We've been watching Fringe, mostly because we're constantly impressed with how it seems to get more and more ridiculous with each  episode. In the one that aired this past Tuesday, a bad guy was running around and killing people with a ray gun and yet there were so many other ludicrous things going on (mindreading, torture with nose probes, etc) that no one even mentioned that, um, there was a dude running around with a ray gun!

At this point, we still aren't sure if we really like Fringe. Half the time the it doesn't make any sense. Fringe makes LOST--with it's crazy time travel and island moving--seem like a documentary. But it is pretty darn entertaining. And we're thrilled that Josh Jackson is in a hit series. It'll just make it easier for us to get him to star in our fantasy pilot about three guys living in New York City with Matthew Perry and Ryan Eggold, better known as that dude who plays the teacher on the new 90210.

Ollie, like a lot of dogs that live in the city (she resides with her master in a modest but comfortable apartment full of tennis balls and squeak toys in the East Village), sometimes likes to get out for a little fresh air, run around in the country, maybe dip her paws in a fresh-water stream.

For that reason, and because her human companion likes to get away sometimes, too, Mr. Cross recently bought himself and Ollie a small cottage in Sullivan County. To make this purchase—and because everything else in the world from squeak toys to HDTVs requires money, lots and lots of money—Mr. Cross took a minor role in Alvin and the Chipmunks, a film you probably didn't see unless you play with Webkinz after school and still occasionally have accidents in your OshKosh B'goshes.

A few weeks’ work on a kiddy flick in exchange for the down payment on a house with a stream seemed logical enough to the 43-year-old Mr. Cross, but to a certain Internet-empowered subset of his fans, this was nothing short of a betrayal.

You could be forgiven for not knowing about this during a news cycle that included the assassination of Benazir Bhutto, the Obama victory in Iowa, the continued war in Iraq, and the emotional collapse of Britney Spears, but to the sort of pop culture obsessives who spent their high-school years memorizing the 'Dead Parrot' routine from Monty Python's Flying Circus, own the Donnie Darko director's-cut DVD, and whose female ideal (since the Cross agonistes seem to be exclusively straight males) runs towards, say, Natalie Portman and the Asian girl in Rushmore, Mr. Cross has done something entirely unforgivable. Think: Dylan going electric, plus Nirvana's "Breed" in a commercial for XBoX's Major League Baseball 2K7, times a thousand. For his Alvin role as Ian, the Chipmunks' agent, plus other recent career choices like a one-off role on Law & Order: Criminal Intent, Mr. Cross has been pilloried by commenters on The Onion AV Club's blog, where they called him a hypocrite, a "smug, condescending asshole," and "a huge prick." (Some of those observations came from commenters who professed to like him.)

After reading things like, "Cross is creating his own style comedy: Double-Standard Standup," as well as a mocking MySpace post by his friend (and onetime Mr. Show guest star) Patton Oswalt, Mr. Cross decided to respond to his critics with an open letter on his Web site, bobanddavid.com. In the searching post, which begins "Enuff Znuff" and is signed "Yours until the next piece of shit I'm in," Mr. Cross clarifies—perhaps a little too defensively—that his decision to appear opposite those adorable CGI chipmunks was born out of needing (and enjoying) work and being unable to buy his country place with his "artistic integrity."

The tone of the post—"I have no regrets at all" he says about his various endeavors—calls to mind Richard Nixon's famous "Checkers" speech with Ollie (or maybe the cottage? or was it Alvin?—it gets confusing) in the role of the irresistible inducement against his integrity.

Speaking directly to one’s critics might not be the best idea for any celebrity—especially one with a cultish online following—but, as he wrote in his open letter, Mr. Cross "wasn't prepared for the level, or amount I should say, of vitriol that's been flung about like so much monkey poo."

He offered four and half "mitigating factors" for his role and assumed he'd settled the Chipmunks contretemps once and for all.

He was wrong. Displaying the sort of reasoned commentary one has come to expect from unmoderated blog comments, a reader of Defamer called the letter "the shittiest fucking defense since the Nuremberg trials." A commenter on a follow up Onion AV Club post wrote in, "He's digging his own grave, professionally." On Stereogum, one reader simply stated that he or she "wouldn't mind if he dies."

Alllviiiiiin!!

Speaking with the Observer a week after he posted his open letter and dozens of blogs and message boards answered with an outpouring of hostility, Mr. Cross seemed, well, cross. He also seemed genuinely hurt by the criticism he was being subjected to online.

"There's no small part of people wanting to call you on your shit. And I think some of it’s deserved on my part, but I also think a lot of it isn't. I think a lot of it is lazy and not really thoughtful, " he said, sitting on a leather sofa beneath a painting of Ronald and Nancy Reagan with Michael Jackson in his apartment.

"Look, do I really think that Lobsterboy103 thinks that I'm 'evil'? Of course not ... But it's just the Internet, you know. It's tippity-tappity-tippity-tap ... [here he mimics simian typing] ... Done. Hit send."

Mr. Cross thinks that much of the criticism—particularly anonymous recollections of unfriendly encounters with him at bars or events—has created an false impression of who he is.

"I've gotten 'bitter' a lot. I don't think that's applicable," he said. "People genuinely don't like me. They find me arrogant and abrasive."

Then again, he adds, "There are plenty of people who think I'm the nicest, sweetest guy in the world." (His dog certainly seems to like him.)

But going out night-after-night and having people point at him and murmur, "There he is" or seeing his every public move recounted on blogs can wear even the nicest, sweetest guy in the world down after a while. Mr. Cross admits, though, that even before he started being well-known he was a bit of jerk, something many readers picked up and amplified in his Alvin posting.

Since publishing his message, Mr. Cross has heard from actor and comedy friends and they support with him in his parry against his critics but worry about him as well. "As Bob [Odenkirk] said, 'I thought it was great, but, man, it's a no-win situation.'"

So why allow himself to be embroiled in a no-winner?

"It wasn't simply that I read somebody said I was a 'douchebag' for doing this. I read hundreds—literally hundreds [of comments] ... Just a lot of it, enough so that when I read Patton's thing it was the breaking point. That coupled with the fact that, and this goes to what the guy in the Onion< wrote, which was really shit, that I 'wrote this 1,700-word blah-blah-blah,' as if I pored over it through the night with a candle at my side and sent it in to an editor ... I wrote a thing and it took me 20 minutes. It had grammar [mistakes] and misspellings ... . It's exactly what they do: I saw something, I wrote it, sent it out."

The integrity issue—regular work within the mainstream versus smaller projects that may
be closer to his heart—has been a concern for Mr. Cross his entire life. In the book Mr. Show—What Happened, which recounts the creation and brief on-air life of his HBO series, a high-school friend of Mr. Cross' recalls, "David always lived by the seat of his pants. He couldn't earn what he needed, was always borrowing, then trying hard to pay it back—and still he was uncompromising. I always thought, 'Why does he get to live like that? I have to compromise. I work a shitty job.' But David wouldn't bend."

After making a name for himself in Boston's late-80's/early-90's alternative comedy scene with performers like Janeane Garofalo and Louis CK, Mr. Cross agonized over whether or not to take his first real comedy writing job.

"When I was 28, I think, I moved to L.A. and I really struggled with whether I should take a job writing for The Ben Stiller Show, which was my big break. And that's where I met all these people and [without it] there'd be no Mr. Show or any of that stuff—or me here."

