Nate Silver and David Blaine, birds of a feather.

Nate Silver, we are so onto you. On election night, the rest of the world was riveted by your New York Times Five ThirtyEight blog--which received 20 percent of the website's traffic! With the rest going to an article about people worried about post-Sandy weight gain!--and you became a genius twice over by predicting the voting breakdown of all the states. Now you are our MATH GOD, who used statistical magic to re-elect Barack Obama.

Except we know what this was all about. You were just using the election as a viral marketing scheme to promote your new book, in which you explained how your dark arts were actually just science that anyone could do. (But not really, and only if they read your book.) Your honor, I present the following evidence to the court ...

Exhibit A: Nate Silver's Twitter feed shortly after the election was called for Obama.

Exhibit B: Sales for the book increased 850 percent on Amazon just 24 hours after the election.
Exhibit C: The question of magic and witchcraft started entering the cultural conversation.
Exhibit D: Nate Silver explained he just used science to predict all his answers during a Daily Show interview...

Exhibit F: Illusionist David Blaine's TED talk on how he held his breath underwater for 17 minutes ... which earned him the title of "scientist" in a no less an esteemed publication than The New Yorker.
http://youtu.be/XFnGhrC_3Gs
So you see, ladies and gentleman, Nate Silver is David Blaine. (Come on, it's just a coincidence they both live in Brooklyn?)

CASE DISMISSED!

- The New Yorker Festival this weekend brought out Lena Dunham, if that was any sort of surprise.

- Good job being electrified forever, David Blaine! Does that even count as magic, or just a very good endurance test?

- Danny DeVito's divorce from Rhea Perlman was due to the actor's propensity for younger women, according to Page Six.

- Jill Zarin is going to be a star again! Well, at least in her own mind...

Screenshot via Instagram

Illusionist David Blaine stopped by Newsweek/The Daily Beast for an appearance on BeastTV today. While in the company's West Chelsea office, Mr. Blaine couldn't resist demonstrating his powers to what we assume were wowed staffers.

Excited writers tweeted the events (with pictures). It isn't every day that magic happens in a newsroom. 

"I just held David Blaine's wrist for a trick and my hand was SO clammy ..." tweeted reporter @ElizaShapiro.

"@aliyarrow just got served by @davidblaine. She was lost in his eyes.#aztektomb @ IAC," tweeted Deputy Books Editor Jimmy So.

Mr. Blaine is making the rounds to promote his latest stunt--he will stand on top of a 20-foot pillar for 72 hours and be electrified by a million votes of electricity. Mr. Blaine will not eat or sleep for the entire three-day period.

Based on the Beast staffers' awed responses to Mr. Blaine this afternoon, it sounds like the magician will have no trouble generating fawning coverage for the feat.

I was at my gym on the cross trainer a few weeks ago when I came across a World Cup game on the mini TV: Portugal vs. South Korea. I was about to switch channels when the camera zoomed in on the faces of a bunch of men from the Portuguese team trotting onto the field. I was brought up short at the sight of them and then turned my attention to the big 30-inch bolted to the wall for confirmation.

It was true. The players were beyond stunning. I noted their chiseled faces, striking eyes and exquisite bodies with awe. “What is this?” I asked myself, wondering if I had stumbled upon some genetically manufactured sports franchise. It was as if God had amassed the best aesthetic attributes he had created since the dawn of time, shouted “Here!” and hefted them all onto one soccer team. The players, impossibly sinewy and cut, ran tirelessly about the field--hair tousling, legs pumping, looking gorgeous and camera-ready all the while.

I saw the game in its entirety. That was how I began, early mornings, to watch World Cup games while I exercised. It didn’t take me long to discover that most of the players for the other teams also had inordinately good looks.

In the midst of leg curls one morning, watching David Beckham score another goal, I got an idea. What better place to meet an athletic foreign guy than by watching a World Cup game at the local bar? It always seemed that it was foreigners who were attracted to the game. This was a plus, since I’d grown weary of American men my age--in their 30’s--most of whom seemed to be undergoing some twisted, premature midlife crisis and were henceforth fixated on screwing 21-year-olds.

When I got home, I called my friend Paul, who’d been watching the games at a bar in the East Village. We arranged to meet at 7 the following morning to watch Spain vs. Ireland. I went to bed pleased that night, imagining the man I hoped to meet in mere hours: dark-haired, 6-foot-1, multilingual, built both in body and intellect.

