For Robert Halmi Sr., the biggest TV movie producer in the world, the test of the American audience and just how low it will go comes Sunday, Feb. 27.

That evening–one of the last in the February television sweeps period–NBC will air the first installment of his 10-hour fantasy epic about trolls and fairies, The Tenth Kingdom . It will run against The Beach Boys: An American Family on ABC and Perfect Murder, Perfect Town , a JonBenet Ramsey movie on CBS.

The competition makes Mr. Halmi, a 76-year-old Hungarian man who landed on Ellis Island 50 years ago with five dollars and a Leica camera, particularly angry. He was explaining why to a visitor at his 21st-floor midtown offices.

"What is the country looking for?" he yelled in his gravely voice, jabbing his finger at the air in true producer style. "The JonBenet thing? Or the Beach Boys? I mean, who the hell! … I wouldn't watch neither of those things, even if it's free! I have an original thing! It will be a test of the country's taste!"

Mr. Halmi, small and gray-haired, was sitting behind his desk, by a glass case housing about 30 gold Emmy statuettes earned by his TV movies.

"Everything is really going downhill for the last three or four years," he said. "Look at it. I mean, where is the dramas? Finished! Game shows, wrestling, you know, Dateline and Stern, Howard Stern, it's just–just–just the pits, it is! This week it was Who Wants to Marry a Millionaire . Next week it will be Who Wants to Fuck a Millionaire ! Can you imagine when television started? You had Playhouse 90 , all these great, wonderful–"

His voice trailed off.

Mr. Halmi made his upcoming miniseries The Tenth Kingdom for an estimated $36 million. Amid all the reality-based shows popular for the last few years, Mr. Halmi's stuff has been a welcome change. In the 90's, he had hits with The Odyssey , Merlin , Alice in Wonderland and Gulliver's Travels .

The son of the last court photographer to the Hapsburg dynasty, Mr. Halmi grew up behind a camera. He was a photojournalist during World War II, when the Nazis took over Budapest. He took up arms against them in the Hungarian underground. When the Nazis were driven out by the Communists, he took up arms against the Reds. In 1947, he said, the Communists convicted him on spying charges. Some American journalist friends helped him escape from prison just before he was to be executed, he said.

Mr. Halmi landed at Ellis Island June 12, 1950. He immediately found a job taking baby pictures for a New York diaper service. Soon after that, he successfully shopped pictures from his trip to America aboard the General Sturges to True Magazine , which launched him into an early career working as a documentarian.

"I captured the expressions of these people seeing the Statue of Liberty at 5 in the morning when we came in," he said. "Very emotional stuff."

With TV starting to truly boom in the 60's, Mr. Halmi decided he wanted to get in on it. He convinced General Foods to back his production of Ernest Hemingway's My Old Man , which he sold to CBS in 1979, starring Kristy McNichol.

This past November came The Magical Legend of the Leprechauns , a Halmi-produced laughingstock that became fodder for late-night talk-show hosts and an embarrassment to NBC because it angered the Irish community. Somehow, the sporadic river-dancing and brawling didn't go over so well. It flailed in the ratings, with an average 14 million viewers. Mr. Halmi, who had enjoyed consistently good press, started taking a public beating, not only by critics, but by big network heads.

NBC's new programming chief, Garth Ancier–who inherited The Tenth Kingdom when he took over last year, along with three other shows by Mr. Halmi scheduled to run in the spring–complained to reporters that the film, which will run over five nights, asks "an awful lot of an audience, to commit to 10 hours of a miniseries. You're almost knocking out a whole tier of viewers under 40." Instead of using the miniseries to launch NBC's sweeps push, Mr. Ancier decided to schedule it at the end of the period, with a couple episodes coming after sweeps.

Last month, NBC miniseries chief Lindy DeKoven resigned from NBC, leaving Mr. Halmi's fate up to her replacement, Steve White.

It didn't take long for CBS president Les Moonves to jump on her departure: "Garth, by his own admission, said … that The Tenth Kingdom is a dog," Mr. Moonves told reporters in January. "If I had 10 hours coming on in February that I thought wasn't very good, I guess maybe I would get rid of the executive early so I could blame them for it."

You might think that Mr. Halmi's brand of TV would be a good fit for CBS, but Mr. Moonves doesn't sound like a fan. Referring to Mr. Halmi, he said, "We at CBS have never been dominated by one producer who provided bad special effects."

The feeling is mutual. Mr. Moonves is a constant target of nasty faxes from Mr. Halmi. "I am always rubbing it in when he did something stupid," Mr. Halmi said. "I don't think he can stand that every time I do something, I beat him."

The Tenth Kingdom is the longest miniseries NBC has run in 21 years. It stars John Larroquette as Central Park West superintendent who, along with his waitress daughter, played by Kimberly Williams, finds himself trapped in an almost medieval world populated by Brothers Grimm characters. The first episode, with a lot of exposition and a few annoying trolls, is the weakest, and Mr. Halmi knows it.

"They tightened up the beginning a little bit, but you need exposition," he said. "You're talking about 10 hours, you have to establish it somehow. I wish I wouldn't have those first two hours, but I just couldn't get rid of them."

After Mr. Halmi's interviewer left, his phone rang. It was Mr. White at NBC, saying the network was ready to go all out with promotion for The Tenth Kingdom –with bus ads and radio ads and even a "making of" short. Mr. Halmi called his interviewer to set the record straight. "He said The Tenth Kingdom was the best thing he ever saw," he said. "He said 'Don't worry, we're going to do all this.' Just like the old times."

Tonight, catch a little magic on Fox's The Secrets of Street Magicians Finally Revealed . Finally! [WNYW, 5, 9 P.M.]

Thursday, Feb. 24

How is it that the cast of Friends is still getting onto magazine covers? It can only be that there hasn't been a real sitcom created since it launched on NBC in 1994. Tonight, Rachel tries to fix a sink. [WNBC, 4, 8 P.M.]

Friday, Feb. 25

After WCBS lost Judge Judy to WNBC last fall, its late-afternoon ratings fell off the radar screen as the belligerent TV justice went on to become the No. 1 show locally between 9 A.M. and 5 P.M. In its 4 P.M. slot, WCBS put on The Martin Short Show , which tanked. To staunch the bleeding, WCBS has launched News 2 at 4 with Stephen Clark and Dana Tyler. The strategy is helping–it's viewed in an average 136,000 local households, compared with Mr. Short's 82,000. But still, WCBS is languishing in sixth place at 4 P.M. Is Judge Judy , watched in 500,000 households daily, huge, or what? [WCBS, 2, 4 P.M.]

Saturday, Feb. 26

A.J. Benza, the host of E!'s Mysteries & Scandals –and the former Daily News gossip columnist who used to employ this NYTV columnist–came to town recently to tape bits for a possible Saturday-night talk show he would host on E! He hopes E! will let him do it because it would allow him to come more often to his hometown. "It's like New York is my wife and L.A. is my mistress," he said. "I want to get back to my wife."

Same old Benza. He said he should find out soon.

"We're still in the planning stages," Mr. Benza said. "We're one big 'if' away."

This morning on M&S , the Harry James-Betty Grable marriage. [E!, 24, 8 A.M.]

Sunday, Feb. 27

For those who don't like somewhat cheesy fantasy flicks like The Tenth Kingdom , there's good, old-fashioned seediness tonight on CBS, when we see another take on the JonBenet Ramsey murder case in Perfect Murder, Perfect Town . Still, NYTV's money is on the first installment of The Tenth Kingdom . Even if you hate the beginning, it gets better during the last eight hours. That's a promise from us, the folks at NYTV. [WCBS, 2, 9 P.M.]

Monday, Feb. 28

Remember Alison Stewart, the former MTV News correspondent who was clearly too good for cable but seemingly too hip for network news? She had gone off to CBS News primarily as a correspondent for Bryant Gumbel's now-canceled Public Eye . Well, now Ms. Stewart is resurfacing at ABC as the new co-anchor of ABC's overnight news show, World News Now , which runs between 2 and 5 A.M. She is replacing Juju Chang at Anderson Cooper's side. She said she'll stay there for at least a year, at which point, she said, she might evaluate whether or not she likes being an anchor–and whether television news can get real again.

"I think TV news is so in flux right now, it could be a totally different beast in a year," she said. Her point? "I think people may turn away from the 24-hour, news-channel sort of talking everything into the ground. You know? When something happens and you can't get away from it, and they're showing the same film from the same plane over and over and not saying anything new about it. That might not be attractive to people anymore." Anything's possible. [WABC, 7, 2 A.M.]

Tuesday, Feb. 29

Cheers . [WPIX, 11, 12 midnight.]

Why did he get the appointment?

"Because he was lucky enough to be president of ABC when Millionaire was put on the air," said Mr. Philbin. Then, accompanied by ABC News correspondent Barry Mitchell on the accordion, Mr. Philbin launched into a parody of "Pennies From Heaven" describing how Who Wants to Be a Millionaire had thrown ABC from third to first place in the prime-time ratings war.

It wasn't quite music, it wasn't quite entertainment, but it made the house happy. Barbara Walters, Diane Sawyer and Connie Chung–along with Mr. Iger's wife, CNN's Moneyline News Hour anchor Willow Bay–roared with approval. After years in the wilderness and long controversy after its acquisition by Disney, ABC not only had success for the first time in years, but a graduating executive moving into the first place of succession in the parent company.

"What can I really say about you, Regis?" said Mr. Iger, who was celebrating his 49th birthday. "Regis, you are the man. I got my job because of you, ABC is No. 1 because of you, Disney earnings are what they are because of you, our stock price is what it is because of you … what is your agent's name again?"

The Grand Ballroom roared for Disney's new subchief, heading off to Los Angeles from his little offices near Columbus Avenue. But Mr. Iger wasn't completely kidding; as Cosby did for NBC in the 1980's, Millionaire was a single hit that hoisted up a network and generally remade its executives' profiles. Mr. Iger had long been expected to be named president and chief operating officer of Disney, but the expectation began to fade along with ABC's fortunes after the network was acquired by Disney in 1995.

In his new position, he will have to not only navigate Disney through a technological rearranging of the media landscape–but also live with the hulking, domineering presence of Michael Eisner, the 6-foot-3 chief executive of Disney whose dispatch of other lurking executives–Jeffrey Katzenberg and Michael Ovitz–had been violent enough to threaten his own absolute power at the Happiest Place on Earth.

But still, there he was: Bob Iger. Bob Iger, the former apprentice to ABC-Capital Cities founder Tom Murphy who survived the Disney purchase to become, one could argue, the biggest winner on Millionaire . And whose trip west is in no small part testament to the power of the network television hit–still a thunderclap event even in the age of the Internet.

Mr. Iger almost says so himself, though he cautions against overstating it. Mr. Eisner first talked to Mr. Iger, then head of ABC, about coming into Disney as his No. 2 in May 1998.

"It didn't seem to make sense at that point," Mr. Iger said during a morning interview with The Observer . "One reason was that it wouldn't have worked for me personally: My wife had just gotten pregnant and wanted to have her first child in New York, and I had a daughter who was still in high school in New York. And Michael and I also talked about the perception of ABC being in third place and my being named president. I'm not suggesting it had an impact on us deciding not to do it then, but it was clearly something that was on his mind."

"I think," Mr. Iger said, "the timing was better because ABC was back, of course."

And so other names started to pop up in the press, like Walt Disney Attractions chief Paul Pressler and current Walt Disney Studios chief Peter Schneider. Even Joe Roth, who resigned as Walt Disney Studios head in January.

It all must have come as somewhat of a shock to Mr. Iger, who, though seemingly still being groomed for the job, had to hear about these other people.

Mr. Iger had been on the precipice before. Just before Disney purchased ABC in 1995, Mr. Iger had learned that ABC-Capital Cities chairman Tom Murphy was planning to name Mr. Iger as his replacement. When the $19 billion Disney-ABC merger took place, Mr. Iger was in the position of having to please a new boss.

Until then, Mr. Iger had built a reputation as a reliable go-to guy with a magic touch and steady hand. "Charmed" was a word often used to describe his career. Growing up in Oceanside, L.I., Mr. Iger had dreamed of being a foreign correspondent for CBS News, and after graduating from Ithaca College, he set out on that path, working as an on-air reporter for the local television and cable stations in Ithaca. In 1974, he landed a bottom-rung job at ABC, helping the producers at ABC Sports, eventually becoming a producer himself.

The Capital Cities executives are said to have taken notice of him when he coolly programmed around unseasonably warm weather during the 1988 Winter Olympics, in Calgary. They decided he was worth taking a chance on, and promoted him to the head ABC's entertainment division, even though he had no experience.

It was a good fit. Mr. Iger steered the network to No. 1 with Home Improvement and Ellen . He developed NYPD Blue . But then came Disney.

Mr. Eisner already knew Mr. Iger–he had sold him Disney-produced television shows–and, along with strong recommendations from the ABC-Capital Cities leadership, made him a point man in the integration of the companies. That left Mr. Iger with the task and power of melding the two cultures–the more open ABC management and the more authoritarian management of Disney.

"In the early years, after the merger," he said, "I used to compare myself to a traffic cop at 42nd Street and Broadway. It was going by so fast and coming from so many different directions. It was impossible to stop, impossible to control and, for the most part, impossible to breathe."