It was hardly the cushy Hollywood gig one might imagine: The FOX sketch comedy program was dogged by poor ratings and moved around by programmers like the queen of spades in a game of Three Card Monty. Yet even with such low stakes Mr. Cross was torn. "I didn't wanna write for TV ... It's insane, but I was that person."

"That person" still weighs in on his decision-making process. "I don't really think about it at length, but I definitely think about how will this [choice of role] be perceived. I don't really give it too much thought, but it does go through my mind. I'd be lying if I said it doesn't. I think I would be probably a happier person if I did get over it or just resigned myself to not caring. But it's just in my nature, I can't help it."

Now, with the internet empowering people who agree with "that person" more than ever—comment threads overflow with people quick to call their favorite artists sell-outs for taking this job or that—Mr. Cross' internal per-project gut check has been externalized and turned back on him.

"I can't tell you how many times somebody would say to me in earnest, not saying it like, you're an asshole for this, but really wanted to know how I could reconcile the fact that I was on Arrested Development, doing the show for FOX."

"That's absurd," he said. Another absurdity lies in the fact that the very thing his fans fetishize him for, the groundbreaking sketch comedy show he created with Bob Odenkirk, was not some indie production distributed through a classified ad in a 'zine: It was on HBO. While satirizing a mega-corporation that "owns 29 percent of the globe" in a bit about "Globo-Chem" (slogan: "We Own Everything So You Don't Have To!"), Mr. Show was being piped into viewers' homes directly by Time Warner, which more or less does own 29 percent of the globe.

Cries of sellout also jangle since Mr. Cross often appears at small venues, keeps his ticket prices affordable, does benefits, and takes roles in smaller, prestige projects without talking chipmunks. Just a few weeks before Alvin unspooled at multiplexes across America, Mr. Cross appeared in Todd Haynes' I'm Not There in a cameo as Allen Ginsberg. Ironically, in that film he's counseling Cate Blanchett's Dylan stand-in after an electric set is met with cries of "Judas." Asked whether he thought the singer "sold out," Mr. Cross' Ginsberg shrugs and says in his best Lower East Side Beat Oracle accent, "I [don't] know. Perhaps you sold out to god? ... If your mission was to see whether you could do great art on a jukebox, well, then we all benefited."

By appearing in Alvin and the Chipmunks (no one's idea of art on a jukebox, but so what?), has David Cross sold out either to god or his dog and her frolicking in Sullivan County? "I don't think anyone gives a shit; I don't think anyone really, truly cares," he said finally. Does he wish he'd never posted his message (or the second one he put up called An Open Letter to Me from Future Me)? "Well, I dunno. The last couple days have been way less boring than they would've been."

He'd like to just let the whole thing go, but then, why did he allow a journalist into his apartment on a Saturday afternoon to discuss it at all?

"The biggest joke of all is that the fact that when this article comes out, it will only make things worse," Mr. Cross said, laughing. "That's the ultimate punchline ... You can give me this opportunity and this context ... but it's gonna go on and then people will talk about this fucking thing." (Especially since the Observer's website has comments.) Mr. Cross even has a suggestion for the accompanying art: "Please make it an illustration of [me with] a big head, just tears, 'boo-hoo!' and a stack of money."

Participating in his own ongoing evisceration aside, Mr. Cross knows this tempest in a comment section will die down eventually and he can get back to work and, when he has time, spend some weekends in the House That Alvin Bought.

As he described the place in his now infamous posting, it's "Nothing fancy, a small cottage on at least a couple of acres near some water where I could get out of here, get some fresh air, buy a smoker, make some b-b-q and hang out with my dog on the porch ... best of all it's in the middle of nowhere. No town, no nothing. Two hours outside the city and only about a ten minute drive from the Delaware River. Perfect."

Reading that description and knowing that his fans' online attacks are pinged directly to him in almost-real time via Google Alerts sent to his wireless device ("that's really being a glutton for punishment," Mr. Cross conceded, calling the alerts "pure vanity"), the Observer wondered whether Mr. Cross ever felt, well, lonely. (It was the Barbara Walters moment: Time for the funnyman to cry on cue.) "Definitely," he said. "That's why I've got Ollie. And Zoloft."

So now you know: If an you're an actor and comic who does the occasional Hollywood work and you need a friend, get yourself a dog.

• Fox Benches 24 Rather than Running Partial Season (B & C)
• ABC to Air Partial Season of Lost (B & C)

Maxim and Blender will be the chief beneficiaries of the new owners' money and time from now on, with plans to increase the rate-base for Blender, the music and lifestyle magazine, to 1 million by January 2009.

Maxim will get "Stuff for Men" as a section of the magazine, now that the title no longer has to compete with FHM magazine, the other lad-shopping mag.

• Adweek: 'Stuff' Folds Into 'Maxim'
• New York Times: New Owner to Combine Men's Magazines

In other media news:

Ziff Davis media is trying to restructure $390 M. in debt (Keith Kelly)

ABC does some downsizing in its D.C. bureau (FishbowlDC)

Goldmans, Browns in feud over O.J. book deal (MSNBC.com/Today)

Ryan Seacrest will host the Superbowl on Fox (Variety.com)

FSG to face firestorm over controversial Israel book (newyorktimes.com)

Get ready for the Book of Rove: Washington macher is already on the case (Publishers Weekly)

Four months later, with the book well underway, Ms. Regan began to shop an interview with Mr. Simpson around the broadcast networks.

She approached Barbara Walters at ABC. Ms. Walters said on the Nov. 15 episode of The View that she declined the interview.

But, according to four sources, Ms. Walters had expressed serious interest in Ms. Regan’s proposal. Another source, who has knowledge of Ms. Walters’ thinking, said that the newswoman expressed interest but never formally committed.

The sources, three of whom work at the network, said ABC News executives objected immediately. Ms. Regan then proposed that Ms. Walters do the interview through the network’s entertainment division instead of its news department.

Ms. Walters was intrigued, but needed to know exactly what revelations the book, called If I Did It, would contain. (Ms. Walters would not comment for this story.)

Ms. Regan arranged a phone call between Ms. Walters and the book’s ghostwriter, Pablo Fenjves, a former co-worker of Ms. Regan’s at The National Enquirer who was also a witness for the prosecution in Mr. Simpson’s criminal trial—it was he who recalled the “plaintive wail” of what might have been Nicole Brown Simpson’s Akita on the day of her murder.

Ms. Walters was sent an excerpt of the work in progress, which she read, the sources said.

ABC, as a matter of course, would not commit to airing an interview with Mr. Simpson before the interview was completed. Ms. Walters’ journalistic ideals were getting in the way.

Ms. Walters, according to two sources, would have wanted to air the interview in February 2007. She already had several prime-time engagements planned for the fall, including “30 Mistakes in 30 Years,” a career blooper reel that ran on Nov. 17. Plus there was the task of integrating Rosie O’Donnell onto The View. Plus she had to find a replacement for Star Jones. Ms. Walters’ schedule was packed through winter.

She spent no more than 10 days, by one informed account, in consideration, weighing these factors as well as a personal distaste for the enterprise. Ms. Walters declined the interview. So Ms. Regan set out to find a less ideal host.

The problem with O.J. Simpson—like Robert Blake or Michael Jackson or John Mark Karr or Charles Manson—is that he is more than a solitary, loathsome figure. He sullies whoever occupies the chair opposite him. Ms. Walters would have been journalist enough to absorb his stench, but few others in the news business are so hearty.