When I arrived at our meeting spot, Paul and his two friends, a young Spanish couple, were already there, swaying on the corner like drunk bobblehead dolls. While I had slept, showered and had ample time to coordinate my outfit--sexy yet casual in a punk, I-don’t-mind-shots-of-Jack-before-8-a.m. sort of way--Paul and friends hadn’t gone to bed, having watched the Sweden vs. Senegal game at 2:30 that morning.

At the bar, there was a doorman and a small group standing out front, which meant we had to wait until some people left. Was my man inside conversing in Spanish and French with his pals, sipping Guinness, I wondered? The city was just rising and the neighborhood still felt serene. A bakery truck idled across the street making morning deliveries, and a young Mexican guy sleepily hosed down the sidewalk in front of a deli.

Twenty minutes later, the bar’s door shot open and a group of people scuttled out like cockroaches, running drunkenly in all directions, shouting and yelping and slapping their hands to their eyes like Lot’s children in response to the nuclear-bright sunlight. We went in. The place was crowded like the D.M.V. on a Thursday afternoon, but it was electric. There were foreign men, to be sure--brogues and Castilian Spanish abounded--but all eyes were glued to the game. Worse, people weren’t making eye contact; the only homage being paid was to the blue TV gods scattered across the room.

What I had forgotten about the World Cup was what a high-stakes game it is. A losing team can find its country plundered overnight, its populace driven to the brink of senility, while winning teams can fly home to find an entirely new civilization has been erected while they’ve been in transit: young virgins shipped in from all corners of the world, and the dirt roads now streets paved with gold. It didn’t take me long to figure out that even if I’d come nude, in red sequined stilettos, not only would I be ignored, someone would probably tell me to move because my head was blocking the screen.

More than 15 minutes into the game, I still hadn’t spotted anyone who looked even remotely close to the studly steed I was hunting for. Most men in the place--not unlike your standard bar scene--were either blind drunk or had their arms draped around their girlfriends. My claustrophobia mounting, I decided to cut my losses and head home to watch the game when Paul stuck another pint in my face.

At halftime the buffaloes stampeded the bar, so Paul and our crew made our way to a safe corner. I was enjoying my first unencumbered view of the game when a guy I’d noticed earlier, handsome though still not quite of the caliber I’d had in mind (think David Blaine, without the mouth-breathing, methadone-withdrawal stare), wandered past. Feeling a bit bold after a shot of tequila, I asked if he was Spanish. “Puerto Rican,” he said in a New York drawl, smiling. This might be interesting, I thought, as he came closer.

“You looking for some?” he whispered in my ear, and I raised my eyebrows, thinking that with another shot, I might ponder dropping a few of my requirements. “You looking for some?” I slurred, smiling coquettishly, as he took his hand out of his pocket and half-opened it between us to reveal a cluster of pills. “Viagras,” he winked. “Great for after you’ve been up all night watching the Cup, but aren’t quite ready to go to bed. For men and women,” he added, winking again--twice this time, for extra effect.

I stared at him with disbelief. Viagra? Sure, I had come here to get my blood flow going, but not like that. I turned around, swerved back to Paul and told him I was going home to watch the last half of the game by myself.

Everyone knows that unless you’re criminally insane or insanely drunk, bars have always been horrible places to meet men--but now I’ve learned it gets worse if your potential mate is distracted by the fact that the reputation of his mother country is on the line. My initial, whimsical fantasy of stumbling upon a few doppelgängers for the Portuguese team proved a bit misguided. But even if I had met a stunner, chances are he would’ve been useless, having blown his wad thanks to the teeth-gnashing, boozing, stomach-churning spectacle that goes hand-in-hand with watching the match. Which, I guess, ultimately makes me the winner.

Everyone knows that unless you’re criminally insane or insanely drunk, bars have always been horrible places to meet men--but now I’ve learned it gets worse if your potential mate is distracted by the fact that the reputation of his mother country is on the line. My initial, whimsical fantasy of stumbling upon a few doppelgängers for the Portuguese team proved a bit misguided. But even if I had met a stunner, chances are he would’ve been useless, having blown his wad thanks to the teeth-gnashing, boozing, stomach-churning spectacle that goes hand-in-hand with watching the match. Which, I guess, ultimately makes me the winner.

Well, I still think Blaine is brave, and people respond to that. But I apologize; I should have been more nuanced.