And during that integration, the dry spell for ABC was beginning to loom. NBC had E.R., Seinfeld and dominance. ABC's shows were turning stale. And ABC's programming chief, Jamie Tarses, brought in from NBC by Mr. Eisner's appointed No. 2, Mr. Ovitz, was struggling to find a hit. That failure began a long struggle for leadership at ABC Entertainment that finally ended last summer when Ms. Tarses was forced out and the network division was merged with Disney's television studio. But by then, ABC was solidly stuck in third.

The merger of Disney's television studio operations with the network division represented the final frustrations of Mr. Eisner over ABC. He had bought the network in order to create "synergies": Disney would make shows, ABC would air shows, they would work hand in hand. That was theory. But it wasn't happening, and that failure was starting to be seen on Wall Street as a drag on the Disney stock, which by the end of the summer was falling far from its 1998 high.

Mr. Iger argues that in reality ABC's cable assets, such as ESPN, A&E and Lifetime, were doing great. Its radio division was growing. Its television stations topped their markets. It still ruled daytime with its soap operas. But prime time is still the most visible part of ABC, covered by the media and watched by investors, and so prime time can still affect stock prices. ABC had to win.

"It was less of a problem from an economic standpoint than it was from an image standpoint, a P.R. standpoint," Mr. Iger said. "Network television is so visible, it moves markets really in a way that belies sort of bottom-line economics, and when you suffer in that arena, when you are off, so to speak, the perception that's created is huge, perhaps much larger than it should be. So the entire merger was sort of viewed negatively because of that, which was completely unfair in many respects."

But it was a long haul in third, five years, and the accruing scent was not sweet.

Enter Millionaire . British producer Michael Davies had been doing great with the show in England and pitched ABC Entertainment's Stu Bloomberg on the idea. Mr. Bloomberg loved it, weighed running it for consecutive nights–as was the custom in Britain–in the dead of August, when ratings are off, anyway. Mr. Iger said he loved the idea. So did Mr. Eisner. Everybody loved the idea.

Mr. Iger ordered it up without a pilot.

"I don't think anybody in our entire company knew it was going to be a hit of this magnitude," Mr. Iger said. "But when we all saw it, we all said, 'Boy, this really is something.' Stu and Michael and myself have had experiences like this in the past, you know, but maybe four or five times out of 350 pilots."

Here's what Millionaire has done for ABC: For the week ending Feb. 13, it was the No. 1 network, with an average 13.9 million nightly viewers compared with 12.8 million for CBS and NBC. This time last year, ABC was in third place with an average 12 million viewers to CBS's 13.2 million and NBC's 12.7 million.

Meanwhile, so far this television season, Millionaire is averaging more than 31 million viewers per show and holds the top three slots of the Nielsen Media Research Top 10.

Other shows are being lifted by it. The Practice , long hailed by critics but never quite a hit with viewers, suddenly has more than 20 million viewers a week.

Now look at the Disney stock. At the end of August, it was going for $26 per share. On Feb. 15, it closed at roughly $37 per share. The day Mr. Eisner announced Mr. Iger's appointment, he also announced that first-quarter earnings were up 7 percent for Disney, after two years of decline, thanks in part to Millionaire .

"As I look at it, Who Wants to Be a Millionaire generates about $1 million a minute," said Jack Myer, chief economist of the Myers Group, a media analysis firm. Mr. Myers quoted Michael Eisner as saying it was "like having three ER 's a week. If ABC can get one more hit program, then they're going to have accomplished what really no network has accomplished in 20 years, which is to demonstrate that network television can still bring in huge ratings week after week after week, day after day after day."

Meanwhile, Millionaire is fitting into that old Disney synergy: There's a Millionaire CD-ROM, a Millionaire book published by Disney's Hyperion, and there will soon be a play-along-at-home version on its Go.com. At long last, old media ABC wasn't looking like such a dumb purchase after all.

And this made Mr. Iger suddenly look like a pretty good promotion. Wall Street had been carping about Mr. Eisner's lack of an heir apparent, and now it can't. Now, Bob Iger will start overseeing other Disney divisions, like film–which has racked up Oscar nominations from Sixth Sense and The Insider –and home video-DVD, its positioning in the on-line age.

But Mr. Iger's hardest task may be living with Mr. Eisner. "Generally, I think it's hard for anyone to work with Eisner," Mr. Myers said. "Eisner is hands-on and an autocratic and highly focused leader. He's right on top of you."

Back at the Waldorf, Mr. Philbin was singing to Mr. Iger, a rendition of "Happy Birthday to You": " You're the new No. 2/ Michael Eisner chose you/ As the one to succeed him/ Michael Ovitz was, too ."

But the problem with Mr. Ovitz, and for that matter Mr. Katzenberg, was that these were men with sizable egos themselves, men who with significant Hollywood contacts and creative histories, who had a taste of glory on their own. Mr. Iger, trained under the ultimate corporate self-sublimator, Tom Murphy of Capital Cities, was raised to have his glory connected to a team, to ABC. He's never stood out as a personality. He's not one to make the scene, opting instead to stay home in his Upper East Side town house with his wife and kids, waking up each morning at 5 A.M. for a Reebok Sports Club workout before a 6:30 A.M. start to his workday. "He really wants to have everybody like him," said one ABC insider. Sometimes that has meant that managers push ahead on projects only to find out later that Mr. Iger was not behind them. That, however, might play well at Disney, where he will likely have no problem playing second fiddle to Mr. Eisner.

"I've had five years of experience of working for him and with him," said Mr. Iger of Mr. Eisner. "Even though this is a different role and one I will need to grow into, it's part of a continuum."

Tonight on ABC, a ratings-improved Two Guys and a Girl . Millionaires don't go to pizza places. [WABC, 7, 8 P.M.]

Thursday, Feb. 17

Tonight on Late Show , Tom Snyder interviews Mike Myers. [WCBS, 2, 11:35 P.M.]

Friday, Feb. 18

Judge Judy is now the No. 1 show in New York during the day. Whadda hell raiser! [WNBC, 4, 4 P.M.]

Saturday, Feb. 19

This morning on Mysteries & Scandals , it's Ethel Merman. [E!, 24, 8 A.M.]

Sunday, Feb. 20

Tonight, it's The Little Richard Story on NBC, starring Leon and Garrett Morris. [WNBC, 4, 9 P.M.]

Monday, Feb. 21

Paul Reubens, whom you might know as Pee Wee Herman, makes an appearance on network TV tonight, on Everybody Loves Raymond . Give him some support. [WCBS, 2, 9 P.M.]

Tuesday, Feb. 22

Now we're talking sweeps! Tonight, on I Dare You! The Ultimate Challenge , UPN shows a plane landing on a truck, and things will certainly blow up! [WWOR, 9, 8 P.M.]

The partnership harks back to the earliest days of television, when you had General Electric Theater and The Colgate Comedy Hour , and sponsors were directly associated with shows. It could quickly drag product placement from the comparative sanctity of the commercial break right into the content of TV entertainment. And it could bring advertising agencies into program development from the early creative stages.

Neither partner rules out a scenario where you could see a TV show underwritten by an automobile manufacturer about a group of race car drivers, or by a bathing suit manufacturer about a group of gorgeous lifeguards, or a sitcom by a dot-com provider about a group of dot-com users. That's a scary one, huh, kids? It could also spawn more story lines similar to the famous Junior Mints episode of Seinfeld , where the mint artfully played a major role in the plot–it fell into a chest cavity during a character's surgery; it was not part of any product placement deal.

Inspired by J. Walter Thompson, the partnership was born out of the necessities of the changing economy. Things were bad enough for TV advertisers when there were all those new cable channels. Any time a commercial came on, the surfer culture could just sail off into the 100-channel universe.

But now comes along Tivo and Web TV–recording systems that allow viewers to skip through commercials at will–and the threat of digital TV with its 500 channels.

Then there's the planned AOL-Time Warner deal, which promises to usher in interactive television where viewers could pretty soon download their shows off the Internet, sans commercials. In essence, TV's audience is being liberated from its years of captivity. In recent years, the networks have tried every split-screened, commercial-crunching, time-compressing trick available to get viewers to stay with an ever more advanced breed of advertising.

On the plus side for retail advertisers, interactive television will likely allow consumers to buy things right off their TV sets with the click of the mouse.

So Madison Avenue is hunkering down and devising ways to position its clients and get their messages out as the traditional advertising model becomes outmoded–and get more involved with shows as they're being produced.

"The whole endeavor is meant to go far beyond the 30-second spot," said J. Walter Thompson executive Marina Hahn, who is running the new partnership, called "(c) JWT," with the "(c)" standing for content. "I think you can create whole television programs and create whole series," said Ms. Hahn. "What you're really trying to do is extend a brand essence." She said several deals are in the works.

Out of the partnership could come shows like Paramount Television's Viper , a syndicated action series centering around a crime fighter who drives a Dodge Viper. This isn't just product placement. The Viper is essentially itself a character.

"I see no reason why a company can't deficit finance a 13-episode series that revolves around their brand position," Ms. Hahn said. "The subject matter could be organically based on the overall gestalt of the brand and what the brand's about."

For example, she said, the partnership could produce a one-hour drama series that's set in Silicon Valley for a tech firm represented by J.W.T. It could be scripted by Basic's writers with actors coming from Brillstein-Grey Management's stable of stars. Certainly other tech firms would find such a show an attractive commercial buy as well.

Or, she agreed, the partnership could conceivably–though not likely–have a half-hour "Tony the Tiger" cartoon. After all, Ms. Hahn said, "Tony the Tiger has as high a Q rating as Mickey Mouse and a higher Q rating than Fred Flintstone." Q ratings measure how well liked a character or celebrity is.

"I'm not saying we are going to do it," she said, "but Tony the Tiger has four friends in the Kellogg's family, they're all legitimate characters. We have a stable of brands that happen to have interesting characters associated with them."

That scenario wouldn't be all that different from Pokémon , which acts in part as an ad for the Pokémon toys.

More traditionally, the partnership could help J. Walter Thompson produce advertisements that play off the plot in midstream, during commercial breaks.

Others are already following J. Walter Thompson's lead. NBC has formed a media company jointly with Polo Ralph Lauren in which the network will help the clothes maker launch an Internet site and, possibly down the road, develop TV programming.

In August, a group of advertisers led by Procter & Gamble donated $1 million to the WB network earmarked for the development of more family-friendly shows. But the general concept isn't sitting well with Hollywood writers and producers, who see it as pure commercial osmosis between the business and creative sides of the business.

"The networks spent a lot of years trying to get out from under the control of sponsors in terms of content, and I think that that was a very important evolution for broadcast television," said Marshall Herskovitz, executive producer of ABC's Once and Again .

Mr. Herskovitz said he was recently asked whether he would be interested in producing a show for an advertiser down the road. "I said, 'Absolutely not,'" he said.

"It's worrisome to me to go in the reverse direction," Mr. Herskovitz said. "I think if I did a television show sponsored by Ford Motor [Company], and all the characters drove Fords, and I was told not to do a story line about faulty gas tanks, that's where you run into a problem. The point is, I can choose what products I want my characters to use based on what I think is a truthful representation of that person."

"It's very hard to pull it off without making the audience feel that a fast one is being pulled on them," said David Kissinger, president of Studios USA, which produces the Law & Order series. "I think the bar has to be very, very high in order to not let the marketing motives get in the way of the entertainment value."

But Kevin Bright, one of the producers of Friends , said he thought it could generally help TV. Having a sponsor who's committed to a show means there's more chance it will last. "It really takes some of the pressure off that show," he said. "The client's going to be more likely to say, 'We're going to keep it on the air and try to make it successful creatively.'"

"It is really taking the purpose of TV to its logical extreme," said David Kohan, executive producer of NBC's Will & Grace . "When you think about it, we're filler between the commercials from the extent of the corporation, anyway." Executives with (c) JWT insisted they would not let the content of shows be corrupted. Basic Entertainment could act as the superego to J. Walter Thompson's id, putting the brakes on anything that could tarnish its reputation–currently stellar, thanks to The Sopranos .

"In terms of the shows that we develop and what talent they're populated by, that's not really a part of the process we intend to share," said Mr. Grey. "I don't have any intention of bringing the advertiser into the creative process in that literal a way.

"If you bring Madison Ave. in as part of the process … not necessarily in terms of the creation of content but in terms of keeping in mind … the demographic they're trying to reach for their dollar," he said, "I think it will ultimately serve everyone in the equation."

"Consumer behavior is changing," Ms. Hahn said. "Our younger targets are able to go on line and watch TV and chew gum at the same time. It's not like the old days when you had three networks and that was it."

A recent study on TV ad viewership conducted in Canada, by Tandemar Research Inc. last spring, found that only about one-third of Canada's English-speaking TV audience–which generally mirrors the United States'–was sticking around for the commercials.

"A third click off, and another third come or go and leave the room–they go take a pee, they go to the laundry room and put another load in the dryer," said John Hallward of Tandemar. Another third, he said, are in the room and leave the channel on, but it is impossible to tell exactly how much attention they are paying to the commercials. "The evidence shows that there is not a lot of attention paid at commercial breaks," Mr. Hallward said.

