“I think Jeff would settle for President of the United States,” said Lawrence O’Donnell, a writer for NBC’s The West Wing, talking about Mr. Zucker’s insatiable ambition. “He might take a rest after that.”

But Mr. Zucker would not respond to the call to duty.

“Luckily for the United States of America,” he said on Tuesday, May 19, “we’re not going to find out.”

The day before, across the street from the G.E. Building, inside the Art Deco palace of Radio City Music Hall, Mr. Zucker had commanded the stage, asking hundreds of ad buyers to “IMAGINE THE POSSIBILITIES,” the instruction that blazed across the vast, 50-foot video screen at the annual prime-time preview of new TV shows, called “the upfronts.” But Mr. Zucker had also been graced with his unprecedented media power just as the actual President of the United States--and his appointed chief at the Federal Communications Commission, Michael Powell--were having their own say about what possibilities they deemed proper to be imagined on American television sets.

“I think we’re all aware that the temperature has been raised,” said Mr. Zucker, referring to recent F.C.C. assaults on “indecency,” “but I think the best regulation has been self-regulation.

“It’s the viewers who are the ultimate arbiters of whether they want to watch a show or not. They’re the best gauge of what’s appropriate or not.”

Mr. Zucker wanted the F.C.C. out of his sight line so that he could program Fear Factor without fear and let the free market do the policing. But meanwhile, in Florida, President Bush’s brother, Governor Jeb Bush, had effectively intimidated the Walt Disney Company from releasing a Michael Moore movie criticizing his brother’s administration, as Disney’s chief executive, Michael Eisner, reportedly indicated that it might screw up his tax break on theme parks and hotels.

Now NBC was related to its own Florida theme park--Universal Studios--and could also be intimidated by such machinations. Mr. Zucker declined to comment on any scenarios involving his new sister division, Universal, saying those were possibilities for Ron Meyer, the head of Universal Studios, to imagine.

But he couldn’t defer to Mr. Meyer when asked if NBC would consider yanking Jerry Springer and Maury Povich, who host two syndicated, NBC-produced shows seen as potential targets of the gathering F.C.C. storm that may soon target daytime TV.

“No comment,” he said. These are scary times for broadcasters.

Nevertheless, for now Mr. Zucker was interested in a brighter future. The F.C.C.’s crackdown, he said, “had no impact on any of our new development at all.” Not only that, he had also introduced a surprise series called Revelations, a new eight-episode TV series featuring Bill Pullman as a scientist investigating apocalyptic biblical events--a nod to the sudden Hollywood discovery of religious conservatism as a profit center.

“We’ve had that in development for quite some time, before The Passion of the Christ even came out,” said Mr. Zucker. Mel Gibson’s film, he said, had only “reinforced our belief in something that works.”

On May 17, Mr. Zucker, coiled and cool, walked through the crowds in the foyer after the upfront presentation show.

“I feel good,” he said to the group of NBC execs who gravitated around him. He looked--as the future NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams had described him a few weeks before--like the fantasy love child of Don Rickles and Don Corleone. Tanned and plug-like, swarthy and shiny in his pinstriped suit and gold-and-red-striped tie, Mr. Zucker was Mr. NBC, or as Conan O’Brien had imagined him for the movie version of the merger of NBC and Vivendi Universal Entertainment, Mini-Me. Like so many of Mr. O’Brien’s jokes, it was closer to the truth than anyone imagined: Mr. Zucker truly was Mini-NBC.

Charged with programming one of the most complex and far-flung media empires in the world--even CBS president Les Moonves doesn’t get to futz with Viacom cable properties like MTV--Mr. Zucker had moved from Today producer to Burbank programmer to broadcast Corleone. When MSNBC president Rick Kaplan chuckled and did his own version of Mr. Zucker’s lecture-circuit hand gestures, as parodied by Saturday Night Live’s departing Jimmy Fallon, Mr. Zucker flashed Mr. Kaplan a withering micro-smile that said, Not funny, slugger. When a female executive raved about a new show called Medium, starring Patricia Arquette as a woman who can see dead people, Mr. Zucker lobbed convincing curse words to emphasize his conviction: “We have so much shit ready to go,” he said. “We have good stuff. That’s the point. We’re holding Law & Order. That should tell you everything.”

It came out of him in little bursts. “The Office is good,” he said. “Today, they’re all good. Today, they’re all good.”

If you want evidence of Mr. Zucker’s influence, all you have to do is look at the screen. If the schedule-saving megahit The Apprentice was about ambition, street smarts and Machiavellian ingenuity, so too was Mr. Zucker. If Dateline NBC was plugging Friends and The Apprentice with two-hour specials, it was because Mr. Zucker was branding almost anything that moved with Peacock feathers. As Sylvester “Pat” Weaver once was, as Grant Tinker once was, as Brandon Tartikoff once was, so Jeff Zucker is attempting to be NBC.

At the Radio City extravaganza, Mr. Zucker’s influence was revealed in a layered Catskills joke: First, SNL’s Darrell Hammond shuffled out as Donald Trump, complete with soufflé’d hair and puckered lips, followed by Mr. Trump himself, who dispatched the comedian with a “You’re fired.”

“My very good friend Jake Zuckerman brought me here,” said the real Mr. Trump. “Frankly, I’m the only thing NBC has going for it.”

As Mr. Trump preened, Mr. Zucker emerged from behind the gold-lamé curtains:

Jeff Zucker: Um, Mr. Trump?

Donald Trump: Hello, Jeff.

Jeff Zucker: You know what, I’ve got two words for you: You’re hired.

Donald Trump: I should be!

Who said vaudeville was dead?

But now Mr. Zucker could get down to business: hammering home the brand, making Donald Trump into--for his NBC--what Milton Berle, Sid Caesar, Jack Paar, Johnny Carson, Bill Cosby and Jerry Seinfeld had been for earlier versions of the network: the emblem, the spokesman. Somehow, this big, cheesy, unscripted megahit, The Apprentice, had become the savior of NBC’s Thursday nights, and a face-saving legacy for Mr. Zucker’s hitless three-year tenure as head of NBC Entertainment, and had kept him from being the Fred Silverman of his era, a disaster, and had avoided being his Supertrain. But nobody believed that a reality show--the lowest form of television production--offered as much as a scripted show like Friends.

It’s amazing that the scripted sitcom is somehow being called the endangered high-water mark of television culture, but that’s America in the 21st century for you.

“It’s worth noting,” Mr. Zucker said at Radio City, that “12 of the top 20 shows this season were unscripted. It’s no passing fancy.”

To think that just 20 years ago, under Grant Tinker and Brandon Tartikoff, NBC’s breakout defining hit had been The Cosby Show, a sitcom about family values and racial progress, swathed in cable-knit sweaters.

Now, with network TV ratings deteriorating under cable TV, Mr. Zucker had hit ratings pay dirt with The Apprentice, starring a real-estate magnate from the first Trumpazoic era, a time identifiable by archaeological dig, and that the revived member of the tycoon species was re-educating the populace about the pleasures of ambition.

Was this the program that Mr. Zucker wanted to define his time at the network? His Cosby? His Seinfeld?

“It is an incredibly well-produced show,” said Mr. Zucker. “People who want to dismiss shows like this probably haven’t looked at how well produced it is. That’s what people have missed with much of this reality--the high-end reality programs like Survivor and The Apprentice are incredibly well produced. Incredibly well produced, smart upscale programming. We’re all proud to be the home of ER, West Wing and Law & Order, Scrubs and … ”

Go on, Jeff! Say it!

“ … The Apprentice.”

Back at Radio City, the big screen had at one point projected the droopy, still-handsome mug of Mr. Zucker’s latest quarry, Sylvester Stallone, sitting in the audience, beaming, another vintage star from the Supertrain era--when the networks still dominated--when giants still trod 30 Rock.

Mark Burnett--the creator of Survivor, The Apprentice and The Contender, Mr. Stallone’s boxing reality series--insisted that NBC needed Mr. Stallone, and not the other way around. “Stallone is a worldwide megastar,” said Mr. Burnett at the NBC after-party in Rockefeller Center. “Look over there now,” he said. “Everybody wants a piece of Stallone.”

He looked over there. Mr. Stallone was standing before an NBC scrim, mugging for photos with advertising executives.

“He doesn’t need any branding,” he said. “He’s doing this because he cares about boxing, that’s all. He doesn’t need the money, he doesn’t need anything.

“It’s not a plan of branding,” he said. “It’s a plan of art.”

Mr. Zucker had announced a new strategy of year-round, 52-week programming. No more making a big deal of the fall. Now, like cable, the network saw no boundaries--every season was back to school. Mr. Zucker attempted to assuage fears that the scripted program was endangered, presenting Law & Order and Joey as the Shakespearean dikes that would protect television from the complete flood of reality programming. Mr. Zucker’s admirers said he could be trusted, he knew TV inside and out. They made the same case for him that had been made for every successful network executive, bad and good, in the last 50 years, from Pat Weaver to Mr. Silverman to Brandon Tartikoff: Jeff Zucker liked what America liked, he was pure TV gut, bottled in a TV executive.

“He doesn’t try to pander to an audience, he doesn’t try to come up with something gimmicky that they will like,” said Adam Levine, a former NBC News producer and Bush White House press official. “‘What is interesting to people? What would I want to watch?’ That’s how he does it. He doesn’t separate himself from people. He doesn’t overly focus-group things or go with conventional wisdom. He says, ‘I’m the demographic. What do I like?’ And it works.”

As executive producer of Today, Mr. Zucker had honed his instincts on the news side, where he gained the confidence of television professionals: because he knew how to make TV, was trusted for his speed and understanding of how to make, say, a beet-salad cooking segment zing. Not everyone can do that.

Even after Dateline NBC had churned out hours of “investigative journalism” on The Apprentice and Frazier, the television professionals still had confidence that Mr. Zucker, a master at fusing news and entertainment into steroidal prime-time programming--like the Dateline–Access Hollywood sit-down with Ben Affleck and J. Lo--would retain the dignity of the news division.

“You gotta look at it in toto,” said Brian Williams. “Look at the hours Dateline has done on race, on veterans, on education. And that they do a Zeitgeist-y hour on what we’re seeing unfold here is, I think, perfectly understandable. It’s harder and harder these days to be truly pious and godly in television news.”

Mr. Williams described himself as a “huge fan” of Mr. Zucker, who he said often came by the studio for some jovial towel-snapping. Mr. Williams said Mr. Zucker’s favorite expression was “No question.” Responding to Mr. Williams’ observations, Mr. Zucker repeated it often: “No question … no question … no question.” So Mr. Williams insisted he wasn’t worried. “I can afford to sound a little old-fashioned and put blinders on,” he said. “Nobody’s saying to me, ‘Hey, we want to scooch up the temperature at Nightly a little bit.’ No. And I hope it never comes across as pious, but you know, I do this for a living for a reason; otherwise, I’d be working somewhere else.”

Jeff Zucker, said Lawrence O’Donnell, was “the only person in his position who has been a hands-on TV producer and television executive during the period where volcanic eruptions were going on all over the field, that created cable news, that created the expansion of original cable dramatic programming, that saw the introduction of reality in prime time--all the things that have reshaped the map of TV, including the declining share of broadcast audience.”

Well, he might be right.

But in a sense, Mr. Zucker is The Apprentice himself.

“At least it’s not some plastics guy like Bob Wright,” said one network insider, referring to the NBC Universal chief executive. Mr. Wright is widely believed to be grooming either Mr. Zucker or NBC president Randy Falco--the business head of the TV group--as his replacement once he retires. Mr. Wright is 61, and G.E.’s retirement age is 65. And Mr. Zucker, like Mr. Wright a fellow cancer survivor with a competitive streak and the poise of a shark, was ready for whatever might come. “There’s nothing that Jeff Zucker can’t do, and I mean nothing in the world,” said producer Adam Levine. “He’s a natural leader. He’s a natural manager. Do I see a little bit of Jack Welch in Jeff? Absolutely. I think the sky’s the limit with Jeff.” Let’s take his word for it. Mr. Levine worked in the Bush White House and watched Jeff Zucker make Donald Trump the Milton Berle of 2004. Sky’s the limit.

Though Mr. Daniels confessed that he was exaggerating about the work-related illnesses, he would’ve been justified in having a bout of hives or acid reflux. Devotees of the original BBC version of The Office--which aired in 2004 and 2005 on cable on BBC America--have reflexively disdained the idea of an American edition of the deadpan workplace faux-documentary.

And Mr. Daniels’ version has to appease not only the hard-core fans, currently wearing out season two of the BBC version in their DVD players, but millions of unwitting Nielsen viewers accustomed to the laugh-track cues of Everybody Loves Raymond.

With six episodes completed, Mr. Daniels’ direction is now clear: NBC’s version is a weird, airless show, unusually faithful to the original created by Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant, and therefore wildly experimental for American network TV.

NBC is sneaking it out on Thursday night, March 24, wedged between reruns of The Apprentice and Will and Grace.

“From the beginning, we talked about getting on the air in a place where they don’t need a lot of ratings,” admitted Mr. Daniels, a former writer for The Simpsons and King of the Hill. “Even now we keep saying, ‘Don’t expect it to be a hit!’”

But that’s exactly what NBC needs right now, following its post-Friends fall to third place among the networks. So it’s fair to wonder just what NBC Entertainment president Kevin Reilly was thinking when he bought a gray-toned, single-camera, mock-documentary series starring a shamelessly smarmy boss character who makes the nattering neurotics of Seinfeld look like inspirational characters from Good Times

The second episode, “Diversity Day,” is the first one shot from an original American script. It’s the kind of thing that would kill on Comedy Central, but might kill a little too much on NBC: When the hyper-slick and smarmy Michael Scott, played by Mr. Carell, is humiliated by a professional diversity trainer, he decides to illustrate his open-mindedness by holding his own diversity session. His method is to tape index cards to the heads of everyone in the office, each with a different race or creed written on it (black, Jamaican, Jewish, to name a few).

He then asks them to figure out who they are based on how co-workers treat them.

