All you really need to know about Ken Burns' newest marathon documentary you can learn from the title: The National Parks: America's Best Idea. Really, the best? Better than the polio vaccine, air conditioning, the Internet, the airplane, liberal democracy, rock 'n' roll, bourbon and the abolition of slavery? Better than toilet paper?
BIG SCREEN Capitalism: A Love Story (R) -- Michael Moore's most impassioned cinematic plea for activism yet explores the recent banking and housing collapse and the increasingly larger -- and more destructive -- role corporations have played in the U.S. government since the Reagan era. Moore does an impressive job of compressing a complicated subject into two highly watchable and entertaining hours, replete with man-on-the-street examples of the toll of the recession on the middle class.
When The CW last spring canceled Everybody Hates Chris and let The Game move over to BET, it created a startling gap: For the first time in nobody-can-remember-how-many years, there wasn't a single black family sitcom on broadcast television. A network staple since Diahann Carroll broke the color barrier in 1968 with Julia was, to borrow a perhaps infelicitous phrase, gone with the wind.
Going against an industry-wide trend, WSVN-Fox 7 is adding news programs instead of canceling them. WSVN kicks off two new late-night newscasts this weekend. The 30-minutes show will air at 11 p.m. Saturdays and Sundays, with Reed Cowan and Robbin Simmons at the anchor desk. The Sunday newscast will be followed by Sports Extra with anchor Steve Shapiro and sports agent Drew Rosenhaus.
If you could see the future, would you try to change it? If you're an ABC executive and the future is 14 million viewers evaporating in a puff of Nielsen smoke when Lost wraps ups its final episode later this season, the first answer is: You betcha! And the second is: FlashForward, the network's sci-fi series that debuts Thursday.
Halloween may still be six weeks off, but don't be surprised if you hear an eerie wail from the ghosts of Ozzie and Harriet Nelson, Samantha Stephens and Hot Lips Houlihan as you watch TV Wednesday night. It's an evening for reworked genres, and the wraiths may be outraged -- and in a couple of cases, a little jealous -- at the posthumous cosmetic surgery they've undergone.
''Obviously crime pays,'' noted plumber-philosopher G. Gordon Liddy once said, ''or there'd be no crime.'' Or television, he might have added.
There is something seriously wrong when Jenna Elfman and Courteney Cox, two of the outstanding television comediennes of their generation, can't get shows on the air without turning themselves into tawdry clichés out of a 1965 Playboy jokebook.
Want my best dead-solid-lock Emmy prediction? You won't watch. Viewers have been jumping overboard from this vacuous exercise in Hollywood narcissism for years, and lately it has looked like the last few minutes on the Titanic: Nielsen ratings have dropped by a third since 2005. The audience for last month's Daytime Emmy awards was barely half of what it was just last year.
If the surgeon-general is watching TV Sunday night, expect the government to issue a new warning label later in the week: Confusing fantasy with reality can be hazardous to your marriage or to your documentary. It's a lesson taught amusingly in HBO's new sitcom Bored to Death and painfully in the PBS documentary Vizcaya.
BIG SCREEN Fame (PG-13) -- Alan Parker's influential 1980 musical about the students at New York City's High School of Performing Arts gets a ''reimagining'' that includes a toning-down of the original R-rating to a High School Musical-friendly PG-13. Yes, New York has changed a lot since the 1980s. But still. Asher Book, Kristy Flores, Paul McGill and Naturi Naughton are among the talented kids who hope to live forever and learn how to fly high. This one is not being screened for critics until the last possible minute, so don't expect much.
Since Animal House established the toga party as the official measure of what constitutes a good college education 30 years ago, the sexual-psychotropic possibilities of campus bacchanalia have been done nearly to death: Slackers, Van Wilder, Road Trip, Real Genius. . . . Wait, I forgot Dead Man on Campus. Strike that word ''nearly'' a couple of sentences back.
It has been almost two decades since poor, benighted Linda Evangelista, mortally wounded by a lowball modeling offer, snapped, ''I don't get out of bed for less than $10,000.'' And finally somebody has gotten around to making a TV show about the slings and arrows of outrageous (or maybe just outraged?) fortune suffered by the world's most oppressed minority, the supermodel.
I don't know whether it was a commentary on my taste or just some mysterious electronic dietetic deficiency, but last fall my TiVo turned voraciously cannibal on the prep-school soap Gossip Girl, devouring half a dozen episodes without leaving behind so much as a teenage bone. I hoped to catch up through reruns, but it didn't work out, and now Monday's debut of Gossip Girl's third season is almost upon us. So I committed a desperate act: I watched the second season on DVD.
Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs (PG) -- Miami homeboy Phil Lord directs (with Chris Miller) this animated adaptation of the beloved children's book about a town where food rains from the sky. See it in IMAX 3-D for maximum effect. Also, the title makes us strangely hungry.
Stop me if you've heard this one: Cute but alienated teenage girl is strangely attracted to the cute but quiet new kid at school. They bond to overcome the typical problems of adolescence, like absent parents and the urge to sleep in a coffin and drink blood.
It's a minor but telling moment in Glee, Fox's exuberant, subversive look at high school: As a kid chats with a guidance counselor, the camera offers a quick glimpse of pamphlets on the desk -- Divorce: Why Your Parents Stopped Loving You and I Can't Stop Touching Myself.
Old soap opera bitches never die, they just . . . well, whatever they do, they don't die. As Exhibit A, I offer you Sydney Andrews, Melrose Place's resident waitress-hooker-secretary-boutique owner-murderess, last seen getting run over on her wedding day in 1997. And yet here she is again, having not just clawed her way out of the grave but sniffed out the trail of the Melrose Place remake clear over at another network.
Labor Day television this year should come with a warning label from Friedrich Nietzsche: ''If you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes into you.'' Monday night's television goes to some deep, dark places, both real and fictional, that are likely to leave even the strongest stomach with a queasy feeling that has nothing to do with picnics.
9 (PG-13) -- This collaboration between co-producers Tim Burton and Russian filmmaker Timur Bekmambetov (Wanted, Nightwatch), which is not to be confused with the upcoming musical Nine), is a computer-animated fantasy about the last human survivors of the apocalypse who wage war against the machines trying to exterminate them. Not necessarily suitable for tykes.
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