1. She’s fine.

2. No, he’s not giving it back.

“She” is Mr. Olbermann’s mother, Marie, who was memorably bonked between the eyes by an errant throw made by Yankees second baseman Chuck Knoblauch last June. Such an event may seem like an unfortunate baseball hazard, but at the time of her beaning, Mrs. Olbermann was nestled in the seventh row behind first base at Yankee Stadium. “When I held a copy of the New York Daily News with a color picture of my mom in the upper right-hand corner—Sportscaster’s Mother Hit By Knoblauch Throw,” Mr. Olbermann said, paraphrasing the headline, “I knew life was going to be different.”

“It” is the splintered handle of the Louisville Slugger formerly owned by Mets catcher Mike Piazza; the same bat that shattered into three pieces when it connected with Roger Clemens’ pitch in Game 2 of last year’s Subway Series; the same bat that Mr. Clemens angrily, er, returned in Mr. Piazza’s direction in an exchange that has become baseball’s replayed equivalent of the Zapruder film.

Mr. Olbermann recovered the bat handle—which he claims was destined for the trash—during his World Series duties as a broadcaster for Fox. And despite pleas that he return it to Mr. Piazza so the entire bat can be sold to the highest bidder in some kind of macabre charity auction, Mr. Olbermann has decided to keep it as a personal memento.

“Like hell I have to give it back,” Mr. Olbermann said. “If I hadn’t asked for it, it would be in the East River.”

As for Keith Olbermann himself, well, he sounds about as good as Keith Olbermann can be expected to be. Now, to some, it may look as if the famously articulate, occasionally acerbic sportscaster from Tarrytown has pulled a David Caruso, migrating in the space of four years from his hyper-influential chair at ESPN’s SportsCenter to his own general-interest talk show on MSNBC, to a star turn as the heavily hyped savior of the Fox Sports network, to … baseball-season duty and a weekly gig as the host of a quirky Fox Sports program called The Keith Olbermann Evening News.

But Mr. Olbermann, 42, believes that rumors of his professional demise (one critic recently wondered if his television career had entered its “death spiral”) have been greatly exaggerated, pointing to Fox’s long-term baseball deal and the building momentum of his new show. Cutting back his hours was his idea, he said. In fact, talk to him a little further and Mr. Olbermann—a chronic malcontent, a man never afraid to publicly divulge his career misery—starts to sound a little … happy?

“I am looking forward to the start of baseball season, and I finally have a format [with the Evening News] that I genuinely enjoy doing and a group of people that I really like working with on Sunday nights,” Mr. Olbermann said by telephone from his home in Santa Monica on a recent afternoon. “I think it’s a really good show. I think it’s twice as good as any other sportscast on the air.”

Ah, but there’s some guilt hidden within Mr. Olbermann’s newfound professional equilibrium. You may recall a time when sportscasters delivered scores without punch lines, called home runs without tagging on catch phrases and wrote copy without first consulting a thesaurus and a rhyming dictionary. But after Mr. Olbermann and his former ESPN co-conspirator Dan Patrick did their thing, every sportscaster born after the Big Red Machine—and a depressing number of older converts as well—has tried to parrot their SportsCenter shtick, devolving the American sportscast into something resembling an open-mike night for Newhouse grads at the Funny Bone. “There’s a whole wise-ass school of sportscasting out there,” said the NBC broadcasting vet Bob Costas. “They’re multiplying like rabbits.”

Mr. Olbermann, well, he feels that pain. If today’s sportscasting has been weakened by wiseacres, he said, then he is its Robert Oppenheimer. “Behold, I have become Death, destroyer of worlds,” Mr. Olbermann said, gamely stepping into the atomic scientist’s role. “It really does inspire that kind of guilt on my part.”

He’s always been an acquired taste, but it’s easy to see why Mr. Olbermann had his legions of imitators. He and Mr. Patrick essentially pioneered the smart-aleck sportscast, studding their mid-1990’s SportsCenters with polysyllabic riffs, sharp put-downs and Zeitgeist-ian catch phrases. (Mr. Olbermann’s contributions included “He hit the ball real hard” and “It’s deep, and I don’t think it’s playable.”) While they could teeter on cutesiness—Mr. Olbermann and Mr. Patrick occasionally sounded like honor students who had commandeered the school P.A. system—they gave a cerebral, slightly sexy sheen to sportscasting, previously the domain of ex-jocks and hairpieces in bad sport coats. The television producer Aaron Sorkin freely admits that the two lead characters in his acclaimed series, Sports Night, were based on Mr. Patrick and Mr. Olbermann, whom he watched while he was living in the Four Seasons in L.A. and writing the script for the film The American President.

“He was unlike any other sportscaster I had seen on TV,” Mr. Sorkin said of Mr. Olbermann. “There was nothing jockish about him at all. In fact, just the opposite. He’s a tremendously erudite guy—very, very funny on the air as well as off.”

Still, the Olbermann-and-Patrick era SportsCenter didn’t foresee the obnoxiousness it would unleash. “I definitely think that Keith and others during that period did reinvent sportscasting, which was a great thing,” said Brett Haber, the WCBS 2 sports director who worked at ESPN at the same time as Mr. Olbermann. “Unfortunately, they also did a disservice to the next generation of sportscasters, who now all have this imperative to imitate them—and can’t.”

“The difference between Olbermann and most of these other [smart-aleck] guys is that there is a greater texture to what he does,” said Mr. Costas. “It’s not just the same note. There is some originality; there is a real point of view, as opposed to just a smart-ass point of view.”

Of course, Mr. Olbermann’s other contribution to sportscasting is his reputation as a difficult employee. Mr. Olbermann’s differences with ESPN—and ESPN’s differences with Mr. Olbermann—have been well chronicled (the parties disagreed on schedules, appearances on other networks and whether the cable station’s sleepy hometown of Bristol, Conn., constituted the ninth circle of hell). Mr. Olbermann left ESPN for MSNBC in 1997, but ran up against management again, as his sojourn coincided with a certain scandal involving a plump White House intern. Mr. Olbermann wasn’t shy about publicly showing his distaste for the story. “I got something taken out of me by Monica Lewinsky—and there are 4,000 jokes that follow that, and I’ll spare you all of them,” Mr. Olbermann said.

On a different note, Mr. Olbermann said that one of his biggest regrets about leaving MSNBC in December 1998 was that his departure gave rise to a star on a rival network. “I used to kick Bill O’Reilly’s ass,” he said. “You talk about Oppenheimer—I watch Bill O’Reilly and go, ‘Oh, for God’s sake. If I had stayed, I could have saved us all this.’” (A Fox News Channel spokesman disputed that account, saying The O’Reilly Factor had begun to edge Mr. Olbermann’s program in the ratings months before Mr. Olbermann left; a spokesperson for Nielsen told The Observer that The O’Reilly Factor averaged 268,000 viewers per episode during the last five months of 1998, compared to the 266,000 per episode for Mr. Olbermann’s The Big Show.)

Though Mr. Olbermann now says that he had met with Fox Sports prior to the discovery of the stained dress and had discussed the possibility of moving there when his MSNBC deal was up, there is little doubt that MSNBC’s harping on Monicagate hastened his departure. Mr. Olbermann’s back-to-back breakups with ESPN and MSNBC marked him as something of a broadcasting diva. Or a latter-day Howard Beale, depending on your view. “I think a lot of people who worked with him admitted his courage, but didn’t have the balls or the clout to say what he said,” said Mr. Haber.

Friends and colleagues say that Mr. Olbermann’s penchant for bomb-throwing at management disguises an almost introverted streak. “I think he is very sensitive,” said Hank Perlman, who helped create some of the SportsCenter commercials. “Sometimes, maybe, he cares too much.” One of Mr. Olbermann’s oldest friends, Jeff Wald, the news director at Los Angeles news channel KTLA, who hired Mr. Olbermann to work at that station in 1985, said that the sports anchor has always been somewhat insular. He recalled that Mr. Olbermann preferred to watch sporting events on television rather than go to the event itself—a decision Mr. Olbermann defended by saying he wanted to see what the home viewer saw and didn’t want to get chummy with pro athletes, but one that some colleagues interpreted as aloof. The secret to dealing with Mr. Olbermann, Mr. Wald said, “is that you don’t try and change him and make him something he is not.”

Fox Sports has tried to appease Mr. Olbermann and embrace his idiosyncrasies. They lured him away in early 1999 with a multimillion-dollar contract and a role as the expanding network’s biggest star, with a weeknight wrap-up show intended to take on the SportsCenter franchise. In one of the more ubiquitous network advertising campaigns in recent memory, Mr. Olbermann’s bespectacled, gray-templed mug was plastered all over ballparks and stadiums, Mr. Potatohead–style, around the country.

Mr. Olbermann said the initial flood of hype was both a blessing and a curse. “This is the exact definition of my ego,” Mr. Olbermann said: “When they [Fox] … had my head 40 feet high at Shea Stadium … they said to me, ‘We’re going to give out 100,000 temporary tattoos of your face at the Super Bowl.’ And I just swallowed and said, ‘No. God. Don’t. You’re not going to, you can’t possibly—what do you mean, temporary?”

On a less sarcastic note, Mr. Olbermann believes that a blunder in the East Coast signs, which said that his weeknight show would air at 10 p.m. instead of 11, may have contributed to the weeknight show’s eventual demise. “If your ad is effective, and you get people to do something like tune into a television show and they see [something else], they get pissed off,” Mr. Olbermann said.

Which brings us to today, with Mr. Olbermann doing baseball and hosting his Sunday-night program, The Keith Olbermann Evening News. The show is about as close to the unfiltered Olbermann experience as you can get, as the host—housed in a set that looks like Sam Spade’s office—performs interviews, reads highlights and examines sports news with his usual smart-mouthed precision. In another against-the-grain nod to the past, the Evening News opens and closes with brief segments in which Mr. Olbermann stands before an old-style microphone, as if in a 40’s newsreel, and dissects whatever he pleases, from athletes to Howard Stern.

Within the broader context of Fox Sports—a network trying to build an audience with regional sportscasts and boosterish emphasis on a particular area’s home teams—the Evening News comes across as a bit anomalous, a sporting version of Inside the Actors Studio on a network chasing the NASCAR crowd. Not to mention an anti-SportsCenter, with its minimal bells and whistles and its Murrow-esque aesthetic. This is by design, Mr. Olbermann explained. “I just said, ‘Let’s look at everything that is on TV now in sports and do exactly the opposite.’”

Mr. Olbermann said he misses New York—he is, at heart, a New York guy, having grown up here and attended Yankee games as a kid. His first job was at U.P.I. radio in the old Daily News building on 42nd Street; he misses black-and-white cookies and the tuna from the Redeye Grill; and on a cold day in L.A., he walks around in a replica 1937 New York Americans jacket. (Mr. Olbermann doesn’t drive because he has no depth perception at speeds exceeding 15 m.p.h., the result of smacking his head 20 years ago inside, of all things, the No. 7 train at Shea Stadium.) He inhales The Times and obsesses over the crossword puzzle; recently, he engaged in a gleeful skirmish with Times editor Bill Borders over the correct spelling of the first name of the former baseball player Eldon Auker. (The Times had misspelled it “E-l-d-e-n” on several occasions.)

“Unless you become estranged from the city for some personal reason, you always remain a New Yorker,” Mr. Olbermann said.

He will never be everyone’s cup of tea, of course. But Keith Olbermann—the self-proclaimed Robert Oppenheimer of modern-day sportscasting, the loved and loathed Cosellian iconoclast—is alive and well, thank you very much. Baseball season is here, his mom is doing great and he still has Mike Piazza’s bat handle. And you don’t.

Tonight, as Mr. Olbermann eases into his chair and ponders Ron Rosenbaum’s The Secret Parts of Fortune, Fox Sports New York feeds the hungry masses the New Jersey Devils vs. the Phoenix Coyotes, live from the Sun Belt. [FSNY, 26, 9 p.m.]

Then: Diane Sawyer to the rescue! The most glamorous interim anchor in network news tap-tap-taps onto the GMA set in snakeskin high heels and a mint green suit like the nanny of your dreams, carrying a stuffed bunny rabbit and an inflatable airplane. Ms. Sawyer wiggles the stuffed bunny and coos gently, but that baby just keeps crying. Then Samantha’s twin Stephen grabs the inflatable airplane and belts another Finck twin, Amanda, in the kisser. Now Amanda’s sobbing inconsolably. The place sounds like the William Morris agency at lunchtime.

That’s when it hits you: Why is Diane Sawyer--Nixon survivor, Brenda Starr look-alike, interviewer of Presidents, the most beautiful lips in network news, Bill Clinton’s lunch pal, Ms. Mike Nichols, the only person in news who would fit in at Oscar Night--still doing morning TV?

She … is … persevering! After three years of running in place, the once-woebegone Good Morning America has found what its staff believes to be an opening, a soft spot, and is making a run at the Today show. A week ago, on March 25, Ms. Sawyer and her colleague, Charlie Gibson--he’s still kicking, too--came within a Westchester suburb (65,000 people) of Today’s Katie Couric and Matt Lauer in the national ratings. Granted, it was the morning after ABC carried the Academy Awards--“If they get the Oscars five nights a week, they’ll have a great shot,” said Today show executive producer Jonathan Wald--but those pre-dawn wake-up alarms Ms. Sawyer hears every weekday are starting to pay off.