Meanwhile, the technological future seems stacked against the 30-second ad, even as it commands top ratings. A survey of television and Internet executives at the National Association of Television Programming Executives conference in New Orleans last month found 35 percent believed network television would cease to be ad-based in the next decade.

"We've gotta be on the lookout for the opportunities to extend brands and brand messaging into content–be it analog TV or digital Internet content sites or whatever," said Guy McCarter, chief of BBDO New York's entertainment marketing division. "You've got to look at ways other than the 30-second commercial, which is still the king of communication, for your brand. All those sorts of conversations are ongoing. I will say that it is true Hollywood and Madison Ave. are talking more now than in my 18-year career."

Meanwhile, tonight on Lucky Strike's Politically Incorrect , comedian John Fugelsang; activist David Duke; host Bill Maher. [WABC, 7, 12:05 A.M.]

Catch the latest installment of TV Guide's The Truth Behind the Sitcom Scandals , one of the greatest shows around. Tonight, it's dirt from the sets of Mash and The Love Boat . The producers said the Love Boat segment is the juicier part, featuring stories about various love affairs between the cast members and Lauren Tewes' fall from grace. Toot-toot! All aboard! [WNYW, 5, 8 P.M.]

Thursday, Feb. 10

Bryant Gumbel's Early Show finished the last week of January with improved ratings. Though it had been averaging 2.3 million households for the season, the CBS breakfast show averaged 2.6 million Jan. 24 through Jan. 28. That is the equivalent of the ratings for CBS This Morning , which the Early Show replaced with promises that it would do far better with A.M. viewers. But, the show's executive producer, Steve Friedman, said he thought the upswing could put Mr. Gumbel's show in position for a ratings boom during the current sweeps period, which began Feb. 3.

"We've been taking a beating in the press about these ratings," Mr. Friedman said. "We don't laugh them off. We kept saying, be patient, be patient, we were going to build until February, that's the most important time there was. This is the foundation week. We don't expect the ratings to go up in a straight line, but this is a step in the right direction." [WCBS, 2, 7 A.M.]

Friday, Feb. 11

It's the 10th anniversary of David Lynch's Twin Peaks , so Bravo has returned the show to television. It makes sense, since executives there said the show always kills for them. Which makes sense because the show always killed, period. It now runs in the slot that belonged to Louis Theroux's Weird Weekends . Mr. Theroux, meanwhile, will probably return to Bravo when he tapes another round of shows.

Tonight, in the first Twin Peaks after the pilot, Catherine begins her horrible plotting. [Bravo, 64, 8 P.M.]

Saturday, Feb. 12

NASCAR Daytona 500 Pole Qualifying round. Watch cars go round and round and round and round, switch lanes, then go round and round and round and round some more. Someday, this will be sponsored by your local Datsun dealer, and it will be only Datsuns. [WCBS, 2, 12 noon.]

Sunday, Feb. 13

Chris Carter is apparently still stinging from Fox's cancellation of his fall virtual reality show, Harsh Realm . During the Feb. 6 episode of The X-Files , a young girl is kidnapped as her father is downstairs watching Harsh Realm on the tube and muttering to himself, "Good show." Later, when he is asked what he was doing when his daughter is killed, he replied that he was watching TV. He said he couldn't remember what show it was, but that it was "a good show, though." That bitter Mr. Carter! Anyway, tonight, it's the continuation of the Feb. 6 X-Files , in which we find out whether Mulder's sister was really abducted by aliens. [WNYW, 5, 9 P.M.]

Monday, Feb. 14

Robert Klein is gearing up for another one-man HBO special that will tape in September or October. To prepare, he will begin doing regular, Wednesday night gigs at the small Gotham Comedy Club. He told NYTV it's how he likes to sharpen his chops and come up with material for these specials.

"The best way to write the stuff is to go back to the smaller, more intimate venues and, yes, people are drinking and sometimes eating," he said.

This will be Mr. Klein's seventh stand-up show for HBO. He did the cable channel's first one in 1975, taped at Haverford College. Lately, Mr. Klein has been somewhat quiet, doing occasional club appearances and some corporate ones. See, when the economy is good, big business has enough cash lying around to hire a guy like Robert Klein for special nights.

"Did Pfizer for a new product for animals: Put it behind the cat's head or dog's head and fleas, worms, everything disappears," he said. "I did the American Society of Dermatologists, came out scratching."

Tonight, HBO is apparently trying to appeal to the male, Valentine's Day backlash audience, beginning prime-time with Switchback –about an F.B.I. agent looking to avenge his son's murder–and wrapping with Real Sports With Bryant Gumbel . Now that's romance. [HBO, 32, 8 P.M.]

Tuesday, Feb. 15

Regis Philbin's Who Wants to Be a Millionaire has not only reversed the fortunes of ABC, but, for at least one hour, it helped reverse the fortunes of network television itself. On Wednesday, Feb. 2, the Big Four networks, which have been steadily losing viewers, saw their combined audience grow by 6.8 million compared to Wednesday, Jan. 24, in the 8 to 9 P.M. hour, leaping from 45.1 million to 51.9 million. This, of course, is just one hour we're talking about. But after so much decline, any upward blip is cause for celebration among network chiefs. Of course, it's still unclear how long all of this lasts. One thing's for certain. Somehow, this Millionaire thing is miraculously rolling along. But tonight, there is something so special, so delightful, so … delectable!!! that it stands alone in the rip-off territory: Fox's rip-off Who Wants to Marry a Multi-Millionaire? , hosted by Murphy Brown's ex-fiancé Jay Thomas, where a multimillionaire picks a bride from 50 magnificent contestants. [WNYW, 5, 8 P.M.]

The people who work for you are too blinded by loyalty to suggest this, Dave, but it's really in your self-interest to let a series of guest hosts sit in for you over the next six to eight weeks.

Right now, CBS and your own production company, Worldwide Pants, are in bunker mode. They feel they must protect you from people volunteering to take your show for a while, everyone from Rosie O'Donnell to Howard Stern. They feel they have to stomp on those wishful calls in the press for weeklong cameos from Jerry Seinfeld or even Johnny Carson.

It leaked into the Hollywood Reporter that there were discussions within CBS about installing one of your own Worldwide Pants employees–Ray Romano or Craig Kilborn–behind your desk, and your loyalists went wild in denying it, screaming and carrying on the way they did in the movie version of The Late Shift .

But now is not the time for a bunker mentality. You're in a position of strength, Dave. Why do you and your people always seem to forget that?

"Dave's been a superstar for CBS for many years, and we can't wait to have him back at work," said the CBS statement. "In the meantime, we plan to provide viewers with the best of Dave in repeats."

At least they didn't call them "encore presentations." But still! Go ahead and do the show-biz thing. Give a call to one of your show's longtime friends. Steve Martin. Norm Macdonald. Dana Carvey. Garry Shandling. Hell, maybe even Tom Hanks could take some time out from his schedule to do something nice for his TV buddy Dave.

Here's what we're thinking: People would enjoy the guest hosts, yes, and the ratings might even creep back up to 6's and 7's, numbers you haven't seen very often since your first glorious year at CBS, when things were clicking and you seemed to briefly enjoy being top dog. But while people will enjoy watching Billy Crystal or whoever else is entertaining the tourists at the Ed Sullivan Theater, they would be secretly pining away for you! The anticipation for your return would be much greater than it will be under the current plan of deadening rerun after deadening rerun (oh, God, we can hear those musty old Monica and O.J. jokes already).

Look, Dave, you don't want to drive people into the arms of Jay Leno for any reason at all. Make them watch Late Show , even if it isn't Late Show With David Letterman .

Get your mom to host, or Martin Short. He looks like he needs the work, now that his daytime talk show has been dropped in New York. The guest host plan sure would go a long way toward keeping your ratings up during the crucial February sweeps period, which begin in the next couple of weeks.

Listen to Grant Tinker, a legendary studio boss and onetime NBC president (before the era of pinheads and weasels): "There probably could be four or five people who are sort of Letterman fans who would keep his spirit alive while he is away," said Mr. Tinker. "I don't think he's too concerned about one-tenth of a rating point up or down. He cares about the show, obviously. If the franchise is going to be enhanced by several people sitting in for him and talking about him, that could be a good middle ground."

Right! Whoever subs for you will be talking about you and joking about you and leading everybody up to your big return–and then you can take back what you lost on that night so long ago when Hugh Grant apologized on The Tonight Show for picking up a street hooker.

By switching guest hosts each week, no one would get a firm footing on your stage. It would be clear that whoever is there is just there for you, as a favor to you.

Your hero Johnny Carson was strong enough to have guest hosts. Steve Martin. Don Rickles. David Brenner. Joe Garagiola. Steve Lawrence. Kate Smith. Our own Peter Bogdanovich. Even you, Dave. And then there was Jay Leno.

But Mr. Carson had a late-night monopoly. No one does the guest host thing anymore. You've been sitting in your seats at CBS and NBC for 17 years with no understudy. And you don't see Mr. Leno letting someone sit in his. Or Conan O'Brien letting go of his desk for even a moment. Things are too competitive these days.

Late-night has to be fresh and topical to work. You could lose a full ratings point, over a million viewers, pretty quickly. It also could hurt your guy, Mr. Kilborn, who won't have as strong a program leading into his during the sweeps.

Of course, Mr. Tinker is a good network guy, and said maybe reruns could be O.K., too. And surely that's what the guys at CBS will tell you, too. They have to, lest they upset you or your people.

But look at Mr. Carson. He let that Joan Rivers become his "permanent guest host" for a while. Sometimes she even pulled better ratings than her mentor. But on her own, at Fox, she tanked. Johnny remained the king and stayed right where he was until Bette Midler serenaded him off the airwaves.

And that's what you should do, Dave. Be the king. Be strong enough to let somebody else drive for a little while. Order your minions to get those crusty reruns off the air with wildly changing Daves–fatter, thinner, older, younger–from night to night. It'll make your return all the more yearned for, an occasion for frenzy. Remember Jack Paar!

One Driver Meets Woody and Letterman

Douglas Rodriguez, 55, was behind the wheel of the gray Lincoln Town Car he drives for Douglas Car Service. He dropped off Tina Louise (Ginger from Gilligan's Island ) on East 46th Street, but wasn't much impressed.

"I don't really like actors all that much," Mr. Rodriguez said, driving west.

He has been driving for a living in New York for 25 years and has had many encounters with celebrities.

"I was looking to pick up Woody Allen on Madison Avenue and 76th Street, and there was snow everywhere. There wasn't a car in sight. I think it was '94, when they had all those snowstorms. And so I spotted him and I backed up to pick him up, I figured maybe I can get this guy. So at first I said 15. No, he wanted to give me $7 to bring him across the town. I said, 'Seven dollars? That's a cab ride.' He said, 'Well, that's what I usually pay.' I said, 'But this is not a cab, this is a Town Car.' But he didn't want to pay the 15. Then I said, 'All right. How about 20?' He says, 'But you just said 15! I asked you to make me a better deal!' I said, 'I made you a better deal–but a deal for me, not for you!'

"So, sure enough, he turned me down again. And I brought somebody up to 86th Street and First Avenue. I come back and, sure enough, he's still standing there in the crevice, you know? And I pull up and he looked at me, walked up, and he says, 'All right! You get $10.' I mean, I'm not asking him for a lot of money. I asked him for 15. Which is not a lot of money, when you can't find a car.

"So he turned around and he says, 'No!' So I went around the block, and he started walking over to my car, and I says, 'Fifty dollars! Fifty! Fifty dollars for you, sir!' Now I wouldn't take him for 20. Ha! and I never let him know that I knew who he was."

Mr. Rodriguez stopped the car by Washington Square Park. In the front seat next to him was a gallon of water, Altoids and a copy of Investor's Business Daily . He was wearing a gray suit, a white shirt, a blue tie. He said he was born in the Bronx and lived in an orphanage until he was 16.

Once, he said, a "black guy" shot at him twice in his cab and missed both times. He said he felt "the wind" of one bullet going by his ear. Another time, a female "crackhead" tried to slice him in the face with a razor blade, missed, but got him on the arm. There's a good-size scar.

The news came over the radio that David Letterman needed a bypass.

"I picked him up on 50th Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenue," he said, remembering his Letterman encounter. "So he gets in the car, and I didn't recognize him at first because he didn't have his wig on. You know, he has a hairpiece? He was complaining to somebody who writes his jokes about writing better jokes, and the punch line wasn't good on that one or something, something like that. And he had a little toy, and he just gave it to me, because everybody's just giving him toys all the time."

What was Mr. Rodriguez's take on Mr. Letterman's heart condition?

"I feel that somebody of his stature should have a dietitian. He should have a dietitian to take care of his health, that's the most important thing in your life! It's not like he can't afford it. He could ask her, 'Well, what's the best foods to eat? What should I avoid? How big a meal should I eat? What combinations of food should I eat?'"

"So he's kind of a dumb ass in a way?"

"Yeah! He's not too smart! I mean, he's very clever on his show and everything, but he knows his father died of a heart attack, so he should know that his health is very important, he should watch it."

"So you kind of don't like these people, actors and famous people?"