Before long, Mr. Carell is doing a jaw-droppingly misguided parody of an Indian convenience-store clerk as he tries to relate to the Indian employee. When she smacks him in the face and skulks off, he’s left dumbfounded before a room of silent, morose employees. With no canned laughter, no music and just a shaky handheld camera trained on his confused expression, it’s a crushing TV moment that trumps the worst feel-bad incidents on American Idol.

“You’ll notice I didn’t have anyone be an Arab,” the boss confides in one of the show’s trademark documentary cutaways. “I just thought it would be too explosive.

“No pun intended,” he adds, with a painful-to-watch wink.

It’s very funny. The effect is vaguely reminiscent of the long, awkward pauses that Norman Lear once shot on All in the Family as Archie Bunker was confronted with his own bigotry. Only this time, it’s also an embarrassing gaffe caught on video. The camera, in effect, defines the self-conscious humor: Because Mr. Carell’s character seems only dimly aware of what has just happened, the recognition of shame—and the nervous laughter—is left to the viewer.

“One of the things we’re desperately trying to do is be grounded in some reality,” said Ben Silverman, the 34-year-old president of Reveille LCC, which imported and produced the show for NBC. “And by ‘reality,’ I don’t mean reality television—I mean truthfulness. And I think people are racist, people are un-P.C. while communicating in P.C. language, people are in love with the wrong person, people are overweight, people aren’t all beautiful. And I think the audience—at least Greg and I believe—wants to be communicated to in that way.”

That’s a huge bet considering that the flagship program on NBC right now is The Apprentice, a reality-free game-show spectacle featuring the impossible fiction of Donald Trump’s hair. Not only that, but Mr. Silverman’s first whack at a Lear-style renaissance of British imports, Coupling, was a stupendous flop for NBC.

But Mr. Silverman, Mr. Daniels and the NBC brass are betting that those who saw the BBC America version of The Office—or rented it on DVD—will help lay the foundation for a network hit. According to BBC America, about two million American viewers watched the original British show across the two seasons it aired on cable. “The rabid base is hopefully going to be our core,” said Mr. Daniels.

But he added later, “I think it has the potential to be bigger than just the cable audience, because it’s about real life and it relates to a lot of people. But it’s got that style that was first on cable.”

While the characters have different names than those in the BBC version, the basic story line remains the same: A hapless boss attempts to save his department from layoffs, all the while inadvertently doing everything possible to keep the company in trouble.

The pilot episode was directed scene-for-scene from the original British script. Invariably, that has had an unpleasant echo effect for fans who love the original. When an illegal downloadable copy hit the Internet, it yielded pages of critical reactions from fans.

“That’s so incredibly lame,” wrote one viewer. “Reminds me of the shot-for-shot remake of Psycho in the 90’s.”

“Wow, maybe the original is coloring my expectations, but this is really, truly flat and unfunny,” wrote another critic.

It only proved to some that NBC wasn’t fit to produce a sophisticated comedy: “If you watch network TV you need to shoot yourself,” one viewer wrote.

“The English show is a wonderful gem, and it’s done,” responded Mr. Daniels. “And we’re all doing it out of love of the English show. We have to get Americans to have that kind of thing, too …. I think for the deep, deep fan of the English show, they’re not going to really start enjoying it until after the pilot.”

Whether he was a fan of the original or not, NBC Universal president Jeff Zucker warmed to Mr. Daniels’ version only after subsequent episodes were shot.

“I think he’s turned,” said Mr. Silverman. “I think initially he’s like, ‘What is this show?’ It’s a little different—maybe I’m reading into it, but it seems to me he’s a big fan of it now.”

“I think when we started writing our own scripts, he got more into it,” added Mr. Daniels.

During the January TV press tour in Los Angeles, Mr. Zucker compared the show’s prospects to those of Seinfeld.

“When Jeff Zucker connects it to Seinfeld, he’s connecting it to the beginning of Seinfeld,” observed Mr. Daniels. “It was a weird show, and when it started off a lot of people didn’t get it and it took a while. But there was always a little group that did get it and started telling their friends.”

Mr. Daniels also pointed out that it wasn’t so much the content that would challenge audiences, but the format, which he said in the end wasn’t really different from The Simpsons.

“It’s a single-camera comedy without a laugh track,” said Mr. Daniels. “That’s what animation is.”

In fact, NBC’s The Office occasionally feels like a live-action version of the iconic Matt Groening show, with its layered jokes, playful skewering of American clichés and variety of elastic characters. That’s not a coincidence: Ricky Gervais, the star of the British series, served as an executive producer on NBC’s version and advised Mr. Silverman to hire Mr. Daniels based on his work on The Simpsons.

Both Mr. Daniels and Mr. Gervais recognized that Michael Scott shares a crucial trait with Homer Simpson.

“He is resistant to learning,” observed Mr. Daniels. The Michael Scott character “could have learned after the pilot, but he was blind to it because it said so much about how his life wasn’t going the way he wanted it to …. Homer doesn’t learn. Isn’t that wonderful for comedy? A lack of self-knowledge.”

Mr. Daniels has plenty of people supporting his effort to make the show work—especially other TV writers, who hope Mr. Daniels’ success will expand the creative terrain for scripted shows on broadcast TV.

“Even the writers I couldn’t hire, they would say to me afterward, ‘Please make it work!” said Mr. Daniels. “Just so this kind of comedy could be on the air and other people will try and imitate it or something. People are sick of the old form.”

As it happens, a handful of writers actually appear as cast members in the first few episodes, including Larry Wilmore, the creator of The Bernie Mac Show, who plays the beleaguered black diversity trainer. The trainer, named Mr. Brown, quietly suffers Mr. Carell’s spastic and horrifying renditions of a Chris Rock standup routine, which ends with Mr. Carell screaming the N-word over and over again (casually bleeped out by censors, à la Comedy Central).

While the show was in production, General Electric, which owns the network, was giving the writers plenty of material to work with. The company required the cast to attend a sexual-harassment seminar, at which Mr. Daniels and his writers took copious notes.

“So they played videos of what not to do, and there was a lawyer leading it, and the entire time we were just taking notes, going, ‘Oh, yeah—this is going to be good.’”

But suddenly, the material is flowing in the other direction: General Electric decided to splice scenes from “Diversity Day” into its own diversity-training videos.

“So even if the show doesn’t go,” said Mr. Daniels, “at least we got some new material for those harassment seminars.”

Mr. Gore’s group plans to transform the sleepy foreign-news outlet into a youth-oriented public-affairs channel, a jump-cut news network for the iPod set. Despite vociferous claims that the network isn’t attempting to be the liberal antidote to Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News, it’s difficult to ignore the obvious: It may be fair, it may be balanced, but it’s going to be owned by Al Gore.

Meanwhile, the other Al among media giants, media-political hybrid Al Franken, incipient Minnesota Democratic candidate and Bill O’Reilly tag-team partner, was launching his somewhat more overtly political media project, Air America Radio, the little liberal radio network determined to correct the Fox effect on American news. And Al’s pal Al was delighted.

“Fabulous!” Mr. Franken said. “I think it’s a good thing. I think Al Gore’s a good guy.” He started laughing with pleasure just thinking about it. “And I think Al Gore is a smart guy who has tremendous curiosity, and I think he’s a person who likes ideas,” he continued. “And I think, you know, from all I know from the people I’ve met in media, he’d be a good choice as someone to have a piece of it. I’m much more comfortable in his hands than a lot of people.”

As far as the dovetailing between Air America Radio and Mr. Gore’s project, Mr. Franken said, “It’s all part of the same thing. It’s fighting back …. I think that the country--there’s an odd idea that the mainstream media is liberal, and it just isn’t. And I think the mainstream media has become scared of its own shadow. Basically, their testicles have been sucked up into their body cavity with a slurping sound.”

And how were his own testicles holding up?

“Mine are hanging fine,” he said.

Would he address Mr. Gore’s new TV network on his radio show?

“Yeah. I think we’re going to have Al on the show, actually,” he said.

Had Mr. Franken considered coupling the radio network with Mr. Gore’s TV project? He hadn’t, but “I’d be open to that,” he said.

No one from Mr. Gore’s camp would comment. They were keeping a low profile, said a source, until they had a high-wattage executive to face the press. “They’re going to stay quiet until they’ve hired their Roger Ailes and let him do all the talking,” said the source, speaking of Mr. Ailes, the media visionary, liberal bête noire and former Nixon adviser who put Fox News on the map. “They don’t have him yet.”

Mr. Franken agreed that Mr. Gore had to find an Ailes type to lead the show. “Roger does a very good job,” he said. “That’s exactly what they need. And I told them that at the beginning: a little less evil, but someone like him.”

Mr. Franken didn’t speak the name of Mr. Murdoch; he didn’t have to. After all, it was News Corp.’s conservative tycoon who, 10 years ago, laid the groundwork for the empire that would redraw the American political center, step up to bat for George W. Bush and send the American liberal establishment into a frothing, reactive tizzy, and Mr. Franken into best-sellerdom.

It wasn’t easy for Mr. Gore to get his hands on NWI. According to two sources familiar with the situation, Mr. Gore went so far as to seek the influence of French President Jacques Chirac in buying the channel, hoping that Mr. Chirac would aid him in landing a sweetened deal with Vivendi chief executive Jean-René Fourtou--and quick. That request resulted in a meeting last summer with executives of Universal Television Group and Vivendi’s chief operating officer, Jean-Bernard Levy. At the time, however, Vivendi was preparing to sell its cable properties to NBC, which temporarily stalled Mr. Gore’s media ambitions.

The deal was delayed for nearly a year, most recently by Barry Diller, chairman and chief executive of InterActive Corp. As the former owner of USA Networks, which he sold to Vivendi for $10 billion in 2001, Mr. Diller still owned a stake in those properties. Sources said Vivendi was keen on selling NWI to Mr. Gore, but Mr. Diller needed to resolve his ownership in Universal properties first. One source with knowledge of the situation suggested that Mr. Diller had stalled the deal as a bargaining chip to improve his take on Vivendi’s sale of Universal to NBC. But a spokeswoman for Mr. Diller disputed that. “It was only Mr. Gore who asked us to reconsider, given how long the process was taking,” she said, “to which we did agree to let this asset escape from our J.V. [joint venture], for no consideration of any kind or as part of any discussion with Vivendi.”

In any case, the path was cleared for Mr. Gore’s group to close the deal. It’s not clear where Mr. Gore and Mr. Hyatt rounded up the money, or how they will cover the gargantuan programming costs to come. But as you may recall, Mr. Gore’s first gig after the election of 2000 was becoming vice chairman of Metropolitan West Financial Inc., headquartered in Los Angeles, which hired him to explore high-tech investments. With the assistance of Peter Knight, his former Democratic fund-raiser and a managing director at Metropolitan West, Mr. Gore had access to scores of investors, according to sources close to him.

The Observer has also learned that the chief operating officer of the fledgling company will be a Los Angeles–based media consultant named Mark Goldman, who served during the late 90’s as the president and chief executive officer of Mr. Murdoch’s satellite company, Sky Latin America.

So here we are. Mr. Murdoch had astonishingly realigned the American media while the Democrats had wallowed in power during the Clinton-Gore era, building a base by insisting nonstop that the traditional television networks (CBS, NBC and ABC) were liberally biased--the same claim that Republicans had been making from Barry Goldwater on, and that reached a near bull’s-eye with Vice President Spiro Agnew’s attacks (written by Pat Buchanan and William Safire) in 1970.

It took a while for the right to get a commander of Mr. Murdoch’s power and vision, but he showed up. And since the liberals’ command of the media, such as it was, was neither as explicitly ideological nor as passionate as Fox’s, they wallowed lazily and cluelessly as they were turned into culture villains by the right. And as liberalism went into abeyance--debunked even by President Clinton--the left never really developed an explicit alternative.

Starting in the early 1990’s, with mighty-righty railer Rush Limbaugh, Republicans had built a well-oiled machine of speakers’ bureaus, think tanks, newspapers and magazines--including Mr. Murdoch’s own glossy high-end neoconservative mouthpiece, The Weekly Standard--and spearheaded the whole thing with the revolutionary cable juggernaut, Fox News. Suddenly, in 2000, what constituted the fair and balanced was over here, rather than over there.

In 2002, a motivated and focused Al Gore, having lost the Presidency for reasons that he partly chalked up to what he felt was a rancid culture, told The Observer that Fox News and Mr. Limbaugh were part of a “fifth column” within the media, responsible for injecting “daily Republican talking points into the definition of what’s objective.”

With a veritable culture war driving the Presidential year--and with the news media serving as the weapon of choice to bludgeon the hell out of an opponent--the Democrats are building their own left-handed sledge, or at least a rough approximation of the weapon of the right. It started with the Center for American Progress, former Clinton chief of staff John Podesta’s think tank, the left’s response to the Bush-approved American Enterprise Institute. Next came Governor Howard Dean with his populist Internet--admired by Mr. Gore, the Deanie Web site was apparently the thing that made Mr. Gore most ga-ga to endorse the Vermont governor for President--performing a counterweight to the Wild West of right-wing Web sites. A source close to Mr. Gore said that his endorsement of Mr. Dean’s bid was inspired almost exclusively by his fascination with Dr. Dean’s media approach and his ability to reach young voters through the Internet. “The reason why Gore became engaged with Dean,” said the source, “was he was fascinated with the way they consumed information and communicated with their supporters, and the way their supporters communicated with them.”

“He clearly got it,” recalled Joe Trippi, Dr. Dean’s former campaign manager and now an MSNBC election analyst. “He clearly got that there was a difference now, that you had to go from the bottom up to use the media.”

And now there’s Air America Radio, the anti–Rush Limbaugh network.

Suddenly, in New York, you can find Mr. Franken on WLIB 1190 AM. It may not be the FAN, but it’s there. And Mr. Gore’s NWI will be on Time Warner Digital Cable, Channel 103--a long way from Hannity and Colmes, but a signal nevertheless.