So Good Morning, America! Morning news is the last great competition in the broadcast-network news business, and all signs say it’s growing more intense. Late night is settled for a while, prime time is too spotty to be anybody’s one-on-one, but morning TV is as good a competition as sports--but it goes on every day. Audiences are big, the profits are big, stars are big. Everyone from Ms. Sawyer to ABC News president David Westin knows that screaming babies aren’t just cute television … they’re gold. They remind viewers of why they watch network TV, and executives know that once you’re there--at ABC or NBC or even … CBS--you may think of it as your regular home. All day and all night. That’s why Mr. Westin called GMA “critically important to ABC News.”

Today is still dominant, the most-watched show in the mornings by far, averaging about 6.2 million viewers per weekday, compared to GMA’s 4.8 million. Katie Couric and Matt Lauer remain the morning’s biggest stars. But they’re down about 3 percent in the ratings for the year and GMA is up 8 percent. Even the left-for-dead CBS Early Show, with cantankerous Bryant Gumbel--remember Bryant?--is showing signs of life, at 2.7 million viewers a day, up 6 percent.

“Today built a lead that could not be sustained,” said Steve Friedman, the ex-Today executive producer who took that show outside at 30 Rock and now produces Mr. Gumbel’s Early Show. “What you are seeing is two [rival] shows pretty much knowing what they are doing, and providing stiff competition.”

Ever since the late, great J. Fred Muggs wrapped an opposable thumb around Dave Garroway’s shirt collar and, legend has it, saved Today from an early extinction, network executives have realized there was money to be made in the morning. And until the 1970’s, the ground was littered with failed CBS and ABC competition--including Jack Paar, Walter Cronkite and Will Rogers Jr. But once the first version of Good Morning America achieved some success in the 1970’s with David Hartmann, and then had its own period of dominance in the 1980’s, there was a kind of profitable, reliable hierarchy on television: At NBC there was Bryant and Jane; ABC had David and Joan; CBS didn’t try. GMA wasn’t technically part of ABC News until five years ago--between Mr. Hartmann and Joan Lunden’s entertainment framework and the news segments, there was, said Ms. Sawyer, a “nice arranged marriage.”

The three morning shows in 2002 are no longer an arranged marriage. They are--even CBS’s Early Show--monsters. That’s true largely because of Today. At an estimated quarter-billion in revenue per year, Today is the most profitable show in network television, bigger for NBC than Friends or ER or even The Tonight Show. At $65 million over five years, Katie Couric earns more than Tom Brokaw--or Peter Jennings or Dan Rather. Today infuses every corner of the network. The network entertainment president, Jeff Zucker, used to run Today. Mr. Wald, Today’s new executive producer, left Mr. Brokaw’s program to run the morning show.

The big shots used to go in the other direction: Former Today hosts Frank McGee, John Chancellor and Mr. Brokaw graduated to the NBC Nightly News, as though they were going north to the majors. So, needless to say, did Barbara Walters, although she went to ABC. But now the evening-news shows are more and more beside the point, and morning is the part that matters. It’s your orientation point during the TV day; it’s your emotional touch point. It’s what the women watch. More important, it’s a defining product for network television that makes cable seem a little marginal.

Today and its competition have also become a vital part of the country’s news cycle. Newsmakers covet slots on morning shows to announce policy decisions or respond to troublesome situations. “All these morning shows, and the Today show specifically, we set the agenda for the day,” said Mr. Wald. “Nobody is waiting around anymore … to seize the day, both literally and figuratively--you got to go on the morning shows. It makes sense to start with all three of these shows, because then you can constantly update and tweak your message.”

But more than anything, what made Today into such a gorilla was its unabashed populism. Unlike the evening news--which still sees its function as being, well, the Evening News--Today aggressively caters to its audience. It’s still the news, but it’s the hometown news. To use a very old cliché that hasn’t been dragged from the blanket box in a long time, morning TV is the Global Village: the comfy café, the town hall, the high-school civics auditorium, the Fashion Barn Ladies Shop, the movie theater and the weather station all at once. Thus the triumph of Katie Couric, the cheerleader-as-student-council-president if ever there was one. And thus Matt, who might not get your daughter home by midnight but probably wouldn’t drink and drive. And thus the exact rightness of the broadcast throbbing crowd in Rockefeller Center, with the hats and the signs and the grins; the U.S.A. Thank goodness we don’t live in Austria, or we’d be looking at Tyrolean hats through that window.

When Today holds an on-air wedding, it lets the audience vote on everything from the invitations to the place settings to the honeymoon locale. When Matt Lauer jetted around the globe in those Waldo-esque “Where in the World Is Matt Lauer?” segments, the show asked viewers to scan the horizon and guess where the anchor was reporting from.

Today is also intensely commercial. All of the morning news business got a wake-up call after the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, but before that big sobriety check, a typical Today show, like most of its competition, was essentially a super-caffeinated promotional vehicle--a speedy string of interviews, plugs and demos for upcoming products, films, books and music. A fall 2001 study by the Project on Excellence in Journalism concluded that prior to Sept. 11, a substantial proportion of morning news shows had become “a kind of sophisticated infomercial,” and that Today, GMA and the Early Show combined dedicated 34 percent of their time to “selling viewers something.” (During the home stretch of the 2000 Presidential race, this selling was apparently expanded to include an incessant schedule of Presidential and Vice Presidential candidates, wives and surrogates.)

Maybe that’s why there’s something ephemeral about all of today’s morning news shows--occasionally, Today or GMA or the Early Show can cook up compelling television, but most of their material feels disposable, whether it’s an interview with John Ashcroft, a cooking segment, a butt-exercise demonstration or a concert with Britney Spears. By design it’s intensely aural--morning TV is really a version of talk radio, since most of its audience is wandering around bedrooms, toothbrushes in hand, yelling at kids. It doesn’t matter if it’s groundbreaking or memorable; morning TV sells an image.

“The sum is greater than the total of its parts,” said Steve Friedman. “It’s the overall feeling [the audience] gets when they watch morning television--they may not even remember any of the spots.”

But it works. Today turned itself into a TV phenomenon, and did it in a time when audiences for broadcast news are being eroded by 24-hour cable. It helps that the morning itself is a better time to tackle the customer--really, who’s at home to watch the 6:30 evening news anymore?--but it’s seen the only winning game left in the broadcast news biz.

As a rivalry, it’s a circus. Competition between the shows for these newsmakers--and other guests--is wilder than ever. “It’s ugly,” said Mr. Friedman. “I’ve never seen it this bad. You have people calling up guests saying, ‘I just talked to the other show and they canceled.’ You have people sending cars pretending to be one show and being for another. You have people at a television studio fighting over who goes first and almost ending up in a fist fight. It’s as brutal as it’s ever been, which I sort of like.”

And there is an old-time show-business no-holds-barred quality to the competition. The shows routinely howl about getting ripped off by each other; Good Morning America executive producer Shelly Ross is still getting over having a Dionne Warwick concert in Bryant Park buzzed by a helicopter hired by Mr. Wald’s predecessor, Jeff Zucker. (“I don’t care if you do anything to us, but we just feel very protective of our guests,” Ms. Ross said.) Said Mr. Friedman: “When Zucker buzzed that concert at GMA, I laughed my ass off. I thought that was fun.”

And it’s only going to get more intense, now that the Today show looks a little vulnerable. There are a million theories as to why Today’s ratings lead began to soften after Sept. 11. One theory is that Today--the sunniest of the morning shows--wasn’t built for such a tragic and wide-ranging story, and that a sliver of the audience turned away to other sources, perhaps cable, perhaps GMA, with the news-nosed Ms. Sawyer and Mr. Gibson. “The advantages of Today were somewhat negated by 9/11,” said Mr. Friedman, who’s emerged as something of a Today critic in residence, though he freely admits he’d trade the Early Show’s numbers “for Today’s numbers tomorrow.”

There are theories that Today’s absurd popularity was simply bound to peak; that Ms. Couric’s girl-next-door popularity may have taken a hit when she flirted with quitting and then signed the $65 million deal; that Mr. Zucker’s departure to run NBC Entertainment left it rudderless; that Mr. Wald didn’t understand the beast.

Mr. Wald, the executive producer, scoffed at the suggestion that the top-rated Today is in trouble. “As somebody once famous said, ‘Lightning doesn’t hit the small trees,’” he said. And Mr. Wald dismissed theories that Today’s hard-news Achilles heel was exposed after Sept. 11. “We will not relinquish the hard-news title to anybody,” he said. “Just because they say ‘We are hard news’ doesn’t mean they are. Look at the work we are doing now, not what they say we were doing then.”

As for his own status, Mr. Wald allowed that a new boss was bound to take some early licks. “It’s always a challenge when someone new takes over a big operation,” he said. Because of inevitable newsroom gossip, “there’s always going to be that kind of low-level hum around any operation,” he said. Still, he insisted that he and his Today crew were undaunted. “They are used to being in first place by a lot, with everybody gunning for them,” he said. “It’s something the staff takes very well.”

Maybe so, but it doesn’t diminish the rising confidence at shops like Good Morning America, which is set to have its most successful quarter in numbers of viewers since the first quarter of 1996. Within GMA, there is a sense that, after some sputtering, this incarnation of the show--which they believe is a more news-oriented program, given Ms. Sawyer and Mr. Gibson’s respective pedigrees--came into its own during the extended 2000 Presidential election and began to reap better ratings after Sept. 11. Of Sept. 11, GMA executive producer Shelley Ross said: “I think it was a story that just played to our strengths … we felt that story in our bone marrow here.”

Of course, GMA isn’t MacNeil-Lehrer; Diane and Charlie can be as goofy as anyone--i.e., the stunt with five live births in one morning, or their introduction of It, the so-called transport revolution that looked like hand-rolled lawnmower. But GMA’s slow rise is impressive considering that ABC’s prime-time lineup, collapsed under the weight of dead sitcoms and Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, is totally in the dumps. So the revitalized GMA has gotten new respect. “We used to ask for dimes,” said Mr. Gibson. “Now they give us dollars.”

Three years ago, Diane and Charles--did you ever think of that?--were brought aboard as interim saviors of a sunk ship, replacing jettisoned captains Lisa McRee and Kevin Newman, enlisted to keep the franchise afloat, but just visiting.

“I think that [interim label] did hold us back,” executive producer Shelley Ross said. “I thought, ‘Gee, if I knew I could say they are going to be here for at least three years …. ” I do think the relationships between the morning audience and the anchors is so personal, that I really feel that this slower growth in the morning really could have been attributed to ‘Why should I fall in love if someone is going to leave me in a couple of months?’”

Now, the belief within GMA is that Mr. Gibson and Ms. Sawyer are not transients, they won’t abandon you. “They are not going anywhere,” Ms. Ross said of Ms. Sawyer and Mr. Gibson. “They are just not.” Said David Westin: “Success always breeds longevity.”

Meanwhile, Ms. Sawyer, once considered too newsy, too glamorous for morning’s peppy atmospherics, has emerged as something of a counterintuitive surprise, kind of like what her husband Mr. Nichols did for Meryl Streep in Heartburn and Postcards from the Edge. “I felt she was the only person in the world who knew she was funny, who knew that she sat on the floor at 3 in the morning, rolled up her sleeves, wore coke-bottle glasses and worked on scripts by cutting them and pasting them together,” Ms. Ross said. “She is funny as hell, she is married to Mike Nichols, she’s a very interesting person.”

Ms. Sawyer concedes that she’s not exactly built for mornings, that she’s still going out two nights a week, maybe three, and if stepping out to see Robin Williams at Carnegie Hall means she might be a tad groggy the next day, she isn’t going to change. “I actually have a husband,” Ms. Sawyer said, laughing, after a recent show. “I actually have a nightlife.”

They’re even cracking a smile over at the Early Show, which got kicked like a junkyard dog a couple years back, when CBS spent millions launching Bryant 2.0 and barely moved the ratings needle. Also co-hosted by Jane Clayson, the Early Show outlasted Brill’s Content, which memorably plastered Mr. Gumbel to its cover with the tag: WHAT’S WRONG WITH THIS PICTURE? The Early Show is by no means a breakout hit, but buoyed by the Survivor wave, it got a jolt, and the buzzards aren’t circling anymore. “Survivor saved this show,” said Mr. Friedman. CBS’ commitment to the show, said Ms. Clayson, “is an indication that they see it going now--for the first time maybe ever at CBS--in the right direction.”

“It’s becoming like it always should be in television, where first is about as much ahead of second as second is ahead of third,” Mr. Friedman said, assessing the race. It may have not gotten there yet, but after television’s wake-up, competition has finally started to tighten. Today, GMA,and the Early Show will continue to scratch and claw. The Finck twins are going to get plenty of work.

