Press reports and even jokes on last night’s Jay Leno Show point to the likelihood that NBC’s experiment with moving Leno from late night to prime time is over, and that the instigator of the changes, Conan O’Brien, will have to accept a diminished role as a consequence of his successful campaign to force Leno out of his 11:30 slot.
Conan O’Brien played it safe in his debut as host of NBC’s Tonight Show last night. That’s a good choice, actually. Will it last? S. T. Karnick writes.
The excellent TV drama series Friday Night Lights returns to the air tonight at 9 EDT—but not on the network where it began. The season premiere of Friday Night Lights on the DirecTV channel The 101 represents a new step in the satellite company’s efforts to bring first-run programming to its subscribers, and is another step in NBC’s attempts to find cheaper programming options.
The excellent TV drama series Friday Night Lights returns to the air tonight at 9 EDT—but not on the network where it began. The season premiere of Friday Night Lights on the DirecTV channel The 101 represents a new step in the satellite company’s efforts to bring first-run programming to its subscribers, and is another step in NBC’s attempts to find cheaper programming options.
The first episodes of season three of the NBC series Heroes premiered last night. I’ll analyze these episodes as soon as I get a chance to watch and ponder them, but until that happy day, I’ll refer you to the interesting recap from E! Online: "So now…everything has changed." The article is packed to the gills with plot spoilers, so be forewarned. For those not satiated after reading the E! piece, here’s one from NJ.com. Last season the show was marred by difficulties created by the writers’ strike, and the producers struggled to establish a new story line with a different threat of catastrophe. The show was still watchable, but nowhere near as interesting and evocative as before. Ratings suffered as a result. It will be interesting to see whether the prooducers have managed to get the franchise back on its feet.
Saturday Night Live alum Jimmy Fallon reportedly will take over Conan O’Brien’s spot as host of NBC’s Late Night next year.
Everything’s Gone Green, as the New Order song has it. As you may know, NBC TV has gone green this week, stacking its lineup with allegedly eco-friendly messages, plotlines, and other empty gestures. This is just part of a general cultural trend toward accepting the premise of the global warming alarmists and their preferred policy of vastly increasing government control over our lives and forcibly returning wealthy modern societies to the supposedly ideal conditions of the 1830s—a society on which they poured undisguised contempt untiil the eco-bug hit.
As a lead-in to its hit series Heroes, NBC is running a new show called Chuck on Mondays at 8 p.m. EDT. The show seems thoroughly fluffy and escapist on the surface, but has some interesting thoughts behind it. It deals with themes including security in the post-9/11 world, the rights of individuals vis a vis the state, and the perpetual thorny issue of how to meet cute girls—all with a very light, comedic touch. The opening scenes of the pilot episode comically establish Chuck Bartowsky (Zachary Levi) as a young man of positively stunning ordinariness, as he works in the Nerd Herd at a Buy-More store, fixing computers and cell phones and being bullied by a jerk coworker who has the inside track on the open assistant manager job. Soon, however, a beautiful woman, Sarah Kent (Yvonne Strzechowski) becomes interested in him—but of course not for conventional reasons. He is, after all, a nerd.
Actor Isaiah Washington, fired from ABC TV program Gray’s Anatomy, one of the top-rated shows on television, for calling a fellow actor a "faggot," may soon have a new job. Washington is in reportedly "sorting through" numerous offers of television and movie projects, and is leaning toward an undisclosed opportunity at NBC. Meanwhile, Washington has argued that the offended actor, T. R. Knight, used the incident to exploit a pro-homosexual spirit in Hollywood in order to bolster his own position on the show.
One of the most woefully underutilized cultural assets of the past few years has been the ION Network. Originally called PaxTV, ION consists of sixty broadcast TV stations reaching ninety million households and all or nearly all the major markets. It’s a pity, because the market area the network was trying to fill is a big one, and it remains largely untapped.
NBC-TV premiered an interesting and innovative new detective series last night. Jeff Goldblum stars in Raines as an L.A. police dept. homicide detective who sees the "ghosts" of the victims, but they are established as being not real ghosts but just his very vivid imagination creating hallucinations with whom he discusses the cases he’s working on. Yes, that is actually the concept of the show. There will be a quiz on this, so please reread the description until you understand it or begin to have hallucinations of your own. Some thoughts— Overall: Interesting concept, OK+ execution. Two, this is definitely one intuitive detective. Or, kind of. He’s certainly intuitive in that he has conversations with his own imagination. In dramatic terms the device is interesting, in that it allows us to see his thought process operating literally. This, however, puts him in the realm of the rationalistic puzzle solvers, if we take his conversations with the imaginary characters as his means of thinking things through. My head hurts. Three, in his reliance on intuition but also ratiocination, Raines resembles both hardboiled detectives and puzzle solvers, combining the two in an extraordinarily intelligent police detective. In this way the show duplicates
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