For a time, Mr. Gore’s TV channel will maintain its current programming, for which there appears to be a very, very small market. NWI has carriage in about 20 million homes, and packages “foreign newscasts originally broadcast in countries such as Germany, Japan, Canada and the European community,” according to its Web site. Currently, Newsworld is a bit like something Bill Murray would flip on in the hotel in Lost in Translation: a two-minute dialogue-free video essay on squirrels, followed by the news about a freak rotating-door accident in a Tokyo shopping mall.

Sources close to Mr. Gore insisted that his new cable network wouldn’t be a liberal answer to Fox News, as some had reported and even hoped. But everyone seemed to agree that the channel would be a 24-hour news, documentary and public-affairs channel geared toward kids in their 20’s, with a scrappy, Dogme 95 news philosophy that would arm kids with cheap digital cameras and empower them to do an end run around the big media. As The Observer reported last year, Mr. Gore’s principal business partner, Mr. Hyatt, purchased a Web site called V.tv from the .tv Corporation in April of 2003, prompting speculation that Mr. Gore’s channel would be called VTV. The company’s Web site listed Mr. Hyatt, who teaches business at Stanford University, as the representative of Mr. Gore’s holding company, INDTV L.L.C., registered in Stanford, Calif.

One thing that’s clear is that VTV seems to fulfill Mr. Gore’s own youthful ambitions to get behind the camera, as opposed to being in front of it. His 103-page senior thesis for the government department at Harvard was entitled “The Impact of Television on the Conduct of the Presidency, 1947-1969.” In essence, Mr. Gore argued that as soon as Presidential hopefuls could bypass newspapers and talk directly to millions of TV viewers, a scintillating personality became a job requirement. It was prescient, if not self-applicable.

Mr. Gore then worked as a reporter, first in Vietnam while serving in the U.S. Army, then at the Nashville Tennessean in the mid-70’s. Much later, of course, he gave the Internet a crucial boost while in Congress. Mr. Gore’s obsession with newfangled tech-geek stuff was catalyzed by the dot-com boom. As Apple Computer chief executive Steve Jobs told reporters in 2003, confirming Mr. Gore’s geek credentials: “Al is also an avid Mac user and does his own video editing in Final Cut Pro.”

He was also a big fan of MTV’s late-90’s video-diary show, Unfiltered, which inspired him to meet with its creator in 2002 in the hope of producing similar programming himself. In the last year, Mr. Gore began building a rationale for a new television service: In a speech to students at Middle Tennessee State University in November 2003, he spoke of television’s “quasi-hypnotic influence” on the electorate. “If people are just staring at a little box for four hours a day, it has a big impact on democracy,” he said. “We have to choose to rehabilitate our democracy in part by making creative use of these new media and by insisting within the current institutions of our democracy that we open up access to the dominant medium.”

Mr. Franken agreed that the left had been lax during the techno-revolution while the right “felt a certain urgency, to their credit, and they had a lot of right-wing financiers who saw this as a need. A lot of them were trust-fund babies who inherited a lot of money and wanted to keep it and now have bought their way into the Congress and the Bush administration, and you have a lot of wealth trying to keep a lot of wealth and a very stacked deck in this country right now.”

Mr. Franken has said he may only do his radio show for a year, depending on how he likes it. For him, there was a pointed political endgame to his own media pursuits--getting Senator John Kerry elected to the Presidency. “I think Rush has had some effect on elections, and I wouldn’t mind having some effect on this one,” he said. “I don’t know how quickly … but hopefully we’ll be able to have some influence and some effect on the way people think.”

Then Mr. Franken paused. There was an edge in his voice. He seemed to realize that he suddenly owned a piece of the playing field and it wasn’t just a college game, that there were stakes.

“Kick a little ass,” he said.

Former National Guardsman Bill Burkett, 55, has grown a full, white beard since his last face-to-face meeting with Mr. Rather, on Sept. 18, 2004. That day, the CBS anchor interviewed him for three hours at the Crescent Court hotel in Dallas, 10 days after 60 Minutes Wednesday had first presented the memos from Mr. Burkett asserting that George W. Bush had received preferential treatment in the National Guard.

Cameras rolling, Mr. Rather had asked Mr. Burkett, his former source--whom he had once promised not to “hang out”--point-blank, if he had misled the network about their provenance.

The former National Guardsman, knowing he was writing his own epitaph, said he had.

“I looked him in the eye,” recalled Mr. Burkett, “and I said, ‘Dan, do you know what you just did to me? Will you attend my funeral?’”

And, according to Mr. Burkett, Dan Rather replied: “Will you attend mine? In fact, I want you to read the eulogy.”

Afterward, said Mr. Burkett, “Dan couldn’t look me in the eye.”

Texas is the place where Dan Rather’s career ballooned, first on local television and then in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963, and Texas is the place that punctured it, as Mr. Rather might say, like a rattlesnake striking the tire treads of a prairie pick-up. And in Texas, if not at Black Rock itself, the question of just what brought Mr. Rather low still remains open. Even apparently to him.

When Mr. Burkett’s admission aired Sept. 20, it did nothing to resolve the mystery behind the documents. But it did mark the point at which CBS, embattled by attacks from consumers, ideologues and politicians, stopped defending its Sept. 8 report on Mr. Bush’s National Guard service and started a massive, and somewhat panicked, clean-up.

Mr. Rather continued hunting down the source of the documents, according to sources--when CBS convened an independent panel to investigate the process behind the story, Mr. Rather sought to hire a New York–based private eye with his own money, for a price sources put in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.

A CBS News spokesperson denied via e-mail that Mr. Rather had made any such offer.

But sources said that Mr. Rather did just that, and that CBS News president Andrew Heyward turned him down. To supplement the panel, the network hired its own P.I., whose quest for the source of the documents abruptly faded after the November 2004 Presidential election.

CBS’s pursuit of the story was sidelined. The network, and CBS News, then became focused on righting itself in the public eye, aggressively finishing its panel report and completing what the producers of the National Guard story felt became a “corporate execution,” according to Mike Smith, a freelance producer who worked on the story. Mr. Smith--a soft-spoken, 33-year-old Austin native with a ponytail and spectacles--worked closely with Mary Mapes, Mr. Rather’s faithful producer.

Ms. Mapes was fired in January 2005, after the panel’s report came out, and three other employees involved in the segment--executive producer Josh Howard, senior vice president Betsy West and senior broadcast producer Mary Murphy--were asked to resign. Mr. Howard has not. And Mr. Rather was ushered to a conclusion of his tenure on his 24th anniversary as anchor--a year earlier than the anniversary he’d planned.

Ms. Mapes, Mr. Smith and Mr. Burkett--two producers and their source--are in contact with each other every day, still puzzling over the memo scandal.

“It’s like Groundhog Day,” said Mr. Smith. “Mary and Bill are trying to figure out how to get out from under this thing.”

In the past week, Mr. Smith has sought to help The New York Observer reconstruct the story of the network’s investigation. The investigating panel needed him: After Sept. 20, he was the only person connected to CBS News that Mr. Burkett was willing to talk to.

“He needed someone to hold his hand,” said Mr. Smith. “That was my role.”

Mr. Smith had first convinced Mr. Burkett to give CBS News the memos--supposedly written by National Guard Lt. Col. Jerry Killian--which cast a negative light on Mr. Bush’s Vietnam-era service.

In early September 2004, Mr. Smith carried those four pieces of paper in his leather briefcase. But by the end of September, Mr. Smith began filling the briefcase with dozens of 90-minute microcassettes recording his telephone discussions with everyone he spoke to about the memo scandal.

Mr. Smith said he made the recordings to guard against being used by CBS to lay blame on people he sympathized with--Mr. Burkett and Ms. Mapes--and because he felt uncomfortable with his position: CBS News was paying him to get the angry Mr. Burkett to cooperate with the panel. Meanwhile, the panel was investigating Mr. Smith himself.

“It would be stupid not to tape,” he said.

The conversations consisted of daily exchanges with Ms. Mapes and Mr. Burkett; with a private eye named Erik T. Rigler, who was hired by CBS; and with Linda Mason, the CBS News senior vice president who was coordinating interviews for the panel. They portray an investigation that bred confusion, occasional desperation and a deep suspicion in its subjects. Mr. Smith said they document how “no one really seemed to be interested in the truth.”

In a tape from late December, days before the report was released, Ms. Mason was asked by Mr. Smith if CBS News would ever regain its former glory after the incident.

“I certainly hope so,” she said, “but this has shaken … Mike, we’re part of this huge corporation now. And [Viacom C.E.O.] Sumner Redstone commented on it at one point. Who needs him commenting about things? Let him stay with his entertainment.

“In the news, when it was first happening,” she continued, “he was away in Hong Kong or something. He made some kind of stupid statement about how he didn’t like this, but he was out of town and he had to learn more about it or something. I mean, wow, right?”

On Sept. 2, 2004, Mr. Smith and Ms. Mapes met with Mr. Burkett and his wife, Nicki Burkett, in a Whataburger restaurant in Clyde, Tex. They discussed the possibility of procuring the Bush National Guard documents. Mr. Smith had worked with Ms. Mapes on a number of 60 Minutes and CBS Evening News pieces starting in 2000. He was hired again as a freelancer in August to work on the National Guard story.

“The road to the White House leads through the Clyde Whataburger” was the group’s joke.

Mr. Burkett gave them one of the documents that day.

“He said, ‘Well, what do you think about this?’” Mr. Smith recalled. “It contained a lot of the elements that had happened with Bush. We read it and our jaws dropped: ‘Wow, that’s exactly what we heard happened.’ So we were stunned when he pulled this document out.”

Mr. Burkett has said that this document and the others he gave CBS were provided on a “stand-alone” basis--meaning he wouldn’t vouch for their authenticity--and under a promise of the utmost secrecy. He had first told Ms. Mapes that the memos had come from a former Guard colleague named George Conn.

In the Sept. 18 interview and thereafter, he has maintained instead that a woman calling herself Lucy Ramirez phoned him--from a number later traced to a Holiday Inn in Houston--and instructed him to attend a livestock show, where he was handed the papers in an envelope.

Despite Mr. Burkett’s desire for secrecy, as CBS News came under fire for peculiarities in the documents’ format, newspapers began citing him as the possible source. With scrutiny mounting, Mr. Burkett requested a conversation with Mr. Rather himself.

The anchor called him at a Holiday Inn in Bozeman, Mont., where the Burketts were staying to avoid attention. Mr. Rather promised to protect his source, according to Mr. Burkett.

“It was very candid--very hard,” recalled Mr. Burkett. “Twenty minutes. He said, ‘Bill, I believe in you. I realize you’re a truth-teller, and I understand we have a commitment to you. We’re not going to hang you out.’”

On Sept. 16, while the media surrounded his house with cameras, Mr. Burkett set up a conference call with CBS News president Andrew Heyward, Mr. Rather, Ms. West and Ms. Mapes. He said he wanted to set the record straight, fearing that, in his poor health, he might die of a heart attack.

“We agreed that we would do an interview--initially, we would do an interview which we would store,” said Mr. Burkett, his voice growing somber and tears welling in his eyes. “It would be so Nicki would have it in case I died, for the protection of me. We talked about name-clearing for Bill Burkett, not for CBS.”

Mr. Burkett insisted that the full taped interview of Sept. 18--a copy of which he said CBS promised him and never delivered--would correct the record regarding his involvement in the segment.

The tape, he said, would show Mr. Rather admitting that CBS had promised him absolute anonymity--a promise that he said was broken, and that unleashed events that ruined his life, from media attacks to health problems to a flagging cattle business.

Asked if Mr. Burkett had been treated fairly, CBS’s Ms. Mason was silent for at least 30 seconds.

“There was no agreement,” she finally said. “There was never an agreement with Burkett. He decided to speak without his lawyer’s permission. In Burkett’s mind, there was an agreement.”

A CBS News spokesperson said that Mr. Rather had not promised Mr. Burkett absolute anonymity and rejected Mr. Burkett’s claim that the interview backed him up, asking, “Why would you do an on-camera interview if you wanted to remain anonymous?”

From then on, Mr. Burkett refused to talk to CBS. He said he distrusted the investigative panel, led by former Attorney General Richard Thornburgh and former Associated Press head Louis Boccardi Jr., which he saw as bought and paid for by CBS.

“It was nothing more than a corporate damage-control plan,” said Mr. Burkett.

He was not alone in having reservations about the panel. A number of critics and observers--including Mr. Rather--complained that the panel was tilted by the inclusion of Mr. Thornburgh, a Republican and Bush family friend. The nonpartisan Mr. Boccardi was supposed to be the neutralizing factor.

Convinced that it had made a mistake in broadcasting the report, CBS seemed more interested in trying to atone for its confessed error than in trying determine whether the memos were a hoax or not. On Oct. 5, CBS president Leslie Moonves promised at a Goldman Sachs media conference that the network would withhold the report until “after the election, so it won’t affect what is going on.”

Still, CBS did take at least one step to dig into the document mystery: After Mr. Rather offered to hire his own private eye, Mr. Heyward stepped in, promising him and Ms. Mapes that Mr. Rigler would pursue the case.

Mr. Rigler is an employee of the New York–based corporate investigative group Safir Rosetti. The company was founded by former Mayor Rudolph Giuliani’s ex-police commissioner, Howard Safir.

Mr. Rigler, a former F.B.I. agent, first introduced himself via e-mail to Mr. Smith and to Mr. Burkett. In that message, sent in early October, Mr. Rigler said his “client” was an “investigative firm hired by CBS.” But Mr. Rigler seems to have been confused about his assignment: In a tape from late October, he complained to Mr. Smith of uncertainty about exactly whom he was working for--the independent panel, which could presumably want to know the source of the documents in order to judge the broadcast, or CBS, which had hired him for the express purpose of finding the documents.

Mr. Rigler said that he would be filing reports directly to Mr. Thornburgh, according to Mr. Smith. On Oct. 25, Mr. Rigler told Mr. Smith: “I got to talk to the former Attorney General at length. What it means is they have enough trust in me to talk to [Bill Burkett] and then carry his message back to them.”