Ms. Regan contacted a handful of the most powerful television insiders, according to two other sources with knowledge of her efforts. She came to each with the promise of a “top-secret” project that she described as “explosive.” To find out more, they had to sign a nondisclosure agreement. (Ms. Walters, the sources said, was among those who signed. According to two sources close to Ms. Walters, News Corp. lawyers threatened to send a cease-and-desist letter after her statements on The View.)

Ms. Regan failed to find a suitable replacement.

She brought the project to Mike Darnell, the executive vice president of alternative programming at the Fox Broadcasting Company; his boss, Peter Liguori, the entertainment president of Fox; and his boss, Peter Chernin, the News Corp. executive in charge of the network. HarperCollins, the parent of ReganBooks, is owned by News Corp. (Executives of News Corp. declined, through publicists, to comment.)

She would conduct the interview herself. Why not?

Fox accepted. The special was scheduled for Nov. 27 and 29, the very end of sweeps. News Corp. boss Rupert Murdoch was kept fully informed, said two company sources. Other News Corp. executives, including Roger Ailes, the president of the Fox News Channel and the Fox affiliate group, were told hours before the release went out on the evening of Nov. 14, the News Corp. sources said.

The appeal for Mr. Murdoch and his subordinates was clear. Fox has had a terrible run this fall, even worse than it has had in recent years before its hits, American Idol and 24, begin again in January. None of the network’s new programs have succeeded.

The ones that have avoided cancellation—the Brad Garrett vehicle ’Til Death, for example, which averages only five to six million viewers a week—have done so by failing slightly less miserably. Vanished, a show about a Senator’s wife who goes missing, was cancelled on Nov. 16. It averaged just over three million viewers an episode. (By comparison, the last season of American Idol regularly drew 25 million viewers per episode.)

A blockbuster interview, even with—or especially with—a figure as widely reviled as Mr. Simpson, could overcome the network’s bleak sweeps performance. Mr. Darnell’s oeuvre—he is the only named producer of the special—includes 1998’s When Animals Attack!, 2002’s Temptation Island and 2000’s Who Wants to Marry a Multi-Millionaire?, whose multimillionaire had a criminal record and whose only tangible outcome was not a marriage but the short-lived nude-modeling career of “winner” Darva Conger.

But things went quickly south. In the week since News Corp. announced the Simpson package-of-terror, sanctimony has been the order of the day. The publishing industry reacted in disgust. At least a dozen Fox affiliates announced, sight unseen, that they would not carry the broadcast. Two major affiliate groups—Tribune and Sinclair—which own dozens of Fox affiliates between them, were threatening to pull the special from their airwaves at the start of this week, said a News Corp. source. Borders and other bookstores volunteered to give all the profits from sales of the book to charity.

Even Bill O’Reilly and Geraldo Rivera strutted out on the Fox News Channel to declare this the latest outrage in the culture wars. First Christmas; now O.J.

All that foaming led Mr. Murdoch, who is in Australia this week, to announce on Monday afternoon that he and his top executives had decided the hubbub wasn’t worth it.

“I and senior management agree with the American public that this was an ill-considered project,” Mr. Murdoch said in a statement issued on Nov. 20, addressing both any question of who comes first at News Corp. (“I”) and whether there might have been dissent in the ranks.

Hadn’t there been?

Mr. Ailes, ever the company man but not exactly good buddies with Mr. Chernin, had allowed his top talent to speak out against the News Corp. family in the days after the Simpson special was announced. On Nov. 17, Mr. O’Reilly called for a boycott of all advertisers who bought commercial time during the special. Moments after the reversal came down on the afternoon of Nov. 20, Fox News anchor Shep Smith—whose career-defining moment involved seeing the phrase “curb job” on a teleprompter and speaking the phrase “blow job” on live television—uttered another gaffe in addressing his corporate parent’s sensible decision.

“Now we know News Corp. and Fox News—err, Fox Broadcasting, which is in no way connected to Fox News—has decided to cancel the publication of the O.J. book and cancel the broadcast of the O.J. interview,” Mr. Smith said on his 3 o’clock newscast, not quite correctly representing the relationship between the channels and their corporate parentage.

But come Monday, News Corp. senior management was a unified front: “We are sorry for any pain this has caused the families of Ron Goldman and Nicole Brown Simpson,” they said. And that was all they said.

It was a nice thing to say, but it did little to address the most legitimate objection to the Simpson special, which is that it allowed Mr. Simpson, directly or indirectly, to profit once more from his role or non-role in the murder of his ex-wife and Mr. Goldman. The figure being tossed around in news reports is $3.5 million for his non-confession confession, though whether that is the amount of his advance, or is entirely inaccurate, is unconfirmed. Ms. Regan has promised the money will go to his children or to the Goldmans, if they work up the energy to sue. (Ms. Regan could not be reached; her cell phone voicemail was full.)

Judith Regan’s books—or Pablo Fenjves’ books—are printed, and some have even shipped. They are wrapped in plastic in warehouses around the country, where most of them will stay—except for the multitude of copies that will be unwrapped, passed around, read and resold for many times their original value on eBay.

As for Ms. Regan’s emotional four-hour interview with Mr. Simpson—tape which was not yet finished being edited into the two one-hour segments allotted for the special—it will remain locked in the News Corp. vault for at least a few hours until it “leaks” out and winds up on YouTube.

And Fox will engineer two nights of sweeps programming without Mr. Simpson.

The network knew that America has always had a special weakness for unconvicted criminals. But this fall, Nielsen numbers reflected a subtle shift in public opinion, a shift that Fox should have noted.

Historically, confessing in prime time, outside the confines of a trial, when there are no longer any consequences for rapes, murders and child-fondlings of years past, has become an honored sweeps-time ritual for the celebrity wrongdoer and his network of choice. This fusion of tabloid news and infotainment programming has grown into a slobbering subgenre. TV stars, including Headline News’ Nancy Grace and Dateline NBC’s Chris Hansen, have staked their careers on the popularity of this form of television. An entire network—Court TV—was founded on its principles.

British interviewer David Frost pioneered the form in 1977, when he conducted eight hours of interviews with a weather-beaten Richard Nixon. Mr. Nixon, realizing that he must make a spectacle of himself, broke down in tears on the final hour of the final day of interviews.

Years later, Martin Bashir’s 2003 interview of Michael Jackson drew 27 million viewers when it aired in the United States, and 14 million when it aired first in England. And Katie Couric’s 2004 interview of O.J. Simpson, conducted on the 10th anniversary of the murders, drew both criticism and boffo ratings for NBC.

But this year, when it became clear that JonBenét Ramsey’s non-killer John Mark Karr was too much of a liability to appear on Good Morning America, the program’s bookers passed the interview over to the producers of the new syndicated Dr. Phil-alike, the extra-bald Dr. Keith Ablow. These producers, according to four sources close to that show, plied the flimsy man-child with wine and used hidden cameras to catch him extemporizing backstage on the sexual preferences of little girls.

Ratings for The Dr. Keith Ablow Show, that day and every day, hovered just over one million viewers.

A disappointing five million viewers watched Diane Sawyer interview Mel Gibson for the first of two hours on Oct. 12 on Good Morning America—one million fewer than were watching whatever NBC was counter-programming over on the Today show, according to Nielsen.