"They're stuck up. Some people are nice, like somebody like Oprah Winfrey. She tries to help people, but this guy's like an egotist, Letterman. He has to be the center of attention, that's the idea that I got. Because he was really yelling at this guy in my car, because nobody was laughing at a couple of jokes that he had, and he was blasting this guy. Give him a break! The guy's trying to write some jokes, all right, so he tried!"

–George Gurley

PASADENA, Calif.–The TV reporters from all over the country were picking at plates of fajitas and corn chips in the middle of Stage 19A in the Warner Brothers lot. Peter Roth, the Warner Brothers Television president, approached the group and took a seat.

It was to be a casual, catered lunch thrown so members of the TV press corps–in town for the twice-yearly ritual during which the networks roll out new TV shows–could have an audience with the executive.

At tables surrounding Mr. Roth's were Norm MacDonald and Jamie Foxx and Drew Carrey, the studio's current crop of TV stars.

The stage was dark and surrounded with ficus trees covered in purple lights.

The reporters started lobbing their questions at Mr. Roth: What exactly led Jeanne Moreau, the French film star, to storm off the ER set after just one day of shooting? Would the show–Warner Brothers' most successful, the No. 1 show on network television–survive the departure of Julianna Margulies? What about this new game-show phenomenon? Will Rob Lowe remain on West Wing ?

The game-show phenomenon? Rob Lowe? The Jeanne Moreau fiasco? There was Mr. Roth, now a key player in the new AOL-Time Warner mega-company, sitting with television reporters for the first time since the deal was announced, and the first thing they wanted to know about is the backstage melodrama at ER !

The scene was indicative of much of the Winter 2000 TV press tour, held by the Television Critics Association. Questions about the merger were few and far between. Yet the producers and studio heads and network presidents that were trotted before them were the ones who'll be most affected by the merger.

During the Jan. 13 lunch, Mr. Roth countenanced the questions gladly enough. For instance: No, Warner Brothers does not intend to let Mr. Lowe out of his contract. But when the subject of the merger came up, he leaned forward in his chair, intense, and his eyes lit up.

As president of Warner Brothers Television, Mr. Roth likely made a million or two on the merger. Then there is the fact that his division, the one that produces television shows for Time Warner, will likely decide what form this new beast takes when it comes to your TV.

"Clearly, we're on the cusp of a whole new world of opportunity," he said.

Then, he uttered the words that, in the days just before the merger, had been left to digital freaks and on-line geeks.

"The traditional network structure will change," he said. "You're going to be able to watch what you want to watch when you want to watch it."

By his reasoning–and most everybody else's–the merger means that television viewers will eventually no longer have to wait until his studio's ER comes onto the tube on NBC.

Key in the merger is Time Warner's hundreds of miles of cable, which gives AOL access to the high-speed lines for "broadband service" that allows information–like video and sound–to travel 50 times faster than it does on today's phone lines.

So, rather than wait until Thursday at 10 P.M., AOL Time Warner's customers could conceivably go on-line any old time and download the ER episode, which will be digitally transferred to their new computerized TV by way of a high-speed broadband Internet connection.

Conceivably, NBC–as a kind of middleman in this transfer of information–could be left out altogether.

"The more opportunity and choices available for the viewers and audience," Mr. Roth said, "the less stranglehold and monopoly the traditional networks are going to have."

Right now, added studio vice president Craig Hunegs, the studio is unsure whether to enlist its big guns, like ER 's John Wells or Drew Carey 's Bruce Helfort to figure out this new form of programming. It's not that they're not big talents. It's just that they might be old-school TV talents.

"There will be things about traditional TV that will change," Mr. Hunegs said. "The big question is, are the big TV guys going to be the ones who determine what that new format is?"

Across the WB lot, as he walked to the ER writing room from the ER set under bright blue skies, Mr. Wells–a robust, redheaded man with a goatee–wasn't so sure his life will change.

"If you wanted to watch a repeat of ER , and you tried to download an episode, it would take you 17 to 18 hours just to download it," he said as he walked near the stucco bungalows that house Warner Brothers' top writers. "So I think you have to be careful about saying everything is now going to completely change."

But, in the end, Mr. Wells said, one thing that could completely change is what his bosses do with his shows after they're produced. "I think it'll definitely affect the way stuff gets sold," he said.

Which brings us back to what Mr. Roth had said: With the technology that's being hastened along by the Time Warner-AOL merger, the big network model will never be the same again once the proper connections are in place.

You have to wonder: Why will a studio need to sell a show to a network when it can get the show out there itself–and, more importantly, collect all the ad revenue itself?

But the networks are still the ones with the money and viewers and will surely continue to be for at least the next few years. Just last year, NBC paid his studio $13 million per episode for ER , even though it only makes about $9.27 million per show in ads.

"At this point, [the Internet] can't possibly afford to pay studios the same amount of cash as the networks are paying now," Mr. Roth said. "The business is not going to change radically, it's going to change evolutionarily."

(Psst. Tonight, on West Wing , it's the one where Martin Sheen's character gets mad and orders vengeance on the bastards who downed a U.S. plane. Tough acting assignment for Mr. Sheen, who is something of a ding-dong, believing that his own politics come before the role he's playing!) [WNBC, 4, 9 P.M.]

Thursday, Jan. 20

Long after the CBS presentation at Pasadena's Ritz-Carlton Huntington Hotel, when the others had all gone away, NYTV asked CBS president Les Moonves if the AOL-Time Warner deal meant the end of the network broadcast model?

In five years, he was asked, will people still be following traditional, prime-time schedules?

Follow such questions to their logical conclusions, and, basically, Mr. Moonves was being asked if network programming is on the verge of becoming a dead medium.

He didn't seem to love the line of questioning. Mr. Moonves is a true creature of television–besides holding the top slots at Lorimar Television and Warner Brothers Television, he had also worked as an actor. He still looks like one, too, with shiny pearly whites, a full head of salt-and-pepper hair and a Robert Wagner-style, leading man's voice. He could do a guest spot tomorrow.

"It may change some of our viewers' viewing habits," he said. "But I still think in 10 years, we'll be making a prime-time schedule."

By the current network thinking, television is generally a passive medium, where viewers sit back on their couches and leave the programming to programmers. This whole Internet TV thing asks the viewers to go from being passive to active.

Still, Mr. Moonves said, CBS is not without its own Internet strategy.

Anyway, it's not like Mr. Moonves can get too worried. The truth is that his network still averages 13 million viewers per night–viewers the dot-com guys are paying a lot to reach right now as they try to build their names. That's making for some fat TV network coffers. After a record May ad sales season, CBS's sales were up 35 percent over last year for the fall.

But Mr. Moonves was running out of patience with this Internet talk. He did a Johnny Carson-style imaginary golf swing, indicating the interview was over. Fore!

Hey, watch the Evening News tonight on the network that made its name on news. [WCBS, 2, 6:30 P.M.]

Friday, Jan. 21

On Friday, Jan. 14, the guys from Replay TV were feeling a bit lonely. They had set up a special suite in the Pasadena Ritz-Carlton to show the TV reporters their wonderful machine.

It digitally records shows through the week so viewers don't have to rely on the network schedules.

Another benefit: These handy little machines make it easy to skip the commercials.

But no one was showing up. It wasn't too hard to figure out the lack of interest. First, the Replay TV guys were competing with a breaking news story (the Government was defending charges that it basically bribed networks to insert antidrug messages into their plot lines). And while these machines may have been considered futuristic just a couple of weeks before, the planned AOL-Time Warner merger makes them seem likely for obsolescence.

Why buy one of these babies when you'll probably get the same results and more over the Internet?

Replay TV executive Jim Plant was ready with a list of comebacks. "We don't know when this is all going to shake out," said Mr. Plant, in a denim shirt with "Replay TV" etched in red stitching. "We know this is a technology that works today with today's infrastructure."

Mr. Plant showed a screen where the channels represent shows. For instance, you can have a Providence channel, where Providence ep-isodes are stored.

"We know that people who have these systems are watching more TV," he said. "What determines whether you watch TV? Whether something good is on. With this, there's always something stored that you want to watch."

What Mr. Plant didn't point out was the fact that the machine lets you skip commercials. He stopped mentioning that so much after NBC bought into the company.

Tonight on Providence , Syd makes an erroneous diagnosis. [WNBC, 4, 8 P.M.]

Saturday, Jan. 22

Allan Arkush, a longtime TV director, couldn't figure out all the hubbub surrounding this ad deal between the Government and the networks. The stories that came out that day said the networks had sold the Government $1 billion worth of ads for antidrug public service announcements. Since this was the Government they were dealing with, they had to agree to air $1 billion worth of their own public service announcements as well. Part of the deal had it that if an approved antidrug message wound up in a prime-time script, a network could get one of the free P.S.A. ad slots back and put it up for sale.

It turned out the networks had won more than 100 of those waivers, but only after the shows had been produced by studios that had no knowledge of the deal. So, they said, they never changed a script in return for the waivers.

Still, everyone was going crazy. Questions were asked like: "What if the Government wanted to encourage the networks to insert anti-abortion themes in their programs?" The question became whether the networks could have given producers notes on a script in order to make the it eligible for a credit without telling them.

Mr. Arkush, who was flustered-looking at a Directors Guild of America cocktail party, said first of all, he really doubted it would ever happen that way. For instance, a David E. Kelley–creator of The Practice and Ally McBeal –isn't going to blindly follow network notes. "When it comes to network notes, how much they get paid attention to depends on the show and producer," he said. "David could ignore them." And, Mr. Arkush said, he had never heard of the deal while he was working on David Kelley's just-canceled Snoops . Meanwhile, he said, it's not like you could go and run a pro-drug storyline on network TV, anyway.

"I think it's like a big so-what," Mr. Arkush said. "I think you know when you are doing something for a network what you're going to be allowed to do."

What you're not allowed to do is create a show that doesn't draw any viewers. Which is why Snoops got canceled even though it starred Gina Gershon.

For good clean fun tonight, catch Martial Law . Tonight, Sammo takes a part-time taxi driver job. Wa-wa-wa. [WCBS, 2, 9 P.M.]

Sunday, Jan. 23

Going into this television season, the sitcom was basically declared dead.

For instance, more dramas were picked up for the '99-'00 season than half-hour comedies for the first time in nearly a decade. Then you have these game shows, which are taking up time slots that might otherwise be used for sitcoms.

But studio and network heads attending the winter TV press tour said they see that changing with Fox's new Sunday-night show, Malcolm in the Middle .

"We usually wish one another ill, so it's odd to see us all rooting for a show," said David Kissinger, president of Studios USA, which produces Law & Order . "There is a great desire to resuscitate the half-hour comedy format … and I do think Malcolm in the Middle is going to lead that turn around."

Lloyd Braun, co-chairman of ABC, was talking the same talk.

"I think Malcolm is something that's really good and different, and people will come to it," he said.

So, what is ABC doing to bring back the sitcom? Executives told NYTV they're not only working with John Cleese on a sitcom for the fall, but also Denis Leary, who will likely star in a show as a New York cop.

Tonight, on Malcolm in the Middle , an adventure in babysitting. [WNYW, 5, 8:30 P.M.]

Monday, Jan. 24

Don't hate Julianna Margulies just because she passed up a $27 million, two-year contract when she decided to up and leave ER . Ms. Margulies, who plays Nurse Carol Hathaway on the country's No. 1-rated show, said she is upset about all the criticism she is receiving for the decision.

"It made me sad," Mr. Margulies said as she greeted reporters on the ER set. "Now everybody says, 'Oh, who do you think you are, some big movie star?' I never said that. I said I wanted to move on as an actor."

Then she lashed into America itself!

"It seems like it's because of this sick American fantasy that money makes your problems go away. I have the same problems now that I had when I was a waitress … it doesn't make your problems go away, it doesn't make you a better person."

Can we have a little of that doesn't-make-you-a-better-person stuff, just to try it out? Mail the check, care of this newspaper.

Ms. Margulies said she might be coming to New York this summer to do some theat-ah. Tonight, on the ER rerun, the Nurse Hathaway character celebrates her birthday. (Aw, hell, we liked the old Emergency! better, anyway.) [TNT, 3, 7 P.M.]

Tuesday, Jan. 25

If anything seems to sum up a sense of crisis in the network community, it's the resurgence of the game show, à la Who Wants to be a Millionaire .

"It's a trend we hope goes away quickly," Mr. Moonves said.

He understands it this way: "People really want to get rich. People–I think the economy is great, people are feeling good about themselves, I think people really think that the rainbow is possible."

Despite his displeasure with the trend, he said, CBS is developing two new prime-time game shows: The $64,000 Question and What's My Line . ABC, meanwhile, is developing a new one called Mastermind .

Warner Brothers Television, meanwhile, is developing a new game show for Fox that's kind of like its current one, Greed . In this one, the audience will get a chance to vote a contestant off a show and split the winnings among themselves by answering questions.

Tonight, there are actually no game shows! But, on ABC, Once & Again , which is always kind of a crapshoot, returns after a brief stint off the air. [WABC, 7, 10 P.M.]

The $183 billion merger means an era in which the TV set and the computer will merge–promising a host of changes for the average viewer.

