmas" tonight, in uncut form, and the network also aired some Peanuts Christmas sketches made later. I only hope WFAA-TV in Dallas showed it. Tomorrow, ABC re-airs "Prep and Landing," and hopefully ABC in the Big D will to.

Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good television season.

A Charlie Brown Controversy

Russell Wiseman, the inappropriately named mayor of the Memphis suburb of Arlington, Tennessee, is the only person I know of who can take a wonderful thing like Christmas and turn it into a problem.

ABC, which has aired classic "Peanuts" holiday television specials since 2002, had planned to air "A Charlie Brown Christmas," the first and still the most loved of all the "Peanuts" specials, on December 1 at 8 PM Eastern Time this year. But President Obama announced a speech on Afghanistan to be broadcast to the nation at the same time, and ABC was obliged to carry it. Wiseman got so upset that he blasted Obama for forcing the pre-emption of "A Charlie Brown Christmas" with his speech and accused him of being a Muslim. Only an Islamic president, Wiseman reasoned, would give a speech on a political issue (involving a Muslim country!) and cause ABC to pre-empt a Christmas special in which Linus Van Pelt recites Gospels text about an angel announcing the birth of a Savior, who is Christ the Lord.

Good grief.

Obama, probably being too busy to watch TV or even check the schedule, probably didn't know "A Charlie Brown Christmas" was on because he was busy with . . . the war in Afghanistan! Specifically, he was busy with preparing to explain the surge in the war, and pre-empting TV shows was the furthest thing from his mind. Besides, "A Charlie Brown Christmas" was aired this past week, and ABC will air it again before Christmas Day. Wiseman's outlandish questioning of Obama's Christian faith over an animated cartoon was so embarrassing to Arlington, Tennessee, even the town apologized for their mayor. Obama is only waging a war against the Taliban and al-Qaeda, not Christmas.

If anyone is waging a war against Christmas, it's the powers of commercialism. According to Dallas TV critic Ed Bark, WFAA-TV ABC's Dallas affiliate pre-empted this week's showing of "A Charlie Brown Christmas" - in which Charlie Brown bemoans the commercialization of the holiday - and the new Christmas special "Prep and Landing" with a prime-time Christmas special version of its morning talk show, "Good Morning Texas." The show is regarded by many as an abomination even by local television standards, stringing product placements and promotional segments in the form of a morning talk show. Bringing such thinly disguised infomercial programming to prime time in place of ABC's nationwide schedule was nothing short of crass. The show's hosts apologized for this, pointing out that both ABC specials will be re-aired later, but this hardly excuses the airing of such a special in the first place. You can read more about it here.

ABC is hardly innocent in the commercialization of Christmas, though, and not because the Disney-made "Prep and Landing" was specifically made for the Disney-owned ABC. The original December 1 air date for "A Charlie Brown Christmas" this year was far too early. Rebroadcasts had already been planned, suggesting deliberate overkill. And to make matters worse, ABC cut scenes out of the special. Various scenes - Sally dictating a letter to her brother, Lucy goading Schroeder to play "Jingle Bells" properly - were conspicuously absent from ABC's December 8 airing. ABC apparently wanted to show more . . . commercials.

We all know Christmas is a big commercial racket. It's run by a big Hollywood (not Eastern) syndicate, you know. Sadly, despite Charlie Brown's sentiments, this Christmas is not a Christmas that will be free of commercialism . . . or real blockheads like Russell Wiseman.

"A Charlie Brown Christmas" is too good to be seen in butchered form. If you want to see the show without cuts or commercials, go to YouTube. Why didn't Russell Wiseman think of that?

On the Tube

So what's on TV these days?

It's been awhile since I commented on television, and I thought I'd take a break from commentary on current events (pretty boring, huh? ;-)), partly because there hasn't been that much to talk about for so long. But a few new shows in the 2009-10 season and of a couple of veteran ones are worth noting. Or not.

First, CBS's "How I met Your Mother." I've always liked this show, particularly because its characters are so likable - even Neil Patrick Harris's Barney - and they've had several unorthodox ideas and plot twists. But none of their far-out storylines have reached the improbable idea of Barney and Robin (Cobie Smulders) getting together. Gee whizbangers, this is more fun than the time Hawkeye and Hot Lips shacked up in a two-part "M*A*S*H" episode.