Mr. Simpson’s stillborn interview would have been the most tiresome event to occur since Oprah Winfrey’s springtime bout with disgraced memoirist James Frey. Mr. Simpson’s book merely inverts Mr. Frey’s formula: Where A Million Little Pieces was a work of fantasy sold as a work of history, If I Did It is a memoir disguised, half-heartedly, as a novel. Mr. Frey’s truth is subjective; Mr. Simpson’s is hypothetical. But the mechanism is the same: Lie, confess, don’t really confess.

There is also the latest season of Survivor, which married the worst instincts of the news division to entertainment programming and so divided its cast into four teams by race. It was a naked ratings ploy disguised as a pop sociological experiment, and it performed poorly. For all the hype, only 18 million viewers—off from a series peak of 45 million—tuned in for the premiere.

On Court TV and Headline News, Ms. Grace has continued her wide-nostriled tirade against defense attorneys, police investigators and anyone suspected of committing a violent crime. On NBC, Mr. Hansen has persisted in setting up sting operations to trap would-be Internet sex offenders. Both shows have presided over suicides this fall.

In Mr. Hansen’s case, a sex predator shot himself in the head earlier this month before the Dateline camera crew could capture his shame. In Ms. Grace’s case, Melinda Duckett, the young mother of a boy who had gone missing in Florida, shot herself in the head this September, less than 24 hours after a televised interrogation by Ms. Grace. On Nov. 20, lawyers representing Ms. Duckett’s estate announced that they would be suing Ms. Grace and the network.

By contrast, the two breakout hits of the fall season are shamelessly life-affirming scripted shows: Heroes, on NBC, about a pretty and ethnically diverse group of young people with superpowers who band together to save the world; and Ugly Betty, on ABC, about a fat girl with braces who triumphs over cosmopolitan adversity. Both draw more than 14 million viewers a week.

In the morning, the President gave a speech outlining the terrible things that could happen if the U.S. military were to leave Iraq too soon. Several hours later, word came that Karl Rove, his top advisor, was not yet clear of the threat of indictment. Bird flu was coming; Hurricane Katrina funds were going fast.

Then, at 4:30 p.m., as producers were emerging from editorial meetings with their evening-news lineups, one last piece of news broke: Any day now, 19 terrorists would explode bombs in baby carriages on the New York City subway. Or—they wouldn’t.

It was a problematic story. Federal and local officials disagreed about the credibility of the threat. Multiple and conflicting political motivations could have been in play. And, as ever, there was a fine line between informing the viewing public about terror threats and merely alarming everyone.

So when the wire report appeared on Keith Olbermann’s computer screen, the anchor got up from his desk and marched into MSNBC’s newsroom in Secaucus.

“How many times is this?” he asked his staff, haute voix. “How many times has this happened?”

By “this,” Mr. Olbermann said, he meant an auspicious confluence of big news stories, one distracting from another distracting from another, capped off with a late-breaking terror-threat bulletin. And by “how many times,” he meant literally.

Thus, as Mayor Michael Bloomberg held a 5:30 p.m. press conference urging everyone to stay calm and the major networks prepared stories on the threat, Mr. Olbermann’s staff began tallying up the precedents. By the 8 p.m. start of Countdown with Keith Olbermann, they had picked out 13 examples of what Mr. Olbermann considered suspiciously timed news stories. Said the host near the top of his show: “How could the coincidences be so consistent?”

Asked later if this wasn’t maybe a little kooky, Mr. Olbermann explained that it was merely his way of demonstrating skepticism about the legitimacy of publicizing this kind of threat. He said he was planning another segment for Oct. 12, this time featuring 16 different examples. On Oct. 11, CNN and others began reporting that the threat was actually a hoax. “There is a—I don’t want to call it a bullshit detector,” Mr. Olbermann had said in an interview the day before. “Let’s call it a too-many-coincidences detector.”

The initial threat report did serve to bump the news of Mr. Rove’s apparent legal troubles lower in the major-network broadcasts. NBC led its 6:30 newscast with a piece on Mr. Rove, then pre-empted that segment for the subway story in its 7 p.m. broadcast, which is taped and aired later on the West Coast. ABC and CBS had already led with the threat at 6:30.

The networks had seemingly exercised their own coincidence detectors, crashing ambivalent pieces that quoted both local officials who deemed it serious and federal officials, like one CBS source, who called it “imagination run amok.” Still, it was next to impossible to find a cab that evening, as Manhattanites evidently opted for non-threatened means of transportation.

All three networks led with the threat again on Friday.

As for Mr. Olbermann’s “juxtaposition theory” segment, the host brought on Craig Crawford, a columnist for Congressional Quarterly and the enterprising author of a new book titled Attack the Messenger: How Politicians Turn You Against the Media. Mr. Crawford criticized the media for being too trusting of the Mayor, the NYPD and the F.B.I.

On Friday, Mr. Crawford contributed to CBSNews.com’s new Public Eye blog: “The news media should be aggressive and skeptical from the outset about the possibility of manipulation in these moments. Instead, we have an environment that spooks reporters and their bosses off this trail, especially when the alerts are first announced, because they know that the politicians will attack them for being callous, or worse, treasonous.”

Jon Banner, the executive producer of ABC’s World News Tonight, said this criticism misses the point. And that point is that a broadcast-network newscast can only do so much vetting.

“Look,” said Mr. Banner, “we tried to shed as much light on the story as possible. We told the facts as we knew them, based on what our sources were telling us as to what led to the threat. We also included some of the back-and-forth as to whether the threat should be believed.”

Television news has been particularly proactive about reporting on terror threats since before even the first World Trade Center attack in 1993, said Dan Forman, a longtime broadcaster and the station manager and senior vice president of WNBC Channel 4 in New York—which made headlines for having had the subway-threat story days before the Mayor’s press conference and not running with it.

Mr. Forman said he dates the sensitivity about getting the news out to the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988. Embassies had been warned about possible terror attacks, but the news media didn’t pick up the story.

Channel 4 investigative reporter Jonathan Dienst, the reporter on the subway-threat tip, likewise cited Lockerbie. Mr. Dienst was a Colgate junior studying abroad in London when Flight 103 was brought down, and two of his friends were on board. That was what made him decide to go into journalism, he said.

It was Oct. 3—four days before the Mayor’s press conference and Mr. Olbermann’s theorizing—that Mr. Dienst first got wind of the suspected subway plot. He reported it out on Tuesday, he said, and planned a segment for the 5 o’clock news. But before the piece aired, three officials—two federal, one local—called and asked the station to hold the piece, citing public safety and national security, Mr. Dienst said.

“In one of the conversations, I said, ‘Look, there are people getting on the subways. Don’t they have a right or need to know?’” Mr. Dienst said. “You don’t take it lightly, but these officials were in the best place to know.”

After consulting with Mr. Forman and wrestling briefly with his conscience, he deferred to the officials and sacrificed his scoop.

“We had to hold the story,” Mr. Forman said. “That was a very tough decision, because we’re in the business of reporting the truth to the public. That’s our mission. But sometimes that has to be hampered by the public good.”

Geraldo: Good for What Ailes Fox?

When Geraldo Rivera’s new half-hour news show launches without irony this Halloween, it will be Roger Ailes’ first really visible fingerprint on the Fox Television Stations Group.