But that apparently wasn’t the CBS plan. Mr. Rigler said on tape that Ms. Mason, the CBS News senior vice president, didn’t want him interacting with the panel. In the recording, he said that he’d consulted with her about questions the panel had asked him: “‘You know, these people are asking a lot of questions about this. I’m not sure how I’m supposed to answer--so what’s my role in all of this? Am I CBS’s investigator or the commission’s investigator?’”

Ms. Mason, he told Mr. Smith, “promptly chewed me out,” saying explicitly: “You should never talk to those people!”

“I said, ‘Wait a minute--you’re the one that told me to call them!’” he recalled. “So it’s like, I guess, a runaway grand jury or something like that.”

The incident in question took place on Oct. 27, after Ms. Mapes discovered that the panel had spoken with Mr. Rigler and received a two-page report on Ms. Mapes herself.

On Feb. 22, Michael Missal, the lead council for the panel, told The Observer that the memo was for cross-checking other things Ms. Mapes had told them.

But Ms. Mapes was infuriated by what she considered to be a double-cross by Mr. Heyward, who had told her the private eye was strictly for searching out the source of the documents, not for investigating staff. In a conversation taped in late December, Ms. Mason told Mr. Smith that Mr. Rigler’s investigation was separate from the panel’s and that his information only passed on through her.

“He was independent,” Ms. Mason said. “Well, through me. If we had gotten information, I would have passed it on to the panel. But he was independent.”

On March 1, Mr. Missal told The Observer that, contrary to what Ms. Mason had said, the panel had been in direct contact with Mr. Rigler on a regular basis and received a number of leads from him, including information about a possible source, J.R. Rodriguez, a former National Guardsman who worked with Lieutenant-Colonel Killian.

Reached for comment, Ms. Mason said via e-mail that Mr. Rigler had spoken to the panel “only twice.”

“You may want to ask [Mr. Missal] again,” she wrote.

In the late October tape, Mr. Rigler suggested that CBS News was only interested in the documents if they could get them before the Presidential election. After Nov. 2, he said, his services would no longer be needed.

“I’m going to be unemployed after the election,” Mr. Rigler said on the tape. “I know what’s coming. I think 5 p.m. Friday, I’m gone--which makes me wonder if this whole thing wasn’t so CBS could tell Mary Mapes, ‘Well, we tried.’ Whatever you’re going to do … if they take any employment action against her and she says, ‘Well, wait a minute, you didn’t even try to verify my side of the story or make an attempt to contact this guy …. ‘”

A CBS spokesperson said via e-mail that Mr. Rigler’s investigation ended on its own schedule. “CBS News wanted to find the source of the documents,” the spokesperson wrote. “When all the attempts failed and the leads dried up, we stopped looking. That occurred before the election. If there were continuing leads, we would have followed them.”

On tape, Mr. Rigler described spending an afternoon with J.R. Rodriguez and his wife, Charlotte, a woman whom Mr. Rigler and a number of reporters refer to by the nickname “Cookie.” The couple lives outside Houston, the site of the livestock show where Mr. Burkett said he received the documents.

Mr. Smith had urged CBS to look into the Rodriguezes, and CBS had Mr. Rigler investigate the two. Mr. Missal said the panel actually called Mr. Rodriguez too, counting him as one of the 66 people the panel interviewed.

But Mr. Rigler said he came away unconvinced that they were related to Lucy Ramirez. In a taped conversation with Mr. Smith, he said, “I don’t see it. She’s Anglo, and he’s retired and patriotic.”

Mr. Missal wouldn’t describe conversations the panel had with Mr. Rodriguez. But when contacted, the former Texas Air National Guard senior master sergeant said he’d never heard of Mr. Thornburgh, had only vaguely recalled the word “panel” in conversations he’d had with reporters and had no recollection whatsoever of Mr. Rigler.

In any case, Mr. Rigler went on to say that interviews with former National Guardsmen were leading him to believe the truth of the documents, if not their authenticity.

“It was so well known for years at Camp Avery about Bush and his failure to serve in the Texas Air National Guard,” he said, referring to the base where Mr. Bush had been stationed in the early 1970’s. “It was just so very, very common. You know, he didn’t even show up out there during his whole eight-year tenure as governor and commander in chief of the Texas Air National Guard--not once did he go to Camp Avery. So most people just sort of looked at him as a draft dodger. They didn’t hold him in very high regard at all.”

He continued: “The story--and I’m talking to some people at Camp Avery--the story about the files, the non-service, the memos, stuff like that, had floated around for years. For that reason, it makes you think it’s likely true.”

By Nov. 23, when Mr. Rather announced he was retiring, Mr. Rigler was long out of the picture. He told Mr. Smith that the investigation was a “black hole,” calling his awkward position between the panel, Ms. Mapes, CBS and Mr. Burkett a “no-win situation.”

“This is not a real investigation,” he told Mr. Smith.

By Dec. 30—10 days before the report was released—Mr. Smith’s last-minute attempts to get Mr. Burkett to cooperate had failed. Mr. Burkett had offered to answer the panel, but only on the condition that his answers be confidential. The panel refused.

Mr. Smith was crestfallen.

“You’ve made a heroic effort,” Ms. Mason told Mr. Smith on one of his tapes. “You know how you follow a lead until you hit a dead end? Well, we’re at a dead end. We’re at an impasse here. He’s not going to do something, and we’re running out of time. So I would fold my tent and leave.”

So he did. But Mr. Smith said a powerful memory stayed with him from the whole ordeal. When Mr. Burkett’s Sept. 18 interview with Mr. Rather was completed after three hours, Mr. Smith said that Mr. Burkett’s wife Nicki had wept and said, “They set a trap. They set us up.”

Shortly after, other witnesses said, a cheerful and relieved CBS News senior vice president named Betsy West walked into the makeshift green room in the Crescent Court hotel to find the Burketts. She discovered them on their knees, praying. According to people who were there, Ms. West was highly unsettled.

So it came as no surprise when, on Friday, Oct. 24, producers at 60 Minutes began mumbling about a letter the TV legend had allegedly typed up--and some said circulated--in which Mr. Hewitt criticized CBS News as a broken organization littered with failing news programs and proposed that CBS News reconsider his forced retirement in June 2004.

After all, Don Hewitt was just being honest. He had invented the best thing CBS News ever had, and he knew best how to run it.

Reached for comment, Mr. Hewitt admitted the letter existed, but he said he never actually sent it to management.

“I was talking about doing it and never did and decided it wasn’t called for and I’m happier than hell,” he said. “If it’s written, then somebody stole it off my word processor. I’m happier than hell. I could not be happier.

“I don’t know of any news organization that couldn’t use some work,” he said of his criticism of CBS News, “from The New York Times on down--including The New York Observer.”

Nobody could disagree with that, and if he could do for this newspaper what he did for CBS News, whoa! Retirement … never! But for one of the cockiest kids in the history of TV, Mr. Hewitt sounded self-deprecating and grateful to the company that has agreed to let him hang around as an executive producer until the year 2013, when he’ll be 90, a stripling compared with some of the yogurt-guzzling supergeezers you see on the air, namely his 60 Minutes co-workers. He is four years younger than Andy Rooney and five younger than Mike Wallace, two bristling journalists who seem about ready to start grappling with their midlife crises.

One CBS executive said Mr. Hewitt often drafted memos and shared them with colleagues to feel out ideas before executing them, but a number of executives also told The Observer that these are difficult days for Mr. Hewitt, who must face separation from his 35-year-old creation, a show that revolutionized TV journalism, and bequeath his duties to the current 60 Minutes II executive producer, 47-year-old Jeffrey Fager. Mr. Hewitt may not be learning the art of the graceful exit, but he’s not doing the opposite.

Nevertheless, the existence--and near public fact--of Mr. Hewitt’s letter only served to underscore the blunt issues surrounding his eventual departure, not only for Mr. Hewitt personally, or even for Mr. Fager, but for the entire 60 Minutes franchise and its particular place in the American culture. For in the vast gloppy landscape of TV, 60 Minutes has held onto its Rooster Cogburn–ish true grit, gristle and stuff. Its integrity and hormonal, jostling personality--pure extensions of Mr. Hewitt’s persona--have not diminished. And when Mr. Hewitt begins his executive departure next summer--and with him, perhaps one or all of the downshifting Big Three correspondents, Ed Bradley, Mike Wallace and Morley Safer--his absence will bring to bear an unavoidable question: Can 60 Minutes, a fundamental function and extension of Don Hewitt’s drive, remain the rough-and-tumble, sentimental, hard-nosed operation it has been?

When Mr. Hewitt leaves, there’s a prospect of 60 Minutes becoming like the competition--a replicant, a kind of Primetime Sunday Dateline U.S.A. III. Don Hewitt is a rarity in TV, an auteur. And they’re not so common. After all, The Tonight Show without Johnny Carson is still on, but it’s just TV, and ABC News without Roone Arledge is just ABC News. But where’s the jet fuel? It’s true that all things must change, but what if they don’t really have to so quickly?

Can Mr. Hewitt’s legacy hover long enough to keep it vital, familiar, needed, protected, the last network appointment news program?

A CBS spokesman said neither Mr. Fager nor CBS News president Andrew Heyward were prepared to talk about it until next year. But a number of CBS employees said that if Mr. Hewitt was suggesting that he’s the Gandalf of West 57th Street, it was a little scary because … it might be true.

And if it were up to many staffers at 60 Minutes, Mr. Hewitt would remain executive producer until his final tick … tick … tick .

“It ain’t broken, we don’t want to fix it,” said one 60 Minutes producer, who, of course, declined to be named. “I’m not anxious to move forward. If it needs new life, new spark, I think Don can provide that himself. Thank God it’s Jeff”--he meant Jeff Fager--“and not somebody from the outside.”

There is widespread belief--let’s call it hope--throughout both 60 Minutes I and II that Mr. Hewitt’s legacy--the brand, the institution--can sustain 60 Minutes without Mr. Hewitt. But that’s mainly because the show won’t be changing much.

“60 Minutes does not condescend to its audience and that’s largely because Don has made it a standard not to do that,” said David Gelber, a producer at the show. “60 Minutes is a haven where you can still respect the audience. You look at stuff like that Elizabeth Smart interview on Sunday”--Katie Couric’s Dateline NBC exclusive that aired Oct. 26--“that’s embarrassing shit. And we don’t do that.”

Mr. Gelber was confident that Mr. Fager would be able to protect the integrity of 60 Minutes. “I think people feel that Fager’s sense is close enough to Don’s sensibility that the quality will be maintained,” he said. “Look at 60 Minutes II. There’s no reason to think that sensibility is going to be lost.”

“I think Don has protected it through its success,” said George Crile, a former producer at 60 Minutes who now produces for Dan Rather at 60 Minutes II, “through his constant capacity to reinvigorate it when it looked like it was going down. I think he will continue to protect it, oddly enough, by the foundation he created. I think there is tremendous opportunity if it’s seized. If Don were younger and intact, the same challenges apply.” Mr. Fager, he said, “has to create a certain sense of excitement and a sense of mission.”

Morley Safer did not expect “volcanic” changes at the newsmagazine under Mr. Fager’s tenure. “I don’t see any eruptive change at all,” said Mr. Safer. “Partly because Jeff is not going to go and prove something. He’s proven what he has to prove already. I’m sure there’s going to be the usual grumbling, and people do that.”

So far, the management philosophy at CBS News is to not rock the barge, to bring in new employees over time, bring co-editor Lesley Stahl and correspondent Bob Simon up front as Mr. Safer and Mr. Wallace scale back, and possibly return Dan Rather to the show he worked on from 1975 to 1981 as a permanent member, should he ever release his own grip on the CBS Evening News desk. The essential format will remain as long as people love it: the ticking clock, the introductions, the three segments--one hard, one semi-hard, one soft--with some Andy Rooney type (someday it’ll probably be old Sarah Vowell) as the after-dinner lecture.

But right now, with the familiar faces, the formula still has a good kick: On Sunday, Oct. 26, the show scored a 10.7--16.2 million viewers--in the Nielsen ratings, broadcasting Ed Bradley’s piece on the Moscow theater hostage crisis, Steve Kroft’s segment on radioactive dumping at Yucca Mountain and Mr. Safer’s look at undercover marketing. Good show; great stories. 60 Minutes is still 60 Minutes.

With ratings for network news descending as the cable supermarket exploded--and 60 Minutes has, despite holding its relative ground, suffered ratings declines in the last five years--one CBS News producer said that CBS News president Andrew Heyward and the rest of CBS management had badly stumbled in coping with the transition, allowing old correspondents to become pretty ancient while not going to the minors to develop new talent.

“As a manager, how could you take that kind of a trademark and allow yourself to get this point?” the producer asked. “Imagine you were running the world and you suddenly discovered everybody was 85 and you hadn’t made plans for next year? Everybody’s taking their long summer vacation and pretending it’s business as usual.”

There seems to be a hunkered-down, change-averse fatalism among some 60 Minutes producers concerning Mr. Hewitt’s departure. Asked if the show would wobble when Mr. Hewitt left, one CBS News producer said, “I can’t buy that. Don is a genius and he’s one of a kind. Whether we like it or not, things change. God willing, it could stay exactly as it was forever. But that’s not an option.”

“The thrust of it is, any news broadcast is going to be better with Don Hewitt than without Don Hewitt,” said another 60 Minutes producer. “That’s a given. This is going to be without Don Hewitt and that’s too bad. But that’s life.”

“In many ways, Don’s dynamism and his enthusiasm were the things that kept 60 Minutes so charged,” said Joel Bernstein, a producer for Bob Simon at 60 Minutes II, who called him “an inspirational kind of guy. You went out and you wanted to please Don. But Don grew into that role. Jeff in a way has a much tougher challenge--how to keep it up. Don was inventing the wheel and just about anything he would put on, people would watch. People tuned in to see what Mike and Morley were doing. That’s not the case now. Because you have so many more choices. I think more people than not will think that’s Jeff’s the guy to do it. You just have to keep the wheel moving.”