It was a gray Monday afternoon, and Mr. Verdi--the shiny-domed stylist, yappy Metro Channel fashion commentator and kill-’em-with-kindness host of the Discovery Channel’s abode-improvement show Surprise by Design--sat on the concrete steps outside the G.M. building at 59th and Fifth. He was looking at guys.

A wide-bodied mid-management drone walked by in an open-collared blue shirt and navy pants.

“ He doesn’t care,” Mr. Verdi said.

Then came a middle-aged bronzed man in a blue blazer, designer jeans and black Prada sport shoes. Straight outta St. Tropez.

“ He looks great,” Mr. Verdi said, sounding relieved. “He actually ironed those jeans.”

He was an exception. For every homme the 34-year-old Mr. Verdi declared fashionable, there were six or seven unmitigated disasters. This was actually a good ratio. Mr. Verdi estimated that 90 percent of men have no idea what they are doing, clothes-wise.

A flabby red-haired man in a white shirt and gray trousers froze on the sidewalk. “ Brownbeltblackshoes,” Mr. Verdi whispered.

A young-turk C.A.A.-agent type strutted by in a black crepe suit.

“Suit doesn’t fit,” Mr. Verdi said. “It’s a weird length. It should be a little longer. He needs a long suit, and they lengthened the sleeves, but the jacket body is too short. His trousers are definitely too short. He looks like Charlie from My Three Sons.”

If you felt, as many do, that New York was a fashionable town compared to, say, any place besides Paris and London, Mr. Verdi’s examination was depressing. This was the eve of Fashion Week, and he was dressing the men of this town down. Way down. It wasn’t just the dumpy fanny-packers and Jets jersey-wearers. Everyone seemed wrong. Worse, he was blasting strangers for stuff you’d proudly worn a thousand times.

It felt like the time you got to college and your roommate stomped on all your favorite bands. All you believed to be true and unique wasn’t.

“ He doesn’t care,” Mr. Verdi said again, this time at a man in a tattered pair of shorts.

But it was easy to criticize. A better question was: Could the average man’s fashion sense be elevated--or were we all hopeless? Women had that preternatural instinct and no shortage of stylistic guide points, from magazines to celebrities to honest friends. Men, on the other hand, were lost. They shopped alone and didn’t talk to their friends about clothes, they couldn’t tell MiuMiu from a muffler, and God forbid anyone ever complimented them on a pair of pants--they’d wear them for 30 years.

Mr. Verdi--who’s made a name for himself telling humans specifically what not to do--conceded that men were hard to train. Partly it was their priorities: Men simply didn’t care enough about clothes to spend time shopping, much less carefully weigh trends and looks. Partly it was money: The average man would rather spend $500 on a Palm Pilot than a good pair of shoes. And then, considering “the average man” was really just code for “the average heterosexual” (not that gay men didn’t have their own fashion foibles, Mr. Verdi said), there also was the old, pathetic prejudice: Many straight men think dressing up makes them look gay.

It was dumb but still true.

“Men think fashion emasculates them,” Mr. Verdi said. “They think that attention to grooming is equated with feminine qualities. That’s where men get led down the wrong path. They are taught to get dressed up on special occasions: Sundays, for a wedding, for an event, maybe Christmas Day. But to a certain extent, dressing up for them just means ironing your pants. I wish that men would have more fun, would roll the dice more and be more playful.”

It seemed insane: Guys who’d think nothing of buying a FUCK YOU, YOU FUCKING FUCK shirt on St. Mark’s Place still worried about sending the wrong message with a patterned print. This staunch macho-ness seemed retro, out of sync with every other trend in men’s grooming. Today’s man cares more about his skin and nails and hair and overall cleanliness than ever.

“Putting moisturizer on isn’t anything that anybody knows you can see,” Mr. Verdi said. “And nothing you have to admit. But putting a pink Oxford on …. ”

What grated Mr. Verdi most, besides men’s marsupial penchant for ramming 50 pieces of crap in their pants pockets--he really detested that--was the sameness of it all. This was strange, considering how much fashion had diversified and democratized itself. Men have more clothing options than ever: A walk down Fifth Avenue could lead you into a hundred different stores, selling everything from bespoke shirts to three-quarter nylon pants to Seattle SuperSonics wristbands. There were dizzying amounts of colors and patterns and fabrics, and a lot of it was affordable.

But men still wound up looking the same--and because contemporary tastes had gone more casual, they looked worse. The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit had been dethroned by the Man in the Shitty Blue Shirt and Khakis.

“You know what I’ve been noticing?” Mr. Verdi asked. “The guys that look best here are the guys in uniforms. The U.P.S. guy. The Crate & Barrel guy who just walked around the corner had a great uniform on. The policemen, the firemen.”

A short man walked by in a navy suit with pants fluttering at his ankles.

“This guy looks great,” Mr. Verdi said.

But the pants?

“He makes it work. They’re too short, but it’s his effort. He clearly wanted it that way; he told the tailor, ‘Make them shorter.’ It wasn’t the tailor’s decision. He put his mark on it.”

Mr. Verdi himself was wearing a vintage leather coat--“This is something Huggy Bear would have worn”--a purple Valentino T-shirt, Diesel jeans and cloggy chocolate Birkenstocks. He wore a pair of silvery Yves Saint Laurent glasses and a Cartier watch. He recommended owning several watches.

He recommended original cuffs. “I hate the inch-and-a-quarter cuff, prescribed by all tailors all the time,” he said. “It just collects dust. When I go to have my trousers cuffed, I ask them to put a three-inch cuff on it. They roll their eyes, so I say, ‘Four-inch cuff.’ I want it to look like a cuff.”

But Mr. Verdi knew that men often didn’t want to look like they had decided anything. That is the conceit of the new-model grunge proliferating among young, lean New York males these days: tiny vintage T-shirts, jeans, Chuck Taylors, long, matted hair. It’s caring just enough to make it look as if you don’t. Walk down Ludlow Street on the Lower East Side or Bedford Avenue, and you’ll see them: guys trying to look like Jack White of the White Stripes--or, judging from their expertly faded T-shirts, competitors in the 1982 Falmouth Road Race.

Mr. Verdi thought our location on 59th had something to do with the poor performance, though. “There is a difference in the way men dress in Chelsea than they do in the East Village than they do on the Upper East Side,” he said. “What we’re seeing right now is this generic, nondescript guy who doesn’t really care about fashion.”

But no, tourists weren’t to blame. An unkempt man--clearly a local--walked by in baggy tan shorts and a T-shirt. “This guy certainly doesn’t care.” Mr. Verdi shook his head. “Carrying his violin with socks in Birkenstocks!”

Mr. Verdi was born in Maplewood, N.J. As a teenager, he sold jewelry in Manhattan, getting his stuff picked up by Barneys and Bergdorf Goodman. He attended F.I.T. and worked retail at the Bloomingdale’s in Short Hills, advising well-moneyed suburban men and women on what to wear to graduation parties and weddings. They were rich, but not exactly fashion-forward.

“You can teach men and women what looks good on them,” Mr. Verdi said. “But if you leave them there, they will always be there.” Mr. Verdi speculated that all the people he advised at the Short Hills Bloomie’s are probably still wearing the clothes he told them to buy more than a decade ago.

Eventually, Mr. Verdi wended his way into television. On air he’s funny and approachable, not at all an intimidating fashion evangelical. In addition to his work for the Metro Channel’s Full Frontal Fashion (among other Metro duties, he hosts a segment called “Where D’ya Get That?”) and the Discovery Channel, he is planning a pilot for his own talk show. Meanwhile, he continues his work as a kind of personal stylist and fashion guru to celebrities and other well-heeled clients.

His phone rang. “ Megan!” Mr. Verdi exclaimed. It was Megan Mullaly, who plays Karen, the decadent society lush from Will & Grace. Mr. Verdi was helping Ms. Mullaly assemble her outfit for the Emmys on Sept. 22. “Hi, girly! I’m good, honey, how are you doing? … Oh my God, don’t do it! … Are we going to meet up and go to Edmundo? … I have a phone call out. I am waiting for him. Do you want me to send a few things up? … Shoe size? … All right.”

Mr. Verdi closed his Nokia. “She’s a class act!”

Ms. Mullaly was an exception, too. Later, over a lunch of salad and gnocchi at Fred’s, Mr. Verdi lamented celebrity fashion. Celebrity mistakes have become a kind of cottage industry these days; magazines and television shows love ridiculing the tragic frocks worn by film and TV stars.

The casualties were easy to explain, Mr. Verdi said. “Celebrity handlers are so busy kissing ass that nobody says, ‘No, Mariah; no, J. Lo.’ If somebody says to me, ‘Do I look fat in this?’ and they do, I say ‘ Yes.’”

There are celebrities who know fashion, even in Mr. Verdi’s usually antiseptic trade, television. David Letterman is one, he said. “I think his suits are impeccably well made, and you can see that on TV. That’s all custom tailoring. He found his look, and it’s effortless and always strong.”

Matt Lauer? “Nice guy, the guy next-door, the frat guy with a good job who has been a little more exposed to things he might not have otherwise been forced to take note of. I like that he’s not trying to hide losing his hair. As a person who has been there, he is rolling with it.”

Mr. Verdi stabbed a gnocchi. “I think Stone Phillips is one of the best-dressed men on TV,” he said of the Dateline NBC anchor. “He actually has style. This is a man who you know shops for his own stuff. He is not depending on stylists. He’s a man who really knows his body. He knows his strengths, and he’s confident enough to experiment with color and pattern.”

Stone Phillips!

“When I watch him, I think, ‘Oh my God, he looks so great,’” Mr. Verdi said. “He gets it. He understands fashion, likes fashion. I think it’s all very tailored and traditional and masculine, but it fits him well. He’s not only in navy or in black; he wears other colors--olive greens, weird browns, taupes. He’s not scared of patterns. He’ll wear a big windowpane on a jacket.”

After lunch, Mr. Verdi walked across Park Avenue and up East 60th to the mothership Bloomingdale’s. There his friend, cartoonist Marisa Acocella, was assembling a series of windows celebrating Fashion Week. Lining the windows were caricatures of New York fixtures like restaurateur Silvano Marchetto and Page Six’s Richard Johnson. Mr. Verdi was depicted seated in an ascot and had a big white bubble over his head saying, “THINK RED, VREELAND WOULD HAVE LOVED IT.”

“It’s great, Marisa,” Mr. Verdi said. “ Fabulous.”

“Robert’s the fashion pundit of the future,” Ms. Acocella said.

That future better get here soon. Behind Ms. Acocella and Mr. Verdi, there they were: swarms of men in oversized pants with inch-and-a-quarter cuffs and untucked blue shirts and brown shoes with black belts.

It looked bad for men and will probably get worse.

Wasn’t there anything that could be done?

“I think Stone Phillips should write a book,” Mr. Verdi said.

The joke’s on them, though. Mr. O’Reilly feasts on love-hate feelings and controversy, and right now, his career is hot. The O’Reilly Factor has the fastest-growing audience for a cable television news talk show. Mr. O’Reilly is the most popular person on the Fox News Channel. That used to be like saying you were the most popular person in your own bathtub, but not anymore. Mr. O’Reilly even beats Larry King in the ratings a couple of times a week. “He has the ability to be the king of this genre, if he handles his own success path well,” said Fox News Channel chairman Roger Ailes.

But Mr. O’Reilly may set his sights on even bigger goals. If Hillary Rodham Clinton gets elected to the Senate this November, he told The Observer, he’d consider running against her in 2006, if he were called upon. “If there is no candidate for the job, I might step up,” he said.

The potential Senatorial candidate also has a new book. It has a long title: The O’Reilly Factor: The Good, The Bad, and the Completely Ridiculous in American Life. The book offers Mr. O’Reilly’s opinions on everyone and everything from the Hardy Boys (good) to President Clinton (ridiculous) to Jesse Helms (bad) to onion-flavored potato chips (also bad).

Mr. O’Reilly really hates those onion-flavored potato chips. “They’ve got to be the worst thing in American society,” he said on a recent afternoon. “Why are we eating those things? They’re offensive to my stomach, they’re offensive to everybody around me. Let’s get rid of them!”

People value these opinions. You may be surprised to learn that Mr. O’Reilly’s new book will be No. 2 on the Oct. 8 New York Times best-seller list. You can’t even get The O’Reilly Factor book in Westchester County, Mr. O’Reilly said--it’s sold out. On Tuesday, Oct. 3, his book was No. 1 on Amazon.com.

What all of this means is that Bill O’Reilly, this brash New York guy with a brash show and a brash book, is becoming a huge media star, to the point where he thinks about running for elected office. This, despite the fact that Mr. O’Reilly ticks people off, and a lot of fancy people, like Al Gore and Hillary Clinton, won’t go near his show. This, despite the fact that Mr. O’Reilly can’t get himself on Oprah, Today, Good Morning America or a host of other television programs to plug his book. This, despite the fact that some TV pundits despise Mr. O’Reilly and his show. Tom Shales of The Washington Post once described The O’Reilly Factor as “worthless.”

Mr. O’Reilly doesn’t really care what his critics say. “They can attack me, they can attack me, and they have been attacking me,” he said, “and it ain’t going to stop the train.”