“I kept saying to him, ‘There’s no big finish!’” Ms. Ross said. “‘You live on the high wire, you live on the high wire, you almost fall off the high wire, you stumble, presumably you sleep on the high wire. But what’s the big finish?’”

The program itself may stand as a big finish for Ms. Ross, who is at the end of her contract with the network, according to ABC sources. Ms. Ross, the former executive producer of Good Morning America, is not expected to sign a new one, sources said—leaving the dangerous and wildly over-budget magic show as the likely final act of a tumultuous career with ABC.

A former print reporter, Ms. Ross arrived at the network in 1989 to produce sensational celebrity-trial coverage. A decade later, she rose to the helm of the network’s beleaguered morning show, then two million viewers behind NBC’s Today. With a style one executive described as full of “moxie” and another as “fascistic,” she hauled it to within fighting distance of its competitor, was deposed in a murky coup in May 2004 and has been playing out her contract ever since.

In the midst of that quiet final spell, David Blaine called.

“There’s always been that sort of kindred spirit between David and me,” said Ms. Ross, who declined to discuss her contract or her history with the network. She disavowed any parallels between Mr. Blaine’s finale and her own. But she also said: “I always have admired not only his skill but his sense of showmanship.”

The two began brainstorming last summer and finally came up with a new idea featuring a suitably big finish: Mr. Blaine would lock himself, nearly naked, in an eight-foot transparent acrylic sphere filled with a finely calibrated partial-saltwater solution. He plans to remain there for a week, by the grace of tubes for breathing, eating and waste removal, communicating with passers-by through an advanced walkie-talkie system. On the last day, he intends to hold his breath for nine minutes, breaking a world record.

“I’m a little rundown from overtraining,” Mr. Blaine said in a brief phone call on April 28. “I just need to get relaxed and focused.”

Two days later, the day before he went in the tank, a relaxed and focused Mr. Blaine called Ms. Ross and told her he was giving her an early birthday present, she said. The master endurance artist, who has previously buried himself alive and frozen himself in ice at other prominent locations around Manhattan, would up the zazz-factor of her TV special a few notches by padlocking himself to the inside of the tank and spending those nine breathless minutes escaping from the chains.

Ta da!

Ms. Ross started her television career at NBC News before moving over to ABC, where she covered the O.J. Simpson case in 1994, booked Paula Jones to her first television interview on Primetime Live, and produced what her official network biography calls a “newsmaking 20/20 segment with correspondent Elizabeth Vargas advancing the JonBenet Ramsey story.”

She met Mr. Blaine in 1999, the same year she became the executive producer of Good Morning America, when he was doing his “Buried Alive” special on the Upper West Side. The ABC morning show was two million viewers behind the Today show at that point but about to begin an epic surge. Ms. Ross and Diane Sawyer, both early risers and relentless perfectionists, would pass by Mr. Blaine’s grave on their way to work at 3 a.m. and remark on his talents. “I’d send people to hold signs over saying ‘Will you do our show after?’” she said.

The following year, Mr. Blaine entombed himself for 61 hours in a six-ton block of ice and emerged live on ABC. Ms. Ross booked him on GMA, and the two became friendly enough that when Mr. Blaine began planning another feat this summer, his people called Ms. Ross and asked her if she would help. Ms. Ross jumped at the chance.

Once they came up with the concept, Mr. Blaine started training with Kirk Krack, a professional scuba instructor who specializes in static apnea, the art of competitive breath holding. Mr. Krack, whose team holds a combined 18 world records, started Mr. Blaine on an ambitious cardio-workout focused on acclimating his body to increased levels of carbon dioxide and decreased levels of oxygen. It takes tremendous physical and mental discipline to stop breathing for nine minutes, Mr. Krack said. “You don’t just sit there, take a deep breath and hold.”

Ms. Ross, meanwhile, scouted locations.

“We really wanted to do something that felt like Woodstock,” she said—which is why they chose Lincoln Center. Huh? “The traffic,” she said. “The people.”

Mr. Blaine finally entered his tiny aquarium at 1 p.m. on Monday, May 1, while a few hundred people—including two tenors and one baritone from the chorus of Parsifal—looked on.

“I don’t know what to think, honestly,” said Chris Carrico, one of the tenors. “I’d watch that on TV,” said Alex Magno, the baritone.