"It's like everybody's been talking about this convergence for so long, and you've got cable and you've got television and you've got the PC and you've got wireless," said Richard Bressler, the chief executive of Time Warner's digital media arm. "And everybody's kind of been like creeping up on it, but everybody's scared to say it's really going to happen, because everybody's been predicting it for so long … I think that it takes events like this, the merger of AOL and Time Warner, to kind of really bring them together in a big way."

The new AOL Time Warner will not only be a driving force behind those changes, it's also positioned to become the first dominant player in this "converged" media world, with its base of power in a new Time Warner building at 10 Columbus Circle. From there, some of the biggest names in the old and new media businesses–Gerald Levin, Steve Case, Ted Turner, Bob Pittman, Richard Parsons–will have to learn to play together as they redefine leisure in the American living room.

"This means you may watch HBO on your Palm Pilot," said Christopher Dixon, media analyst for Paine Webber.

The task of bringing together the two corporations will primarily fall to Mr. Pittman, the fresh-faced former Time Warner executive who helped launch MTV and ended up at AOL.

Fleshing out the transition team are Mr. Parsons, the politically connected Time Warner president and former chief executive of Dime Bancorp, AOL's chief financial officer Michael Kelly and Mr. Bressler.

Those executives will report to Mr. Levin, Time Warner's chief executive; and Mr. Case, AOL's chief executive. The success of the venture will hinge on how successful they are at melding the two corporate cultures into one and changing the rules of television.

At the heart of the deal is access to broadband Internet cable.

Broadband is the high-speed Internet connection provided over an upgraded telephone or cable line. It's just a thick cable packed with wires–thicker than the thing that runs into your cable box right now–and it allows more information to travel more rapidly between a server and your computer.

On today's standard modems, which use telephone lines, video images now come up on computer screens slowly. And when they finally appear, they're often fuzzy or pixilated. Broadband allows crystal-clear images and sound to arrive on computer quickly–the equivalent of what you get off your TV. And there's still room on the wire for the user to send information out in the form of e-mails or telephone calls.

Time Warner has 13 million household cable subscribers and owns hundreds of miles of underground cable. In other words, it has the hardware broadband users need, the links into the houses that AOL desires. About 85 percent of Time Warner's cable is ready to carry broadband signals. Currently, that service is called Road Runner, a program Mr. Bressler has overseen as head of Time Warner digital. (Whether Mr. Bressler maintains control over it after the merger remains unclear, but he will certainly oversee the mechanism for its continued distribution.)

Time Warner also has a host of well-established brands, like Time, CNN and HBO.

With 22 million subscribers, AOL is the leading Internet service provider, existing in a realm where Time Warner has been unable to build a real presence, despite its dominance with CNN, HBO, Warner Brothers Studios, Warner Brothers Records and the Time Inc. magazines.

With this broadband alliance, it is conceivable that one day soon, AOL-Time Warner subscribers will be able to log on and pull up archived episodes of The Sopranos , an HBO show, or the WB's Roswell , or Warner Brothers Television's ER at will, thus creating their own TV schedules.

Mr. Bressler said he believes many shows will be re-created for the Internet with shorter running times for shorter computer attention spans.

What about the commercials? Well, since on-line viewers would be inclined to skip through the commercials, Madison Avenue could potentially rely more on product placement. A flag may tell you that Buffy the Vampire Slayer's pants are made by the Gap. If you're interested, you could click on the flag and buy a pair on line, using your credit card. (Consumers spent $2.5 billion this past Christmas buying goods over America Online.)

"I certainly can see knocking off an e-mail to Mom while I'm watching ER ," said media analyst Tom Wolzien, of Sanford C. Bernstein & Company, who predicted a Time Warner-AOL merger more than a year ago.

"The Internet, as a medium, is still, not in its infancy, but in its toddler years, so … it's hard to say where that goes," said Richard Parsons, the Time Warner president who is to become co-chief operating officer of the new AOL-Time Warner.

"Whether people will ever really watch HBO through their computers or whether this will all migrate onto a high-definition TV screen, I mean, who knows quite what the future holds," he went on. "But what we are trying to do with this merger is to position ourselves strategically so we have every base covered, and we can deliver more, faster, better than anybody else can and with greater appeal to the consumer."

Only a small percentage of consumers currently has broadband access. Time Warner's Road Runner, for instance, has about 320,000 subscribers. With AOL, Time Warner will certainly be pushing the service–which requires the instillation of special modems by Time Warner technicians, meaning more visits from the cable man.

As broadband spreads, though, AOL Time Warner's position looks enviable.

For instance, CBS–in the process of merging with Viacom–has radio and TV distribution, but it doesn't own cable systems or telephone lines or anything near the Internet presence of AOL. Same goes for Disney. But at least they both own studios that produce shows. NBC, the most profitable of the Big Three networks, has neither a studio nor cable carrier nor telephone system.

Pssst: Tonight, on Roswell , Liz wants Max to play Samantha from Bewitched and use his powers improperly. [WB, 11, 9 P.M.]

Thursday, Jan. 13

One possible beneficiary of the new AOL Time Warner is Geraldine Laybourne, the former Nickelodeon chief who is launching a converged Internet and cable network for women, called Oxygen.

Ms. Laybourne's headquarters are in New York. But until Jan. 9, it did not look likely that her network would have much of a presence on TV screens in town. The largest cable provider is Time Warner, which already carries a women's network, Lifetime, and it had been slow to offer Ms. Laybourne local carriage.

But one of Oxygen's key investors is America Online.

Richard Parsons, AOL Time Warner's chief operating officer, would only say, "Oxygen? Oxygen? Well, you know, Gerry is one of my favorite people …" And then he walked away.

Ms. Laybourne's network is set to hit the airwaves nationally Feb. 2. Tonight, on Nickelodeon, catch The Jeffersons , in which George nearly sells his dry-cleaning business. [Nickelodeon, 6, 10:30 P.M.]

Friday, Jan. 14

Just a couple of weeks before the AOL-Time Warner merger, Time Warner vice chairman Ted Turner had once again said that he was interested in purchasing NBC, despite resistance from his fellow Time Warner board members.

While Mr. Parsons did not rule out the possibility that this new corporation could one day snatch up the network, an AOL-Time Warner-NBC merger doesn't look likely for the near future.

"Ted, I'm sure, is still enthusiastic about the broadcast network business," said Mr. Parsons. "But, right now, we're focused on this."

In the deal, Mr. Turner made an initial profit of $2.5 billion on his shares, but he's really happy, one of his colleagues said, because now he gets a chance at "world domination."

World domination may not be as hyperbolic as one would like to assume, given the new company's instant 125 million paid subscribers.

Tonight, on Mr. Turner's TBS, catch Forever Young , a homespun time-travel weeper starring Mel Gibson. [TBS, 8, 8 P.M.]

Saturday, Jan. 15

Speaking of NBC, it was just on Friday, Jan. 7, when General Electric executives told NYTV: "We're very bullish on NBC, and we have no intention of selling it."

After the merger announcement, executives were sticking to that position–even though it is now believed that, without being aligned to a studio or a cable carrier, NBC looks weak.

The G.E. position, however, is that NBC remains a dominant brand, a network the whole country knows in an era of increased entertainment choices. It makes more money than any of its broadcast cousins, leading the pack with shows like ER (owned by Time Warner) and Saturday Night Live .

Still, executives high up the chain of command at NBC privately say they expect some sort of sale–or at least a major new partnership.

Tonight on Saturday Night Live : Freddie Prinze Jr., a very likable talent, with musical guest Macy Gray. [WNBC, 4, 11:30 P.M.]

Sunday, Jan. 16

One key concern about the merged AOL Time Warner is that its news divisions– Time , People , Fortune , CNN, New York 1, etc.–will be corrupted. The company is so big, the fear goes, that its own reporters are bound to stumble upon stories involving some part of it. Will they pull their punches? Will they be pressured to lay off? Will they get unfair advantage against their competitors on other stories? Mr. Case said No and that one priority will be "protecting journalistic ethics."

So, who got the first interview with Mr. Case and Mr. Levin, after the merger was announced? Why, the company's own CNN! Even local New York 1–which is, you guessed it, owned by Time Warner–got interviews with the men before other national news organizations.

Then you read the original Time Online story about the merger and see the CNN news Web site described as "competitive" and Warner Brothers as "innovative." Honestly, that's all probably fair. But still, the merger will certainly prompt more of these types of questions.

Right before the press conference, two television reporters stood before the complimentary fruit and coffee table when the subject of stocks came up. "Do you have any AOL?" one reporter asked the other. Today, on CNN, catch Late Edition . [CNN, 10, noon.]

Monday, Jan. 17

Richard Bressler, the chief executive of Time Warner's digital media unit, took issue with assumptions that people will watch full-length movies and TV shows on their computer screens. Internet users, he said, have shorter attention spans, and most broadband content will likely be shorter than the average TV show.

Then again, the pioneers of television thought the same thing. In the Nov. 29, 1975, issue of TV Guide , former NBC executive Leslie Raddaty wrote of those early days: "When NBC was preparing to take the giant step into television, the vice president in charge of that department made a careful study of the new medium and came to the conclusion that the viewing public just couldn't concentrate on a program for a whole half-hour."

Tonight, catch a rerun of Warner Brother's hourlong No. 1 drama, ER , on Time Warner's TNT. [TNT, 3, 7 P.M.]

Tuesday, Jan. 18

Speaking of mergers (sort of), is the unheard-of news collective formed by Fox, CBS and ABC about to get even bigger? NBC and CNN had been pointedly excluded from the news-video-sharing agreement, which was announced late last month.

After it was announced, NBC press representatives began publicly saying it was "curious" that they weren't included in the strange alliance, and they were eager to find out why.

Representatives from both NBC and the new news alliance confirm that the new group will brief NBC on the consortium in the coming days. Sources at NBC said executives from the new group approached the network and offered the briefing.

Of course, the news alliance probably had to do that, lest it face an antitrust lawsuit.

Then again, consortium executives have said NBC would be welcome to join the collective if it so chose.

Tonight, catch a little World News Tonight , with my favorite anchorman, ABC's Peter Jennings. [WABC, 7, 6:30 P.M.]

Under the agreement, finalized late last month, the three news organizations and their affiliates will formally share video footage from breaking news stories they cover throughout the country.

"This is a substantial shift," said one longtime network news executive. "Now you're in bed with your enemy."

For instance, if ABC can't get a crew to the next school shooting in, say, Wyoming, the network and its affiliates can pick up the footage from one of its network partners. Or, if ABC or one of its stations doesn't like the footage it's getting from one of its affiliates as much as the footage that CBS is using on a given story, the new alliance would allow it to switch to its rival's footage instead.

ABC and CBS will each contribute $4 million annually to the venture-which will go by the name of Network News Service-and Fox will contribute about $7 million, sources said.

It's all about fighting the CNN cable beast. The end result, some TV news people fear, could be even more sameness in television newscasts.

"I don't think we would have done it five years ago," said CBS News president Andrew Heyward. "It is a based on a growing realization of how the business is changing."

It used to be 25 to 30 percent of all TV homes tuned into the likes of Walter Cronkite or David Brinkley each evening. Now, an average of 15 percent of TV households watch Peter Jennings, Tom Brokaw or Dan Rather.

Here's how, exactly, this ABC-CBS-Fox alliance will help those networks in their news battle against CNN. The way things stand now, CNN gets footage from 600 local stations from around the country. These stations can be affiliated with any of the networks. In exchange for a fee and an agreement to give footage to CNN now and then, the local stations get national and international news footage from CNN.

The little affiliates need the CNN footage. How else can they be certain they'll have footage of a hijacking in India, or bodies in the water, for their rinky-dink newscasts? They can't rely on the network they're affiliated with for that; none of the networks have the global and domestic presence of CNN.

But now, ABC, CBS and Fox can tell the little affiliates across the country that they don't really need Mr. Turner and his news network anymore. By pooling footage and distributing it among everyone who is in the deal, stations from across the country will have a big, brand-new bank of footage to draw from.

Fox, which paid $3 million more than CBS or ABC to join the new alliance, looks like the big winner for the time being, simply because it is the only one of the three networks involved to have a cable news network. Footage belonging to the new collective will likely air first on Fox News Network much of the time.

Some of the local channels who are now members of this new collective may still give their news footage to CNN; but now Rupert Murdoch, chief executive of News Corporation, which owns Fox, will have the footage he needs to match that of his rival, Mr. Turner.

"You can't let the other guys beat you with your own guys," said one news executive who spoke on condition of anonymity. "It's sort of like your own guys that are killing you."

"You think Rupert Murdoch likes writing Ted Turner checks?" said an executive close to the talks.

But, at its heart, the agreement represents an admission by two of the Big Three networks that they are no longer so much in the news gathering business as in the news analysis and packaging business.

"I think that it's critical, as we go forward as ABC News, to identify the places where we can compete and win," ABC News president David Westin told The Observer . "And where it's important to compete and win, to devote all of our resources to those places and to minimize the resources that we are devoting to things where we can't compete."

Where ABC can compete, he said, is with its on-air talent like Peter Jennings and Barbara Walters and Diane Sawyer. Where it can't compete, he said, is on the ground with cameramen during breaking stories.

"There are exclusives that come up from time to time, but those are increasingly rare. By and large, we're not going to compete and beat CBS or Fox on generic video on breaking news stories. It's not going to happen," he said.

