Not needing much new programming after beating the other networks senseless in the Nielsen ratings this season, and not having much to choose from anyway after a writers' strike laid waste to production development, Fox is adding just two shows to its fall schedule, the company's executives said Thursday.
Not needing much new programming after beating the other networks senseless in the Nielsen ratings this season, and not having much to choose from anyway after a writers' strike laid waste to production development, Fox is adding just two shows to its fall schedule, the company's executives said Thursday.
TELEVISION
Not needing much new programming after beating the other networks senseless in the Nielsen ratings this season, and not having much to choose from anyway after a writers' strike laid waste to production development, Fox is adding just two shows to its fall schedule, the company's executives said Thursday.
CBS, for the past decade a network built around CSI and its gory crime-drama clones, unveiled on Wednesday a fall schedule intended to make its viewers laugh as well as gag.
Broadcast television networks tried to put on a pretty face Tuesday as they began unveiling their fall schedules, but Hollywood's most creative makeup artists couldn't conceal the scars from the industry's three-month brawl with its own writers.
FRANK SINATRA
It was 40 years ago, but the memory still shimmers: Exhausted and incognito, Nancy Sinatra was sitting at a back table at the Fontainebleau relaxing the best way she could imagine -- listening to her dad sing. Suddenly the show took an unexpected turn. ''My daughter's here, just back from Vietnam,'' Frank Sinatra told the audience. ``Chicken, why don't you come up here and sing one?''
SMALL SCREEN Sex: The Revolution! (10 p.m. Monday, VH1) -- From the Kinsey Report to Bill Clinton's stupid cigar tricks, this four-part documentary tracks the upheaval in American sexual mores during the second half the 20th century and its impact on culture and politics.
BIG SCREEN Speed Racer (PG) -- In their first film since The Matrix Revolutions, directors Larry and Andy Wachowski turn the TV cartoon staple into the first live-action anime film. Emile Hirsch is Speed, Christina Ricci is Trixie, John Goodman is Pops, and Matthew Fox is Racer X.
Hey, what's radio-programmer jargon for ''oops''? South Florida oldies station WMXJ fired its morning man Bruce Kelly late last month, saying his ratings were flat. But in the Arbitron ratings released Friday, covering January through March, Kelly's show zoomed from 10th place to fifth in Majic-102's target audience, listeners aged 25 to 64.
TELEVISION REVIEW
Escape from Auschwitz, 8-9 p.m. Wednesday, WPBT-PBS 2 From their hiding place just outside the fence of the Auschwitz death camp, Rudolph Vrba and Alfred Wetzler clearly heard the scream of a Jewish prisoner being dragged off to the gas chamber in retaliation for their breakout: ``Avenge us!'' But, as this sobering documentary reveals, that would not be so easy. And a heroic escape from the Nazis that might have saved hundreds of thousands of lives instead slid into frustration and futility.
SMALL SCREEN Nanking (7 p.m. Tuesday, Cinemax) -- Germany's crimes during World War II have been endlessly documented, but Japan's much less so -- at least in the West. This documentary on the Japanese army's murderous 1937 conquest of the Chinese city of Nanking could change that. Using archival footage and first-person accounts read by actors such as Woody Harrelson and Mariel Hemingway, Nanking recounts how 20,000 civilians were killed and 20,000 women and children raped in a six-week orgy of...
RADIO
It took oldies station WMXJ-FM (102.7) six months of hard looking to find a new morning man after the legendary Rick Shaw announced his retirement in November 2006. And now the man who replaced him, Bruce Kelly, has barely lasted longer than the search.
CAMPAIGN 2008 | TELEVISION
When the polls close in Pennsylvania Tuesday night, network television viewers will have a choice: They can watch Kristi Yamaguchi flash some cunning new moves on ABC's Dancing With The Stars, see if Sharon or Sheila gets kicked out of the house on CBS' Big Brother, or stare at old Saturday Night Live skits on NBC.
Escape to Dreamland, 9-10 p.m. Sunday, WLRN-PBS 17 Because I grew up halfway across the country in the middle of a desert, my knowledge of Florida's sultry southern tip was vague and tenuous. For years my dominant and perhaps only mental image of South Florida was grubby tenement rat Dustin Hoffman's quiet expiration in the back of the bus at the end of Midnight Cowboy, the beaches he dreamed of shimmering delusively in the background.
BIG SCREEN Baby Mama (PG-13) -- Saturday Night Live's Tina Fey and Amy Poehler star as a successful businesswoman (Fey) pining to become a mother and the South Philly working girl (Poehler) she hires to be her surrogate.
TELEVISION REVIEW
Viva Hollywood!, 10:30 p.m.-midnight Sunday, VH1 Viva Hollywood!, VH-1's new reality show for telenovela-star wannabes, is one of those shows that makes TV critics start jabbing thumbs in their own eyes and biting themselves. So let's ease into the subject with a quote taken directly from the show's narration: ''The competition ignites as our hot mamis and hot papis live la vida loca 24/7 in their pursuit of the grand prize!'' How many clichés and stereotypes and mixed metaphors and general...
TELEVISION REVIEW
What Females Want and Males Will Do, 8-9 p.m. Sunday. WPBT-PBS 2 The main question raised by What Females Want and Males Will Do, a documentary on mating rituals in the animal world that airs Sunday as part of the PBS series Nature, is this: How do biologists ever reproduce? As a species, they seem dimmer, weirder and far more sinister than any of the slithering lizards or howling baboons they study.
BIG SCREEN Flawless (PG-13) -- Demi Moore is a diamond company executive in 1960s London trying to no avail to make her way in a male-dominated corporate world. Then a janitor (Michael Caine) offers her a chance to pay back her sexist bosses by helping him steal the stones stashed in the company's vaults.
AS SEEN ON TV
When a team of documentary producers first met with supercharged rocker Meat Loaf (real name: Michael Lee Aday) about making a film on his tour supporting his Bat Out Of Hell III album, the initial omens were not good.
Forget Must-See TV -- NBC seems to be rebranding its comedy bloc Thursday Night Live. The fall lineup unveiled by the network Wednesday (NBC has bagged its upfront, the traditional May meeting with advertisers where new programming is previewed) includes not only SNL alum Tina Fey's 30 Rock but a half-hour version of SNL's Weekend Update mock newscast that Fey used to write and star in. Both shows will air on Thursday night.