Nearby, a giant poster advertised the special. Designed to be as evocative of Houdini as possible, the poster features an image of Mr. Blaine chained to the inside of a bubble—suggesting the padlocks were not such a last-minute addition, but regardless—with the worlds “Failure Means a Drowning Death” scrolled across the bottom.

This, strictly speaking, is probably not true. For the next week, a full security detail will monitor Mr. Blaine at every moment, taking turns grabbing catnaps at their suite at the Hudson Hotel. Twenty-four people will be on alert during the breath-holding portion of the program, ready to pry open the globe if Mr. Blaine gives a distress signal and fish him out.

“We’ve done safety drills,” said Ms. Ross. “We have Roosevelt Hospital on alert. We have state-of-the-art medical equipment. We have monitors. We’ve tested the helmet he’s going to sleep in to make sure it doesn’t leak. He will be watched 24/7.”

“He’s not going to die,” said Mr. Krack, who is in charge of the watching.

This is what will happen to Mr. Blaine: For the first five minutes, according to his trainer, “he’ll go through a very, very euphoric sensation of relaxation as his body gets into a high relaxed state, like a state of intense meditation. Then, as his CO₂ level starts to rise, his respiratory muscles will start to contract and he’ll have this insane urge to breathe. Most people would break at the two-minute mark.”

Harry Houdini once made it to three. The current world record-holder made it to 8 minutes and 58 seconds. David Blaine is aiming for nine.

Mr. Krack—who declined, citing confidentiality agreements, to say how long Mr. Blaine held his breath during trial runs—gives him a 25 percent chance.

Anne Farber, a pianist from the Upper West Side and a teacher at the Special Music School, gave him slightly more than that when she happened by on Monday afternoon.

“Is this an art installation?” she asked. “Are they advertising something?”

She would put music to it, whatever it is, she said—some Debussy, some hip-hop, “something quite contemporary.” When informed about the feat she was witnessing, Ms. Farber was hopeful, if unimpressed. “ABC is trying to get more viewers to watch?” she asked. “Oh, for God’s sake.”

Later that evening, Ms. Ross returned to Lincoln Square to check in on Mr. Blaine. As she stood by, admiring the merman in his tank, she said she was optimistic about the final act.

“It is genuinely not without risk,” she said via cell phone, “but we have just loaded up every precaution. It’s healthy, and we’re over-budget, which is like—you know, which falls on David Blaine’s shoulders. His career, everything. He’s putting it all on the line for this.”

“I kept saying to him, ‘There’s no big finish!’” Ms. Ross said. “‘You live on the high wire, you live on the high wire, you almost fall off the high wire, you stumble, presumably you sleep on the high wire. But what’s the big finish?’”

The program itself may stand as a big finish for Ms. Ross, who is at the end of her contract with the network, according to ABC sources. Ms. Ross, the former executive producer of Good Morning America, is not expected to sign a new one, sources said—leaving the dangerous and wildly over-budget magic show as the likely final act of a tumultuous career with ABC.

A former print reporter, Ms. Ross arrived at the network in 1989 to produce sensational celebrity-trial coverage. A decade later, she rose to the helm of the network’s beleaguered morning show, then two million viewers behind NBC’s Today. With a style one executive described as full of “moxie” and another as “fascistic,” she hauled it to within fighting distance of its competitor, was deposed in a murky coup in May 2004 and has been playing out her contract ever since.

In the midst of that quiet final spell, David Blaine called.

“There’s always been that sort of kindred spirit between David and me,” said Ms. Ross, who declined to discuss her contract or her history with the network. She disavowed any parallels between Mr. Blaine’s finale and her own. But she also said: “I always have admired not only his skill but his sense of showmanship.”

The two began brainstorming last summer and finally came up with a new idea featuring a suitably big finish: Mr. Blaine would lock himself, nearly naked, in an eight-foot transparent acrylic sphere filled with a finely calibrated partial-saltwater solution. He plans to remain there for a week, by the grace of tubes for breathing, eating and waste removal, communicating with passers-by through an advanced walkie-talkie system. On the last day, he intends to hold his breath for nine minutes, breaking a world record.

“I’m a little rundown from overtraining,” Mr. Blaine said in a brief phone call on April 28. “I just need to get relaxed and focused.”