Weirdly, what producers at 60 Minutes don’t want is the hiring of some larger-than-life personality who will screw around with the formula: a young Don Hewitt, or Roone Arledge, or--in a Bizzaro CBS universe--a Roger Ailes. They don’t want someone to reconfigure the program in new, risky ways. They want Don’s show.

But life doesn’t necessarily work that way.

In 1998, Chris Wallace, the son of Mike Wallace and a longtime ABC News correspondent, was invited to join 60 Minutes II, but ABC prevented him. With his contract up again this season, Mr. Wallace announced on Monday, Oct. 27, that he would anchor Fox News Sunday . Describing his new boss to The Observer, Chris Wallace sounded a lot like what his father sounded like describing Mr. Hewitt many years ago. “He thinks big and he takes chances,” he said. “In an era of so-called decline in the news business, he’s always thinking of ways to grow his network.”

He was talking about Roger Ailes.

Mr. Wallace said Mr. Hewitt and his father were giants. Whether they were replaceable remained to be seen, but he seemed skeptical.

“As time goes on and you will start to see Scott Pelley and Bob Simon move into those positions,” he said. “Are they giants? Time will tell. They don’t come along very often. Do I have any doubts of their ability to put on a serious, thoughtful, first-rate broadcast? No. Can you capture that lightning in a bottle again? That’s a good question.”

Chris Wallace said that the old guard had protected the franchise from deteriorating under the pressures of demographics, costs and ratings, the stuff often scrutinized by company stockholders. But once that old guard is gone, all bets are off.

“I’m amazed they’re getting those audiences with stories we’d never dream of doing,” he said. “Whether they’ll still watch those kinds of stories just because they’re attached to 60 Minutes, if it’s not Ed and Mike and Morley telling them--they may say this is way too serious and where is Jennifer and Ben? I think 60 Minutes, because of its enormous success, is the most untouchable program in TV news and maybe in all of TV. With a new cast of characters, will it still be untouchable?”

Mr. Wallace didn’t attempt an answer.

“Every program needs a driving force,” said David Corvo, the executive producer of Dateline NBC and a former executive at CBS News. He suggested that 60 Minutes would need someone willing to invigorate the show, as Mr. Hewitt had done many times in his career there. “Don was always quietly reinventing the show,” he said. “It’s not the same show it was 35 years ago. They used to do all the ambush stuff and he decided it had worn out its welcome. When he hadn’t been doing much news and the Gulf War broke out in the early 90’s, he went big time into investigative stuff. The ratings went up, but the quality of the show went up, too.”

For now, Mr. Heyward and CBS News want to maintain and prune 60 Minutes like any other high-quality brand, which means doing everything very slowly and cautiously: introducing new talent, trying to develop flagship correspondents on 60 Minutes II, hoping the viewing public doesn’t flee as Mount Rushmore--Mr. Wallace, Mr. Safer, Mr. Rooney, Mr. Bradley--crumbles and gets replaced by the John Roberts generation. CBS News employees are enthusiastic about Mr. Fager--and insiders point to 60 Minutes senior producer Josh Howard as his likely successor at 60 Minutes II--because he promises to maintain the historic integrity created by Mr. Hewitt.

“They could have gone outside the company and brought in somebody like a former Dateline NBC executive producer,” said Mr. Bernstein. “The fact that they appointed Jeff and are leaning toward Josh is a good sign--even if there are people who believe that Jeff can’t measure up to Hewitt’s size.”

Meanwhile, Morley Safer, 71, wasn’t convinced that he’ll be able to cut back his working time to half time as he had planned on doing earlier next year. “We’ll see if that happens!” Mr. Safer said. “It’s supposed to happen in December, but it may take a little while before it kicks in.”

“He thinks the country is disserved by the absence of truth in news, by the absence of honesty in public-official presentation, by the apparently infinite cynicism of those who currently hold high office,” said Reed Hundt, the former chairman of the F.C.C.--the Michael Powell of another political age--who saw through the Telecommunications Act of 1996, as well as a close friend of Mr. Gore’s. “These things disturb him, I know that. He’s made these points to me. I think Al, and to my knowledge dozens of other progressives, would like to go beyond complaining to actually trying to fix the problems.”

If, as Mr. Gore told The Observer in December 2002, Fox News and right-wing talk radio have helped bolster the Bush administration’s message, then Mr. Gore’s buy would mark a further convergence of television and politics--the migration of power and influence to politicized media. In a cable-television world in which Fox News Channel, with its self-proclaimed corrective point of view, beats CNN’s self-proclaimed absence of point of view; in which programmers have to “narrowcast” to gain an audience; in which HBO’s K Street mixes up Howard Dean with Hollywood actors and has James Carville participate in a kind of Being John Malkovich version of being James Carville, in a reality-TV business in which all bets are off--being a media mogul may be a whole lot better than being President.

“In a world of highly concentrated media conglomerates,” said Mr. Hundt, “the truth of the matter is, the personal tastes of a half-dozen people matter immensely. It’s not the case that people in the media poll their audience to see what flavors they would like. They hip-shoot on that topic, and their personal views have an impact.”

Mr. Hundt suggested that the media coverage of everything from the war in Iraq to the California election had only firmed up Mr. Gore’s beliefs.

In September 2003, The Observer reported that Mr. Gore first met with Universal executives last summer to discuss buying Newsworld, or NWI, a channel that currently packages international news from places like Japan and Canada and can reach about 20 million homes. You can watch it here in New York on the Time Warner Cable system, channel 103.

With it, Mr. Gore is reportedly working on a youth-geared “public affairs” channel that would present news and documentaries--something that would sound a bit like Son of C-Span if it wasn’t being financed by the loyal opposition. One associate has suggested that Mr. Gore’s network would employ MTV-style programming, using cheap digital cameras and user-created content to allow regular people to get stuff off their chests--but that is pure speculation, and the fact is that the whole Gore TV agenda is still to be announced.

In explaining the power of media on public tastes, Mr. Hundt didn’t bring up News Corp. and Fox News Channel boss Rupert Murdoch. But as Mr. Gore said last year, he considers Fox part of a “fifth column” within the media, responsible for injecting “daily Republican talking points into the definition of what’s objective.”

“There’s no question that Democrats are suffering in an environment where there are powerful outlets for anti-Democrat viewpoints,” said Bob Somerby, editor of influential political Web site The Daily Howler. “It’s clear that people don’t watch PBS or C-Span, so commercially you’ve got to have some point of view. It doesn’t have to be a liberal-line point of view, but it does have to have some edge or attitude while you’re there. You turn on Fox first because you know something’s going to happen.”

On Tuesday, Oct. 7, as Fox News celebrated its seven-year anniversary, Brit Hume, the channel’s managing editor and chief Washington, D.C., correspondent, wondered if Mr. Gore really knew what he was getting into.

“It’s a little unclear what he’s trying to do if he wants to start a kind of talk channel that he believes would counter-program Fox,” said Mr. Hume. “He clearly doesn’t know what we’re really doing. If he’s trying to start a serious news organization with worldwide reach, then he immediately becomes a competitor, in my view, to CNN and MSNBC, so he does us good. It doesn’t seem like it would affect us very much.”

Mr. Hume wondered if Mr. Gore had really considered the basics--like cameras and mobile trucks. Watching a live feed of the California recall on Fox, Mr. Hume said, “If you were the Al Gore News Channel, you’re going to want that signal, too. You’re going to have to hire your own truck, get your own equipment--I wonder if they’ve even thought about those things.”

If the channel is to succeed, said one cable-TV executive, the Gore group may itself have to do as Fox does by giving it the “Full Franken,” larding its programming up with song-and-dance commentators like the author of Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them. Otherwise, it might not attract viewers. “Extremes are more interesting for neutrals to watch,” said the executive, who didn’t have much optimism for Mr. Gore’s group, mainly because of Mr. Gore’s up-market sensibilities. “Given who’s involved in it, they’re all way too classy,” he said.

For his part, Mr. Franken--a friend of Mr. Gore’s, who defends him in his book--said he was busy developing a three-hour talk show for a proposed liberal radio network and probably wouldn’t have time to anchor a show for Mr. Gore. But he took issue with the idea that the left played to the same extremes as the right.

“I think, right now, there’s only one side that’s doing that, and that’s their side,” Mr. Franken said. “When I’ve talked to [Mr. Gore], he’s been talking about a whole different thing than what they do. He’s been criticized for being Mr. Policy Wonk. He’s not a tabloid guy.”

Based on his book sales and the crowds he was seeing on his book tour, Mr. Franken said there would be a market for Mr. Gore’s network, too. He said the left was alienated and was hungry for news, and its hunger, by its nature, was not for tarted-up opinion. “If they’re driving around in their car,” he said, “they’re listening to NPR not because it’s left-wing information, but because it’s information. Conservatives want right-wing information; liberals want information. They need ammunition now, because they feel attacked. When I tell them about the liberal media network, they just cheer. Because they want to hear something.”

And Mr. Hundt said, “We’re not trying to fight fire with fire; we’re trying to fight fire with cold water.”

Whether or not Mr. Gore’s reading of the media landscape as a political foothold is fundamentally flawed depends on your reading of Fox’s success. Did Mr. Murdoch tap into a market of wildly underserved conservatives who yearned to see and hear their views expressed on TV? Or was it, as Mr. Gore has it, that Mr. Murdoch’s imported brand of loudmouthed, politically skewed programming bludgeoned the viewing public into submission with entertaining, right-leaning ideas? Or was it, as Mr. Hume would have it, that they simply had better news coverage?

At a special Senate hearing on F.C.C. deregulation earlier this year, Democratic Senator Byron Dorgan from North Dakota asked Mr. Murdoch if he could explain why the radio properties he owned had more than 300 hours of nationally syndicated conservative talk each week, against five hours of liberal talk.

Mr. Murdoch replied: “Yes. Apparently, conservative talk is more popular.”

He’s just giving the people what they want.

The conventional wisdom has it that cable news could become like the tabloid press of the U.K., or Mr. Murdoch’s home of Australia, where eight or nine papers each spin the news based on their own political agendas. It’s a model that leaves it to the public to sort things out based on their own leanings--even if those leanings are, primarily, the desire to see an American flag waving on their TV screen or to be entertained by angry white guys yelling at you. That’s a great market. The current ratings doldrums at CNN, which is struggling to doll itself up while protesting that it intends to keep its old blue-chip objectivity, may be the clearest harbinger yet of Mr. Ailes’ acute instincts. If Ted Turner was still there, things might be different.

But he’s not.

While Fox News may be the most popular cable news channel, however, is it also therefore politically influential?

“If the ambition is political influence, it could not be more misplaced,” said Lawrence O’Donnell Jr., the senior political analyst for MSNBC and former adviser to the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan. “If you add up everybody watching MSNBC, CNN and Fox on any given night, you’re dealing with a number that would get any number canceled in prime-time television. As soon as you understand it, you realize the utter meaninglessness on the political level of Al Gore’s network. Whether it gets started, it doesn’t matter. What matters is, does it make enough money or sustain a low-enough loss margin to employ the people and pay for the cameras?”

Mr. O’Donnell said that cable news barked at the converted and changed almost no one’s mind. And he pointed to The News Hour with Jim Lehrer as liberal TV news that already exists--with more viewers than Fox News, he noted. “I don’t think there’s a liberal in America who wouldn’t say The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer is an exemplary piece of television journalism,” he said. “It’s there, but we steadfastly avoid it in a way that I think tells you the story about how much is available for some theoretically counter-programmed Fox rival.”

Even Mr. Gore’s friend Mr. Hundt said that the very nature of what makes cable TV popular was at odds with a thoughtful liberal message. Right-wing ideologues, he said, appeal to quick, emotional bullet points, which “creates in those individuals a frightening relationship to the public trust.”

Mr. Hundt also said the public has shown surprising resistance to the media’s influence. “In the face of almost no media endorsement and precious little elected-official communications, somehow, according to today’s poll, 53 percent think the Iraq war was not worth it,” he said. “How did that happen? It’s certainly not because editorial pages changed their opinion. Certainly not because the White House backed off. In fact, it’s the opposite: It has intensified its advocacy.

“Having said that,” he added, “it’s still true that if you have a political agenda, you should buy a TV station.”

Sir Howard Stringer, chairman and chief executive of Sony Corporation of America and the former president of CBS, said that audience size didn’t tell the story about TV’s influence. If, he said, what Mr. Gore called the right-wing media’s “echo chamber” affects the mainstream media via noisy accusations of liberal bias, then the ability to create its own echo is some form of influence.

“When it’s fragmented, as the media landscape is now, it’s possible to have a voice that is greater in effect than the size of the audience you generate,” he said. “If you’re a reporter these days, or a Washington pundit or politician, you can get on all these cable news channels with fractional audiences and generate influence that seems to be beyond the scale of your audience to a laughable degree.”

The prime example, he said, was Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly, who has achieved a fame that would seem to belie TV numbers that are dwarfed by network news. Mr. O’Reilly reaches two million a night on average, compared to seven and a half million for CBS’s Dan Rather. His latest book, Who’s Looking Out for You?, is the New York Times No. 1 best-seller. Even if book sales don’t match network-TV numbers, cable, books and print synergize into a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts, said Mr. Stringer. It wouldn’t matter if Mr. Gore’s network matched only the viewership of C-Span, he said, because it could still have an impact.

“Influence is influence,” Mr. Stringer said. “It may be a small voice, but it’s more likely to be heard in this environment than ever. C-Span has an audience, too, you know. I was on C-Span, and I couldn’t believe the number of people who stopped me and said, ‘Hey, I saw you on C-Span.’ In a media society, any exposure is better than none.”

But Mr. Gore has some huge hurdles before he can transmit a minute of television. The first one is a lot of money.

“It is estimated that there were losses amounting to a billion dollars before Fox News turned a profit,” said Mr. Hume. “We’re talking about a grand-scale investment. If you start thinking what it could cost to start from complete scratch--with nothing to support you--we’re talking about a truly staggering sum of money, and the losses would have to be eaten along the way.”

And, Mr. Hume added, it’s not clear that any amount of money will help Mr. Gore if his view of Fox News is so fundamentally flawed.