Mr. Rivera’s show, Geraldo at Large (not to be confused with his current weekend Fox News show, At Large with Geraldo Rivera), is to be shot live in New York and funneled out to the 35 Fox affiliates around the country, as well as other network affiliates who may buy the rights to the program. At the Fox stations, the show will become a hallmark of the Fox group’s newly revealed strategy for local programming: creating blocks of similar shows—in this case, news shows—to save money, hold viewers’ attention and increase their loyalty to their local Fox channel.

“In many of these stations, I would look at the program schedule, and I’d see a news show leading into a talk show leading into a court show leading into Cops,” said Jack Abernethy, the chief executive of the stations group and Mr. Ailes’ right-hand man. “I think broadcasters traditionally—certainly in the old days—were able to have six or seven different niches all blended together in a channel.”

But not now. These days, as the wildly successful Fox News Channel has helped to demonstrate, the way to make money in television is to be a brand, carve a niche, establish an identity. To this end, the Fox group has made three high-level hires in the last week, including Dennis Swanson, the new president of station operations, who has worked at all three major networks, most recently as the second in command at Viacom’s television-station group.

Mr. Swanson is known as a gifted local news programmer, not unlike Mr. Ailes, who took over the Fox Television Stations Group in August. The stations group—the most profitable unit of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation empire—was previously run by Mr. Murdoch’s son and heir-apparent, Lachlan, who resigned in July.

The appointment of Mr. Ailes led television folks to speculate that he might remake the Fox affiliates in the image of the cable news channel he helped create in 1996 and move into first place five years later. That doesn’t mean there will be 35 little Fox News Channels scattered in major markets around the country, Mr. Abernethy said. But there’s no reason local television can’t take a cue from cable.

As to persistent rumors that Fox and its new star anchor, Shep Smith, will be getting into the national evening-news business, Mr. Abernethy said, “Clearly, we would like to do national news and information programming to complement our local newses on our stations. But that’s something we haven’t talked about formally, although it has come up.”

He did say that they’ve kicked around the idea of doing a version of Nightline, when things were looking especially perilous for the show earlier this summer.

“When Nightline was in play,” he said, “people would call and say, ‘Hey, is there an appetite for that kind of national news?’”

The conclusion they reached is just what no one at Nightline or in any of the broadcast-network news divisions wants to hear.

“We’d look at it, you know,” Mr. Abernethy said, “and we’d see there’s just not a big demand for that right now.”

In the morning, the President gave a speech outlining the terrible things that could happen if the U.S. military were to leave Iraq too soon. Several hours later, word came that Karl Rove, his top advisor, was not yet clear of the threat of indictment. Bird flu was coming; Hurricane Katrina funds were going fast.

Then, at 4:30 p.m., as producers were emerging from editorial meetings with their evening-news lineups, one last piece of news broke: Any day now, 19 terrorists would explode bombs in baby carriages on the New York City subway. Or—they wouldn’t.

It was a problematic story. Federal and local officials disagreed about the credibility of the threat. Multiple and conflicting political motivations could have been in play. And, as ever, there was a fine line between informing the viewing public about terror threats and merely alarming everyone.

So when the wire report appeared on Keith Olbermann’s computer screen, the anchor got up from his desk and marched into MSNBC’s newsroom in Secaucus.

“How many times is this?” he asked his staff, haute voix. “How many times has this happened?”

By “this,” Mr. Olbermann said, he meant an auspicious confluence of big news stories, one distracting from another distracting from another, capped off with a late-breaking terror-threat bulletin. And by “how many times,” he meant literally.

Thus, as Mayor Michael Bloomberg held a 5:30 p.m. press conference urging everyone to stay calm and the major networks prepared stories on the threat, Mr. Olbermann’s staff began tallying up the precedents. By the 8 p.m. start of Countdown with Keith Olbermann, they had picked out 13 examples of what Mr. Olbermann considered suspiciously timed news stories. Said the host near the top of his show: “How could the coincidences be so consistent?”

Asked later if this wasn’t maybe a little kooky, Mr. Olbermann explained that it was merely his way of demonstrating skepticism about the legitimacy of publicizing this kind of threat. He said he was planning another segment for Oct. 12, this time featuring 16 different examples. On Oct. 11, CNN and others began reporting that the threat was actually a hoax. “There is a—I don’t want to call it a bullshit detector,” Mr. Olbermann had said in an interview the day before. “Let’s call it a too-many-coincidences detector.”

The initial threat report did serve to bump the news of Mr. Rove’s apparent legal troubles lower in the major-network broadcasts. NBC led its 6:30 newscast with a piece on Mr. Rove, then pre-empted that segment for the subway story in its 7 p.m. broadcast, which is taped and aired later on the West Coast. ABC and CBS had already led with the threat at 6:30.

The networks had seemingly exercised their own coincidence detectors, crashing ambivalent pieces that quoted both local officials who deemed it serious and federal officials, like one CBS source, who called it “imagination run amok.” Still, it was next to impossible to find a cab that evening, as Manhattanites evidently opted for non-threatened means of transportation.

All three networks led with the threat again on Friday.

As for Mr. Olbermann’s “juxtaposition theory” segment, the host brought on Craig Crawford, a columnist for Congressional Quarterly and the enterprising author of a new book titled Attack the Messenger: How Politicians Turn You Against the Media. Mr. Crawford criticized the media for being too trusting of the Mayor, the NYPD and the F.B.I.

On Friday, Mr. Crawford contributed to CBSNews.com’s new Public Eye blog: “The news media should be aggressive and skeptical from the outset about the possibility of manipulation in these moments. Instead, we have an environment that spooks reporters and their bosses off this trail, especially when the alerts are first announced, because they know that the politicians will attack them for being callous, or worse, treasonous.”

Jon Banner, the executive producer of ABC’s World News Tonight, said this criticism misses the point. And that point is that a broadcast-network newscast can only do so much vetting.

“Look,” said Mr. Banner, “we tried to shed as much light on the story as possible. We told the facts as we knew them, based on what our sources were telling us as to what led to the threat. We also included some of the back-and-forth as to whether the threat should be believed.”

Television news has been particularly proactive about reporting on terror threats since before even the first World Trade Center attack in 1993, said Dan Forman, a longtime broadcaster and the station manager and senior vice president of WNBC Channel 4 in New York—which made headlines for having had the subway-threat story days before the Mayor’s press conference and not running with it.

Mr. Forman said he dates the sensitivity about getting the news out to the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988. Embassies had been warned about possible terror attacks, but the news media didn’t pick up the story.

Channel 4 investigative reporter Jonathan Dienst, the reporter on the subway-threat tip, likewise cited Lockerbie. Mr. Dienst was a Colgate junior studying abroad in London when Flight 103 was brought down, and two of his friends were on board. That was what made him decide to go into journalism, he said.

It was Oct. 3—four days before the Mayor’s press conference and Mr. Olbermann’s theorizing—that Mr. Dienst first got wind of the suspected subway plot. He reported it out on Tuesday, he said, and planned a segment for the 5 o’clock news. But before the piece aired, three officials—two federal, one local—called and asked the station to hold the piece, citing public safety and national security, Mr. Dienst said.

“In one of the conversations, I said, ‘Look, there are people getting on the subways. Don’t they have a right or need to know?’” Mr. Dienst said. “You don’t take it lightly, but these officials were in the best place to know.”

After consulting with Mr. Forman and wrestling briefly with his conscience, he deferred to the officials and sacrificed his scoop.