Two days later, the day before he went in the tank, a relaxed and focused Mr. Blaine called Ms. Ross and told her he was giving her an early birthday present, she said. The master endurance artist, who has previously buried himself alive and frozen himself in ice at other prominent locations around Manhattan, would up the zazz-factor of her TV special a few notches by padlocking himself to the inside of the tank and spending those nine breathless minutes escaping from the chains.

Ta da!

Ms. Ross started her television career at NBC News before moving over to ABC, where she covered the O.J. Simpson case in 1994, booked Paula Jones to her first television interview on Primetime Live, and produced what her official network biography calls a “newsmaking 20/20 segment with correspondent Elizabeth Vargas advancing the JonBenet Ramsey story.”

She met Mr. Blaine in 1999, the same year she became the executive producer of Good Morning America, when he was doing his “Buried Alive” special on the Upper West Side. The ABC morning show was two million viewers behind the Today show at that point but about to begin an epic surge. Ms. Ross and Diane Sawyer, both early risers and relentless perfectionists, would pass by Mr. Blaine’s grave on their way to work at 3 a.m. and remark on his talents. “I’d send people to hold signs over saying ‘Will you do our show after?’” she said.

The following year, Mr. Blaine entombed himself for 61 hours in a six-ton block of ice and emerged live on ABC. Ms. Ross booked him on GMA, and the two became friendly enough that when Mr. Blaine began planning another feat this summer, his people called Ms. Ross and asked her if she would help. Ms. Ross jumped at the chance.

Once they came up with the concept, Mr. Blaine started training with Kirk Krack, a professional scuba instructor who specializes in static apnea, the art of competitive breath holding. Mr. Krack, whose team holds a combined 18 world records, started Mr. Blaine on an ambitious cardio-workout focused on acclimating his body to increased levels of carbon dioxide and decreased levels of oxygen. It takes tremendous physical and mental discipline to stop breathing for nine minutes, Mr. Krack said. “You don’t just sit there, take a deep breath and hold.”

Ms. Ross, meanwhile, scouted locations.

“We really wanted to do something that felt like Woodstock,” she said—which is why they chose Lincoln Center. Huh? “The traffic,” she said. “The people.”

Mr. Blaine finally entered his tiny aquarium at 1 p.m. on Monday, May 1, while a few hundred people—including two tenors and one baritone from the chorus of Parsifal—looked on.

“I don’t know what to think, honestly,” said Chris Carrico, one of the tenors. “I’d watch that on TV,” said Alex Magno, the baritone.

Nearby, a giant poster advertised the special. Designed to be as evocative of Houdini as possible, the poster features an image of Mr. Blaine chained to the inside of a bubble—suggesting the padlocks were not such a last-minute addition, but regardless—with the worlds “Failure Means a Drowning Death” scrolled across the bottom.

This, strictly speaking, is probably not true. For the next week, a full security detail will monitor Mr. Blaine at every moment, taking turns grabbing catnaps at their suite at the Hudson Hotel. Twenty-four people will be on alert during the breath-holding portion of the program, ready to pry open the globe if Mr. Blaine gives a distress signal and fish him out.

“We’ve done safety drills,” said Ms. Ross. “We have Roosevelt Hospital on alert. We have state-of-the-art medical equipment. We have monitors. We’ve tested the helmet he’s going to sleep in to make sure it doesn’t leak. He will be watched 24/7.”

“He’s not going to die,” said Mr. Krack, who is in charge of the watching.

This is what will happen to Mr. Blaine: For the first five minutes, according to his trainer, “he’ll go through a very, very euphoric sensation of relaxation as his body gets into a high relaxed state, like a state of intense meditation. Then, as his CO2 level starts to rise, his respiratory muscles will start to contract and he’ll have this insane urge to breathe. Most people would break at the two-minute mark.”

Harry Houdini once made it to three. The current world record-holder made it to 8 minutes and 58 seconds. David Blaine is aiming for nine.

Mr. Krack—who declined, citing confidentiality agreements, to say how long Mr. Blaine held his breath during trial runs—gives him a 25 percent chance.

Anne Farber, a pianist from the Upper West Side and a teacher at the Special Music School, gave him slightly more than that when she happened by on Monday afternoon.

“Is this an art installation?” she asked. “Are they advertising something?”

She would put music to it, whatever it is, she said—some Debussy, some hip-hop, “something quite contemporary.” When informed about the feat she was witnessing, Ms. Farber was hopeful, if unimpressed. “ABC is trying to get more viewers to watch?” she asked. “Oh, for God’s sake.”