That's an admission that has some of the troops over at the networks a bit upset. While it is not uncommon for them to share video with a rival once in a while out of courtesy, they said, this takes things farther than they're comfortable with.

"This is about the downfall of the Tiffany Network and the downfall of ABC, both of which had famous news divisions in the past," said one ABC producer. "We would have never thought of doing something like this. We were too proud of ourselves and too proud of what we did, and there was a kind of snobbery-we've got better stuff than anybody else, so why would we want to share it … This denigrates the uniqueness of our product."

But Mr. Heyward, the CBS president, questioned just how unique the product is when it comes to breaking news.

"You see the same pictures on a lot of channels now," he said. "Footage of breaking news has become a commodity. It is essential. You're much more likely to be burned by not having the pictures of the day than you are to be rewarded for having them. The audience expects you to have them. You're going to be judged on how you turn the raw material into a finished product."

He said any fears that this will lead to a total collaboration by the three partners should be allayed by a clause dictating that the agreement is null and void in the city where a story breaks-so local news channels will still aggressively compete for scoops.

The deal has been in the works for a year and should take effect in February, he said.

NBC was apparently not included because it is already leading the pack and has in MSNBC its own 24-hour operation to collaborate with. NBC representatives have repeatedly called that decision "curious," while the partners have said if NBC is interested in joining up, it should approach them.

Under the terms, the news service will be run out of the CBS broadcast center on West 57th Street. Fox News will control the purse strings, and ABC will name an executive to run the service. If one network claims a piece of video is "exclusive," and the others disagree, Mr. Heyward, Mr. Westin and Roger Ailes, chief executive of the Fox News Channel, will get on the phone to hash it out.

Officials at the two rival networks predict that the organizational chart is fraught with peril.

People in the Internet news world see the collaboration as another signal that their time is going to come.

"These guys are all fighting over crumbs on the table," said Steve Rosenbaum, chief executive of a Cameraplanet.com, an Internet site that will launch in March featuring home-made, digital video of news events and features. "There's not a marketplace for the amount of news that's on television, for the amount of follow-me news that looks the same. The Internet is about to break wide open people's access to images, and this is just further consolidation to try and shore up the edges of a big franchise."

Today, get your news the old-fashioned way, from Mr. Jennings on World News Tonight . [WABC, 7, 6:30 P.M.]

Thursday, Jan. 6

Tonight marks the second night of the return of Greed , the treacherous Fox game show and evil twin of ABC's Who Wants to Be a Millionaire . We're big fans over here. We especially like the "Terminator" feature, during which host Chuck Woolery gives a player the option to go up against a teammate in a one-question quiz-off for all of the teammate's money. It also gives the five teammates a chance to give their team leader-who signs off on answers before they are submitted-the boot if they don't like him or her. It's all so deliciously dastardly! NYTV asked co-executive producer Bob Boden whose sick mind came up with these nasty features. He said basically that Fox asked the Greed team at Dick Clark Productions to make it edgy, so he and his writers came up with the Terminator Round. "We originally called it the 'Eliminator.' At one point it was the 'Annihilator.' Then we settled on the 'Terminator,'" he said. "We wanted to come up with an acceptable way for teammates to challenge each other, since they did not know each other coming in to the game."

Who could argue with that? Mr. Boden would not say whether he thought his game was better than Millionaire -which his game show is copying-but he did assess the key differences like this: "I think the dynamics of our team play reflect the human spirit-both its positives and its negatives," he said. [WNYW, 5, 9 P.M.]

Friday, Jan. 7

Tonight, one of the Brady Bunch , Marcia, convinces Davy Jones to perform at the prom. Sing it with me: "Guhl, look what you've done to me." [Nickelodeon, 6, 9 P.M.]

Saturday, Jan. 8

We really have reached the end of an era. After more than 6 years, the E! Gossip Show is now off the air. That's right, the show that helped Downtown Julie Brown cling onto a career and Liz Smith become a TV face has been canned. Executives at E! said it isn't even that the show was falling in the ratings. It's just that new things that were brought onto the E! schedule were doing much better. More specifically, the reality-biography shows like E! True Hollywood Story and Mysteries & Scandals -ironically hosted by A.J. Benza, who was discovered on Gossip Show .

"It is a victim of the success of the other shows," said Betsy Rott, the network's vice president of original programming.

For some good ol' E!-style celebrity reporting, catch The Best of Whipple's World on New York 1 tonight. [New York 1, 1, 9:30 P.M.]

Sunday, Jan. 9

A few weeks ago, CBS chief Les Moonves was asked what he thought about all these new game shows that are flooding the network schedules thanks to the surprise success of ABC's Who Wants to Be a Millionaire . He basically said he's not thrilled with the trend because, for each game show, there are about a dozen TV writers out of work.

Jump-cut to the week between Christmas and New Year's Day. There was Peter Mehlman, the former Seinfeld producer who created It's Like, You Know , nursing a sitcom cancellation hangover-one of the first to directly lose a job to the game show juggernaut.

A few days earlier, he was told his show about Los Angeles yuppies-starring the new-look Jennifer Grey-was going to bite the dust to make way for Who Wants to Be a Millionaire , which will now run three nights a week on ABC. "When you're knocked off by Who Wants to Be a Millionaire , you can't be unhappy about it … it's just so off the charts," Mr. Mehlman said from his Santa Monica, Calif., home. "Being taken off that schedule is like being rejected for a detective's job in the Boulder Police Department." But what does he really think of Regis Philbin's smash hit?

"It's just very effortless to watch, and it's kind of feel-good, too, because you basically feel smarter than most of the contestants, unlike Jeopardy , where you kind of look up to these people," he said.

Stu Bloomberg, the ABC Entertainment co-chair who acquired Millionaire over the summer-when no one thought it would pull any real ratings-told Mr. Mehlman it is possible that his show could get picked back up in the spring, though it seems unlikely right now.

"Stu said, 'In any other season, we would have kept you on, but this Millionaire thing has got to be played out,'" Mr. Mehlman said, almost listlessly.

Tonight, it's the return of Millionaire , with Mr. Philbin as host and possible savior of ABC. (NBC will try to take it on with the launch of its new Twenty-One remake). [WABC, 7, 8 P.M.]

Monday, Jan. 10

Hugh Downs, 80, really gets this whole Internet thing. Why, just a few months ago, the TV news veteran left ABC's 20/20 for a news Web site covering the White House called Exbtv.Com. But he's not going to stop there. He told NYTV he's planning to launch a Web site for old people that will offer stories and advice on financial planning and health issues. It's not just because he's old, he said. In fact, he said, his interest in old people began, oh, about 50 years ago.

"I did a special for NBC, How Long Can You Live , which still stands up somewhat," he said. "It was on human life span, not life expectancy, and I got more and more interested."

Speaking of the elderly, tonight, catch The Golden Girls and that lovable Betty White. [Lifetime, 12, 6 P.M.]

Tuesday, Jan. 11

9 So Barry Diller is again talking with the Walt Disney Company's Michael Eisner about some kind of broadcast partnership between his high-numbered UHF stations and Mr. Eisner's ABC. But those close to Mr. Diller's organization said don't assume that means Disney will wind up being Mr. Diller's partner. He is also talking to everybody else in the broadcast business-still.

Tonight on Mr. Diller's USA, catch a rerun of Walker, Texas Ranger! [USA, 23, 8 P.M.]

Under the agreement, finalized late last month, the three news organizations and their affiliates will formally share video footage from breaking news stories they cover throughout the country.

"This is a substantial shift," said one longtime network news executive. "Now you're in bed with your enemy."

For instance, if ABC can't get a crew to the next school shooting in, say, Wyoming, the network and its affiliates can pick up the footage from one of its network partners. Or, if ABC or one of its stations doesn't like the footage it's getting from one of its affiliates as much as the footage that CBS is using on a given story, the new alliance would allow it to switch to its rival's footage instead.

ABC and CBS will each contribute $4 million annually to the venture-which will go by the name of Network News Service-and Fox will contribute about $7 million, sources said.

It's all about fighting the CNN cable beast. The end result, some TV news people fear, could be even more sameness in television newscasts.

"I don't think we would have done it five years ago," said CBS News president Andrew Heyward. "It is a based on a growing realization of how the business is changing."

It used to be 25 to 30 percent of all TV homes tuned into the likes of Walter Cronkite or David Brinkley each evening. Now, an average of 15 percent of TV households watch Peter Jennings, Tom Brokaw or Dan Rather.

Here's how, exactly, this ABC-CBS-Fox alliance will help those networks in their news battle against CNN. The way things stand now, CNN gets footage from 600 local stations from around the country. These stations can be affiliated with any of the networks. In exchange for a fee and an agreement to give footage to CNN now and then, the local stations get national and international news footage from CNN.

The little affiliates need the CNN footage. How else can they be certain they'll have footage of a hijacking in India, or bodies in the water, for their rinky-dink newscasts? They can't rely on the network they're affiliated with for that; none of the networks have the global and domestic presence of CNN.

But now, ABC, CBS and Fox can tell the little affiliates across the country that they don't really need Mr. Turner and his news network anymore. By pooling footage and distributing it among everyone who is in the deal, stations from across the country will have a big, brand-new bank of footage to draw from.

Fox, which paid $3 million more than CBS or ABC to join the new alliance, looks like the big winner for the time being, simply because it is the only one of the three networks involved to have a cable news network. Footage belonging to the new collective will likely air first on Fox News Network much of the time.

Some of the local channels who are now members of this new collective may still give their news footage to CNN; but now Rupert Murdoch, chief executive of News Corporation, which owns Fox, will have the footage he needs to match that of his rival, Mr. Turner.

"You can't let the other guys beat you with your own guys," said one news executive who spoke on condition of anonymity. "It's sort of like your own guys that are killing you."

"You think Rupert Murdoch likes writing Ted Turner checks?" said an executive close to the talks.

But, at its heart, the agreement represents an admission by two of the Big Three networks that they are no longer so much in the news gathering business as in the news analysis and packaging business.

"I think that it's critical, as we go forward as ABC News, to identify the places where we can compete and win," ABC News president David Westin told The Observer . "And where it's important to compete and win, to devote all of our resources to those places and to minimize the resources that we are devoting to things where we can't compete."

Where ABC can compete, he said, is with its on-air talent like Peter Jennings and Barbara Walters and Diane Sawyer. Where it can't compete, he said, is on the ground with cameramen during breaking stories.

"There are exclusives that come up from time to time, but those are increasingly rare. By and large, we're not going to compete and beat CBS or Fox on generic video on breaking news stories. It's not going to happen," he said.

That's an admission that has some of the troops over at the networks a bit upset. While it is not uncommon for them to share video with a rival once in a while out of courtesy, they said, this takes things farther than they're comfortable with.

"This is about the downfall of the Tiffany Network and the downfall of ABC, both of which had famous news divisions in the past," said one ABC producer. "We would have never thought of doing something like this. We were too proud of ourselves and too proud of what we did, and there was a kind of snobbery-we've got better stuff than anybody else, so why would we want to share it … This denigrates the uniqueness of our product."

But Mr. Heyward, the CBS president, questioned just how unique the product is when it comes to breaking news.

"You see the same pictures on a lot of channels now," he said. "Footage of breaking news has become a commodity. It is essential. You're much more likely to be burned by not having the pictures of the day than you are to be rewarded for having them. The audience expects you to have them. You're going to be judged on how you turn the raw material into a finished product."

He said any fears that this will lead to a total collaboration by the three partners should be allayed by a clause dictating that the agreement is null and void in the city where a story breaks-so local news channels will still aggressively compete for scoops.

The deal has been in the works for a year and should take effect in February, he said.

NBC was apparently not included because it is already leading the pack and has in MSNBC its own 24-hour operation to collaborate with. NBC representatives have repeatedly called that decision "curious," while the partners have said if NBC is interested in joining up, it should approach them.

Under the terms, the news service will be run out of the CBS broadcast center on West 57th Street. Fox News will control the purse strings, and ABC will name an executive to run the service. If one network claims a piece of video is "exclusive," and the others disagree, Mr. Heyward, Mr. Westin and Roger Ailes, chief executive of the Fox News Channel, will get on the phone to hash it out.

Officials at the two rival networks predict that the organizational chart is fraught with peril.

People in the Internet news world see the collaboration as another signal that their time is going to come.

"These guys are all fighting over crumbs on the table," said Steve Rosenbaum, chief executive of a Cameraplanet.com, an Internet site that will launch in March featuring home-made, digital video of news events and features. "There's not a marketplace for the amount of news that's on television, for the amount of follow-me news that looks the same. The Internet is about to break wide open people's access to images, and this is just further consolidation to try and shore up the edges of a big franchise."

Today, get your news the old-fashioned way, from Mr. Jennings on World News Tonight . [WABC, 7, 6:30 P.M.]