“We had to hold the story,” Mr. Forman said. “That was a very tough decision, because we’re in the business of reporting the truth to the public. That’s our mission. But sometimes that has to be hampered by the public good.”

Geraldo: Good for What Ailes Fox?

When Geraldo Rivera’s new half-hour news show launches without irony this Halloween, it will be Roger Ailes’ first really visible fingerprint on the Fox Television Stations Group.

Mr. Rivera’s show, Geraldo at Large (not to be confused with his current weekend Fox News show, At Large with Geraldo Rivera), is to be shot live in New York and funneled out to the 35 Fox affiliates around the country, as well as other network affiliates who may buy the rights to the program. At the Fox stations, the show will become a hallmark of the Fox group’s newly revealed strategy for local programming: creating blocks of similar shows—in this case, news shows—to save money, hold viewers’ attention and increase their loyalty to their local Fox channel.

“In many of these stations, I would look at the program schedule, and I’d see a news show leading into a talk show leading into a court show leading into Cops,” said Jack Abernethy, the chief executive of the stations group and Mr. Ailes’ right-hand man. “I think broadcasters traditionally—certainly in the old days—were able to have six or seven different niches all blended together in a channel.”

But not now. These days, as the wildly successful Fox News Channel has helped to demonstrate, the way to make money in television is to be a brand, carve a niche, establish an identity. To this end, the Fox group has made three high-level hires in the last week, including Dennis Swanson, the new president of station operations, who has worked at all three major networks, most recently as the second in command at Viacom’s television-station group.

Mr. Swanson is known as a gifted local news programmer, not unlike Mr. Ailes, who took over the Fox Television Stations Group in August. The stations group—the most profitable unit of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation empire—was previously run by Mr. Murdoch’s son and heir-apparent, Lachlan, who resigned in July.

The appointment of Mr. Ailes led television folks to speculate that he might remake the Fox affiliates in the image of the cable news channel he helped create in 1996 and move into first place five years later. That doesn’t mean there will be 35 little Fox News Channels scattered in major markets around the country, Mr. Abernethy said. But there’s no reason local television can’t take a cue from cable.

As to persistent rumors that Fox and its new star anchor, Shep Smith, will be getting into the national evening-news business, Mr. Abernethy said, “Clearly, we would like to do national news and information programming to complement our local newses on our stations. But that’s something we haven’t talked about formally, although it has come up.”

He did say that they’ve kicked around the idea of doing a version of Nightline, when things were looking especially perilous for the show earlier this summer.

“When Nightline was in play,” he said, “people would call and say, ‘Hey, is there an appetite for that kind of national news?’”

The conclusion they reached is just what no one at Nightline or in any of the broadcast-network news divisions wants to hear.

“We’d look at it, you know,” Mr. Abernethy said, “and we’d see there’s just not a big demand for that right now.”

Even without the new digs, Mr. Ailes’ appointment earlier this month to head the Fox Television Stations group marks him as the ascendant figure in the post-Lachlan realignment of News Corp.

Mr. Ailes’ newest territory is the most profitable unit of News Corp., bringing in $900 million in operating income last year, or more than one quarter of the company’s total operating income. But unlike the Fox Broadcasting Company or the Fox News Channel, it remains one of the more vaguely known parts of the Murdoch empire, with no Homer Simpson or Bill O’Reilly to embody it.

The station group has been around since 1986, when Mr. Murdoch began buying up local television stations to carry his Fox network programming around the country.

Eventually, buying affiliates from independent owners and from other station groups, News Corp. amassed 35 stations. Among those were pairs of stations in nine markets—including New York, Los Angeles and Chicago—which allowed Fox to save money by sharing a certain amount of staff.

All told, the Fox Stations Group now accounts for around 20 percent of the Fox network’s affiliates and employs some 5,300 people. It is the second-largest station group in the country, behind only Viacom’s station group.

Yet it has largely remained an aggregation of individual stations, not a streamlined national brand reaching out to local communities. Said one high-ranking executive who has worked both with Mr. Ailes and in local television, “That’s what’s missing at Fox, and that’s the first thing Roger’s gonna try to do.”

Mr. Ailes, a product of Warren, Ohio, has a history of connecting to small-town America. After producing the Ohio-based Mike Douglas show, the young Mr. Ailes made his name by putting Richard Nixon on television in 1968, making him look appealing to local viewers.

Building a station-group identity would be another feat of packaging. Right now, the affiliates get two hours of prime-time programming from Fox on weekdays, seven hours of kids and nighttime programming on Saturdays, four hours on Sundays, and an assortment of sports events and specials. That’s less than what ABC, NBC and CBS offer their affiliates, because the Big Three also have morning and late-night shows and national evening newscasts.

The individual Fox affiliates fill up the rest of the day with local newscasts and syndicated programming, either first-run or reruns.

In another bit of centralization, Mr. Ailes will also oversee Twentieth Television, which produces some of this first-run syndicated programming and distributes off-network programming.

And Mr. Ailes will remain busy running the top-ranking Fox News Channel he helped build from scratch. But to varying degrees, the job of heading a stations group can be a hands-off job.

Mr. Ailes’ rough organizational equivalent at Sinclair, which owns 61 stations (including 20 Fox affiliates), would be David Smith, the company’s president and C.E.O. Mr. Smith is described by his company as a big picture, long-term strategic thinker; day-to-day operations are run by chief operating officer Steve Marks. Mr. Marks is an approximate analog to Jack Abernethy, C.E.O. of the Fox Stations Group, and Mr. Ailes’ right-hand man and former deputy at Fox News Channel.

Each Fox Group station has a general manager, who reports up the corporate ladder to Mr. Abernethy, who reports to Mr. Ailes, who reports jointly to Mr. Murdoch and News Corp. president and chief operating officer Peter Chernin.

Much has already been made about the initial challenges that Mr. Ailes will face in the job: what to do (if anything) with morning and late-night time slots; how to convince Nielsen to change its people meters to boost Fox-friendly urban-viewership numbers; how to make local news more watchable; how (or whether) to proceed with the development of a Fox business channel; how to balance his new responsibilities with his old ones at Fox News.

Said one insider: “I don’t think there will be time for a lot of golf.”

Over linguine with truffle oil and two Dewar’s on the rocks, Henry S. Schleiff laid out his vision for the future of television news: less God-like monotone, more Nancy Grace.

“The audience doesn’t need a didactic voice,” Mr. Schleiff said. “The audience wants a friend who’s smart, who’s credible, who’s Diogenes—but a cool Diogenes—who says, ‘Here’s the story. Here’s my way in. Agree or disagree, but here’s my analysis.’”

Henry S. Schleiff is not—at the moment—a broadcast-news executive. He is chairman of Court TV and, at 57, one of the nation’s leading purveyors of human misadventure.

Though he was talking about Edward R. Murrow, his network broadcasts salacious trials interspersed with antagonistic commentary and programming themed around the judicial system.

And it works: In seven years, Mr. Schleiff has boosted Court TV’s viewership by 55 million people. He has become a queen-maker to the slightly off-kilter (on Ms. Grace, one of his most popular anchors, his stated position is “You go girl!”). He has given America more Scott Peterson and Michael Jackson than it can handle—or not quite enough.