Later that evening, Ms. Ross returned to Lincoln Square to check in on Mr. Blaine. As she stood by, admiring the merman in his tank, she said she was optimistic about the final act.

“It is genuinely not without risk,” she said via cell phone, “but we have just loaded up every precaution. It’s healthy, and we’re over-budget, which is like—you know, which falls on David Blaine’s shoulders. His career, everything. He’s putting it all on the line for this.”

Who does David Blaine think he is, being all suave and cool, wearing Dolce & Gabbana, dating Fiona Apple, club-hopping with Leo DiCaprio? He's a magician, for chrissakes. Aren't they all supposed to be geeks?

Perhaps sensing that he could gain mainstream acceptance only if he isolated himself from the supermodels and hip downtown nightspots, Mr. Blaine recently launched a successful publicity stunt by apparently burying himself underground in a clear-topped coffin under two tons of water. With no food and little drinking water, Mr. Blaine, 26, seemed to lie around for seven days on land owned by Donald Trump between Riverside Drive and the Hudson River. Friends, tourists and gawkers stood over him, trying to figure out if it was a hoax or not. Deborah Norville, anchor of Inside Edition , tried not to get too close to the tank, joking that Mr. Blaine could see up her skirt.

If it wasn't magic, then what was the point? "This is more than a test of endurance," said Bill Kalush, Mr. Blaine's collaborator, who hovered by the burial site for much of the week. "Houdini was successful because he gave people hope when it comes to not being confined. This touches an emotional heartstring. A lot of people connect to him, seeing the fears he overcomes."

As if on cue, a little girl then came up to Mr. Kalush and handed him a letter for Mr. Blaine. "It congratulates him for trying to fulfill Houdini's dream," said the girl, Rachel Quart of Charlotte, N.C.

The main intention of the stunt, other than to hype Mr. Trump's latest apartment complex, was to promote Mr. Blaine's television special, Magic Man , airing tonight. In the special–whose credits include Harmony Korine as a segment director and Harvey Weinstein as a production consultant–the laconic Mr. Blaine wanders around the world, performing sleight of hand and other tricks for people he meets. He also manages to show his buff chest several times. Some of the tricks are undoubtedly cool, such as when he asks a woman to think of a name, and a second later a taxicab barrels down the street with the name, "Dawn," spray-painted on the side. But much of the special feels pointless–and not just the cameos by Tyra Banks and Puff Daddy. Why exactly does Mr. Blaine travel to Haiti and the Yanomamo territories in the Amazon rain forest? To perform card tricks?

Though Mr. Blaine may be able to walk into any nightclub in town, he is not as revered among his magical peers. Penn Jillette of Penn & Teller recently attacked him in New York magazine, and Erika Larsen, the former editor of Genii Magazine , a trade magazine for magicians, says most magicians "think they can do better."

"Magicians by and large think his television specials are entertaining, but that he isn't a good magician," said Ms. Larsen, whose father and uncle founded the Magic Castle, a private club in Hollywood for magicians. "He doesn't have good sleight-of-hand chops. He uses store-bought tricks, and that kind of thing." [WABC, 7, 10 P.M.]

Thursday, April 15

Do you know who Terry Farrell, Kathleen York, Cindy Margolis and Traylor Howard are? What about Ashton Kutcher? Jennifer Paige? Shanice? Neither do we. Apparently, they're all pretty young models, actors or singers, some of the bottom-of-the-celebrity-barrel guests who regularly appear on the late-night talk show Later . Yes, this show is still on, though NYTV could find no one who's actually watched it since host Greg Kinnear left in 1996 to pursue an acting career. (He was nominated for an Oscar, you know.) Now NBC struggles to remind people of the show's existence. "That's our daily battle," said Neal Kendall, the show's producer.

After Mr. Kinnear's exit, the network announced that a series of guest hosts would take over until a permanent replacement was named. Alas, the search for a permanent host was abandoned, and the roster of guest hosts is now filled by second-stringers like Peri Gilpin, Debi Mazar, Judd Nelson, Rita Sever and Daryl Mitchell. (NYTV can identify two of them. How about you?) What do they have in common? Conveniently, they're all NBC employees. Mr. Nelson, for instance, stars on the network's Suddenly Susan .

