TELEVISION

Sex on TV? Who knew?

Broadcast television characters are almost three times as likely to have sex with a child, an animal or a corpse than with a spouse, a study released Tuesday by a clean- up-TV group said.

TELEVISION REVIEW

Focused on economics, ABC flunks history

China Inside Out: Bob Woodruff Reports, 10-11 p.m. Wednesday, WPLG-ABC 10 It seems like an eternity ago -- if you even remember it at all -- but the first foreign policy crisis of George W. Bush's administration had nothing to do with Muslim extremists, the Middle East or putative weapons of mass destruction. It was Beijing's 11-day detention of the crew of a U.S. Navy reconnaissance plane captured after a midair collision with a Chinese fighter shadowing it during an eavesdropping mission over the...

TELEVISION REVIEW

Documentary explores mystery of Islam's Koran

Inside The Koran, 9-11 p.m. Tuesday, National Geographic Channel Suppose you were strapping on a vest full of dynamite to blow up a market in Baghdad. Suddenly your cell phone rings -- it's your imam, telling you the Koran verse promising martyrs a reward of six dozen virgins has been misunderstood. Actually, your reward for blasting yourself to pieces will be a bunch of grapes. Do you still go through with it?

APPRECIATION

His ideas launched the future

You've probably never heard of Clay T. Whitehead. But without him, you'd never have seen Tony Soprano carry out a hit, or shed a tear when Big dumped Carrie Bradshaw. You'd never have cheered or booed Bill O'Reilly or Keith Olbermann. You quite possibly never would have dialed a number on a cellphone or logged onto the Internet.

TELEVISION REVIEW

And you thought the chainsaw was mean

Fab Five: The Texas Cheerleader Scandal, 9-11 Saturday, Lifetime If you have any doubt about how gloriously, deliriously tawdry Fab Five: The Texas Cheerleader Scandal is going to be -- and with a title like that, how could you? -- it's dispelled in the first 30 seconds. As a pack of jailbait jigglers do slow-mo splits and pelvic thrusts on the screen, the soundtrack echoes bitterly: American woman/get away from me/American woman/mama let me be . . .

TELEVISION REVIEWS

Ew, that's gross -- don't miss it

Jurassic Fight Club, 9-10 p.m. Tuesday, History In The Gutter, 10-11 p.m. Tuesday, Starz You can learn a lot from life's little coincidences. The weekend I screened an advance copy of In The Gutter, a new documentary about the history of gross-out movies, I also caught a rerun of The Way We Were, the old Barbra Streisand/Robert Redford flick about the World War II generation. The Way We Were characters amuse themselves by arguing about the best bourbon, ice cream and football games they can remember...

Screen Gems | Coming this week on TV and at the movies

BIG SCREEN The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor (PG-13) -- If the latest Indiana Jones movie leaves you hungry for more adventure, Brendan Fraser will be happy to oblige, once again playing the intrepid explorer from the first two Mummy pictures, this time battling a shape-shifting emperor (Jet Li).

TELEVISION REVIEW

They've got that global warming thing down cold

Penn & Teller's Bull----! 10-10:30 p.m. Thursday, Showtime I've seen lots of things on Penn & Teller's Bull----!, television's only investigative-journalism program run by comic magicians: Hidden-camera pranks where yuppie fools blather on about designer water that actually came from a garden hose. New Age health nuts allowing mollusks to crawl around on their faces to soak up the health benefits of slug slime. Naked people floating around in a zero-gravity chamber for a show on NASA. I don't...

Screen Gems | Coming this week on TV and at the movies

SMALL SCREEN Heidi Fleiss: The Would-Be Madam of Crystal (9 p.m. Monday, HBO) -- Nevada rolled out the welcome mat for the Mafia goombahs who invented Las Vegas and the busted-luck gamblers who made it pay; for the mad Strangelovian scientists who needed a place to test-fire their nukes; even for all those space aliens who annually abduct countless innocent Americans and fly them to Area 51 to be buggered with random anal probes. But Heidi Fleiss, the Hollywood madam? Heaven forfend! This sad, funny...

