I’m not sure if Mad Men executive producer Matt Weiner was tongue-in-cheek joking or not when he asked TV critics touring the show’s set Tuesday not to walk off with any souvenirs.

“Please be respectful of the set, and we say this to everyone who comes to visit: Don’t take anything,” Weiner told several busloads of writers assembled for the set visit. “This is like Pompeii. You see the bones in the walls, they are irreplaceable. Some of this stuff has really been hard to find.”

But then Weiner enthusiastically escorted writers around the set he so obviously loves, located at the LA Center Studios in downtown Los Angeles.

AMC’s Mad Men—a period piece about an enigmatic crew working at the Sterling Cooper ad agency in the early 1960s on Madison Avenue, is the ...Read More

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Beverly Hills, Calif.—After four long and busy days here in Beverly Hills, cable’s portion of the Television Critics Association is wrapping up. The event had its moments, to be sure.

I admit that my eyes welled up when I saw the clip from WE tv’s The Locator, which is about a man who helps adopted people track down their blood relations. In the video, we were shown weepy men and women reconnected to their never-known or long-lost families. It was heart-wrenching.

And I was moved when I saw Georgia, one of Michael Vick’s abused—and toothless—pit bulls that’s been rehabilitated, a process that’s being depicted in Nation...Read More

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TV writers—yours truly included—return to the Left Coast this week for the first Television Critics Association tour in a year where cable will kick off an event that normally takes place twice annually, in the winter and summer.

The Writers Guild of America strike earlier this year not only hit Hollywood in the wallet, it put the kibosh on the January press tour, which had to be canceled. Now, the Screen Actors Guild is in the middle of a bitter battle for a new contract. But even with that threat hanging over Hollywood the summer press tour is forging forward.

The “tour” is when TV networks tell the media—gathered scribes from papers across the nation—about their new shows, for the summer, fall and beyond. Network executives, producers...Read More

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Note to Google guys: Do your homework before addressing an auditorium that’s packed with advertising-research executives.

There were several cringe-worthy moments at the Advertising Research Foundation’s conference when Google was questioned about two of its media-buying initiatives, namely Google TV Ads and Google Ad Planner.

Both Keval Desai, Google’s director of product management for TV Ads, and Wayne Lin, Google’s business product manager, seemed flummoxed this week when they were asked if the Internet giant would seek accreditation for its two media-buying offerings.

At the conference, Desai and Lin didn&rs...Read More

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Oprah Winfrey and Discovery Communications are lining up the management team for the daytime diva’s new cable network, which will debut in the second half of next year—a reincarnation of Discovery Health Channel.

The first shoe dropped yesterday, with the announcement that Robin Schwartz, president of Regency Television, had been appointed president of OWN: The Oprah Winfrey Network. It’s a curious choice in my mind, in that Schwartz’s overall experience in cable—at least in what we were told in her announcement—seems somewhat limited.

It’s true, she did a stint at ABC Family. But her strong suit...Read More

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I spent Tuesday morning literally in the heart of Times Square, on the island between Broadway and Seventh Avenue, alongside a 10-foot tall slice of wedding cake, decorated with more than 50 gallons of butter cream frosting.

In a stunt celebrating the fifth season of Bridezillas, WE had 10 brides-to-be—clad in wedding dresses, white helmets, and sneakers—scamper up the giant slice, in the middle of the morning rush. In the competition, the first woman to grab a bouquet at the top of the “cake” got a $25,000 check to go toward her coming nuptials.

The winner, Meghan Gressler of Basking Ridge, N.J., shot up the slanted slice so quick she left everyone else in her wake, wiping blue frosting from th...Read More

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I should have been a lawyer, working for Charlie Ergen and billing by the hour. I’d never have to worry about my credit cards bills or retirement fund again.

Ergen, who chairs both Dish Network and his equipment company EchoStar, is known for his penchant for suing—and for being sued. I’m not exaggerating when I say I can’t keep up with all the litigation his companies are embroiled in.

But one of his most newsworthy—and sexy—suits came to its culmination Thursday, a piracy case filed in 2003 by EchoStar against one of Rupert Murdoch’s companies, NDS Group.

EchoStar won the case in princi...Read More

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Comcast CEO Brian Roberts must be proud.

One of his networks, G4, appears poised to reach a new low in term of taste in programming with its new summer series, Hurl!  The show’s very concept—inspired by viral videos—makes me want to hurl, i.e., throw up. But then I’m out of the network’s demo, which is young men, so what I think doesn’t matter.

Here’s Hurl!’s premise, as explained verbatim in a press release today.

“In each episode of the half-hour series, five contestants will attempt to consume the largest quantity of food in a short amount of time. They will then immediately be subjected to a series of challenges designed to shake them up. The one to hold his or her food down the longe...Read More

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You’ve got to hand it to Lifetime and Project Runway producer Harvey Weinstein, for pure chutzpah, moxie, fearlessness, boldness, pluck, cojones—whatever term you want to use.

Rather than lying low because of the pending legal brouhaha over Project Runway moving from Bravo to the women’s network, Weinstein was front and center at Lifetime’s upfront presentation Monday in Manhattan.

Always a larger-than-life character, Weinstein went on at length, defending the show’s switch, arguing that Lifetime will be a better fit and will widen and increase the signature hit’s audience.

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In May, most of the cable industry will be in New Orleans for The Cable Show, presumably pouring dollars into local coffers. The Big Easy still very much needs the help.

Even though Louisiana is aggressively trying to bolster its economy by fostering arts and culture, the state is looking for an assist from Washington as it struggles to recover from Hurricane Katrina’s devastating hit in 2005.

“We believe that Katrina made New Orleans more like itself, that in fact it just kind of put a mirror—or a spotlight—on all our splendor and all our despair,” Louisiana Lieutenant Gov. Mitch Landrieu told a room packed with the media, yours truly included, during a press conference Tuesday at Home of Jazz at Lincoln Center in Manhattan.

The lieutenant governor, flanked by Emmy-winning actress [and New Orleans native] Patricia Clarkson, w...Read More

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Which is it Charlie, an HDTV delay or no delay?

Early this week Charlie Ergen’s Dish Network told the Securities and Exchange Commission that a snag in the launch of a new bird, AMC-14, was going to delay the satellite provider’s rollout of some HDTV channels.

The 8-K filing prompted several very negative newspaper stories and Wall Street analysts’ reports, including a particularly biting one from Sanford Bernstein’s Craig Moffett.

But lo and behold, a day after its 8-K filing, Dish Network issued a press release that announced that plans for its HDTV expansion this year remained on schedule, despite the AMC-14 “launch anomaly.” 

Say what? What about that little missive you filed with the SEC Monday, Charlie?

I asked Dish for an explanation of the different company messages regarding...Read More

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Who won?

That’s the question media writers, assorted bloggers and more traditional print pundits are weighing in on today now that it looks like the TV and film writers’ strike is about to end.

The Writers Guild of America waged a rancorous fight over what may just be virtually pennies right now: residuals for new-media platforms whose financial potential is a big-fat unknown. It was a three-month-long, bare-knuckle battle, but were the writers the victors?

Many will disagree with me, but I say yes.

As controversial film-maker Michael Moore put it over the weekend: Writers, the eyeglass-wearing kids that usually got picked on by bullies at school, came out ahead in this fisticuffs affair.

WGA leaders jogged my memory when, over the weekend, they reminded their membership that initially, the studios were seeking a rollback on tra...Read More

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