So choo-choo--all aboard. It was late on a Thursday afternoon when Mr. O’Reilly sat with NYTV in his corner office at the News Corporation headquarters in midtown. A North Pole–sized pile of viewer mail was stacked on his couch. On the wall was a photograph of Mr. O’Reilly and Gerald Ford. Mr. O’Reilly had a lot more hair in the photograph than he does now. There was also a framed TV Guide article on the wall with the headline, “FUTURE NEWS SUPERSTARS.” The article was from 1983. Underneath his desk was a green doormat with Hillary Clinton’s face on it. “I’ve Always Been a Yankee Fan,” the doormat read.

Mr. O’Reilly fussed at his desk. “My life is so hectic, it’s ridiculous,” he said.

Mr. O’Reilly is a big guy. A lot of people on TV are really small, but he is not. He is 6 feet 4 inches. He is 50 years old, with a firm chin and gray hair on his temples. He looks to be in good shape. He is not chubby. Mr. O’Reilly said he still plays touch football on the weekends with some old high-school buddies. That’s about as much as he wanted to talk about his personal life. “I can’t talk about my personal life,” he said, “because of security reasons.” He didn’t elaborate.

But Mr. O’Reilly will talk about his professional life. Yes, sir. And it’s clear that he is a pretty, well, confident about himself and his show. “There is something about the presentation that we bring to the Factor that has struck a chord in America,” he said. He said he wanted to bring a “powerful voice” to this country. He also said he wanted The O’Reilly Factor to present “things that are not presented in the elite media.” In the Factor, he said, “I’ve got that forum.”

The O’Reilly Factor almost always has the same basic format every night: First, Mr. O’Reilly opens up the show by telling everyone what he thinks about something. This part is called “Talking Points.” Then Mr. O’Reilly and his guests go mano a mano. Mr. O’Reilly does not host a cocktail party. Factor segments are more debates than interviews. Mr. O’Reilly is aggressive, and he will interrupt his guests. Often, he interrupts to give his own opinions. He likes to talk a lot.

Mr. O’Reilly’s viewers think he is a tough host. But Mr. O’Reilly said he tries not to be ruthless. He said he won’t purposely try to humiliate a guest, especially if they are struggling. “I’m not going to embarrass anybody, but there have been times when people have been on the program, that they were obviously intellectually overmatched,” he said.

People have a hard time figuring out Mr. O’Reilly’s politics. A lot of people think he’s a conservative, and these people haven’t even seen the Hillary Clinton doormat under his desk. Technically, he’s a registered Independent. But he’s also pro–gun control. He’s against the death penalty. He believes in global warming. He’s even for legalizing marijuana. “I would decriminalize marijuana, but you step out of your house high and you bother somebody else in any way, shape or form, I’m going to slap a fine on you that’s going to curl your hair!”

Clearly, Mr. O’Reilly is not everybody’s cup of tea. But people seem to like watching him even if they don’t agree with him, because he gets them riled up.

“He has an eclectic positioning,” Mr. Ailes said of Mr. O’Reilly. “We’ve had the same number of liberals screaming at us as we’ve had conservatives screaming at us, and Republicans and Democrats and independents and everybody else. Bill has a sort of universal way of pissing people off.”

So how did Mr. O’Reilly get to where he is? Here’s a short version of the story: He grew up in Levittown, Long Island, the son of an accountant, went to high school, went to Marist, got a master’s degree at Boston University, went into local TV in Boston, went into national TV at CBS and ABC, went into tabloid TV (he hosted the syndicated program Inside Edition), left, attended a mid-career graduate program at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and finally landed at the fledging Fox.

He also wrote a novel called Those Who Trespass, which is about a bitter former newsman who goes around killing his former rivals. Here is a scene from Those Who Trespass: “His hands firmly gripped her buttocks. Ashley could feel his rhythm. First quick, then slow, then quick again. He brought her right up to orgasm, then pulled back.”

In the TV news business, Mr. O’Reilly grew to be known as something of a troublemaker. Mr. O’Reilly is not ashamed of talking about this. As a young newsman, he didn’t bite his tongue, he freely offered his opinions and he ran into trouble. He said he once told Morley Safer, “There’s a line here, sir,” when the veteran 60 Minutes newsman cut him in the CBS cafeteria. No one really says that kind of thing to Morley Safer. “A lot of people found him intolerable,” recalled a former colleague of Mr. O’Reilly’s from Boston, Emily Rooney. It should be pointed out that Ms. Rooney really likes Mr. O’Reilly.

You might say that, more than anything else, Mr. O’Reilly is driven by the issue of socio-economic class. He talks about class a lot. Ms. Rooney said he used to talk about it years ago, back in Boston. Mr. O’Reilly often tells people he grew up with nothing, in a working-class family, and he understands the little guy. His dad never made more than $35,000 a year, he wrote in his book. “You don’t come from any lower than I came from on an economic scale,” he said. “I fully realize that blacks in the ghetto, and all that, had a much rougher life than I had. But I started from ground zero. When I got out of B.U., I had not a nickel.” Well, he probably had a nickel, but you get the point.

But Mr. O’Reilly said he is not interested in fame and wealth. He doesn’t want to join the media elite. He doesn’t want to go to fancy parties with Vladimir Putin at “21.” He just likes to work, he said. “I drive in here in my 1994 automobile and I come up and I do this show,” he said. Mr. O’Reilly was asked what kind of 1994 automobile he had. “A Lexus,” he said. “But you know, it’s a 1994--it’s got some dings in it.”

Mr. O’Reilly is obviously pleased that The O’Reilly Factor is hot on the heels of Larry King Live. The shows really couldn’t be more different, though. Mr. O’Reilly didn’t say this, but Larry King has a reputation of being--well, you know, a softy. The only thing soft about Mr. O’Reilly are his Arnold Brant suits. But Mr. O’Reilly said he respects his chief competitor. He’d sure like to have some of his guests. “I do believe that they [guests] think it’s a more prestigious vessel to go on Larry King than The O’Reilly Factor,” he said. “I’ve got to change that.”

Getting guests can be bit of a problem for Mr. O’Reilly. Like, not getting Al Gore kind of stinks. But Mr. Ailes sees it differently. “I say the [guests] who do Bill O’Reilly are intelligent, sure of their positions and fearless,” the Fox News boss said. “Now if they are wimps, promoters, cowards, salesmen or bullshit artists, they probably won’t do the show. In the end, that may eliminate some, but the guests that do come on will be good, and the television will be good.”

Mr. Ailes said he was happy for Mr. O’Reilly’s success. But he didn’t want to label Mr. O’Reilly the “face” of the Fox News Channel. “To be honest with you, as the face of Fox News, I’d rather have Paula Zahn’s, because she just has a better face,” Mr. Ailes said. “I like O’Reilly’s face, but Paula Zahn’s face is outstanding.” He was kidding around.

So for now, Mr. O’Reilly sails along with his hot TV show and his best-selling book. He is really proud of that book. “I think it’s an important book,” he said. Mr. O’Reilly said the book is important because it lays out what the “system” is. He said he wished he had a book like The O’Reilly Factor: The Good, the Bad and the Ridiculous in American Life when he was a kid. In addition to stuff about politics, class and race, the book also offers some tips on dating. Mr. O’Reilly, who is married now with a baby daughter, used to date a lot. The book also has some teenage grooming tips. “They should be instructed in the use of deodorants, shaving products, and cleansing agents,” he writes. The book also has a list of Mr. O’Reilly’s favorite movies. He liked Saturday Night Fever.

It was getting late, and Mr. O’Reilly had to go meet a friend and go to dinner. They were going to the Harvard Club. Mr. O’Reilly got his friend at his office and they rode the elevator down to the lobby. They exited through the revolving doors. It was dark outside, and the air was chilly and crisp. Before saying goodnight, Mr. O’Reilly said he had an idea for another book. “This one is going to be really big,” he said. But he wouldn’t say anything more, at least not for the time being.

"I'm going on vacation overseas. I'm not telling you where."

Bob Anderson, Marble Hill, the Bronx

"I have no idea. I don't have any money, so I guess I will stay home. I mind my business. That's hard to do. Just doing what you're supposed to do is not easy. I might go play some basketball. I have an old-timers' game I go to every year."

Bob Anderson, Upper East Side

"I'm going out to the Cape-Cape Cod, that is-with my family."

Bob Anderson, Throgs Neck, the Bronx

"Nothin'. I'll watch TV-that's about it. I can't do much. I can't hardly walk. I'm in a wheelchair. I play cards, poker, with my friends. We get together sometimes; we play for nickels and dimes. The only activity we have is bingo once a week. If you win, you win $5. You win the big pot, you win $15 to $17."

Bob Anderson, Prospect Park, Brooklyn

"I'm going to go outside and look at the weather, see if it rains or if it's sunny. I can't do nothing at all. I just sit down; I just watch people walking by, eat ice cream when the truck comes. It comes once in a while-every two hours. I just sit down and play checkers sometimes."

Bob Anderson, Flatbush, Brooklyn

"There's work to be done. I have sales work, I have house work. For me, I'm stuck in a work mode. When you borrow people's money, you create a dynamic where you have to have a system to repay it. I borrowed from the bank. I just have to bear down on the issue. There's much I would love to do recreationally, but it's not a priority at this point in time."

Bob Anderson, Upper West Side

"We've got a bunch of kids, and different people are going in different directions. One's going to Italy, one's going to France, another's going to Canada. We usually go to the Hamptons, but we're not sure this year because we don't know which of the kids we're going to visit, with all the events in the world. It's just completely up in the air. It's paralysis through analysis."

Bob Anderson, Bay Ridge, Brooklyn

"I'm just existing. Just hanging around waiting to die."

Bob Anderson, Flatbush, Brooklyn

"Sometimes I go on vacation; sometimes I just take time off and read and putz around. Maybe I read and go to the theater. I'm not one who really plans. I'm not a beach person. I come home after work, work in the garden. I play music sometimes. I play my trumpet and read. I'm just sort of low-key."

Bob Anderson, Upper West Side

"I'm going to write a novel. It's about Sylvia Plath."

-Alexandra Wolfe

The Dean of Peekskill

In 1977, a sultry, green-eyed 21-year-old singer/songwriter named Dean Friedman released a song called "Ariel," an ode to a free-spirited Jewish girl from "way on the other side of the Hudson" who volunteered for WBAI, didn't eat meat, got high and "wore a peasant blouse with nothing underneath."

"Ariel" was a hit, and though some compared the Paramus-born Mr. Friedman's elastic vocals to a stoned Kermit the Frog's, others thought his wry style and urbane wit resembled Bowie's and Dylan's. He enjoyed some success in later years, but following a skirmish with his record label-the now-defunct Life Song-Mr. Friedman's three top-selling albums went out of print, and the whinnying chorus of "Ariel" faded along with the Carter administration.

Mr. Friedman's career fared somewhat better in England, where his managers were savvier and his moony duet "Lucky Stars" became a Barry Manilow–esque guilty pleasure. But in 1981, the BBC banned his song "McDonald's Girl" because the government-owned station wouldn't play songs that insinuated anything commercial. Mr. Friedman's U.K. label dropped him, and not long after that he filed for personal bankruptcy. Though the Barenaked Ladies later covered "McDonald's Girl"-there was even a recent dance-remix version-"Whatever happened to …? " became something of a prefix to Dean Friedman's name.

Now 47, Mr. Friedman lives with his wife and two kids in Peekskill, N.Y., where he runs his Web site, deanfriedman.com. In the site's chat room, devoted fans banter about his music-"My 4 year old was caught singing a DF song at breakfast yesterday!" wrote Stu from Abu Dhabi on May 18. Then there's Mr. Friedman's "Frequently Asked Questions" section. Example: Q. Is the reason Dean didn't record for 17 years because he's a reclusive millionaire living off his royalties in the mountains of NY State? A. ROTFL (Rolling on the floor laughing… )

"People imagine that I sold all these records and had all these hits and made millions of dollars and retired," Mr. Friedman said on a recent evening at the DT-UT cafe on Second Avenue. Now gray-haired, with a trimmed beard and a little belly, he smiled wryly. "The reality is that I never got paid for any of the sales of those records. Just business and politics-record companies have been fucking artists since the beginning of time. I've made more money as an independent artist selling 10,000 records directly to my audience through my Web site than I did selling a million records as part of the mainstream industry, and I think that's very revealing. It illustrates how odious the industry is."

Since songwriting didn't exactly pay the bills, Mr. Friedman has also spent the better part of the last two decades making musical, synthesizer-inspired toys for kids' museums around the world. They come in fantastical shapes-one looks like a beach ball sprouting breasts-and they have names like "The Booble" and "The Honkblatt." Today, Mr. Friedman's largest group of American fans is under the age of 10, and his current repertoire of original music includes songs like "That Stove is Hot" and "Please, Don't Tease the Bees."

"There's not a big difference between performing for 10,000 people on a stage or sitting on the floor in a kindergarten surrounded by a dozen little kids," Mr. Friedman said. "The essence of the exchange of music is the same."