Consequently, and because his capacity for self-promotion is as discomfittingly perfect as his smile, Mr. Schleiff has become one of those hot shots whom everyone assumes has preordered curtains to fit the windows on the executive floor of 30 Rock. He has been talked about as a possible successor to Neal Shapiro as president of NBC News, or of a conglomerate that also includes CNBC and MSNBC. He is also rumored to have his eye on Jonathan Klein’s job as president of CNN.

That he has no discernable network news background doesn’t seem to factor in (though, as Frank Biondi, his onetime mentor and the former chairman of Viacom, said, “News folks can get awfully snippy at that”).

Said one broadcast network executive: “One of the biggest parlor games in Manhattan is guessing what big job Henry Schleiff is going to do next.”

While Mr. Schleiff doesn’t openly participate in this game, he is an enthusiastic spectator: sitting back, sipping scotch, subtly goading the gossip with evasive one-liners and non-denial denials. His official word on other jobs is: “I don’t see anything right now on the horizon that I think personally and totally selfishly would provide as much fun, challenge and interest as I see coming up on Court TV.”

In the words of Susan Krakower, the senior vice president of prime-time programming at CNBC and a close friend and former employee of Mr. Schleiff’s: “That’s a bunch of bullshit if I ever heard it.”

Mr. Schleiff is not some newfangled television executive. On the contrary, he is distinctly old-fashioned, of the same mold as Leslie Moonves, Fred Silverman and Brandon Tartikoff.

“I would say he was born with a William Paley gene and a Shecky Green gene,” said Brian Williams, the anchor of NBC Nightly News and a Schleiff acolyte. “He was born with a ton of personality and the ability to navigate a room full of very important people and an industry where knives are always drawn. I will say he has an increasingly rare quality in television. I think he has vision.”

That vision may have carried him as far a person can go at Court TV. When Mr. Schleiff took over in 1998, the channel was ranked 44th of 44 ad-supported, Nielsen-rated television networks. Once a channel by lawyers and for lawyers, it had become a channel by lawyers and for whatever insomniacs and potheads happened to cruise by, to the tune of a 0.1 rating, on average. Now it regularly rates a 0.9 and frequently ranks in the top 12.

“The good thing about cable is it’s still the Wild West,” Mr. Schleiff said one recent morning in his tchotchke-laden corner office at Court TV headquarters in midtown. Behind him, a television on mute showed a man on trial for attempted homicide, apparently involving some drunken gunplay. The accused fidgeted on the stand. Mr. Schleiff twitched gleefully in his armchair. “You can still experiment with cable. You can still try things. As long as you understand what your audience comes to you for, they give you pretty wide leeway.”

In his first moves as head of the network, Mr. Schleiff bought the rights to popular syndicated dramas, such as Homicide, and set about wooing personalities, including Catherine Crier and Dominick Dunne, to host their own shows.

“Henry pays attention,” said Ms. Crier, who had worked at Court TV previously and was lured back in October 1999. “He makes a point of working with people, not working over them, which happens to be my own personal managing philosophy. I find it inspiring.”

“He’s great to work for if you’re a woman,” said Ms. Krakower. “My job with Henry was the last job I ever loved.”

“Henry is one of the most charming people I’ve ever met,” said Mr. Dunne. “He is hilariously funny. He misses nothing. I happen to be several of those things myself. We got along from the first day that we met.”

Mr. Schleiff, he said, calls him “Domster.”

In fact, Mr. Schleiff has pet names for many of his adult male friends. At lunch one day at Michael’s, from his regular table—table 27—Mr. Schleiff identified the grizzled industry types around the room as if they were Labrador puppies in a cardboard box. In the course of this tour, CBS publicist Gil Schwartz, a man known to occasionally display the temperament and facial expressions of a bear, was described as “adorable.”

Between bites of his regular Cobb salad, Mr. Schleiff talked about his latest project: Court TV’s recent rebranding. Through a complicated process of television meiosis, a single network divided into two this summer: Court TV News, which includes the daytime trial coverage; and Seriously Entertaining, which includes the original series and movies shown at night. First the headlines, then the loosely fictionalized programming that’s been ripped from them.

“I think the stories that we can cover on Court TV are just so right for these times,” he said. “People get the importance of it. People get the value of seeing these trials. And if you tell the story well, if you combine compelling execution with high stakes and importance, then I think you have the prescription for a very successful network.”

Or a somewhat more successful network newscast?

When Mr. Schleiff talks about how to improve television news, he does it in the way Dan Rather might address the challenges of writing a sitcom: by going with what he knows. That may mean glossing over sticking points for television newshounds—such as the issue of leadership on the evening news, of an anchor who tells viewers which stories are most important—in favor of a programmer’s sensibility. How do you get more eyeballs at 6:30? Give the people what they want: drama, pathos, the good stuff.

That’s not to say Mr. Schleiff is in favor of replacing political coverage with pop-star molestation-trial analysis. He said that he’s most proud of the advocacy work he’s done since coming to Court TV: the Voting Rights Act symposium he went to in Washington recently; the cases he has argued—unsuccessfully as of late—to open up federal courtrooms to video cameras; the laws he has fought to change; the other advocates he has honored.

“He’s a bright light in the media world, where there aren’t too many bright lights these days,” said Sherron S. Watkins, the Enron whistle-blower and the recipient of a Court TV Scales of Justice award. “I think he’s trying to maintain a network that does things a little differently,” she said, “that doesn’t necessarily cater to the imperative to keep everything short, quick and entertaining.”

Mr. Schleiff grew up on Long Island, the child of a financier and a stay-at-home mom. Little Henry traveled a smooth trajectory from the cradle to the University of Pennsylvania to the Manhattan office of Davis, Polk & Wardwell.

During his six years at Davis Polk, he subscribed to Variety and took up writing freelance for Saturday Night Live. He had exactly two pieces of material accepted, for Guido Sarducci sketches, and neither, by his own admission, drew any great laughs. The experience did give him an opportunity to interact with writers and comedians, and it allowed him time to hone a specialty in dead-Pope humor. “There’s a very narrow window for that—only about once every 20 years when you can use this stuff,” he said. “But it’s timeless.”

In 1978, Mr. Schleiff went to work at Viacom, where he had a long career that involved several different jobs where he oversaw the production of many famous shows, and one notable but less famous Simpsons cousin called Twisted Puppet Theatre.

In 1998, Time Warner chief executive Richard Parsons approached him about the Court TV job. Per Mr. Schleiff’s request, Mr. Biondi said that he called Mr. Parsons with a reference: “There’s not one other job for C.E.O. in the country that I’d recommend Henry for, other than this one. He’s got something your network needs desperately: a sense of humor.”

Or, as Mr. Dunne, the Domster, put it: “So many television executives are withdrawn from everything. But Henry just mixes with everybody; it’s all the same to him. His humor’s the same. There’s people who save their funniest stuff for their most important friends, you know? And he’s the antithesis of that.”

Nothing seems to delight Mr. Schleiff more than flaunting his wit on the Manhattan and Hamptons party circuits. “I love New York City,” he said. “I love the pace of it. I love the people. I love the action, the turmoil. I would be hard-pressed to live anywhere else.”

To demonstrate his cocktail-party bona fides, and to sweet-talk the Mayor into a project about New York’s counterterrorism plans, Mr. Schleiff went one recent evening to a party for the New York entertainment community at Gracie Mansion.