“If what he’s trying to provide is left-wing editorial, I’ll guarantee you this: It wouldn’t compete with us,” he said. “It wouldn’t compete with anybody. It may be relevant to what they think we’re doing, but I doubt it’s relevant to what we’re truly doing.”

For Mr. Stringer, all the cable-news noise is further evidence that the news center has not held. As the former head of CBS from 1988 to 1995, and a former head of CBS News, he said the shift from “objective” news to “balanced” news had been a slippery slope that pointed to the future of media, from which there was probably no return.

“I once argued with a former news president that ‘balance’ is a dangerous word, because you could run a story called Hitler: Right or Wrong?” he said. “The job is to go after the objective truth and come to a conclusion. The fragmented media has changed that--the nature of music, the nature of movies. We don’t sit around the hearth and share the same thoughts any more, so it’s a perfect world for this kind of environment. Is something lost? Yes, I think taking your facts as presented and coming to your own conclusions felt like a healthier environment, but it’s a thing of the past.”

To Mr. Gore and his dream of starting his own TV news channel, Mr. Stringer had this to say: “You have nothing to lose but your loneliness.”

“It means ‘FUCK THE BULLSHIT IT’S TIME TO THROW DOWN,’” explained Mr. Frey, a fledgling filmmaker turned author whose first book, A Million Little Pieces, will be published in April by Nan A. Talese/Doubleday. Film director Gus Van Sant has compared Mr. Frey to “a young-guard Eggers”--which means Dave Eggers had better be prepared to, you know, throw down.

“The Eggers book pissed me off,” said Mr. Frey, referring to the best-selling and critically beloved A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, published in 2000. He was sitting in a black leather Eames chair in his 1,800-square-foot Tribeca loft on a recent afternoon, dressed in a pale blue T-shirt and green medical scrub pants. “Because a book that I thought was mediocre was being hailed as the best book written by the best writer of my generation,” he said. “Fuck that. And fuck him and fuck anybody that says that. I don’t give a fuck what they think of me. I’m going to try to write the best book of my generation and I’m going to try to be the best writer.”

Mr. Frey has thinning, curly hair, a slightly doughy build and a Southern California drawl. “And maybe I’ll fall flat on my fucking face,” he conceded, “but I’ll fall flat on my fucking face trying to do it.”

Mr. Frey (pronounced “fry”) wasn’t drunk when he said all this. In fact, he’s a recovering crackhead, glue-sniffer, gas-huffer and alcoholic whose forthcoming memoir begins with the writer having fallen, well, flat on his fucking face--in this case, off a fire escape. After a two-week crack bender (the culmination of a three-year addiction), Mr. Frey is scraped off the pavement by some friends and sent by plane to his clueless parents, who then deliver the ravaged carcass of their son to the famous Minnesota rehab clinic, Hazelden. Thus begins A Million Little Pieces, the gripping raw story of a then 23-year-old Mr. Frey, who cobbles his life back together while angrily rejecting the 12-step program in favor of his own style of Taoism.

Seven years after those incidents, Mr. Frey wrote about it. It took him 10 months and, after selling it last year, he moved to New York from Los Angeles in August.

The book is a relentless, halogen-lit confessional littered with self-loathing addicts, tortured souls, weeping and wailing and smoking and fighting and lots and lots of stomach bile. There is a cast of tragic misfits: a Las Vegas mobster, a former boxing champion, a black Southern judge and a wisp of a crackhead-prostitute named Lilly, Mr. Frey’s love interest.

A Million Little Pieces does read a bit like Charles Bukowski, had the Beat boozer been a suburban rich kid kicking the rock in Hazelden. Kirkus called it “startling, at times pretentious in its self-regard, but ultimately breathtaking.” Doubleday is printing 50,000 copies, a confident print run for a first work. It’s not the sort of book one associates with the genteel Nan Talese. “It’s not a Nan book,” said Sean McDonald, the editor who acquired the manuscript for $50,000. “The grittiness is different. The way he writes is different. [Ian] McEwan isn’t the first person that comes to mind when comparing him to someone.”

Ms. Talese, who publishes best-selling authors like Mr. McEwan and Pat Conroy, was skeptical of a “drug book.” But she was won over after reading the first chapter.

“I thought, ‘Oh well, this will take a few seconds,’” Ms. Talese said. “It was the same reaction when we brought it to the acquisition committee.”

The book opens with Mr. Frey waking up on the floor of an airplane with four front teeth missing, a hole in his face, his nose broken and his eyes swollen shut—and itching for booze. Mr. Conroy called it “the War and Peace of addiction.”

Mr. Frey said he originally shopped the book as a work of fiction, but Ms. Talese and Co. declined to publish it as such. He said he hoped Ms. Talese’s imprint would deflect the characterization of his book as part of the sentimental recovery genre. “That imprint lends a lot of credibility to what otherwise might be considered a recovery memoir. Nan’s not in the business of publishing that bullshit,” he said.

Early on, he turned down the services of one agent who wanted to sell him as a recovery guru. The agent, he said, “went ballistic over it, called and said, ‘We’re going to turn you into an industry.’ I said, ‘What are you talking about?’ ‘You know who Deepak Chopra is?’ I was like, ‘Yeah.’ ‘You’re going to be the Deepak Chopra of recovery. We’re going to start a whole line of self-help books with your name on it. We’re going to publish your own version of the Tao. We’re going to send you out on speaking tours. We’re going to build a religion around you.’ I was like, ‘You must be fucking kidding me!’ I very much admired the enthusiasm, but it was bizarre.”

Despite his literary self-regard, Mr. Frey agreed to be interviewed for an ABC-TV John Stossel special about addiction, set to air in March.

“I guess I’m the poster boy for unconventional addiction thought,” said Mr. Frey. “They were trying to lead me into saying certain things. They kept trying to get me to swear. Stossel was like, ‘I heard you swear a lot. I heard you’re feisty. Why won’t you swear for me?’ Because my mom and my wife asked me not to. ‘Well forget about them, I need you to swear!’ So I was like, ‘O.K., fuck you!’

“I’m terrified of what they’re going to do to me now,” he said, sucking on a plastic nicotine inhaler, his last vice since quitting cigarettes a year ago. “They’re going to cut me up.”

Mr. Frey likes to think of himself as coming from the old Norman Mailer “I Can Kick Your Ass” school of writers.

“My wife calls me a savage,” he said. “Because I eat with my hands. Because my best friends are my dogs. And I like pit bulls. And N.W.A. And I love boxing. I think boxing is beautiful. The purity of fighting is a beautiful thing.

“Writers aren’t like that anymore,” he said. “They’re all these guys who have fucking masters’ degrees and are so ‘sophisticated’ and ‘educated’ and … well, I’m not a guy with a master’s degree. I think I’m sophisticated. I can write big fat books. But I’m not an effete little guy.”

As he spoke, his Swiss mountain dog, Preacher, began humping his pit bull, Bella. Mr. Frey got up and pulled them apart.

“My favorite boxer is Vernon Forrest,” he said, referring to the welterweight champion. “He’s fast as fuck and he hits real hard. That’s his skill. And he doesn’t get hit that much.”

Mr. Frey’s agent, Kassie Evashevski of Brillstein-Grey, likes to call her client “authentic.” But while Mr. Frey did go to jail for three months in Ohio in 1994 for assaulting a police officer, he doesn’t exactly come from the wrong side of 8 Mile. He grew up in an upper-class suburb in Michigan. His father was the vice president of Herman Miller, the publicly traded furniture company, and later headed the international division of Whirlpool.

Mr. Frey attended Denison University in Ohio, where he dealt drugs, and did some heroic partying while majoring in English and film.

“He didn’t get into Harvard, so he said, ‘Fuck Yale’--even though he got in there--‘I’m going to go have some fucking fun,’” said Mark Hyatt, a former college friend and Mr. Frey’s onetime business partner in a production company in Los Angeles. The way Mr. Frey partied, said Mr. Hyatt, “he made everybody else look like they were Christian Scientists.”

Mr. Frey, however, said he never actually applied to Yale. Or Harvard. While his friend’s faulty recall may have been a harmless mistake, it’s also telling: Mr. Frey’s closest friends still describe him as somewhat mysterious. For one, few people knew the extent to which he was addicted to drugs—least of all his parents. In his book, Mr. Frey describes his childhood as one long drug haze: starting at 10, when he first got drunk while his parents “were out at the symphony or at some charity function,” continuing through high school, when he was doing “coke and acid and crystal meth,” and all the way through college, where “I was in Heaven. I blacked out every night, always had a bloody nose from snorting coke all the time.” When his parents sent him to crack-free Europe after school, he started freebasing cocaine.

To this day, Mr. Frey is known by three different names, depending on what period of his life someone met him. After his father moved to Brazil to become head of the Latin American division of Whirlpool, Mr. Frey “enlisted himself in the soccer program as ‘Jaime Frey from Brazil,’” said his father, Robert Frey. “They called him Jimmy in high school, Jaime in college and James in California.”

“I still think he hides a lot,” said Kevin Kendrick, an actor and friend in L.A. “He plays ‘Mystery Guy.’”

When Mr. Frey moved to Los Angeles to work in film, he became known among his friends for throwing huge parties revolving around boxing matches on TV.

“He’d invite homeless people he’d met,” said Mr. Hyatt. “He enjoyed mixing them up with actors and agents and watching them all drink, even though he never did. All these entertainment people who weren’t even fans of boxing were over at his house getting drunk and--he’s not pushing it on people, but he’s very at ease with the fact that he doesn’t drink and other people do.”

Until last year, Mr. Frey lived in Venice, Calif., writing, producing and directing films. He sold his first screenplay, Curious, in 1997, which got made into Kissing a Fool, starring David Schwimmer. In 2001, Mr. Frey married a 30-year-old advertising executive named Maya. She works on the Time Warner Cable account for Shepardson, Stern & Kaminsky.

They seem to live well. Hanging on one wall of the loft were two Picassos, two Matisses, a Dalí and a watercolor by Henry Miller. Mr. Frey said he maxed out a number of credit cards buying them over the years, in Chicago, Paris and L.A. (He said he paid off the credit cards “a long, long, long time ago.”) At one point, two Latina housekeepers were folding Mr. Frey’s white bed linens. He said it was a one-time indulgence.

While he was in L.A., Mr. Frey acquired a number of tattoos, his own personal footnotes. “I’ve seen you glance at this one,” he said, displaying a row of letters on the inside of his left wrist: S.P.C.D.H.C. “Simplicity, Patience, Compassion, Discipline, Honesty, Courage,” he said. “Words to live by. When I see that, it reminds me that these things embody the person I want to be.”

He pulled back his shirt to reveal others. “That’s a symbol of birth and rebirth,” he said, pointing to a small phoenix. “That is a Taoist symbol of life. I have my wife’s initials on my chest. I very deliberately scar myself so that I remember these things. However twisted my logic may be, by scarring myself, I’m making a commitment to myself. I’m committed to the things on my wrist.”

Mr. Frey keeps a few other messages to himself on the wall in front of the iMac where he writes. They read like Nike ad copy: “BE BOLD.” “Life is hard. Be harder.” “Bare Your Soul.” “A page a day. Anything less is unacceptable you punk-ass-bitch-motherfucker. Anything less is unacceptable.”

Mr. Frey didn’t like being compared to Mr. Eggers or David Foster Wallace. It miffed him--though he’d convinced himself it was ultimately a good thing.

“I think my approach to telling a story couldn’t be more different than theirs is,” he said. “I think they’re full of bells and whistles and tricks and being cute and being ironic and being all this shit. To be honest, I don’t understand it. It’s not how I think or how I feel. I think [Mr. Van Sant] thinks of those guys as sort of being the leading writers of my age. Eggers and I are exactly the same age. If there’s a guy out there who is ‘The Guy’ of my generation, it’s Eggers. In that sense, I was honored by the comparison.” (He also said Mr. Van Sant has expressed interest in directing a film version of his memoir.)

Mr. Frey’s work isn’t really generational per se. He’s not especially funny--sardonic, maybe, but not in an ironic way. He doesn’t allude to, say, Gilligan’s Island or MTV. In fact, his story seems to exist in a vacuum, without allusion to current events or historical context. That’s partly because the book takes place in rural Minnesota. But it’s also a self-conscious style.

“All that matters is what the feelings are and what the events are,” he explained over lunch one afternoon at the Socrates diner in Tribeca. “It’s not about all this trickery. When I think about writing, I have a very simple formula: Where was I? Who was I with? What happened? And how did it make me feel? Those are the only important things. It doesn’t matter if I can write a sentence that’s a page long or if I have 30 pages of footnotes in the back or people chuckle at the introduction page. I want to move people and have them understand what I felt, what I went through and what I felt other people were feeling and going through.”

While he’s read Jonathan Franzen and Zadie Smith--he had about 300 books haphazardly stacked against a wall in his loft--he is stridently uninterested in being among them. “I don’t give a fuck what Jonathan Safran whatever-his-name does or what David Foster Wallace does. I don’t give a fuck what any of these people do. I don’t hang out with them, I’m not friends with them, I’m not part of the literati. I think of myself as outside of this publishing culture.”

But Mr. Frey does appear to share one thing with Mr. Eggers: an acute sensitivity to criticism. “ Kirkus called me pretentious. Am I pretentious in my self-regard because I’m serious about what I do? Because I’m moving against the trend of irony? I don’t know. I hope I’m a bullet in the heart of that bullshit.”

Tick.

Nearly a year after his retirement, Don Hewitt, the 83-year-old inventor of 60 Minutes, is talking with PBS about creating a new project-an hour-long program consisting of three separate documentary segments.

In other words, Mr. Hewitt's new idea is … 60 Minutes.

"With general reality being shoved aside by NBC, ABC and CBS for contrived reality TV, public television is in a position to bring back CBS-style news," Mr. Hewitt said by phone from his office at West 57th Street. "In that regard, I think an hour of television a week, devoted to two, three or four well-crafted, judiciously edited documentaries on a variety of subjects would be a winner."