In England, Mr. Friedman still appears on the occasional sit-com or talk show. To promote his two new albums-as well as to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the British release of his earlier albums, Dean Friedman and 'Well, Well,' Said the Rocking Chair -Mr. Friedman has organized a 30-city United Kingdom tour this fall. "I could actually make a living there as a musician," he said. "But we never moved because, up until this year, there was a quarantine for animals." He explained that his wife, Allison, is a zoologist, and the two-along with their tykes, Hannah and Sam-have two cats, a dog and a pet monkey.

But Mr. Friedman seemed content with the attention he's gotten from his Web site, which gets 10,000 to 20,000 hits a month.

"People find the site and write and say things like, 'I can't believe I finally found you-I've been looking for your records for 25 years, because my girlfriend took them when she moved out.' Or 'Thanks for helping me get through college,' or 'through my divorce," Mr. Friedman said. "And I get lots of e-mails from girls named Ariel."

-Anna Jane Grossman

Hamptons Summer Preview

1. "Wooooooooooo!"

2. "You're not invited."

3. "Wooooooooooo!"

4. "Jerkoff!"

5. "You're not invited."

6. "Wooooooooooo!"

-Jason Gay

But in the end we decided to do a wish list. Television is nothing if not an instant-gratification business-so if we're not instantly gratified by what's currently out there, in a 500-channel, digital cable, HBO-on-Demand, Bill Maher–gets-one-show-after-another universe, then something's amiss. So here's 10 wishes:

1. We wish for peace in the Middle East-and on cable news. We've enjoyed the mean-spirited missile attacks between Fox News and CNN and MSNBC as much as anyone-probably more-but it's time to stop. Guys: You all have your positives and your negatives, and as great as you think you are, twice as many people watch an average episode of 8 Simple Rules for Dating My Teenage Daughter than anything on your respective channels.

2. We wish television news in general would stop being so crazed about being live. Live coverage is easily the most overrated journalistic innovation going. It's one thing if it's Ted Koppel by the Euphrates, but the vast majority of live coverage is merely "live from the scene where such-and-such happened a long time ago, and the only reason we're doing this is because we can." It'd be great if news organizations cut their live coverage in half and devoted the saved resources to enterprise, investigative journalism.

3. We wish television writers wouldn't confuse verbosity with intelligence. One of the more irritating developments of the past decade in TV is the growth of the 78 R.P.M. drama: shows in which characters speak faster than kindergartners who have to go to the potty, and always do it so grammatically and exquisitely-Blake references! Teddy Roosevelt quotes!-and launch smart comebacks every time. We'd really enjoy it if, every once in while, a super-smart character on a super-smart show said, "Huh?"

4. We wish David Letterman, Jay Leno, Conan O'Brien, Craig Kilborn and Jimmy Kimmel would do one week a year where not a single one of their guests had something to plug. And Bobby Short was the musical guest every night. We guarantee it would be the most interesting week of the year-and, probably, the worst-rated.

5. We wish someone would give Monica Lewinsky a reality show. Wait: done !

6. We wish the Friends could live forever. We really do. And by the end, the world will have run out of money to give them, so instead of giving them cash, we'll have to award them vast tracts of land-literally, nations-so people living in, say, China, will instead live in "Lisa Kudrow" and have to answer to Lisa Kudrow if she wants to do anything, like redecorate the Great Wall for InStyle magazine or something.

8. We've moaned about this before, but we wish Six Feet Under would knock it off with the dream sequences. It's gotten to the point where when anything interesting happens, you automatically assume it's a dream-just like you do with the CBS Early Show .

8. We wish there'd be a reality television dating series which followed the love lives of the people who create reality television dating series. Why do we get the feeling it wouldn't exactly be Shampoo ?

9. We wish there was a sign on the right-field fence in Yankee Stadium that read, "Hit This Sign-and Michael Kay Shuts Up For Three Innings."

10. We wish Larry David ran everything.

Tonight on Fox, the finale of American Idol . [WNYW, 5, 8 p.m.]

Thursday, May 22

Found: media defender of Jayson Blair! In the person of Ted Faraone, a loquacious, no-nonsense local television consultant and public-relations rep. Mr. Faraone, of course, has a Big Fat Reason for sticking up for Mr. Blair-he's angling to help his client, former Current Affair executive Ian Rae, land the reporter's life rights for TV/film/book-but it's worth noting he was also an occasional source for the disgraced ex- Times scribe, and said he was never burned by inaccuracies or cooked-up info.

"He did well and he got everything right," Mr. Faraone said. "He impressed the sources I introduced him to."

Mr. Faraone said it was a "big surprise" to find out Mr. Blair had been fabricating/ripping off stories. He called him a "very intelligent, very good reporter, very creative, good turns of phrase, good writer-all of the above."

"If he had applied to all of his work the standards he applied to the stories he did on which I helped him as a source, this whole scandal wouldn't have happened," Mr. Faraone said. "And it really infuriates me, all the people who go around saying, 'See what happens when you start giving preference to black people!' That really pisses me off."

We smell an "executive producer" credit for Mr. Faraone somewhere down the line! Tonight on WPIX-one of Mr. Faraone's other clients-it's Sabrina, the Teenage Witch . Isn't Sabs post-pubescent at this point? [WPIX, 11, 8 p.m.]

Friday, May 23

NYTV Left Coast correspondent Alexandra Jacobs took time off from her packed schedule of writing, editing, hosting media salons and couching with Jenny Aniston to weigh in on last week's epic Dawson's Creek finale:

Fans of the young-adult television drama Dawson's Creek -indeed, citizens of the world-can be divided into two camps: the "DJ"ers and the "PJ"ers. "DJ"ers are the cerebral, sexless idealists who thought that Joey Potter should wind up with that insipid broad-browed beta-male Dawson Leery. "PJ"ers are quick-pulsed emotional types who kept hoping, against all reason, that Joey would find a way to be with that handsome devil, Pacey …. What was his last name, anyway?

Well, no matter. The series finale last Wednesday marked a resounding victory for the "PJ"ers, still basking in the afterglow on the show's teeming on-line message boards. After an excruciating two hours- during which that soporific blond chick took waaay too long to die (with obligatory plastic tube up her nose) and there were more same-sex clinches than in The Hours-Joey, now a sophisticated book editor, is spotted in her improbably luxurious Manhattan high-rise watching TV with … Pacey!

Phew! One might venture that Dawson's Creek is this generation's Philadelphia Story , with the tomboyish, holier-than-thou Katie Holmes in the Kate Hepburn role, James Van Der Beek as a bumbling Jimmy Stewart (albeit with a big forehead and zero charisma) and Joshua Jackson settling Cary Grant's ermine mantle over his shoulders. Thanks for six special years, guys, and this Janey-come-lately fan will see you over on TBS.

Thanks, Jake! Tonight, Jake takes Precious and the cats to an early buffet at Asia de Cuba as TBS force-feeds us a Mets loss to the Braves. [TBS, 8, 7:30 p.m.]

Saturday, May 24

Kurt Andersen's a great talk-show guest-we caught him the other day on Charlie Rose talking about the Matrix phenomenon, even though he hadn't seen The Matrix Reloaded , and he managed just fine, much better than we ever did when we blew off the Faulkner before American Lit and tried to skirt by using the words "sweeping" and "Gothic."

The point is Mr. Andersen's a pro at this stuff, and he now has his own talk show, which ought to be good, and it is. It's called Face Time , and it's on the Trio network-growing in reputation as the Thinking D-Girl's Digital Channel-and for its upcoming season Mr. Andersen's gone out and interviewed a bunch of comedians, among them Dennis Miller-another professional talk-show guest-Bernie Mac and Triumph the Insult Comic Dog, the latter of whom has a paw up his hindquarters belonging to SNL /Conan O'Brien genius Robert Smigel.

Trio president Lauren Zalaznick raved about Mr. Andersen and Face Time . "Talk shows fall into two categories," she said. "Fairly uninteresting people talking to all different kinds of people, and in Kurt's case, an interesting person talking to all sorts of interesting people."

Ms. Zalaznick, who used to work for VH1 before it became the " Us Weekly Channel"-seriously, one of these days that Cuckoo-for-Cocoa-Puffs network is going to run out of "sexy" pop stars to build cheap compilations shows out of, and it'll be just as grisly as the day they ran out of drugged-out Behind the Music bands-said that Mr. Andersen's show benefited by not having to do the usual talk-show pumping of "Friday movies" and so on. "That takes the lid of publicist pressure off and you end up with a more genuine conversation," she said.

In other words, it may be a conversation with a rubber-dog hand puppet, but at least the rubber-dog hand puppet isn't whoring an American Pie sequel! Face Time premieres June 1. Tonight on Trio, Perfect Pitch , a documentary about the art of convincing executives like Ms. Zalaznick to burn money. [TRIO, 102, 8:30 p.m.]

Sunday, May 25

Jeff Zucker-we mean, Ari Fleischer-has decided to step down as the White House's spokesman, and you can hear the crocodile tears in Washington, D.C., all the way up here. Mr. Fleischer, of course, was hardly Mr. Revelatory-the guy was scripted as tightly as a Mamet moll-but we'll miss his nice glasses, his occasionally spooky answers (hypothesizing the Iraq war could be avoided with a single bullet) and, of course, his important siege upon international freedom scourge Bill Maher.

Face the Nation moderator Bob Schieffer-who's been around one or two White House spokesmen in his time-agreed that Mr. Fleischer wasn't forthcoming with the press, but wondered if the young charge was simply following orders from on high. "He never gave you much information beyond the talking points," Mr. Schieffer said. "But I always had the idea he was operating under such tight restrictions that maybe he just couldn't go beyond that."

Mr. Fleischer said he's quitting the White House to move on to work in the private sector. Cable news networks, start your contract departments!

This morning on Face the Nation , Mr. Schieffer kindly begs some of his audience to go watch This Week with George Stephanopolous , "just to buck the kid up a notch." [WCBS, 2, 10:30 a.m.]

Monday, May 26

We couldn't get out of here without giving local loon/ Pop-Up Video guy/NYTV mascot Tad Low a final chance to sound off, and we were lucky to catch him at the airport, en route to Italy to attend the wedding of Rick " Cad " Marin and Ilene " Swell " Rosenzweig (hope Mr. Low brought his bear suit for the reception!).

We wanted the Tadster to talk about the future of television-we were hoping he'd sketch some kind of hilarious dystopia in which we'd all be downloading reruns of Silver Spoons into our optic nerves-but he was actually pretty thoughtful about it (the guy went to Yale!). Mr. Low predicted a not-so-future future in which the principal television delivery devices would be hand-held phones and P.D.A.'s (hey!-didn't we read about that in the "Circuits" section?) and there'd be no such thing as nailed-to-your-couch destination viewing (as in, "Everyone gather around at 9 p.m. on NBC and watch the season finale of Frasier !").

Mr. Low thought TV would soon be a free-for-all.

"The only thing people will watch en masse anymore will be sports and helicopter car chases!" Mr. Low said. He suggested the sitcom would soon be dead, and advised all sitcom writers-boy, Mr. Low just loves sticking it to those guys-to go out, buy cars and try to induce police chases if they wanted to see their work on the telly.

Television as we knew it would soon be dead, Mr. Low said.

"Les Moonves is a guy with a nice suit riding a dinosaur!" he said.

We have no idea what Mr. Low is talking about. Tonight on CBS, Yes, Dear . [WCBS, 2, 8:30 p.m.]

Tuesday, May 27

Tonight on YES, it's the Boston Red Sox Versus the New York Yankees in a game of professional baseball played in the Bronx, N.Y. [YES, 80, 7:05 p.m.]

Thanks everyone for the e-mails, anger and encouragement. Now shut that thing off, go outside and take a walk. Courage!

It was a Sunday afternoon in May, and Ms. McKay, who is 19, strawberry-blond, button-nosed, dewdrop-lipped, and a startlingly precocious singer-songwriter you should hear from soon, was walking along the bridle path in Central Park. She wore a crisp pink overcoat, shiny black shoes and a red bow in the back of her hair, and she was talking exuberantly of Making It Big, in the way talented young people used to talk about Making It Big before, somewhere along the way, it became sadly uncool to do so.

"I used to run for office in high school just so I could see my name on the wall," she said. "It's wonderful to be noticed and have people like you, have people like you without even knowing you. I love that. You look at Don't Look Back and Dylan seems bored by it, but I-well, it's only been a few months. I love it, I love it, I love it."

It really has been only a few months. Singer-songwriters often spend years trekking around before anyone bothers to notice, but Ms. McKay (it's pronounced "Mi-KAI") appears to have plopped down from the clouds. Six months ago, nobody knew much of anything about her. But after a string of performances at places like the Sidewalk Café, an out-of-nowhere win at a songwriting competition, a hastily produced CD and a flattering write-up in Time Out New York , the chattering began. The other night, she played Joe's Pub, and though Ms. McKay was merely the opening act-taking the stage at the early-bird buffet hour of 7 p.m.-the room was as electric as a Saturday at midnight. Her mom, Robin Pappas, was there; her manager, Lach, was there; her growing coterie of fans was there; and the record-label suits were there, too-they, like everybody else, had been told about this girl they had, had, had to see, who looked like a 1940's movie star, banged the piano like a whirlybird, sang like Doris Day and penned couplets as divine as Cole Porter's.