We still don't know who becomes the "mother" - the lady love of Ted (Josh Radnor) yet, but who cares? I'm having too much fun watching how everything else plays out. And Cobie Smulders remains the most beautiful brunette on American television. (Not bad for a Canadian.)

The most beautiful blonde on American television, Julie Bowen, landed a plum role on "Modern Family," an ABC sitcom about an extended family comprised of three separate units. Bowen plays Claire, the mother in a traditional nuclear family with a homosexual brother in his own relationship and their father married to a Hispanic trophy wife with her own son. This is probably the best new sitcom to appear in four years, and the intricate plot lines tying the three situations together offer plenty of enjoyable moments. Ed O'Neill, as the patriarch, is funnier than playing Al Bundy on "Married . . . With Children" ever allowed him to be. The pseudo-documentary format modeled after "The Office" (more of which later) adds to "Modern Family"'s freshness.

"Community," on NBC, is another keeper, starring Joel McHale as a conceited lawyer who's learned that his bachelor's degree is illegitimate and has to go to community college, where he thinks he's superior to his fellow students. He finds himself in a study group full of eccentrics, including one character played by Chevy Chase. Chase, as an entrepreneurial type with crazy ideas, performs with understatement but remains as funny as ever. This is a big comeback for Chase, whose movie career has long since stalled - although I'll go to my grave insisting that Foul Play is one of the greatest screwball comedies of all time, or at least the seventies. He's ready to take a chance again.

Sadly, NBC can't do much better. Still in fourth place, the network once known for groundbreaking dramas has moved their veteran drama series to the 9 PM ET hour, where they have to compete with lighter fare in the same time slot. Jay Leno owns every weekday 10 PM ET slot, hampering NBC's ability to produce new drama shows and shore up old ones. Well, what old ones they still have - they lost "Medium" to CBS. Leno himself has proven himself unable to compete with the traditional ten o'clock programming on ABC or CBS. Fox, as always, continues to eschew the 10 PM ET time slot, preferring to let its affiliates air local newscasts in that slot.

Speaking of local news, NBC's affiliates, whose own local newscasts are between Leno and Conan O'Brien, are losing viewers even as O'Brien struggles in vain to go up against David Letterman, a man O'Brien reveres and chooses not to lampoon for his sex scandal blackmail issues. O'Brien has been unable to adapt his after-midnight style of smart-aleck humor to "The Tonight Show" the way Letterman did when he began doing late-night talk an hour earlier.

Who would have thought that Jimmy Fallon, the insufferable nimrod who took over for O'Brien at "Late Night" and has enjoyed good ratings, would be the one NBC late-night comedian smelling like a rose?

Meanwhile, "The Office" is beginning to stink. Yeah, I saw the one-hour episode of Jim and Pam's wedding, but the humor was so lame and in some cases rather sick - Andy Bernard (Ed Helms) hurting his scrotum on his car keys while dancing - I have a feeling that, if it hasn't jumped the shark, it's swimming close to it. The British sitcom of the same name that it was based on didn't run as long, as Ricky Gervais (who played the boss) and his castmates knew when to quit.

This is NBC at the end of the two thousand zeroes, folks. Devoid of any coherent programming plan, unable to pull out of fourth place after half a decade, it's in such dire straits it may qualify for a taxpayer-supported federal bailout. Well, that's one way to get a BBC-style national television network; heck, it already has the proper name (NBC stands for National Broadcasting Company). It's easily the weakest link in the NBC/Universal media empire, its sister cable networks MSNBC and CNBC probably drawing more viewers. But gee whiz, look at its great successes of the past - "Ed," Friends," Frasier." As of today, Julie Bowen, Courteney Cox (star of the new series "Cougar Town," a sitcom I don't get) and Kelsey Grammer, who respectively starred in those shows, have all gone to ABC and Patricia Arquette took her entire show to CBS with her.

One thing about Kelsey Grammer's new ABC series, "Hank." Grammer has said that he would reprise his most famous character, Dr. Frasier Crane, in a new sitcom if he thought it was good enough. He apparently thought a show like "Hank," about a humbled man returning to his hometown to take a dead-end job, wasn't good enough to bring Frasier back in - his character is, after all, named Hank - and neither do critics and viewers. It's only one midseason replacement away from cancellation, and Grammer's chances of pulling off the impossible - enjoying three hit sitcoms in a single career - seem to have evaporated. NBC is probably glad it did not at least get stuck with this one.