Technically, Mr. Hewitt can't pull the trigger on any new projects until his CBS contract expires in June, and he said he doesn't intend to.

But he's ready to dream. And so, he said, he's taken three existing documentaries-"one shocking, one entertaining, one poignant," he said, declining to elaborate-and edited them into an hour-long test pilot. Mr. Hewitt said he gave CBS parent Viacom a first look at his project, in keeping with the terms of his contract. They passed on it, he said.

"I want to do it 60 Minutes–style," said Mr. Hewitt. "I want to take the great moments from documentaries, just like we took great moments from our documentaries and made them 60 Minutes pieces. And I think there's a world of that stuff out there."

As the network newsmagazines fight for air time and the cable-news outlets go on 24-hour tabloid chimney alert, where's well-meaning documentary news to go? Well, PBS. Considering the shrinking air time for network news, PBS could find a huge infusion of available talent in the coming years-for instance, Nightline host Ted Koppel and his longtime executive producer Tom Bettag, who will depart ABC News in December. No, they're not announcing anything, but Mr. Bettag did say PBS had great potential to make up for what's been lost at the networks.

"There is a real opportunity for PBS, in that the networks are under enormous pressure from advertisers to deliver an 18-to-49 audience," said Mr. Bettag, "which is not the easiest news audience to have. If PBS could find a way to deliver news to the 49-plus audience, it would be a real service to the citizenry."

But anyone who wants to create a news show for PBS faces byzantine issues: inconsistent time slots across member stations; in-fighting over political bias; and the need to constantly kiss up to corporate sponsors, who aren't exactly in huge supply right now. Just ask Pat Mitchell, PBS' chief executive, who announced she would step down next year, after suffering the feudal system for five years. That included political heat from Bush Education Secretary Margaret Spellings over the appearance of some lesbian moms who were set to appear in passing on the kids' show Postcards from Buster. (The show was never aired, angering liberals in turn.)

And as it stands, PBS already features a slew of public-affairs programs, including NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, Tavis Smiley, Washington Week, Frontline and Wide Angle.

Also: Does anyone really care to watch quality news?

Jim Lehrer, host of NewsHour, attempted to answer that question at a PBS Showcase Meeting in Las Vegas on April 12.

"I hear what some people are saying," he said to an audience of 800 public-television employees. "With all of these other outlets, broadcast and otherwise, who needs public television?"

Mr. Lehrer argued that there was "an increasing need-and demand-within the public for assistance in sorting through it all."

As it stands, he observed, News Hour had three million viewers, "significantly outdrawing CNN, Fox News and MSNBC in our time period."

In July 2003, this incarnation of NYTV began with a story about the future of 60 Minutes, the great ticker of TV news. So it ends with another.

We want to believe, we really do. In fact, we'd like to officially declare long-form investigative journalism narrated by newscasters who add ponderous weight to subjects worthy of ponderous weight the new black. But it's probably more like the new burnt umber.

Close enough. Tonight, Dan Rather puts his reporter's cap back on and investigates celebrity poker on 60 Minutes Wednesday. [WCBS, 2, 8 p.m.]

Thursday, April 21

% What does the future of television hold for Triumph the Insult Comic Dog? Where can we envision his career 10 years from now?

It's a question that only his stage hand can answer.

"For Triumph, he ends up in Branson when he gets tired of touring," Robert Smigel said by phone on Tuesday, April 19. "He wants to get away from the camera, become more of an entrepreneur, produce game shows and salad dressing."

For charity, like Paul Newman?

"A little of it for charity. A small portion," he said. "Hopefully he'll be stinking up someone else's hand."

As for himself, Mr. Smigel had great dreams for the future of television.

"I just want a wider screen," he said. "I don't think the screen is wide enough."

Tonight, no screen is wide enough to capture the unbridled joy of The O.C.'s Seth Cohen (actor Adam Brody) when indie-rockers Death Cab for Cutie make an appearance. It's his dream come true to see those guys!

We don't even know what we're talking about. [Fox, 5, 8 p.m.]

Friday, April 22

& Now that we think about it, PBS has always been kind of punk rock. We recall some lyrics from our favorite song by late 80's punk band the Mice, out of Cleveland, Ohio. It's called "Public Television":

The White House calls it a communist threat

But they ain't seen the last of it yet

Cuz I got this goddamn cerebral contraction

And I can't get no satisfaction

I need public television …

Unfortunately for Mr. Lehrer, The Mice broke up. But maybe he can get Death Cab for Cutie to cover it for the NewsHour theme song. Tonight, the most subversive documentary programming on network TV: America's Funniest Home Videos. [WABC, 7, 8 p.m.]

Saturday, April 23

* To the future captain of the NYTV column, we bequeath the 12-inch Sanyo TV set with an old episode of Tucker Carlson Unfiltered in the VHS player.

Sorry about that. [WNET, 13, 12:30 a.m.]

Sunday, April 24

o Enough about white men who read news off teleprompters!

Let's move on to white men directing lesbian TV sex dramas, as reported by special correspondent Suzy Hansen. [Warning: If you're Education Secretary Margaret Spellings, DO NOT READ THIS!]

The nationwide sexual enlightenment thanks to Showtime's The L Word continues.

In the April 17 episode, fans watched as Latina character Carmen (Sarah Shahi) got out of the shower and straddled her recovering-straight lover Jenny (Mia Kirshner), who was sitting on the toilet. "I need to pee, too," Carmen whispered. And so she did.

Shower scenes are nothing new for premium-cable drama. But a golden-shower scene?

"That was sooooo gross," one poster wrote, alarmed, on Showtime's official message board, which was inundated with postings on the subject. Other viewers were mystified. "I guess that I am a total loser because I don't understand the bathroom scene," another thread began. On Afterellen.com, a commentary site for lesbian and bisexual women, the recap of the scene read: "Either Carmen is fucking Jenny while Jenny pees, or Carmen is peeing while Jenny pees."

According to Ilene Chaiken, the show's creator, there was no either/or about it. "I'm not all that well-versed in water sports," Ms. Chaiken said. "But this is a uniquely lesbian sex act. First, [the director Tony Goldwyn] thought, 'O.K., she's peeing between her legs and that's sexy.' Then, when he realized that she was using the peeing as part of the sex act-that it was direct stimulation-that blew him away."

Besides being directed by Mr. Goldwyn, the episode was written by another man, David Stenn. Both have worked on L Word episodes before. But viewers prone to broad generalizations and gross stereotypes could have been forgiven for suspecting the influence of Y chromosomes on the show: Besides the two-on-the-toilet business, the other sex scenes were unusually long, glowy and beatific in that late-night soft-core way. Phalluses figured prominently in the plot-the bisexual character, Alice, begged her partner, Dana, to wear a strap-on, and a sex-store owner rhapsodized about the many variations of dildos. And a pregnant character had an irrational breakdown that was later attributed to "hormones."

Ms Chaiken said that many women, including herself, had a hand in shaping the golden-shower show. She wouldn't say who had come up with the idea for the toilet scene.

She did, however, note Mr. Goldwyn's curiosity about the act.

"There is a thing that happens when straight men direct the show," Ms. Chaiken said. "Straight men take an approach to it that's different than women. They get really fascinated by the nuances of lesbian sex. They say, 'Oh my god, is that possible?' That's happened with Tony, and it's happened with Burr Steers, another director. Tony just gets kind of thrilled and delighted-but not in a salacious way."

(Mr. Goldwyn referred all questions about the episode to Ms. Chaiken.)

Ms. Chaiken laughed dismissively at the idea that a masculine viewpoint had affected the scene or the show. "I don't ascribe it to a particular male sensibility," she said. "And the hormonal breakdown scene was a lesbian conception."

-Suzy Hansen

[Showtime, 48, 9 p.m.]

Monday, April 25

$ These are godawful times for the TV news business-we were always so depressed at NYTV!-so it's easy to conclude that it's all downhill from here. Looking for answers-for closure, really-we turned to former NBC News anchor and all-around TV legend Tom Brokaw for some wisdom.

"For all of the complaints about Fox, cable-news feeding frenzies, reality overload, remember this: There's also Discovery, History, the Beeb, more Sunday talk, Lehrer, Frontline, C-Span, etc.," said Mr. Brokaw, via e-mail on Monday, April 18. "The viewer also has a role. Remote controls have channel selection and off-on switches."

Mr. Brokaw added that he was currently working on three documentaries, but he couldn't talk about them yet. However, he was departing this week for Afghanistan, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia.

Thanks for that report, Mr. Brokaw.

Tonight on NBC, the original Apprentice-that is, Brian Williams on NBC Nightly News. Is it just us, or does Mr. Williams seem like the genetic result of crossing Jimmy Stewart, Paul Lynde and a tangerine? [WNBC, 4, 6:30 p.m.]

Tuesday, April 26

$ Tonight, you can turn on Late Night with Conan O'Brien and just let the laughter and tears come pouring out. We know we will. [WNBC, 4, 11:35 p.m.]

And with that, our time at NYTV is up. We're folding up the bunny ears, packing up the Roone Arledge autobiography and skedaddling. Godspeed, Peter Jennings.

He wasn't joking. But he did add a caveat: "I can't speak for British TV."

In fact, Mr. C.K.'s HBO pilot is based squarely on precedent: It will be a half-hour situation comedy, complete with a kitchen-table-and-chairs set, multiple cameras and a live studio audience.

But Mr. C.K.-a balding, affable guy with a fringe of red hair, a goatee and a perpetually stifled smirk-seems to have faith that the it's-not-TV-it's-HBO ethos can redeem even TV's most flagging, formula-choked genre. As the writer, director and star of the cable network's first attempt at the form, Mr. C.K. said he saw the potential to finally get the sitcom right.

"No commercials," he explained. "That's a seismic difference. We have no limits and we have no markets. It's unbelievable."

If Mr. C.K. (whose last name is the phonetic approximation of his actual name, Szekely) sounded enthusiastic-even manic-he had reason: His television pilot wraps on Wednesday, April 13. Five days after that, his wife is due to deliver his second child. Three days after that, he'll record a half-hour standup show as part of HBO's One Night Stand comedy series. After 20 years working as a comic, the former comedy writer for Conan O'Brien and Chris Rock appeared to be on the edge of a professional breakthrough.

The model for Mr. C.K.'s not-yet-titled sitcom-which centers on a lower-middle-class muffler repairman named Louis, his nurse wife and their 4-year-old daughter-was Norman Lear's All in the Family, which ran on CBS starting in 1971. The aim was to recapture the spirit of Mr. Lear's comedies, stage plays that tried to address hard truths about family life in changing times.

"In some ways, we're going back to Norman Lear," Mr. C.K. said, "in the way we're going to be able to open up these issues and let characters be flawed and really show true circumstances, and do it from a sincere, romantic angle instead of a pomo, fake, anti-comedy angle.

"That's a step back in a good way," he continued, "and then a step forward is an incredible shaking up of the story structure through HBO that's never, ever been done, language-wise and story-wise."

As far as CBS was concerned, the format could stay in the Carter administration. The Tiffany network declined to pick up Saint Louie, Mr. C.K.'s first attempt at a network version of his sitcom project.

As it stands, HBO hasn't officially picked the show up either. But the program's chances are considerably better given that it has no other pilots against which to compete. It will be a purely qualitative judgment on HBO's part.

"It's getting back to writing human beings," said Tracy Katsky, the head of HBO Independent Productions, who gave Mr. C.K. his shot.

Mr. C.K. was one of the original writers on Late Night with Conan O'Brien, where he came up with such bits as the staring contest. In 1999, he won an Emmy for his work on The Chris Rock Show, which led to an unusual reputation as the black man's white comedian. He wrote, directed and produced the cult blaxploitation flick Pootie Tang, which starred actor Lance Crouther speaking a fake jive language that Mr. C.K. made up. (Example: "Baby, I'm gonna sine your pitty on the runny kine.")

When Carolyn Strauss, president of HBO Entertainment, announced plans to start programming half-hour blocks, Mr. C.K. decided he wanted to be first. His bold idea was to make it an experiment in non-experimentation.

"I don't want to have alternate realities and weird HBO stuff to improve it," he said. "I just want to do a good sitcom."

For Mr. C.K., that meant using a tiny, simple apartment set modeled on the one in The Honeymooners, rather than the large-scale, throw-pillow-strewn pad used on a show like Friends. He said it focused the drama and made the audience laughter louder and more overwhelming.

He was also shooting it on traditional videotape instead of film.

"It's going to have this familiar look," he said. "'Oh! I might be watching Roseanne or even Saved by the Bell.' It's like you're watching Saved by the Bell and all of a sudden somebody says, 'God is dead,' and you say, 'What the fuck is going on here?'"

Without advertisements, Mr. C.K. said, the show could escape network narrative structures. In a traditional network sitcom, he said, "you have to have a premise that within the first 10 seconds you say, 'How are we going to do a surprise birthday party?' 'Well, you just pretend that blah blah blah.' And then you have to get to the act break …. And the act break is: 'Oh, no, he thinks it's not a birthday party-he thinks we're having an affair.' And that will get you through the longest act of the night.

"It just doesn't exist with us; we get to just tell stories," he continued.

The result, in essence, is the White Stripes formula for rock 'n' roll put to sitcom-making: strip down, simplify and voilà, everything old is new again. Mr. C.K. may be the first of his type-the Lenny Bruce–inspired alt-comics who came out of the late 1980's Boston standup scene-to gravitate to mainstream material. Unlike other veterans of that period, Janeane Garofalo or David Cross, Mr. C.K. eventually pushed his standup material to the standard-issue sitcom subjects, from child-rearing to bill-paying.

One of Mr. C.K.'s best bits has been about going broke after his bank charged him a fee for not having enough money in the bank-a theme he explores ad absurdum.

"You ever have negative money?" he asked at a standup gig in Kansas City recently. "Negative $10. That means I don't even have no money now. I wish I did! I wish I didn't have anything. I wish I just had nothing, but I have less than that. I don't have none. I have not-10. If it's free, I can't fucking afford it! Somebody comes up to me, 'Take this, it's free.' 'Fuck, that costs nothing, I can't afford that-it's more than I have.' I've got to raise 10 bucks to be broke. That's not good. That's bad."