And, that night, Ms. McKay wore a red dress like you're supposed to wear a red dress, and she was just-exciting. It's awfully easy to be cynical about the New York music scene these days, with its multiple pretenders and poseurs and the shaggy-haired rock crits jerkin' their Gherkins to the latest Stooges imitation, but Ms. McKay was not at all like that or them. She'd stepped out of a different orbit-she'd hardly listened to records made after Some Like It Hot was released-and yet she was no nostalgia act; she was as contemporary and connected as anyone, singing about the war and 'N Sync, for goodness' sake, and she was just ridiculously young. She was younger than Britney and Christina, and she wrote preternatural songs with titles like "I Wanna Get Married," with lyrics like:

I want to get married

I need to cook meals

I want to pack cute little lunches

For my Brady Bunches

Then read Danielle Steele

I want to partake

In bake sales for the classroom

I want to hear the sweet tune

Of Sally's little vroom-vroom

As she zooms around my broom

As I exhume the gloom

Of my shallow life.

"Oops, I Did it Again" it wasn't. She'd sung that song late last year at the Sidewalk, and you could have heard a sugar grain plunk into a cappuccino.

"I was just like, 'Come on!'" said Lach, who books the room. "That rhyme scheme-' zooms around my broom as I exhume the gloom ' and ending with ' my shallow life '-that's up there with McCartney and Costello as far as melodic lines. Or the Gershwins. And I'm like, 'Is she putting me on? Is she a 40-year-old midget?' No one's got this much. It's like she's out of the 40's or something. It's like Myrna Loy walked in."

Not long after, Lach signed on as Ms. McKay's manager, and he'd set about trying to make as many people as possible know who she was. The Joe's Pub show, on April 30, was her biggest yet, and the usually unflappable Ms. McKay confessed that she was nervous, even terrified, beforehand. "I couldn't talk to anybody," she said. "I went to the Starbucks and I almost missed my time to go on. And I'm a girl, so half of me was thinking about my hair."

The show-and the hair-went splendidly, however, and now the labels were calling all the time, offering money, studios, producers and the promise of the only thing Ms. McKay was really after: fame. Born in London to an actress and a director who split soon after-"England was too small for the both of them," she said-young Nellie moved to America with her mother and undertook an artist's daughter odyssey that began in Harlem ("I was a very weird kid"), crossed the country in a crowded VW Beetle bus ("We had nine cats and a dog") to Olympia, Wash. ("Wasn't very artsy") before finally returning East-to the Poconos, of all places. She rebelled against her mother's Dylan and Leadbelly records by listening to Eydie Gorme and Doris Day and the "whitest of white singers." But Mama, who'd graduated from the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts and played parts in Chariots of Fire and Superman II , encouraged Nellie, made sure she had a piano to play, kept her surrounded by musicians and artists and influencers-in Harlem, she rented a room to everyone from a "gay opera singer from El Paso" to a "folk singer who was a closet Republican," she said-and, even early on, the kid wanted to be a star.

"Nellie is 10 times more talented than I ever was-and very smart," Robin Pappas said. "She knows what's got to be done to get ahead in this business. She's not afraid to dye her hair or wear red. Without being bogus, she pulls it off."

Still, as much as young Nellie wanted to be famous, she wasn't so sure how she'd get there. She'd gone to the Manhattan School of Music and studied jazz voice for a couple of years, then dropped out. ("I didn't feel like eating Chinese food and talking the shit all day. I always wanted to go out and be auditioning for something and making it," she said.) She'd gone out for acting roles and even dabbled in stand-up comedy. But she kept returning to music. It was probably inevitable; it was what she did best.

"When I was in sixth grade, instead of doing 'Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On', I did 'Whole Lot of Learnin' Goin' On'-I was like, ' This school's burnin'! Whole lotta learnin' goin' on! '-and I'd be kicking the piano, playing, playing, playing, and everyone would be there, smacking their gum-this was in Olympia-and I was like, 'Don't you guys get it? I'm a star !'" Ms. McKay said. "But I wasn't; I was just this geeky little four-eyes."

But now she's on the verge. There's a documentary film crew following Ms. McKay around; they want to make a Star Is Born kind of thing. She and Lach are trying to figure out which label to sign with. She gets compared to the obvious people-Norah Jones, Fiona Apple, Tori Amos, Diana Krall, Vanessa Carlton ("The chicks with pianos," she said)-but she is trying to cut her own path. She wants to be a pop star-even if, as she admits, the pop songs she writes "come out like something from 1937." She's undoubtedly capable of achieving niche fame, but she wants the whole deal: the cover-of-magazine fame, the buy-Mama-a-house fame. "A house?" Robin Pappas said. "It was a pink castle a couple of weeks ago."

And she's such a talent and so sure of herself that you won't bet against her. Ms. McKay's certainty isn't arrogance-at least it's not the unattractive kind of arrogance. It's the winning, old-time confidence you're supposed to have if you want to be a star, and you're 19 years old and wanted by everyone, and strangers who walk past you in Central Park stop and stare like they know you, even if they don't. Yet.

"I think it's such a shame when people are taken by surprise by fame," Nellie McKay said. "I just think they should quit then, and leave the playing field open for me. Because I really want it."

-Jason Gay

If you're there, look for something: Before Mr. Moonves begins, before he cracks the self-deprecating jokes penned with the help of people like Everybody Loves Raymond creator Phil Rosenthal, before he unveils the new Survivor and unmasks the new hits- CSI: Hoboken ?-he'll pause on the Carnegie stage for a second or two, take in that rocking aprés -two-cocktail-lunch applause, puff out that executive chest of his and noticeably, if briefly, bask.

And yes, it's kind of a silly, self-congratulatory El Presidente basking moment, the kind that a gregarious tough-guy executive like Mr. Moonves, 53, is sometimes ridiculed for.

But it's also a hoot. This is show business, and Mr. Moonves, more than anyone else these days, is a show businessman.

He's earned the right to bask. The hard-nosed, indefatigable ex-actor, ex–studio chief (Warner Brothers television) has done a Lazarus act upon CBS, resuscitating it from cobwebbed irrelevance and reasserting its dominance through a combination of classically mainstream hits ( Everybody Loves Raymond ) and not-your-papa's-CBS sensations like Survivor and CSI . CBS expects to finish the year with the most total viewers in broadcast television, and only slightly behind NBC in the 18-to-49 year-old demographic, the demo that advertisers covet, for a number of pseudo-scientific reasons they themselves have trouble explaining.

Along the way, Mr. Moonves has also revived the faded concept of the single-headed entertainment empire. CBS is not a one-man show, but in a hyper-bureaucratic era it is an anti-bureaucracy; all roads lead to Les. He's involved in entertainment, news, sports; he even signs off on the casting selections for each program (actors never die; they just become casting agents). For better and for worse, he's become indistinguishable from his network, and his network has become indistinguishable from him.

"It sort of harkens back to the studio system that the town enjoyed years and years ago on a creative basis," said Mr. Moonves' longtime friend, the producer Brad Grey. "And the results have been self-evident."

Naturally, Mr. Moonves' high profile and tough-guy tactics have also made him an awfully big target. He been razzed by David Letterman on CBS's own air, though that's died down in the past couple of years. Lately Howard Stern, who's upset that CBS recently entered into an agreement with a producer he believes stole one of his ideas, has been savaging Mr. Moonves about his personal life on the air. (Mr. Moonves' wife, Nancy, recently filed for divorce.) It's fair to say that none of Mr. Moonves' colleagues at NBC, ABC or Fox endure the same kind of abuse.

Of course, the attacks are also a perverse kind of testament to where he's gotten. No one in TV is exactly like Les Moonves.

And that is why today, he basks.

"I thought I'd be here earlier, to tell you the truth," Mr. Moonves said. It was late in the afternoon of May 8, and he was sitting in his spacious 19th floor office at CBS's fabled 52nd Street headquarters, known as Black Rock. Basking day was still almost a week away. Mr. Moonves wore a navy suit and a canary yellow tie, and his hair and teeth looked, as usual, great.

He was responding to a question of whether CBS was where he thought it would be at this point, eight years into his run.

"To really build a schedule that is going to last, it took longer than I thought," he said. "A quick fix doesn't help you. You can't just get a hit and throw on 20 other shows like it. It's about one block at a time."

This was true and it wasn't. It was true in that CBS was in such decrepit shape when Mr. Moonves arrived in 1995 that the Bill Cosby-Milton Berle-Jerry Seinfeld-Chris Rock Half-Hour Comedy Hour probably couldn't have resuscitated it by itself. The CBS that Mr. Moonves inherited was the Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman CBS, as old and undesirable as the butterscotch candies on grandmother's coffee table.

"CBS held on to that Tiffany mantra a little bit too long," Mr. Moonves said. "When I got here, it was in shambles."

But Mr. Moonves thought CBS had always played it too conservatively. He was willing to be lucky, too. He did raise shows from seed, the old-fashioned way, like he did with Everybody Loves Raymond , nurturing it in a Friday night time slot before gently shifting it to Mondays, where it blossomed. But he'd also been eager to take big-bopper home-run swings, like he did with that show with the naked guy and the island.

He couldn't take full credit for that-he first dismissed Survivor as the dumbest idea he'd ever heard, "a cable show"-but when the program became a phenomenon and a franchise, he did what was probably the craziest thing he could possibly do with it, which was to move it to Thursdays, against NBC's Friends . People can say now that it wasn't such a crazy idea, but it was. He put Survivor and another new CBS hit, CSI, there, and prayed they would work. They worked. CSI is now the No. 1 show on TV, in fact.

"That changed the face of the network," Mr. Moonves said. "We could have been destroyed."

One show had helped turn it around. Now, the network looked more like he wanted it to. It was still a tad geezerish-CBS is still the oldest-skewing network, a fact which Mr. Moonves said was "held against us by the advertising community." But with Survivor and CSI and Raymond and the King of Queens and the gang at 60 Minutes , it looked like-of all things-the last broadcasting network. NBC had long gone hip and urbane, Fox was for the smart-asses and kids, and ABC was … well, ask us later. But Mr. Moonves, as Hollywood insider as you could get, had crafted a network with something for everyone, even you- even if nobody you knew ever, ever, watched Becker .

"We're the only ones that talk about viewers," he said.

He talked about "viewers" not only because NBC still had the 18-to-49-year-old edge, but also because the showman in Mr. Moonves liked the idea of it: He enjoyed the big-tent hit, the show everyone watched. Especially if it was a classy show. Network executives are great pretenders, but Mr. Moonves didn't begin to pretend he was as proud of, say, Big Brother as he was of 9/11 , the network's award-winning documentary about the World Trade Center attack.

"There are victories, and there are hollow victories," he said. "You all want to be proud of your work. It's not to say I'm not proud of everything on our network-I'm prouder of certain things. But the reason you got into this business is to get a Peabody Award for the 9/11 special. There is a spiritual, social thing. There is a responsibility I take very seriously."

It didn't always work out the way he liked, of course. Mr. Moonves had been beaten up a bit over his decision to air a miniseries about Hitler's early years, premiering May 18.

"I took that very seriously," he said. "I thought a lot about the criticism that was coming our way-which bothered us only because it was based on a script we threw away. But I thought: Is doing this program at all going to provoke anti-Semitism and neo-Nazism? We gave it a lot of thought. The people out there who think network heads and programmers are a bunch of heathens are wrong. I really do care what goes on the screen.

"The criticism stung," he continued. "It bothered me because there was a whole wave of it from leading Jewish leaders. From top guys. So we did take pause: 'Is this the right thing to do?' And I said: 'Yes, it is. It's our obligation, and it's important that we tell this story-but it's important that we get it right.' That was my main concern. I was nervous about getting it right."

He felt he'd made the right decision. He said he was proud of the Hitler project.

And then … .what about the Beverly Hillbillies ? He'd been roasted about that, too-CBS had been mulling a reality series with real-life backwoods people moving to real-life Beverly Hills. It outraged Georgia Senator Zell Miller, who found time to blast Mr. Moonves on the floor of the United States Senate.

"We have not decided what to do," Mr. Moonves said. "It has certainly received a lot more attention than I ever thought it would-resolutions on the floor of the U.S. Senate days before we bombed Iraq, which I found to be the most astonishing thing, that a Senator took 15 minutes on the floor of the United States Senate to put me down for a show that we haven't even ordered. We're still looking at it, we're still exploring it-we haven't made any decisions."

It was television ! There was always going to be something. He'd been on decent terms with Mr. Letterman for a while, so that was a nice plus, since it'd been ugly not too long ago. "I still think we got the best guy," Mr. Moonves said of Dave. "When I go home at night and I want to watch a show, that monologue is the best thing on television." He even had nice words for Craiggers, Craig Kilborn, who's been dealing with a new challenge from ABC's Jimmy Kimmel. "Craig is doing fine," he said.