BROADCASTING

Station merger on track

The likely approval of the merger of WTVJ-NBC 6 and WPLG-ABC would be due to the strength of Miami's Spanish-language stations.

Emmy surprises with nods to AMC, FX shows

A topsy-turvy television season disfigured by Hollywood's labor troubles took one final unpredictable turn Thursday when Emmy voters mutinied, turning their backs on network hits in favor of shows with marginal ratings or obscure cable origins.

TELEVISION REVIEW

A grunt's-eye-view of war's snafus

Generation Kill, 9-10:15 p.m. Sunday, HBO Two bedraggled enlisted men, exhausted after days of dodging snipers and artillery barrages, are awakened to search for a captain who went to a latrine outside the perimeter and got lost in the desert. 'Bleepin' officers will be the death of us yet,'' grumbles one as they resignedly head off into the night.

TELEVISION REVIEW

A grunt's-eye-view of war's snafus

Generation Kill, 9-10:15 p.m. Sunday, HBO Two bedraggled enlisted men, exhausted after days of dodging snipers and artillery barrages, are awakened to search for a captain who went to a latrine outside the perimeter and got lost in the desert. 'Bleepin' officers will be the death of us yet,'' grumbles one as they resignedly head off into the night.

TELEVISION REVIEW

A grunt's-eye-view of war's snafus

Generation Kill, 9-10:15 p.m. Sunday, HBO Two bedraggled enlisted men, exhausted after days of dodging snipers and artillery barrages, are awakened to search for a captain who went to a latrine outside the perimeter and got lost in the desert. 'Bleepin' officers will be the death of us yet,'' grumbles one as they resignedly head off into the night.

TELEVISION REVIEW

Let's play constables and robbers

Flashpoint, 10-11 p.m. Friday, WFOR-CBS 4 From the rouge -- a mysterious and possibly sinister kicking play they added to U.S. football -- to poutin -- a barbarous dish made from french fries, cheese curd and gravy -- Canadians have always been a puzzle to their American neighbors. And Flashpoint, the new CBS cop drama from north of the border, doesn't really clarify anything.

SPY STUFF

Some of the best stuff in Spycraft, the book H. Keith Melton wrote with co-authors Robert Wallace and Henry Robert Schlesinger, is unfortunately not on display in his museum:

Screen Gems | Coming this week on TV and at the movies

BIG SCREEN Hellboy II: The Golden Army (PG-13) -- How do you follow up a slew of Oscar nominations? If you're writer-director Guillermo Del Toro (Pan's Labyrinth), you stick to your fantastical roots and make another installment in the adventures of the red-skinned comic-book hero Hellboy (Ron Perlman) to defend our planet from an invasion of otherwordly baddies.

SPY MUSEUM

Palm Beach collector's got a secret -- and it's really spooky

The surgeon general doesn't know the half of it: H. Keith Melton's got a cigarette that isn't just bad for your health. It can kill, abruptly and noisily.

TELEVISION

Foreign idea finds a home on Brickell

When Sebastian Perioche arrived at Harvard to start work on his M.B.A. 12 years ago, he was shocked. Everybody in Paris had told him Boston was one of America's most cosmopolitan cities, but he could hardly find a theater screening the films of Claude Chabrol, Pedro Almódovar or any of the other European directors he liked so much.

Screen Gems | Coming this week on TV and at the movies

BIG SCREEN BIG SCREEN Hancock (PG-13) -- A cranky, alcoholic superhero (Will Smith) hires a publicist (Jason Bateman) to help him repair his public persona. Charlize Theron co-stars for director Peter Berg (The Kingdom). Early reviews have not been kind, but Smith movies and the Fourth of July holiday are an unbeatable combination. Opens Wednesday.