In another rapid-fire bit he performed on Late Night with Conan O'Brien in 2004, Mr. C.K. tells a cautionary tale of why it's O.K. not to answer your small child's every question about life. He starts off trying to respond to his daughter's question "Why is it hot?", followed by dozens of more whys. When he can't summon the hard science of why, he has to tell her, "Well, I just didn't pay attention when they taught me this stuff in school. I really didn't listen-I didn't think it was important. 'Why?' Because I smoked a lot of pot and I just didn't really have any values. 'Why?' Because my parents didn't raise me very well. They just didn't pay attention to me. 'Why?' Because they just had sex in a car and here I am and they resent me for taking their youth. 'Why?' Because they had bad parents and they had no moral compass and it just keeps going like that. 'Why?'

"Because there's no God and we're alone and there's no point to anything!" he finally yells.

Mr. C.K.'s sitcom lifts from his routine, which is about his own life. When he pitched his idea to network executives, he said awful things about his family.

"I was being pretty harsh in the room meeting with these networks, saying, 'My baby's a fucking asshole and won't let me have sex with my wife,'" he said. "They loved it."

In the HBO sitcom, the family lives with crushing debt and the prickly, unhappy realities of child-rearing on a low income. It's not exactly how he lives as a comic in Los Angeles, but it's based loosely on his early life as a would-be auto mechanic, and it's set in a town near where he grew up in Newton, Mass. Mr. C.K. was raised by a single mother, as one of four kids, and he said he felt bad that his mother had to watch bad television when she got home from work.

"I remember thinking in fifth grade, 'I have to get inside that box and make this shit better,'" he said. "Because she deserves this. It made me mad that the shows were so bad. People have a right to relax and watch theater about themselves that makes them reflect and feel and have a good time doing it."

Mr. C.K.'s attention to detail made it sound like the script was lifted not only from his own life, but from Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed.

"We've done research on this stuff," he said. "I make about $118 a week, she makes $1,200, and because of the crushing, cold-assed, careless debt of American corporations, we always have to pay our bills at the check-cashing place … but we're not trying to get rich quick and we're not complaining about it, we're just living with it. And we're surrounded by fast food and beer, and we're trying to be healthy and keep our daughter out of it."

None of which meant that Mr. C.K. was interested in hashing over partisan politics per se. He just wanted a character like Doug Heffernan in CBS's The King of Queens to be more like a real bus driver. He said the lesson he drew from pitching his own version of reality to networks was that they weren't interested in anything real.

"When you pitch to networks and you say, 'The guy's a bus driver,' they say, 'He's not a loser though, right? What are his dreams? Is he a writer on the side?' 'No.' 'He's just a fucking bus driver? But is he the best bus driver?' 'Not really.' 'Did they win the lottery?' 'No!'

"They don't like to feel the discomfort of life, and they think that that's what people don't want to see," he said.

What It's Really Like

If you can't express issues on the television screen, then you can always throw a wing-ding in Washington, D.C.

Actress Patricia Heaton, who plays Debra Barone, wife of Raymond on CBS's Everybody Loves Raymond, was scheduled to host a $250-a-ticket event on Tuesday, April 12, to support her favorite cause: opposition to abortion.

According to an invitation obtained by The Observer, Ms. Heaton, the honorary chair for a group called Feminists for Life, will rub elbows with Republican Senators Rick Santorum and Sam Brownback and a slew of Republican Congressmen to push messages like "Refuse to Choose" and "Women Deserve Better," both trademarked expressions of the organization.

"Pro-life in Hollywood," the invite reads. "What It's Really Like."

A spokeswoman for the group said Ms. Heaton didn't want to comment on the event, but she hasn't been shy about pushing her pro-life views in more noble venues-like Entertainment Tonight. On March 23, she opined on the Terri Schiavo case, telling host Mark Steines, "As an actor, I visualize these situations when I'm doing a role."

Ms. Heaton's visualizations appeared to affirm her views.

"If my kid was in this position, I would never pull his feeding tube," she said. "I would never starve my son. I would never dehydrate my son. Never."

That's … entertainment!

SOURCES: WARREN BEATTY TO BLOG!

The Observer has learned that Warren Beatty, the 68-year-old actor and director, will likely join a lineup of liberal all-stars who will "group blog" on a Web site to be launched next month by columnist Arianna Huffington.

"I probably will," Mr. Beatty said, on the phone from his production office in Los Angeles.

The "Huffington Report," as Ms. Huffington has dubbed it, will also feature such boldface bloggers as Senator Jon Corzine, David Geffen, Viacom co-chief Tom Freston, Barry Diller, Tina Brown and Gwyneth Paltrow. If the name seems to echo that of the Drudge Report-the mega-site operated by the rightward-tilting unofficial editorial director of America's news cycle, Matt Drudge-well, it's supposed to. And Mr. Beatty approved of that.

"I applaud the effort to tell the side of the story that Arianna Huffington seems to be engaged in," he said. Mr. Beatty was all too aware, he said, of the power Mr. Drudge has to steer the American media.

"I would say he does a very industrious job of finding the things that he feels could be exploited to further the political agenda of the far right," said Mr. Beatty.

For his part, Mr. Drudge was deeply skeptical of a Web site operated by Hollywood liberals. And he rebuffed Mr. Beatty's characterization of his site as slanted toward Republicans.

"I still refuse to be put into the category of feeding completely Republican talking points," Mr. Drudge said. "That's ridiculous. If they're accusing me of doing Republican, we can assume all Warren Beatty is going to do is be putting out Democratic talking points.

"I look forward to the Warren Beatty News Network," Mr. Drudge cracked, before asking: "So they really are serious about this, aren't they?"

The Hollywooders appear to be. The partisan left has slowly been constructing outlets to counterbalance the partisan right's perceived influence in radio and television (Air America; former Vice President Al Gore's TV channel). Ms. Huffington, Mr. Beatty and Co., however, are aiming not at the margins but at the center of the media scrum: the news cycle itself, now being deftly nudged, goosed and spun by Mr. Drudge-daily, hourly, instantly.

"As the day follows the night, Drudge will inspire its opposite," Mr. Beatty said.

Arianna and Clyde aren't the only ones gunning for Mr. Drudge. On April 6, New York–based Gawker Media plans to launch Sploid.com, a British-style tabloid site meant to compile breaking news in a similar style to the Drudge Report. Gawker's publisher, Nick Denton, described its politics as "anarcho-capitalist," pitted only against "all the lazy incumbents who thrive on hypocrisy."

A screenshot of Sploid, provided by Mr. Denton, showed a fairly literal interpretation of a U.K. tabloid sheet, complete with corpulent fonts and bludgeoning (yet merry!) headlines in a style seemingly ripped from Rupert Murdoch's publishing playbook.

"We want to occupy the space between the whiny left and the ranting right," said Mr. Denton, who said he considered Mr. Drudge a brilliant news editor whose site was likely unstoppable for the foreseeable future.

However, his own project-which will be edited by ex-Gawker editor Choire Sicha on the East Coast and a blogger named Ken Lane on the West Coast-would avoid what he saw as Mr. Drudge's weaknesses, he said.

"It's not a wonder that newspaper front pages have their agenda set by him," Mr. Denton said, but "he has some blind spots. Occasionally, there's a story that takes on the Bush administration that's a good story. Occasionally there's a funny, interesting, scandalous story that he won't touch because it offends his audience. And he won't take on the churches."

He described Mr. Drudge's recent lead story featuring the Pope lying in state above the word "Peace" as the "same reverential coverage of every newspaper across the planet."

Mr. Drudge took issue with the criticism. "Oh, he would put 'Hell'?" he asked. "I mean, c'mon, this is small-time. How do I take seriously 'Sploid,' 'Gawker,' 'Wonkette'? How do you begin to take this seriously? It's like 'Supercalifragalisticexpialadocious: This is just in!' … Too cute by half."

In June, Mr. Drudge celebrates 10 years on the Web, having long since become the first draft of daily journalism in America. His site provides a pungent, sneering feed of the conservative, populist media mindset, whether serving as a launching pad for Swift Boat Veterans for Truth or mulling the weekend box office for Sin City and its alignment with the Pope's death.

Mr. Drudge has stayed on top by being essential-a "utility," he said-and always being there for his readers, day and night. He operates from anywhere he chooses, most recently from his new "newsroom," a brand-new 2005 Mustang GT that he outfitted with a broadband connection. (He engaged in a recent instant-messenger conversation discussing his would-be challengers while sitting in the parking lot of a Chinese restaurant in his hometown of Miami.)

Until now, his dominance has never really been challenged by other independent operators. Other Web efforts have mainly focused on a single area of interest, be it Hollywood or Washington, instead of trying to be one all-encompassing clearinghouse. But here come Ms. Huffington and Mr. Denton with a new format to realign the factual firmament with a breaking-news zag for Mr. Drudge's zig-hoping, ultimately, to become the news media's leading sensibility.

Mr. Drudge said he doubted the market for news links would support more players.

"I don't think that need is there," he said. "I think I fill that need."

Mr. Drudge observed that Ms. Huffington had "tons of charm and humor," but he questioned whether she and her powerful Hollywood friends had the stamina or wherewithal to keep up with him.

"This isn't a dinner party, darling," he said. " This is the beast! This is the Internet beast, which is all-consuming, as anyone knows who works in this business."

It's little wonder that Mr. Drudge accuses his adversaries of hanging out at parties. He said he once met Mr. Beatty at a book party in Los Angeles co-hosted by Susan Estrich celebrating a publication by lawyer Burt Fields.

"When he met me, he said it was the biggest thing since meeting John Wayne," recalled Mr. Drudge, who called Mr. Beatty an "extreme charmer. Extreme."

He added that Mr. Beatty's wife, actress Annette Bening, glowered at him and asked, "'How's Sidney Blumenthal?' with her Being Julia look." (She was referring to the former Clinton White house aide who once sued Mr. Drudge for defamation.)

Mr. Drudge was dismissive of competitors, including the contingent he liked to call "Drudge Babies."

"The road is littered with Wonkettes who have come and gone," he laughed. "They lose interest and/or they can't make it work. Or burn out."

But Mr. Drudge was still pugnacious. Just name a popular Web site-then count the seconds it takes for Mr. Drudge to dismiss it.

"I don't read Romenesko," he said, referring to the media-news site run by the Poynter Institute. "It's redundant to me. Every once in a while, someone will give him a memo that's hot. Other than that, it's redundant."

What about the Note, the ABC News political Web site run by Mr. Halperin?

"Oh, please!" said Mr. Drudge. "That Mark Halperin-it's like picking lint out of your navel. And really old, nasty lint."

Gawker?

"I mean, they have sightings of me in New York City when I'm halfway around the world," he spat. "I feel if they can't get that right about me, I don't know what to do."

Mr. Drudge gleefully sent The Observer a number of links to traffic charts generated by Alexa, a service of Amazon.com, which measured the visitors to his Web site versus traffic to other Web sites like Wonkette and Gawker. They showed a giant blue spike for Mr. Drudge, with Mr. Denton's blogs barely registering in comparison.

"Drudge is very good," said Mr. Denton. "It will probably take us 10 years to catch up with his level of traffic. We'll have 1,000th of the traffic, at least to begin with."

Mr. Drudge was especially proud of a comparison to The New York Times. According to the charts, the Drudge Report surpassed The Times online during the period in which Terri Schiavo and the Pope dominated the news cycle. He said The Times had been slow to pick up on "the populist wave" of dramas like the Schaivo case.

Mr. Drudge said he didn't read other blogs, but he admitted to enjoying Rosie O'Donnell's blog entries-dubbed by Ms. O'Donnell as "the unedited rantings of a fat 43 year old menopausal ex-talk show host."

"She's the new Maureen Dowd now," he said. "Oh, Rosie's on fire. She's the must-read. We read Dowd second. It's true!"

(In an e-mail, Ms. Dowd said she didn't read the Drudge Report. "I'm afraid I'll see something about myself," she wrote. "If he's got something good, I know I'll hear about it around the coffee machine.")

Ms. Dowd may be an exception to the rule. Mr. Drudge's influence on the rest of media runs on self-fulfilling prophecy: Reporters provide him with the good stuff-leaked memos, not-yet-published Times articles, breaking-news links-for a crack at the enormous audience that the good stuff draws to his site.

But to some, the rest of the press has been playing into Mr. Drudge's hands. His former political friend David Brock, who runs the Web site Media Matters for America, compiled a 33-page dossier on Mr. Drudge, bullet-pointing his many alleged distortions and misreports.

"We try to function not as a Drudge, but as an anti-Drudge," he said via e-mail, "which leaves plenty of room for a progressive knock-off of Drudge."

Mr. Brock said he saw a place for Ms. Huffington's project.

"I think it's long overdue," he said. "I've always felt that progressives have information and another entity could be fed. I think it could be very successful."

Mr. Denton was more cautious about the idea of a liberal response to Mr. Drudge. "Unfortunately, a liberal tabloid is a contradiction in terms," he said. "I don't think it's workable."

If Ms. Huffington and her crew hoped to counteract Mr. Drudge's impact, their first move seemed aggressive enough: According to a Washington Times item, they were in the process of hiring Andrew Breitbart, the longtime West Coast contributor to Mr. Drudge's site, to run the Huffington Report.

Mr. Breitbart, who once worked as a researcher for Ms. Huffington before he worked for Mr. Drudge, declined to discuss his current status with Ms. Huffington, but said he was still presently working with Mr. Drudge. On Tuesday, April 5, he was set to appear on Dennis Miller's CNBC show as an affiliate of Mr. Drudge's. But he could be contractually annexed by Ms. Huffington.

"I think actually hiring Drudge's guy is a smart move," observed Mr. Denton. "I don't know how much he did, but he knows the ropes."

Mr. Drudge said Mr. Breitbart's influence was a moot point, because "I'm the final edit. I have control on the Web site. I always have the final edit. My name is on the page."

Developing …

-Additional reporting by

Gabriel Sherman