And if you want to talk about potential hornets' nests, since 1998 Mr. Moonves has also overseen the CBS News division. From the get-go, there was worry about what the entertainment executive might do. Down on West 57th, the legends in suspenders were skittish. Mr. Moonves said he was skittish, too.

"When I'm first dealing with the Don Hewitts of the world and the Dan Rathers and the Mike Wallaces, I was a little bit intimidated," Mr. Moonves said. "These were legends. I have been a news junkie my whole life-my family, I grew up with that-and I was suddenly their boss. So I treaded softly."

Mr. Moonves said he was proud of the work CBS News had done throughout the Iraq war, and before that, 9-11. He called the coverage "phenomenal." There'd been some back-and-forth during the war about when to break regular programming to carry news coverage-in the mother of all conflicts, CBS was scheduled to open the NCAA basketball tournament hours after the war broke out-but he felt each decision had been handled appropriately. "There are economic questions every time we do that," he said of breaking news interruptions. "Even if it's 11 in the morning and we've got to yank The Young and the Restless -we lose x amount of dollars on that. We are trying to be good corporate citizens, and we've got to be good public citizens. It's always tough calls."

He said he got it: He knew why breaking coverage was important, not just to the integrity and tradition of the company, but to the principle of broadcasting. He'd always be the outsider, but he felt he understood the news beast, and earned some respect back.

Andrew Heyward, the CBS News president, agreed. "He said, 'As long as you keep me informed, we'll be fine-I'm going to let you run your division," Mr. Heyward recalled. "He has totally lived up to that."

There would be more tough calls, obviously. Mr. Moonves isn't exactly freaking out about TiVo-yet-but he said that if more people begin using services that allow them to zap out commercials, his network would have no choice but to find ways of integrating the advertisers' products into programming.

"That is the future," Mr. Moonves said. "There's going to be much more product placement. We did it with Survivor, obviously. They're doing it with American Idol . I saw Minority Report , Steven Spielberg's movie-that had more product placement than any TV show I've ever seen. So my phrase is, 'If it's good enough for Spielberg, it's good enough for us.' So you're going to see more and more of that- you're going to see cars incorporated into shows, and instead of Ray Romano, sitting there with a can of nondescript soda, he'll be drinking a Diet Pepsi. That's going to happen."

Mr. Romano, of course, was about to sign a new contract ensuring him $43 million dollars to continue having Everybody Love him - tough life! - so he'd probably happily suck down the Diet Pepsi. But that was probably as much as Mr. Moonves would ask of him. Mr. Romano's pal Phil Rosenthal - not doing too bad these days himself, either - said that Mr. Moonves calls him each time Everybody Loves Raymond celebrates anniversaries, and reminds him he didn't screw with his show, like television executives are wont to do.

"He'll say, 'Didn't get a note from me, did ya? Didn't get one note from us, did ya? Once it got going - no notes!'" Mr. Rosenthal said. "He's proud of that. And you got to love that if you're in my position. They didn't mess with it."

Which is not to say that Mr. Moonves is a hands-off guy. Not every show is as promising as Everybody Loves Raymond , and the CBS chief will get involved if he feels he needs to, in everything from casting to plotlines to contracts. Especially in negotiations, he can be terminally relentless and aggressive, and even his friends acknowledge he's a grizzly in a fight. "He's just passionate about what he does," said his friend Jim Wiatt, the head of the William Morris Agency. "If he doesn't get something he wants, he's pissed. He does not like to lose."

But it's his game to lose. More than anyone else in the TV business, Mr. Moonves gets to run the show. This afternoon he'll walk out at Carnegie Hall and introduce a number of new shows. There's a sitcom ( Two and a Half Men ) with Charlie Sheen, a drama ( The Handler ) with Joey Pants from The Sopranos , another Jerry Bruckheimer thriller ( Cold Case ), and something from David E. Kelley ( The Brotherhood of Poland, N.H. ), a friend of Mr. Moonves' who may or may not be entering his Willie Mays-on-the-Mets stage.

A few of these shows will likely be flops. But maybe there's a hit in there. Maybe even two. Whatever happens, Leslie Moonves intends to keep broadcasting, doing it the only way he knows, front center, larger than life and … basking. It's what he does.

"Opportunity for me has been less out of design than 'Shit happens,'" Mr. Moonves said. "Stuff comes at me and I weave through it. At the moment, I really am content with what I am doing. It's exciting, it's fun. Especially this time of the year."

Tonight, May 7, well-known television innovator ( Pop-Up Video ) and nut case Tad Low will host something he's calling a Private Panty Portrait Party, which sounds like one of those voyeuristic hootenannies you used to read a lot about three or four years ago, when everyone under 35 was still drunk on dot-com money, reading Brill's Content and devoting much horny after-work energy to postmodern, public sexual fulfillment.

Guests at Mr. Low's PPPP bash will be plied with booze (beer, tequila) and asked to strip down to their skivvies in order to be photographed. Why photographed? Because-of course!-Mr. Low and his Tad-poles at Spin the Bottle productions are making a TV series for which they need a lot of pictures of people running around in their underwear (can't they just use B-roll from a bunch of Benny Hill s?).

The photos will be used in a segment of 4-Play , a music video program Mr. Low is making for the digital cable channel Fuse (formerly Much Music). 4-Play 's gimmick is that the screen is divided into four blocks, with one block playing an actual music video, and the other blocks showing related, silly material. For example, for a recent video by Queens of the Stone Age-in which the real video depicts the band getting into a car crash with a deer- 4-Play 's other blocks will include someone making venison Wellington, as well as faces of celebrities who look like deer. (Mr. Low said this list includes Mary Tyler Moore, Chris Kattan, Michael Richards, Johnny Depp and Martha Plimpton. Johnny Depp ?)

Mr. Low's underwear photos, then, will be used to accompany a recent Jimmy Eat World video in which the actual band plays at a high-school underwear party. The idea is to contrast the hired hardbodies in the real video against the squishy vérité ones you get when you send out a mass e-mail invite. Capiche ?

"Face inclusion is optional," Mr. Low said.

Tonight on Much Music, Fuse or whatever it is, Behind the Music That Sucks . We're fine with the idea behind this show, but the gratuitous "sucks" is just lame-ass, 13-year-old–ish shock-mongering. Whoever suggested it-10 push-ups in a thong, at Mr. Low's soirée! [MM, 132, 9 p.m.]

Thursday, May 8

When we saw him a few months back, documentary filmmaker R.J. Cutler could barely contain his excitement about his upcoming reality show, American Candidate , in which viewers would select a person they felt was well-positioned to mount an actual campaign for President of the United States. (Not you , John Kerry!)

Now American Candidate is on ice, after its network, FX, decided the video democracy program was going to be too expensive to produce. But Mr. Cutler's still excited, and optimistic his show is going to get picked up by another network.

"We have reason to be extremely confident that continuing production on the show is a wise idea," Mr. Cutler said.

So preproduction on American Candidate wages on. Though the show has moved the launch of its Web-based candidate search from this spring to September, Mr. Cutler said the program was "completely on schedule."

Why not get Mr. Cutler's other documentary subject, Roseanne, to fund the show herself? Mr. Cutler said his experience with the sometimes-combustible comedienne has been going "really, really well." He's been following her around for an ABC reality series that is scheduled to launch sometime in August, he said.

On FX's big daddy Fox tonight, the Miss Dog Beauty Pageant . News Corp doesn't have the moola for American Candidate , but they do have the moola for this. It's co-hosted by that J. Peterman guy from Seinfeld . Roof ! [WNYW, 5, 8 p.m.]

Friday, May 9

Stephen Glass-the scandalized ex– New Republic ex- Wunderkind who hasn't piped up publicly since he was given the heave-ho for making stuff up-will break his silence Sunday May 11 in an interview on 60 Minutes.

Mr. Glass recently sat for an interview with 60 Minutes correspondent Steve Kroft. Other individuals interviewed for the piece include Charles Lane, Mr. Glass's former editor at TNR -now at The Washington Post -and Leon Wieseltier, TNR' s literary editor.

Mr. Glass, who'd written for other magazines besides TNR , was at the center of a mighty media hoo-hah in 1998 after he was busted for fabricating parts of many of his pieces. Canned from TNR by Mr. Lane, the then-25-year-old pretty much went underground, though along the way he did get a diploma from Georgetown Law.

Now there appears to be at Stephen Glass revival at hand. Mr. Glass's story is the subject of a forthcoming film entitled Shattered Glass , in which the reporter is played by Hayden Christensen, the Star Wars: Attack of the Clones kid. Mr. Lane is played by Peter Sarsgaard; late TNR editor Michael Kelly is played by Hank Azaria. The film is scheduled for release in October.

And Mr. Glass has written a novel. It's a fictionalized account-your joke here-of his own story.

Efforts to locate Mr. Glass yesterday were unsuccessful. A spokesperson for 60 Minutes said the show had no comment on this Sunday's episode. Mr. Lane declined comment, and Mr. Wieseltier did not return calls.

One person who will be watching Sunday's 60 Minutes with interest is Adam Penenberg, a journalist whose Forbes.com investigation of one of Mr. Glass's stories ultimately led to the reporter's ouster. Mr. Penenberg and his Forbes.com editor, Kambiz Foroohar, are also characters in Shattered Glass (Mr. Penenberg, now an accomplished book author himself, is played by Steve Zahn)

"I'd love to hear what he has to say," Mr. Penenberg said. "I guess the question I have is, 'Why should we believe anything he has to say?'"

On CBS tonight, Star Search . [WCBS, 2, 9 p.m.]

Saturday, May 10

We all know that Martin Scorsese's a pretty good actor. He was swell in Quiz Show , and surely Mr. Scorsese deserved an Academy Award for acting like it was a breeze to collaborate with Harvey Weinstein on Gangs of New York.

He's also really good in that new American Express commercial that's running in recognition of the current Tribeca Film Festival. In the spot, Mr. Scorsese, a famous perfectionist, tears through a stack of snapshots at a drugstore, trying to find the ideal one from his nephew's 5th birthday party. Unsatisfied, he phones his nephew and asks him how he'd like to "turn five again."

It's a snazzy commercial, but can you imagine directing Mr. Scorsese around? That assignment fell to 40-year-old, Jim Jenkins, an experienced commercial director.

"He asked me for my resume, which is kind of frightening" Mr. Jenkins said.

But Mr. Jenkins and Mr. Scorsese got along quite well, and Mr. Jenkins got the job. "He is very easy going," Mr. Jenkins said.

Mr. Jenkins said the making of the commercial was equally blissful. The spot was made in one day; Mr. Scorsese was on set for about five hours, the director said. Some familiar faces from Mr. Scorsese's past films were to be part of his crew, just to make sure the star was comfortable, but Mr. Jenkins said everything went smoothly.

Mr. Jenkins also said Mr. Scorsese, who's known for being his own toughest critic, had fun playing with his perfectionist image. "He's so humble," Mr. Jenkins said. "He never speaks highly of himself or his work, he only credits other people. I think that sort of self-deprecating thing is not only what made him game for the spot, but what made the spot work overall."

Since the commercial began airing, Mr. Jenkins said he'd heard that Mr. Scorsese was a fan of it. And Mr. Jenkins, who'd already directed plenty of celebrities, has received a lot of additional notice, including a big May 4 story in Advertising Age . Not a bad day's work for someone who can still recall seeing his first Scorsese film, Taxi Driver.

"I have never shot anybody like him," Mr. Jenkins said.

Tonight, Mr. Scorsese curls up at home and weeps uncontrollably to The Green Mile. [WABC, 7, 8 p.m.]

Sunday, May 11

Buffy the Vampire Slayer goes bye-bye on May 20. No fans are more cuckoo about their show than Buffy fans, of course, so to mark the occasion, we did a little email interview with Janine Mischor, who runs a Buffy fan web site called Slayer's Empire (http://www.web-glitter.com/~tempting) and is currently residing in Germany:

When did you launch your site?

"Slayer's Empire" went online on March 3rd 2000 after the site idea had been brewing in my mind for around one month.

Why'd you do it?

In the year 2000 my whole life consisted of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I practically lived for this show, so I thought, how many other like-minded Buffy obsessed freaks are out there in the world?

Why were Buffy fans so nuts about the show?

I think the show is down to earth and captures every day problems-not just teen problems. The show really gets to you and is so moving, because you can identify yourself with or relate to any of the characters. It also has a bright and open-minded female superhero, a lot of humor and tons of action and, of course, scary demons. There's a bit of everything in it for anyone who watches it.

Do you think Buffy is Sarah Michelle Gellar's finest work?

Yes, definitely, she showed us for seven years that she is an amazing and talented young inspiring actress. As for movies, her acting in Cruel Intentions was unbelievably good and wicked, but her other role choices just didn't bring out her real potential.

What did you think of Scooby-Doo ?

I saw it in the cinema, of course, but, well, it definitely doesn't count as one of my favorite movies. It's fun to watch once or twice but then you kind of have seen enough. But if Sarah wants to take her career in that way, I mean, starring in comedies, then I really appreciate that and support her, of course.

Are you going to go out of business when Buffy goes off the air?