Immediately upon arrival, Mr. Schleiff began a fruitless quest for scotch. Along the way, he figure-eighted through the party, swapping jokes with Homicide producer Tom Fontana, making nice with Cindy Adams and chatting up Katherine Oliver, the commissioner for the Mayor’s Office of Film, Theatre and Broadcasting. His three-person entourage jogged to keep up.

Settling for white wine, he looped through the backyard tent, remembered everybody’s name, took a picture with Mayor Bloomberg.

Toward the end of the evening, a William Morris agent, all winks and nudges, approached with the latest rumor. “I heard your name in the trade winds,” he said. Mr. Schleiff smiled his neon-white, too-perfect smile. “Oh, everybody’s always talking,” he said, in a way that was almost convincingly sheepish. “But really, who knows?”

Director Wong Kar-Wai is worried about forgetting, and he makes movies that are fuzzy and luminous so he can remember exactly how he remembers things. Themes of memory, love and obsession move recurrently through his work like weather patterns.

The Wong Kar-Wai Collection is almost entirely devoid of extras but generously includes Happy Together, Chungking Express, Fallen Angels, Days of Being Wild and his debut feature As Tears Go By. Killers and cops and cashiers fall in love but mostly out of it. His characters spend a lot of time alone in crowded places. The actors who regularly appear in his films—Tony Leung and Maggie Cheung, the Jean Sebergian Faye Wong or the late Leslie Cheung—aren’t just dolls to be played with, or special effects. Despite working most of the time without a script or even a coherent story line, these ridiculously too-gifted actors still manage to be human beings. Like car-sick kids staring steadily at that point on the horizon, we find ourselves trying to keep focused on their faces amid the dense, dizzying thicket of camera tricks. Cinematographer Christopher Doyle is the mad scientist who gives all these films their dreamy efflorescent colors, their strange, screwy camera movements.

Fallen Angels, a sort-of sequel to the lovely, nutty Chungking Express, is what you would dream after a long night of John Woo and NyQuil. A conscience-riddled hitman brandishes pistols in both hands, and sends messages via jukebox to his smitten partner. She, in turn, cleans his apartment, scopes out the scenes of his next crimes, and jerks off in his bed while he’s out shooting and getting shot. Meanwhile, an ex-con, mute since childhood after eating an expired can of pineapples, breaks into closed shops at night and reopens them for business. Some hints about his sales techniques can be gleaned from the cast list, which includes Man Forced to Eat Ice Cream, Man Forced to Have His Clothes Washed and Woman Pressed to Buy Vegetables.

The real masterpiece here is Happy Together. Radiant, nasty and very, very sad, it’s all about the abusive love affair between two gay expats barely scraping by in Buenos Aires. When we first meet the two men, Lai (Tony Leung) and Ho (Leslie Cheung), they’re busy fucking, which is about the only time we see them together and happy. The rest of the time they chafe. Lai and Ho break up and start over and break up. Their heartbreak is worse and weirder because it happens so far from home, like drinking booze at very high altitudes. But after many fights and multiple tangos; after Ho breaks both his hands; after they get lost looking for the waterfalls on their souvneir lamp; after Lai finally finds the falls, all alone, and then flies to Taipei, and boards the train at night; after all that, somebody on the soundtrack starts singing, "Happy Together." You’ve been waiting the whole movie to hear it. Ba-ba-ba-ba. So happy together. This is maybe the happiest ending in movies: Lai’s train pulls into the station.

[The Wong Kar-Wai Collection ( As Tears Go By, Days of Being Wild, Fallen Angels, Happy Together, Chungking Express) $99.95.]

—Mark Lotto

From Angora to ‘The Animal’

Tim Burton’s Ed Wood, a meticulously crafted masterpiece of dark comedy and Mr. Burton’s best work, tells the story of arguably the worst film director who ever lived. Ed Wood, played with typical verve by Johnny Depp, exclaims in the film, "Movies are not about the little details; it’s about the big picture." Considering Mr. Burton’s obsessive attention to detail and Mr. Wood’s utter lack thereof (unless the details involved Mr. Wood’s curious angora fetish), the directors are two sides of the same cinematic coin, a dynamic of extremes that makes the film remarkably personal. The odd yet brilliantly funny screenplay was written by none other than Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski, the same team behind the Jon Ritter bomb The Problem Child. Martin Landau also gives an Academy Award–winning performance as the cantankerous Bela Lugosi, and Bill Murray’s comedic genius is on full display as Mr. Wood’s close friend Bunny Breckenridge.

This DVD is the special-edition release, and it’s chock full of extras. The special features are as pleasing as the film, particularly behind-the-scenes footage aptly titled Let’s Shoot This F#*%@r, in which Mr. Burton explains how to grimace properly to wrestling behemoth George "The Animal" Steele (who plays Tor Johnson in the movie). The audio commentary boasts more than the haphazard musings typical of most DVD’s; instead, it’s constructed as a cohesive narrative of the film’s inception.

But the most entertaining "featurette" is entitled The Theremin. The theremin, apparently the oldest electronic instrument, was used by the film’s composer Howard Shore to achieve an eerie, evocative sound most closely associated with 50’s-era flying-saucer landings. The gentleman who plays the theremin on the DVD is odder than anyone Mr. Burton could have cooked up.

The only thing lacking in this tribute to Mr. Wood are snippets of his own "masterpiece," Plan Nine from Outer Space, and, perhaps, a jewel case covered with angora.

[ Ed Wood (1994), 127 min., R, $29.99.]

—Jake Brooks

Turn Off That Reality Show!

The Fox TV show Arrested Development finally got its due this fall when it took home five Emmys—if only people would start watching it, too.

The DVD release of the show’s first season is valuable as a catch-up tool. In the pilot, George Bluth (played by Jeffrey Tambor), the C.E.O. of the Bluth Development Corporation, orders his secretary to shred company documents by cell phone as the Security and Exchange Commission comes to take him away, all while his cockeyed family flails around in a panic. From there it only gets better: His son, Michael Bluth (played by the deliciously uptight Jason Bateman), tries to keep the disintegrating company going while his flaky, nightmare dilettante mother, sister and brothers make his life hell.

Mr. Bateman has been grossly underemployed since starring in It’s Your Move, a great, wacky sitcom that ended prematurely in 1985. Both David Cross, playing the sexually ambidextrous brother-in-law and recurring guest star Liza Minelli as a post-menopausal loon, are hilarious and repulsive. Michael Bluth’s preteen son, George-Michael, played by Michael Cera, is so dorky and neurotic one aches when he appears on screen.

In one of the bonus segments on the DVD, someone asks whether the cast and writers of Arrested Development are "frustrated" by the show’s lack of recognition. The question pretty much sums up the tragedy of television. One needs a lobotomy to sit through nearly everything on TV these days; Arrested Development, with its smart writing and pure absurdity, represents a small ray of hope. Predictably, it was nearly too "smart" for its medium, and was hanging by a thread last spring under threat of cancellation.

Through interviews with the show’s creator, Mitchell Hurwitz, we learn that Arrested Development was modeled after reality television—the production team used both handheld cameras and natural light. The producers didn’t allow video monitors on the set—to prevent the skittish network suits from seeing the "ugly" footage and running screaming back to the cancellation committee.

But Fox recently announced that it was picking up the show for a second season. New episodes are to air starting on Nov. 7, so there will be no excuse for watching Wife Swap.

[ Arrested Development: Season One, (2003), $39.90.]

—Sheelah Kolhatkar