Thursday, Jan. 6

Tonight marks the second night of the return of Greed , the treacherous Fox game show and evil twin of ABC's Who Wants to Be a Millionaire . We're big fans over here. We especially like the "Terminator" feature, during which host Chuck Woolery gives a player the option to go up against a teammate in a one-question quiz-off for all of the teammate's money. It also gives the five teammates a chance to give their team leader-who signs off on answers before they are submitted-the boot if they don't like him or her. It's all so deliciously dastardly! NYTV asked co-executive producer Bob Boden whose sick mind came up with these nasty features. He said basically that Fox asked the Greed team at Dick Clark Productions to make it edgy, so he and his writers came up with the Terminator Round. "We originally called it the 'Eliminator.' At one point it was the 'Annihilator.' Then we settled on the 'Terminator,'" he said. "We wanted to come up with an acceptable way for teammates to challenge each other, since they did not know each other coming in to the game."

Who could argue with that? Mr. Boden would not say whether he thought his game was better than Millionaire -which his game show is copying-but he did assess the key differences like this: "I think the dynamics of our team play reflect the human spirit-both its positives and its negatives," he said. [WNYW, 5, 9 P.M.]

Friday, Jan. 7

Tonight, one of the Brady Bunch , Marcia, convinces Davy Jones to perform at the prom. Sing it with me: "Guhl, look what you've done to me." [Nickelodeon, 6, 9 P.M.]

Saturday, Jan. 8

We really have reached the end of an era. After more than 6 years, the E! Gossip Show is now off the air. That's right, the show that helped Downtown Julie Brown cling onto a career and Liz Smith become a TV face has been canned. Executives at E! said it isn't even that the show was falling in the ratings. It's just that new things that were brought onto the E! schedule were doing much better. More specifically, the reality-biography shows like E! True Hollywood Story and Mysteries & Scandals -ironically hosted by A.J. Benza, who was discovered on Gossip Show .

"It is a victim of the success of the other shows," said Betsy Rott, the network's vice president of original programming.

For some good ol' E!-style celebrity reporting, catch The Best of Whipple's World on New York 1 tonight. [New York 1, 1, 9:30 P.M.]

Sunday, Jan. 9

A few weeks ago, CBS chief Les Moonves was asked what he thought about all these new game shows that are flooding the network schedules thanks to the surprise success of ABC's Who Wants to Be a Millionaire . He basically said he's not thrilled with the trend because, for each game show, there are about a dozen TV writers out of work.

Jump-cut to the week between Christmas and New Year's Day. There was Peter Mehlman, the former Seinfeld producer who created It's Like, You Know , nursing a sitcom cancellation hangover-one of the first to directly lose a job to the game show juggernaut.

A few days earlier, he was told his show about Los Angeles yuppies-starring the new-look Jennifer Grey-was going to bite the dust to make way for Who Wants to Be a Millionaire , which will now run three nights a week on ABC. "When you're knocked off by Who Wants to Be a Millionaire , you can't be unhappy about it … it's just so off the charts," Mr. Mehlman said from his Santa Monica, Calif., home. "Being taken off that schedule is like being rejected for a detective's job in the Boulder Police Department." But what does he really think of Regis Philbin's smash hit?

"It's just very effortless to watch, and it's kind of feel-good, too, because you basically feel smarter than most of the contestants, unlike Jeopardy , where you kind of look up to these people," he said.

Stu Bloomberg, the ABC Entertainment co-chair who acquired Millionaire over the summer-when no one thought it would pull any real ratings-told Mr. Mehlman it is possible that his show could get picked back up in the spring, though it seems unlikely right now.

"Stu said, 'In any other season, we would have kept you on, but this Millionaire thing has got to be played out,'" Mr. Mehlman said, almost listlessly.

Tonight, it's the return of Millionaire , with Mr. Philbin as host and possible savior of ABC. (NBC will try to take it on with the launch of its new Twenty-One remake). [WABC, 7, 8 P.M.]

Monday, Jan. 10

Hugh Downs, 80, really gets this whole Internet thing. Why, just a few months ago, the TV news veteran left ABC's 20/20 for a news Web site covering the White House called Exbtv.Com. But he's not going to stop there. He told NYTV he's planning to launch a Web site for old people that will offer stories and advice on financial planning and health issues. It's not just because he's old, he said. In fact, he said, his interest in old people began, oh, about 50 years ago.

"I did a special for NBC, How Long Can You Live , which still stands up somewhat," he said. "It was on human life span, not life expectancy, and I got more and more interested."

Speaking of the elderly, tonight, catch The Golden Girls and that lovable Betty White. [Lifetime, 12, 6 P.M.]

Tuesday, Jan. 11

So Barry Diller is again talking with the Walt Disney Company's Michael Eisner about some kind of broadcast partnership between his high-numbered UHF stations and Mr. Eisner's ABC. But those close to Mr. Diller's organization said don't assume that means Disney will wind up being Mr. Diller's partner. He is also talking to everybody else in the broadcast business-still.

Tonight on Mr. Diller's USA, catch a rerun of Walker, Texas Ranger! [USA, 23, 8 P.M.]

Columbia Tristar Television is finally getting close to creating a show for Bette Midler. The diva recently signed a deal with the studio, but coming up with an appropriate vehicle has been slow going. "It's almost impossible," said one writer. "It's like, what do you do? This is Bette Midler! You can't come up with a traditional sitcom for her."

Ms. Midler is said to be aware of the problems the writers have been having but reportedly has been unhappy with various potential plot lines pitched to her–like one that would have made her the mayor of a small town and another that would have made her a former big-time actress who left Hollywood to run a community theater.

We hear, though, that Columbia Tristar executives were planning to catch Ms. Midler's show in Anaheim, Calif., the week of Dec. 13, then meet her later to toss around some new ideas.

A spokesman for Columbia Tristar said a decision should be made soon. Whatever the concept is, it will likely wind up on CBS, possibly next fall.

Tonight, catch Ms. Midler in Beaches . [Cinemax, 33, 6 P.M.]

Thursday, Dec. 23

Sponsors are beginning to request givebacks from CBS for delivering lower-than-expected ratings with its new Early Show , starring Bryant Gumbel and Jane Clayson, NYTV has learned.

When CBS ad sales people were selling Early Show time slots last spring, they promised the show would be up to some 2.7 million households each morning by now (that's a "2.7 rating" in TV talk). So far, it has averaged about 2.4 million, the same as its lousy predecessor, CBS This Morning .

Tom DeCabia, head ad buyer for the media firm Schulman-Advanswers NY, said CBS has already given "a handful" of his corporate clients free ads to make up the difference. He wouldn't discuss how much the 30-second spots went for–the estimate is less than $40,000 each–or which clients were involved.

The givebacks are the latest bad news for the show, which launched Nov. 2 with lots of hype but too few viewers.

Still, Madison Avenue executives said it's only six weeks–too soon to tell whether the show will catch on. And Mr. DeCabia said while he wants his clients to get their money's worth in ad time, he's not about to pull clients from the show or advise against it as a buy. "If it was a stock, you wouldn't sell it. You'd hang in there," he said. "I think it's going to be fine. These shows take a long time to develop, and these are shows that you have to be patient with; you just can't pull the trigger on it too quickly."

The belief is that morning audiences are habit-driven, and they haven't gotten used to tuning to CBS just yet. After all, the network has been in last place in the morning time slot for 25 years. CBS executives are so confident that Mr. Gumbel's Early Show will change that they built a $30 million glass studio for it on Fifth Avenue and 59th Street. It took the Today show nine months to grow its audience after it moved to its glass studios in 1994.

Meanwhile, the show's executive producer, Steve Friedman, said all he wants is a fair shake. "We thought we'd be doing a 2.5 or 2.6 going into the new year," Mr. Friedman said. "Now we're doing a 2.4. If you want to kill the show for a tenth of a point or two, go right ahead. We said when we started, this would be a long, hard struggle, that the most important thing for us is to go into the field … If a year from now we're getting a 2.3, then O.K."

Right. Fair is fair. Give these guys a break. Come back around in March.

Anyway, to nudge things along, Mr. Friedman said he's making a few small internal changes, and he'll push for more big bookings–like the two-part interview with Muammar Qaddafi that aired first on Dec. 21.

This morning on the Early Show , Bobby Flay teaches about salmon, and fast-food chain Wendy's chief executive, Dave Thomas, will talk about adoption. (He's adopted; Wendy isn't.) [WCBS, 2, 7 A.M.]

Friday, Dec. 24

They bring you the Knicks and the Rangers and now … The Yule Log ! Ever since Channel 11 stopped airing footage of a burning log every Dec. 24, Christmas hasn't been the same in this town. So the Madison Square Garden network called WPIX up a few weeks ago to see if it would be O.K. to borrow the concept. Channel 11 said no problem. And tonight, between 11 P.M. and midnight, you can catch the Yule log on MSG.

Now showing a seven-second video loop of a burning log for an hour might seem like a simple enough concept to pull off. Ha! MSG executives had asked their at-home audience to send in pictures of their fireplaces as nominees for the Yule log setting. But all those New York apartment dwellers had no idea what the heck they were talking about. On Friday, Dec. 17, one week before the big date, MSG still had no Yule log host. "We're certainly not going to have any problem finding an attractive fireplace," said MSG executive producer Mike McCarthy, obviously trying to reassure himself. And voilà! He was right! On Dec. 20, the Yule log producers finally settled on a 260-year-old house on Long Island. So curl up with that cup of spiced eggnog, draw the old blankie around the neck–and commence snoring.

By the way, if you are glued to some cybersex site tonight, switch over to www.WPIX.com. They've kept the old log tradition alive on the Internet. [MSG, 27, 11 P.M.]

Saturday, Dec. 25

Check out the plot lines for the first two programs in tonight's CBS prime-time lineup:

Early Edition : A bomber targets a skating rink.

Martial Law : Sammo wakes up with a bomb and learns that if he stops moving, it will explode and blast him to bits.

On Christmas, no less! For heaven's sake, what about the children? [WCBS, 2, 8 P.M.]

Today on TBS, the Superstation: Planet of the Apes , all day. They don't call it the Superstation for nothin'. [TBS, 8, 9:30 A.M.]

Sunday, Dec. 26

& Thought you'd never see David Kelley fail? Well, we point you to Snoops , his female private detective show, starring Gina Gershon (who, in one episode, goes undercover as a country singer to lure a serial killer with an affinity for amateur performers). Had it not been canceled, it would have been on tonight, at 9 P.M. Instead, we get Flirting With Disaster , a comedy where a character played by Ben Stiller goes looking for his birth parents.

What about Jerry? [WABC, 7, 9 P.M.]

Monday, Dec. 27

Al Goldstein, the Screw magazine publisher, went on Late Night With Conan O'Brien in August. He spent most of his visit insulting Mr. O'Brien. "He pretty much told Conan he was an Irish scumbag who never gets laid," explained Mr. Goldstein's managing editor, Philippe Kane.

Well, that's Mr. Goldstein's shtick. But then Mr. Goldstein was on his Midnight Blue public access show the other night, listing Mr. O'Brien in his "Fuck You" segment.

Why, Al, why? What's not to like about Conan O'Brien?

Mr. Goldstein explained: Since he is a member of the television actors union–Aftra–he was entitled to $600 for appearing on the show. But, "We never got the fucking check." Mr. Goldstein said he filed suit against the show in small-claims court in early December. "It's nothing personal," he said. "I did the show, I should get the money. It's my money."

Determined to get to the bottom of all this, NYTV called up Mr. O'Brien's representatives, who told us a check was cut in October and apparently sent out. Mr. Goldstein's people could find no record of it. But he said if that's the case, and he finds out it was sent, he'll do the right thing by Mr. O'Brien. "I'll apologize," he said. "I'm a wild man, but I'm not going to lie."

Hey, you do what you gotta do, pal.

Tonight it will be a Conan repeat. But even those are funnier than most other stuff on TV. [WNBC, 4, 12:35 A.M.]

Tuesday, Dec. 28

This spring, Comedy Central will launch its second prime-time sitcom. The first one was Strangers With Candy . The new one is called Strip Mall , which is a Melrose Place sendup. It was created by comedian Julie Brown and her partner Charles Coffey. "It's really extreme. Julie plays a former child star who went on a PCP rampage and killed her co-stars and is trying to claw her way back into the spotlight," Mr. Coffey told NYTV. "The most normal characters on the show is this really cranky lesbian Chinese food restaurant owner who refuses to serve, and instead they put on country-western karaoke strip shows."

The show will also star Amy Hill, from All-American Girl , and Jennifer Coolidge from American Pie . Victoria Jackson, the old Saturday Night Live cast member, will also star.

Strip Mall will start airing in June. "We are writing our asses off," Mr. Coffey said, then added, "Actually, no, we're not. We're starting Jan. 2." Whatever.

Tonight on Comedy Central, catch the Daily Show , starring John Stewart. [Comedy Central, 45, 11 P.M.]

Wednesday, Dec. 29

Tonight, it's the war of the Roswells. On Channel 11, the WB has the Roswell series, about teenage alien survivors of the 1947 Roswell U.F.O. crash just trying to fit in as best they can at their New Mexico high school. Over on the UPN, we have Roswell: The Aliens Attack , about survivors of the 1947 Roswell U.F.O. crash who want to destroy the Earth, until one of them falls in love. We have to go with the WB series, just because the guy who created it, Jason Katims, is a damned nice guy. [WPIX, 11, 9 P.M.]