Surprisingly, the show's ratings are generally higher than they were during the tenure of Mr. Kinnear, who was fresh from hosting Talk Soup and who replaced Bob Costas. Credit goes to Later 's lead-ins, Jay Leno and Conan O'Brien, who seem to attract some viewers who will eagerly sit through 150 minutes of people sitting behind desks. ( Later is only half an hour long.) According to Mr. Kendall, Later is attracting about a million and a half people, with overnight ratings hovering between 1.6 and 2.0. For comparison, Conan usually earns between 2.3 and a 2.9. NBC is so strong in late-night programming that it often beats or matches the competition which airs an hour earlier. Conan , at 12:30 A.M., has matched Letterman , 11:30 P.M., in key demos; Later consistently beat Tom Snyder and has kept pace with new guy Craig Kilborn. Tonight, the host is … David DeLuise (from NBC's Jesse ), and the guest is … Sean Hayes (from NBC's Will & Grace ). [WNBC, 4, 1:35 A.M.]

Friday, April 16

Paul Begala loyally supported President Clinton when he served as his assistant and counselor. And unlike some others (that short Greek guy), Mr. Begala has no intention of changing his tune now that he's no longer on the Federal payroll. So he's billing himself as a "pro-Clinton pundit" for his new hosting duties on MSNBC's Equal Time with sparring partner Oliver North. Won't such a label limit him if the President screws up? "As much as I love the President, if he ever signed a renewed version of the Independent Counsel Act, I'd attack him, because it's a monstrosity and unsalvageable." But, Mr. Begala notes, "That's a hypothetical." Thanks for the clarification, bub. [MSNBC, 43, 8 P.M.]

Saturday, April 17

The Onion 's march into the mainstream continues. A satirical newspaper published in Wisconsin and on the Web, The Onion can no longer be considered just a cult hit. Its first book, Our Dumb Century , debuted at No. 26 on the extended New York Times best seller list; next week it jumps to No. 9, according to its publisher, Three Rivers Press. In other Onion news, former editor Ben Karlin, who had ventured to Los Angeles to write pilots and episodes of Cartoon Network's Space Ghost: Coast to Coast , has become the new senior producer at The Daily Show With Jon Stewart , replacing head writer Chris Kreski (who's moving to Martin Short's syndicated talk show, now in the early stages over at King World). Another Onion alum, David Javerbaum, recently left Late Show With David Letterman to try his hand at–huh?–musical theater. [Comedy Central, 45, 5 P.M.]

Sunday, April 18

Jaws 2 : Un enorme tiburon aterroriza a los turistas en un punto maritimo de veraneo. Roy Scheider. [WNJU, 47, 8 P.M.]

Monday, April 19

As the country eagerly awaits Bryant Gumbel's imminent return to A.M. television on CBS This Morning , NYTV has been reflecting on its visit to the Today Show near the end of Mr. Gumbel's tenure there. NYTV was impressed with Mr. Gumbel's legendary interviewing skills, especially his reluctance to toss softball questions to a buddy. On this particular program in early 1994, Mr. Gumbel spoke about the newly revised SAT with Donald Stewart, the president of the College Board. Before the segment began, Mr. Gumbel and Mr. Stewart chatted amiably about Mr. Stewart's child and about an event the two men had attended the previous evening. Obviously, they were friends. But then on the air, Mr. Gumbel held no punches: "What say that all of these changes are simply motivated by money? They're designed to encourage more students to take the test and more schools to use them." Mr. Stewart was momentarily flustered. Still, Mr. Gumbel ended the segment as he often did, with a banal blessing: "Stay well." [WCBS, 2, 7 A.M.]

Tuesday, April 20

Thanks to Harvey Weinstein's massive advertising budget, the battle between Shakespeare in Love and Saving Private Ryan was largely fought through the "For Your Consideration" pages in the trade papers. (The real Oscar winners? The bank accounts of Variety and The Hollywood Reporter.) In what may be a sly parody or simply a desperate bid for publicity, Universal Pictures took out the back page of Daily Variety on April 5 for its horror-comedy Bride of Chucky: "Hey MTV! Consider this …" That's right, the MTV Movie Awards, an amusing program that few take seriously, is coming up June 10, and Universal, alone among its peers, is pitching its film as a nominee for best villain, best kiss, best fight, best action sequence and best on-screen duo.