No way, the show helped me grow up and inspired me so much, I could never close this site, I want to show how much Buffy means to me. My first website ever was about Buffy- that's how I got a weblife-so once you are addicted there's no way you can get out of the Buffy verse.

Do true Buffy fans watch stuff like Friends ?

In fact I looove Friends . I love tons of TV shows but I only got interested in them because I started watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer, so here's another good thing the show did for me.

What are you going to do the night of the final episode?

I won't be able to view the episode since I'm still stuck in Germany, but I will probably light a few candles in my room, put my favorite Buffy episodes in my VCR and watch them and think of all those times when the show has been my inspiration and helped me overcome my teenage problems and my constant pain.

Thanks Janine! Tonight on the UPN, the lowbrow network goes suddenly highbrow with Coppola-mentary Apocalypse Now Redux . [WWOR, 9, 7 p.m.]

Monday, May 12

On NBC tonight, Behind the Camera: The Unauthorized Story of "Three's Company ." We'll hold out for the authorized one. [WNBC, 4, 9 p.m.]

Tuesday, May 13

Watching Ellie . There she is-and there she goes! [WNBC, 4, 9:30 p.m.]

By now every television critic, pop-culture theorist, political hack, sociology scholar, professional weight lifter, cabaret singer, shameless gasbag and even Ashleigh Banfield has released an opinion about television news' coverage of the Iraq war. But we wanted to take the subject to the street-you know, actual, un-focus-grouped TV viewers-so we traipsed on down to New York's altar of real-life television worship, the early-morning audience outside the Today show set in Rockefeller Center.

There, on Tuesday, April 29, we did ourselves a little survey, and though the results are staggeringly unscientific-the only result we can claim as scientific is that Al Roker has, indeed, lost half an Al Roker-there were a couple of trends.

One is that people standing outside of the Today show don't necessarily watch the NBC Nightly News as their principal news source (sorry Tom Brokaw and all you NBC brand synergists). Another is that people standing outside of the Today show seem to like-those guys again!-Fox News.

And as far as war coverage is concerned, the people we spoke with-amid Katie Couric's story on conjoined twins and Mr. Roker's weather reports and Matt Lauer's friendly dives into the crowd for photographs-generally felt satisfied, though they thought there was waaaay too much of it and they worried it was bad for kids. They also agreed there wasn't much of an international perspective in the coverage, and that there wasn't much TV blood and guts for a war, but they didn't seem too worried about those oversights.

"I got to tell you, I work out of my home and I had it on like 24 hours a day," said Phyllis Wagner, visiting from Taylor Mill, Ky., with her friend Catherine O'Neill. She said her favorite channels were MSNBC and CNN. "I think we had enough. I would not have wanted to see any harder coverage. Because of the children watching it. I found myself drawn in to the point where it was almost unhealthy."

Brett Bastien, in from New Mexico with his friend Robin Beachner, agreed. "There was quite a bit of coverage. Maybe too much coverage," he said. "There was a lot of information. It seemed like too much."

Still, Mr. Bastien was impressed by coverage technology. "I remember watching Vietnam and even the war from 1991, and with all the mobile cameras and people that went there, it seemed like it was pretty well covered," he said. "Maybe it was just on too often."

Ms. Beachner said she didn't watch any TV news at all, other than occasionally tuning in to monitor the news ticker crawling across the bottom of the screen. "I only watched for a few minutes," she said. "I just liked that thing underneath. I didn't believe a lot of the stuff that was being said. I think it was a lot of propaganda.

"I think they could have shown both sides," Ms. Beachner added. "They should have interviewed more Iraqi people. Because it's pretty jaded over here. There's a guy on CNN, I don't know his name-white hair, fat guy-and he has got it out for them."

But Trent Armstrong, visiting from Dallas, found a lot of the war coverage "fascinating." "Just having the live shots from downtown Baghdad, 24-7, and being able to wake up and see the U.S. as they drive into Baghdad."

Mr. Armstrong loved Fox. "I like the friendly attitudes of the reporters," he said. "They seem to be fair, they seem to be covering every aspect of it-the good and the bad."

Mr. Armstrong even liked Geraldo. "I love Geraldo!" he said. "I didn't particularly like him at first-Rivera and his 'Tour of Terror'-but he got himself in and was really positive with the troops." He said he wasn't fazed by Mr. Rivera's troubles with the U.S. military, which briefly booted him for scribbling troop positions in the sand (he was later reinstated). "He probably knew better. He probably should not have done what he did. I appreciated that they let him go back."

Scott James, in from Columbus, Ohio, with his wife, Debbie, was another Fox News fan (so was Debbie). "We scan some of the other stations, but a lot of them seem to be one-sided," he said. "I think Fox gives more of both sides of what was going on."

Also watching Fox was Nashville's Amy Andrews, though she wasn't exactly sure why she did. "There was no reason," she said. "It was just what I went to. It was on." But then: "My husband always had it on, so that's just what I would flip to."

Boston's Travis Kistler said he tried to avoid television news altogether. He preferred looking at newspapers, the Internet or listening to NPR. "I think I have more control if I go to the news myself instead of having it come to me," he said. But once in a while he'd check out BBC TV coverage. "It's interesting to see what the international perspective on our situation is, because we're always so introspective, American-centric."

And Lynn Gaffey of Waukesha, Wis., just appreciated the fact that television's war coverage was finally winding down. "It got a little overwhelming," she said. "There is such a fine line between information and overkill."

"War is never glamorous," Ms. Gaffey said. "I understand we need to do what we did, but it was glamorized too much. And there is nothing glamorous about it."

On NBC this morning, Today . [WNBC, 4, 7 a.m.]

Thursday, May 1

That anti–Michael Bloomberg ad is too much! Have you seen it? It looks like something out of that Eddie Murphy comedy Trading Places , with gauzy footage of nutty rich people drinking, smoking and whooping it up at a cocktail party. It's sponsored by the people at Local 1180-the New York arm of a national communication-workers union-and designed to call attention to the billionaire Mayor's budget cuts and what the union considers his "out-of-touch" attitude.

"The Mayor has asked city workers to bear a disproportionate burden of getting out of the deficit we're in right now," said Local 1180 union president Arthur Cheliotes.

The company behind the ad is New York outfit called the Advance Group. Its president, Scott Levenson, said the cocktail party footage is old B-roll material, which staffers located after hours and hours of scouring clips.

"To stage something like that costs a fortune that was way beyond the production budget," Mr. Levenson said. "We ended up spending an awful lot of staff time to find the right clips."

Mr. Levenson said the footage was originally shot for something quite different than a political ad.

"It was actually originally a bowling ad," he said. "None of the bowling segment obviously made it into the final cut."

As for the commercial's dated, low-budget look, Mr. Levenson said that it was on purpose. "We were not looking for current footage," he said. "We were looking for things that reinforced 'out of touch.' It needed to be a little dated, but not too dated."

Mr. Levenson said the response to the ad thus far has been "nothing short of phenomenal."

"I think it's a message that's been resonating," he said. "For whatever reason, Mike Bloomberg has not had his wealth used against him before. Even throughout the Mayoral campaign, it didn't really become an issue as it relates to his ability to be empathetic to the average New Yorker. Maybe it's not an issue. But it's something he's arguably vulnerable to."

Tonight, scan the dial for the Local 1180 ad blitz. Those guys probably can't afford time on Friends , so you're better off looking someplace like Live from the Headlines , with suddenly sleeping-in Paula Zahn. [CNN, 10, 7 p.m.]

Friday, May 2

Bob Costas is back with his third version in three years of his HBO talk show On the Record . If that characterization makes it sound like it's a show that's getting messed with too much, then that's the wrong idea. They just keep fiddling with the Emmy Award–winning program's time. The first year it was an hour, the second year it was a half hour, and for the third season it's going to be an only-on-HBO 45 minutes. Maybe for season 4 it can be 15 minutes and Mr. Costas can do it running down Sixth Avenue eating a Chipwich. Chipwich's done, he's done.

The accomplished Mr. Costas is pretty much in that he-gets-whoever-he-wants mode of his interviewing career; already he's had On the Record sitdowns with everyone from Bobby Knight to wrestling boob Vince McMahon (in the same show, no less!) to wrestling non-boob Tom Cruise. For his May 2 debut he's cannily invited Baseball Hall of Fame disinvitees Tim Robbins and Susan Sarandon to join actor Robert Wuhl and director Ron Shelton to have the Bull Durham reunion the H.O.F. was supposed to have before freaking out. (Kevin Costner had a previous commitment and had to say no, and if you've ever seen him being interviewed, you know you shouldn't feel so bad about that.)

Besides Mr. Costner, there are a few gets Mr. Costas hasn't gotten yet, chief among them that well-known publicity-chaser Sandy Koufax. "Koufax is a guy who has a great career, a tremendous mystique and legend surrounding him, but he is seldom heard from," Mr. Costas said. "So that makes it all the more alluring. But I completely respect his position that he's just not comfortable doing it."

Another guest Mr. Costas won't likely see on his show soon is Kirby Puckett, a player he befriended during his baseball days who recently was acquitted of charges that he assaulted a woman. "It doesn't seem like now is the right time," he said. "But eventually it might be."

But Mr. Costas said he'd be open to having a TV discussion about the much-talked-about Sports Illustrated cover story about Mr. Puckett's post-retirement troubles. He said there had been "considerable disagreement" among sports journalists over whether or not SI 's approach to the story was correct. "It isn't so much an issue of fact as it is of proportion," Mr. Costas said.

And even though it's come and gone, Mr. Costas said he's also open to the idea of revisiting the women-at-Augusta controversy. Though he believes Augusta National Golf Club's policy on women is "antiquated," he said he was not surprised that the protest helmed by National Organization of Women president Martha Burk didn't cause much of a fuss over Masters weekend.

"I think it's actually a tribute to people's common sense," Mr. Costas said. "It isn't that Martha Burk doesn't have a point. It's just that that point doesn't rise to the level of great moral outrage. And the attempt to link it with exclusion based on race in this particular instance, or to link it to other great moral questions, falls flat."

Dare you to say that to Susan Sarandon tonight, Bob! On the Record . [HBO, 32, 11:30 p.m.]

Saturday, May 3

Speaking of sports guys, it's probably time to declare our steadfast allegiance to Budd Mishkin. In a profession dominated by cynical screamers and gimmick artists, the veteran NY1 sportscaster is a low-key, classy anomaly, an island of tranquillity in a sea of idiots-intelligent, thoughtful and still enthusiastic about the games people play. On the grating scale , the majority of sports call-in shows fall somewhere between fingernails on a blackboard and Fran Drescher being chainsawed in two, but when Mishkin's in the chair for NY1's sports call-in show, Sports on 1 , he keeps it calm and elevates the conversation. As a result, he generates respectful callers who may be rightly miffed about the Mets or the Knicks or the Rangers, but seldom stoop to gratuitous name-calling.

The polite Mr. Mishkin said that shouting just wasn't his style. "I'm not a screamer or a yeller," Mr. Mishkin said. "Not that I'm putting down anybody who is. Everybody has to be their own personality."

This has been a challenging spring for Mr. Mishkin, a huge winter sports fan, who doesn't have a Knicks or Rangers playoff appearance to talk about. "I'm kind of in mourning," he said. In place of hockey and basketball, the majority of the talk on Sports on 1 has turned to the under-performing Mets, a zestier subject compared to the near-unbeatable Yankees.

"Tales of sorrow and woe tend to bring out the phone calls," Mr. Mishkin said. "If you're a Yankee fan, what are you going to call about? 'This team is unbelievable! It's amazing!' How many times can you say that?"

Away from sports, it turns out that Mr. Mishkin is an accomplished Russian folk musician. (We always did get the feeling he wasn't the kind of guy who went home and puttered around on PlayStation 2 all night.) He's visited the Soviet Union four times and once studied there, and along the way developed an affection for the work of Bulat Okudzhava, the acclaimed singer-songwriter Mr. Mishkin called the "bard of Russian folk music."

Mr. Mishkin began singing in his apartment and eventually worked up to doing some live performances. Occasionally, he said, his two worlds collide. Every once in a while, someone will call him live on the air on New York 1 and in a Russian accent ask, "You sing Russian folk songs, right? Alright , as far as the Yankees are concerned …. " [NY1, 1, 11:30 p.m.]

Sunday, May 4

On ABC tonight, Tim Allen Presents: A User's Guide to Home Improvement . Before a live audience, Mr. Allen hosts a saw-down-memory lane with special guests and clips. Who does he think he is, Lucille Ball? Just come back and do another sitcom, bub. [WABC, 7, 8 p.m.]

Monday, May 5

Tonight on ABC, ABC's 50th Anniversary Blooper Celebration , hosted by Dick Clark. Zzzzz. Another Dick Clark blooper show? We want to see ABC's 50th Anniversary Executive Blooper Celebration , hosted by a paddle-wielding Michael Eisner. [WABC, 7, 8 p.m.]

Tuesday, May 6

Tonight's E! True Hollywood Story examines Nicky and Paris Hilton. Forget it, you're on your own, it's too easy. [E!, 24, 8 p.m.]