Thursday, Dec. 30

This is the world in which we now live: The United Paramount Network, which made professional wrestling a prime-time smash on Thursday nights, is doing even more to hook the guns 'n' ammo crowd. During the February ratings sweeps period, the UPN will air an hour-long, monster-truck racing special, in which giant, building-size trucks will race across an auditorium. But there's a catch. The network plans to make the sport more like wrestling. So, whereas in a normal monster truck event you just have a couple of a big old trucks knocking around, now you'll have plot-driven characters behind the wheel. And if it draws good ratings and gets a good response from viewers, then the UPN will likely turn it into a regular, weekly series next fall.

"What we're trying to do is reinvent a sport that's been kind of dormant on cable and the arenas," explained Tom Nunan, the UPN entertainment head. "We're trying to build up the interpersonal relationships, rather than seeing how fast one of these huge trucks can move. I haven't seen the characters yet, but it won't be as much about 'My truck's faster than yours.' It will be more about, 'I can't believe you went out with my sister.'" From there, we assume the line will go, "So, let's race across this arena floor and see who's got the faster truck!"

The problem, though, is that the guys who own the trucks and take these arena races seriously are only willing to go so far. "They still want to protect the integrity of the quote-unquote sport, which isn't something we're too concerned with. I mean, it isn't exactly the World Series," Mr. Nunan said.

Basically, the truck people have been told to put on a good show and get a shot at regular stardom or this is a one-shot deal.

Tonight, catch WWF Smackdown! [WWOR, 9, 8 P.M.]

Friday, Dec. 31

Millennium madness! Peter Jennings goes more than 24 straight hours on ABC 2000 . CNN starts five days of millennium coverage! Tom Brokaw to anchor the ball drop on NBC! Oh, yeah: Dick Clark to ring it in on ABC at midnight! The William Shatner-Patrick Stewart Star Trek movie on Fox, to precede millennium coverage anchored by Brit Hume and Paula Zahn! Ooooh! The excitement!

Start your New Year's viewing with Mr. Jennings. [WABC, 7, 5 A.M .]

Saturday, Jan. 1

If the doomsayers are correct, then there will be no television today. So NYTV will list nothing for this day lest we get anybody's hopes up for something that will never air–ever.

Sunday, Jan. 2

We're assuming by now television has been restored. Phew! (Then again, the Second Coming could have happened, in which case there would be no television for about half the population. No. Wait. Actually, in hell, wouldn't they make you watch reruns of Encore! Encore! for eternity? And what about that whole thing about the Jews getting a second chance to accept Jesus? We could go on and on. The bottom line is, we can't tailor NYTV around all of these crazy theories.) Today, watch The Real World to convince yourself you're still here. [MTV, 20, starting at noon, all day.]

Monday, Jan. 3

Everybody's going game-show crazy!

First, you have Who Wants to Be a Millionaire on ABC. Then you have Greed over on Fox. Then you have TwentyOne coming to NBC. And of course, there's Winning Lines coming to CBS and starring Dick Clark as host. Now MTV is adding yet another game show to its crowded roster of dreck. This one has some promise, though. It's being created by Jamie Greenberg, who hosts the public-access show Media Shower , a weekly collection of pirated videotape that is taped in his Upper West Side apartment. He couldn't tell us too much about it since it's still being developed. But, he said, it will basically test people's video and rock knowledge and there will be some sort of physical component as well, like they'll have to run around a bit while answering questions. Mr. Greenberg said it's still unclear what winners will get, but it won't be anywhere near the $1 million handed out on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire . In fact, it could wind up being just plain old promotional stuff.

For good, old-fashioned game-show fun tonight, catch Wheel of Fortune , one of New York's most highly rated shows. [WABC, 7, 7:30 P.M.]

Tuesday, Jan. 4

So now ABC, CBS and the Fox News Channel are going to pool their resources on news stories–meaning whoever gets to a scene first will share footage with whatever network in the group didn't make it there, and its affiliates. Notice there are two major news names not in this list: NBC and CNN. NBC executives said they were caught flatfooted by the announcement and aren't too pleased about it. But it doesn't hurt them as much as it hurts CNN. CNN makes millions of dollars supplying footage–CNN logo and all–to network-affiliated stations with few resources. Now those little guys affiliated with the three partners get a lot of the same stuff for free.

The deal also gives Fox News a leg up in its competition with CNN.

Tonight, on Fox News, catch Mr. Tough Guy himself, Bill O'Reilly on the O'Reilly Factor . [Fox News Channel, 46, 8 P.M.]

You'd think ABC is taking a big chance by scheduling Who Wants to Be a Millionaire three nights a week this winter. Like, what if someone wins a million bucks every show? But an NYTV analysis shows that ABC could give away $1 million every episode and still make a killing.

Let's go to the numbers. Millionaire is making about $300,000 per 30-second ad. The network sells 8.5 minutes of ads per hour. So that comes out to $2.55 million per show. Of course, you have your expenses–about $300,000 per show once you factor in the transmission costs, the 800-number costs, Regis Philbin's salary, the set, etc. A reminder: That's the cost of one 30-second ad. When all is said and done, even after losing $1 million per show to the geniuses, ABC is left with about $1 million in profit right off the bat. If the show is to run 48 weeks per year, three days per week, it could bring ABC just over $144 million per annum.

(It doesn't seem like so much of a stretch, the idea of a contestant pocketing $1 million each episode, what with questions like, "At sea level, water freezes at X degrees, define X." But what comes easily in the living room is pretty hard when you're under the hot TV lights and staring into the eyes of Reeg.)

Now, the Millionaire ad rate pales in comparison to that of NBC's ER , the top-rated show on television. That show commands $545,000 per 30-second slot–which means $4.6 million in ad revenue per show. But each episode of ER costs $13 million to produce–so NBC is not looking at any sort of profit until rerun time in the late spring and summer.

So now you see that it's no wonder that every other network is devising its own prime-time game show.

Millionaire will run on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Sundays starting this January. No Millionaire tonight. But tune into ABC for It's Like, You Know … , produced by former Seinfeld producer Peter Mehlman. In the TV's new game-show economy, this is the kind of show that gets scrapped–so catch it while you can. [WABC, 7, 8:30 P.M.]

Thursday, Dec. 9

Speaking of Millionaire , with it ABC won the November sweeps. That has executives at the other networks grumbling about the whole sweeps system–and lobbying to dismantle it. Sure, Millionaire kicked everyone's ass fair and square, even beat NBC's invincible Frasier in the ratings. But the whole idea behind sweeps is to gauge how many viewers the networks are drawing so they can then set corresponding ad rates. So, thanks to Millionaire , ABC's overall rating was up, which will allow network executives to charge higher ad rates all around. But at the time of sweeps, Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? wasn't a regularly scheduled show. ABC ran it to goose its ratings (just as NBC ran Leprechauns and CBS aired a Shania Twain concert to goose their own). In fact, with its Millionaire -heavy lineup during the sweeps period, ABC ran only 70 percent of its regular programming. CBS and NBC ran 88 percent of theirs. So executives are saying: Is this a fair way to crown a ratings champion? Is it fair to charge advertisers rates based on specials?

"I don't want to sound like I'm Mr. Sour Grapes here," said Les Moonves, the chief executive of CBS. "I was in favor of eliminating sweeps when we won sweeps." (CBS had been the No. 1-rated network before ABC's upset.)

Added CBS's chief researcher David Poltrack: "There's a growing concern about the sweeps, and the advertising agencies and advertisers have talked to us about alternate approaches."

He spoke of electronic meters and a world in which Nielsen can gauge the ratings more precisely through the entire year, without sweeps.

That may be paradise for the TV executives and advertisers–but what about us poor schmos at home, who channel-surf our way through the brain-deadening months, except in those gaudy sweeps months of May, February and November? Sweeps may be a cheap floozy, but right now she's the only gal we got!

Tonight, on Frasier , Kelsey Grammer blows his back out while blowing out birthday candles. Silly billy. [WNBC, 4, 9 P.M.]

Tonight! On TNT! Overboard ! The great Goldie Hawn! Also Kurt Russell! Love sizzles on screen and off! [TNT, 3, 8 P.M.]

Friday, Dec. 10

On Tuesday, Nov. 30, WABC's Eyewitness News led its 11 P.M. newscast with a report on the Seattle riots, which were related to the World Trade Organization conference in town that week. The report showed footage of windows being smashed and fires being set and people being arrested and, oh, the madness! The local guys even got a correspondent of their own on the scene. But after the report was over, you realized one very important thing: No one ever said what the W.T.O. is, what it was meeting about or what the protesters were protesting. It just came down to: The rioters rioted and the mysterious organization canceled its mysterious meeting. Local news at its lamest.

The W.T.O., by the way, is the public-private international group charged with loosening trade restrictions. The protesters were mostly labor people opposed to all this deregulation. The real trouble was caused by some longhairs looking to get excited over something and a police force that waaaay overreacted. (Does NYTV have to do everything around here?)

If you like a little information with your spectacle, catch WCBS's News 2 this evening instead. [WCBS, 2, 11 P.M.]

Saturday, Dec. 11

CBS airs Stars on Ice . Watch Scott Hamilton, Tara Lipinski and company skate around, jump and spin. Why, it must be near Christmas time, and there couldn't be a better way to spend a Saturday night. Who said CBS isn't hip? [WCBS, 2, 8:30 P.M.]

Sunday, Dec. 12

Don Roos has finally found a woman to play the lead part in the upcoming sitcom M.Y.O.B. , which is based on his nearly flawless film The Opposite of Sex .

As NYTV reported, Mr. Roos had initially cast Nicki Aycox when he shot the pilot for the series, which hits NBC this March. But Ms. Aycox just didn't have the same sarcastic bite as Christina Ricci, who played a sharp-tongued teenager preternaturally adept at manipulating grown-ups. Ms. Aycox was sent away, and the search for a small-screen Ricci dragged on and on. Love Ms. Ricci or hate her, there's just one of her, and she's not ready to lower herself to TV just yet. Not sitcoms, anyway. (She did her deadpan bitch routine just perfectly for Saturday Night Live on Dec. 4, giving that show its first decent episode of the season.)

Anyhoots, NBC sources tell NYTV that Mr. Roos has settled on Kate Towne, who happens to be the daughter of Robert Towne, who happens to have written the script for Chinatown and directed Personal Best (you've seen it), Tequila Sunrise (you've seen it–but you just don't remember) and Without Limits (you should see it–really–it's cool).

Ms. Towne has starred in Go and The Bachelor .

"We literally looked at hundreds upon hundreds of girls. We were looking for caustic–which you don't usually find on TV," said M.Y.O.B. executive producer Ann Donahue. "When Kate came in, she is so unlike everybody else. I pulled Don out of a writing session and I said, 'You've got to see this girl. She's got bite.' I would say she's got the soul of a 40-year-old gay man."

That's good, because Ms. Towne's character is a manipulative little wench, just like Ms. Ricci's in the movie!

It's still unclear where M.Y.O.B. will be placed in the NBC lineup. It could wind up in Suddenly Susan 's Tuesday slot come March. But we'll believe it when we see it. [The Movie Channel, 49, 9 P.M.]

Monday, Dec. 13

Now that the Internet has moved from the enough-already hype phase and is actually a real force, the major broadcast networks are trying to figure out how much it's going to hurt them after it's even more established. Right now, the two media are in a honeymoon phase, with Internet companies feeding TV's coffers, buying ad time for one dopey ad after another. But a lot of the betting money is on the Internet taking down the networks, or severely weakening them, sometime in the not-so-distant future.

Still, no one really knows what to expect. During the November sweeps period, some networks even set out to find out how many television households are on line and how that affected TV viewership.

NBC research chief Alan Wurtzel is pretty happy with what he sees–and it goes against the prevailing wisdom. The latest data he has seen concluded that the average computer user spent 1.4 hours per week on the Internet and 30 hours per week watching television in 1998.

Not even a comparison there, really. But that was '98, this is now. In the year 2000, average Internet usage per computer user is expected to double, to 3.7 hours per week. But, the study predicts, that won't affect TV viewership–which is actually expected to grow a bit, too, coming in closer to 31 hours per week.

That supports the TV-Internet theory du jour: that the Internet could actually help boost television viewership. Huh?

"There's a sense that one reason why traditional media may benefit is because the Internet makes your life more efficient," said Mr. Wurtzel. "So you have more time to spend with traditional media."

For instance, you used to have to go out to shop, and that can take hours! Now you can do it all with the click of a button, so you can watch more TV! (O, brave new world.)

The point: "The Internet is huge and is having a profound impact on many, many things: How we communicate, how we shop," he said. "But I think sometimes you get carried away without realizing within the scheme of things the proportion of its role right now."

Got it. But even Mr. Wurtzel admits nobody really knows what to expect.

"It's like the wild West in terms of new technical research," he said. "There's just a zillion different numbers out there." That's a lot of numbers.

Today, for a glimpse at just how far all this computer stuff can take us, catch Short Circuit –about the madcap adventures of an adorable, yet zany robot. [Turner Network Television, 3, 1 P.M.]

Tuesday, Dec. 14

CNN's Moneyline Newshour continues its special two-week series on this ridiculous economy–"The New Economy: Boom Without End?"–with interviews with Amazon.com Inc.'s Jeff Bezos, Boeing Company's Phil Condit, Howard Schultz from Starbucks Corporation and other filthy rich guys. [CNN, 10, 6:30 P.M.]