Producer Joel Gallen can't remember any other studio creating a similar advertisement in the awards' eight-year history. And there's a good reason: MTV does not choose the nominees itself. Its viewers do, through a mailed poll sent to 1,000 people. MTV's audience does not overlap too much with Variety 's, but Chucky might get lucky. "That movie did do very well with our audience," said Mr. Gallen. "Maybe it will show up somewhere."

Do these awards even matter? According to Mr. Gallen, winning films (like Scream ) tend to get a boost in home video box-office. And Universal may simply want to keep the Chucky series in the public eye, since it has another one– Son of Chucky –in the works. Tonight, see if the advertising paid off, on the MTV Movie Awards Nomination Special . [MTV, 20, 10 P.M.]

Peter Bogdanovich's Movie of the Week

If you like Cary Grant as much as I do, then it doesn't matter that 1943's romantic World War II homefront drama, Mr. Lucky [Sunday, April 18, Turner Classic Movies, 82, noon; also, as all others below, on videocassette] , is neither a great movie nor a film from an interesting though flawed director, nor even featuring an unusually fine screenplay. It is, though, a terrific vehicle for Cary Grant, who might therefore be called the picture's auteur by default.

Contributing to the "happy accident" status of the movie is excellent black-and-white lighting by veteran ace cinematographer George Barnes (Oscar for Hitchcock's Rebecca ); extremely effective "production design"–which certainly must have included camera setups–from the legendary William Cameron Menzies (designer of Gone With the Wind ); and a script intriguingly knowledgeable on the subject of gamblers' techniques by first-time scenarist Milton Holmes, cleverly streamlined and tailored for Grant by old pro (and soon one of the blacklisted "Hollywood Ten") Adrian Scott. The director H.C. (Hank) Potter, who started in radio and theater, was generally mild and inoffensive, but this remains by far his best work, his second-best being another (more family-oriented) Cary Grant movie, 1948's likable Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House [Sunday, April 18, Turner Classic Movies, 82, 4 P.M.] , which co-stars the equally smooth at drawing-room comedy Myrna Loy and Melvyn Douglas.

The occasionally predictable, but nonetheless engrossingly played, story of Mr. Lucky concerns Grant's being a crooked gambler who takes over a dead man's 4-F identity in order to evade the draft and then gets involved in a war relief effort from which he plans to bilk all the group's money until, of course, he falls for society gal Laraine Day (lovely, but not an exceedingly resourceful actress). At this point, Cary's own accomplices are none too happy about his change of heart. (In real life, Grant gave his entire salary to war relief.)

The film is constructed in flashback, and contains other stylistic reverberations from the wake of Orson Welles' Citizen Kane of two years before (including Kane's valet Paul Stewart as main heavy). Whoever injected into the script (probably Grant with scenarist Scott) the charming use of Australian rhyming slang for the gambler added a great deal to the evocativeness of the piece. Having cockney-sounding, Bristol-born Cary explain to Laraine that "tit for tat" means "hat," "bottle 'n' stopper" means "copper," and "briny marlin" means "darlin'" becomes inspired movie-star magic, and it's nicely paid off as well.

Seeing Grant play larcenous, edgy and tough (puts a roll of nickels into his fist to strike a better punch) becomes especially winning when shown beside his learning how to knit in order to impress the ladies' group he's conning–thus admirably covering both the masculine-dramatic and feminine-comic sides of the actor's persona. This double whammy, combined with his matinee-idol looks, made him a triple threat like no other male star in picture history.

As is vividly in evidence in the first film (of only two) for which he was nominated for an Oscar (never won), George Stevens' 1941 tear-jerker with Irene Dunne, Penny Serenade [Sunday, April 18, Turner Classic Movies, 82, 2 P.M.] , where he's heartbreaking in his big scene pleading for the child he wants to adopt; or darkly dangerous and ambiguous as hell in Alfred Hitchcock's 1946 masterpiece with Ingrid Bergman, Notorious [Tuesday, April 20, Showtime, 48, 1:15 P.M.] . Or, conversely, absolutely fall-down hilarious in two of Howard Hawks' comedy classics, co-starring Katharine Hepburn in 1938's Bringing Up Baby [Sunday, April 18, Turner Classic Movies, 82, 6 P.M.] , and with Ann Sheridan in 1949's I Was a Male War Bride [Tuesday, April 20, American Movie Classics, 54, 6 P.M. and 1:45 A.M.]. No other movie star had that sort of range within a very defined personality. How can we not miss dear Cary and all he stood for?