Disney bites back

Feeling sorry for the Walt Disney Co. because its ABC network was slapped around this week by big, bad Time Warner? You won't be after reading this account from TV Barn reader Keith Privett:

"As you've reported before, 'Who Wants to Be a Millionaire' isn't shot in real time, but is edited down to 60 minutes. But my friend didn't know that. So when during the final celebrity 'Millionaire' on Thursday, Ray Romano went to the hot seat at about 8:45 p.m., and then was subjected to a rather long, lazy interview by Regis, my friend started yelling at the TV set. I reminded him that these programs had taped a month ago, and that Ray probably would miss right by the 8:59 mark.

"At 8:59, however, something was awry. Ray was still in the hot seat. Nine o'clock came and went. By 9:02 I realized what was up: ABC was trying to screw over 'E.R.'! Sure enough, 'Millionaire' went eight minutes over time while Romano won $125,000 for the NYPD D.A.R.E. program.

"Celador/Buena Vista could easily have trimmed the interviews, quips, etc. to finish the show by 9:00 CT. But '20/20 Downtown' is flexible and could as easily start at 9:08. And ABC would love to keep viewers away from the opening of 'E.R.'

"When you have an invulnerable ratings hit, airing three nights a week is aggressive. Going against '60 Minutes' is aggressive. Scheduling a behind-the-scenes show against the 'ER' season finale is aggressive. But airing nine minutes of unscheduled overtime on your biggest week of shows, just to keep viewers away from the best the competition has to offer, is deliciously cruel.

"And then I recalled a 'Millionaire' question once asked about the 'Heidi game,' where NBC missed broadcasting an amazing football comeback because the game seemed to be over. This is the reason we see the closing minutes of every game today, and the rest of that night's schedule gets pushed back. The difference is the 'Millionaire's' producers did the same thing with malice and forethought.

"In a perverted way, I loved it."

POSTSCRIPT: Nielsen separated ABC's rating for "Millionaire" from 10:00-10:08 (ET) Thursday night. The celebrity quiz show still whipped two half-hours of "Frasier," with a 20.6/rating and 31 share (to NBC's 11.7/18) and 22.6/34 (to NBC's 10.4/15 for a "Frasier" repeat). Among adults 18-49, the eight minutes of runover rated 13.8 (i.e., nearly 14 percent of the U.S. ages 18 to 49 was watching Ray Romano on "Millionaire"). For the half hour, "ER" rated 12.1 in A18-49. "Millionaire" won handily in A18-49 against "Frasier," 10.4 to 8.3 and 11.7 to 7.3. For the night, NBC won in A18-49, 10.2 to 7.8.

ALSO: Best demographics ever for "Millionaire"

KCPT debuts high-definition program

One of the few TV stations in the country with an up-and-running digital signal is public TV's KCPT in Kansas City. And now it is coming out with its first original program for the format: "Uniquely Kansas City," a coffee-table book of the air with spectacular details of the city's arts achievements. Part one airs this week. ALSO: Sign away your insurance before getting into a helicopter? That's what some employees at the top-rated ABC affiliate thought management wanted them to do.

Read both stories in Saturday's "On the Air" column in the Kansas City Star

NOTE: For those of you outside Kansas City, the broadcast of "Uniquely Kansas City" will actually be carried on PBS's national digital feed originating from Virginia, because KCPT does not have the equipment to insert locally on its digital channel. Which means that if you can receive the PBS digital feed in your market, you too can watch "Uniquely Kansas City" at 8 p.m. Central time on Wednesday. KCPT is also hopeful that the program will be added to the regular rotation of PBS's digital feed. This will doubtless be welcome news for those of you who can recite every scene in "Chihuly Over Venice" by heart.

Triumph spits fire

In a bizarre tour de force that chewed up 12 minutes of national airtime, Triumph the Insult Comic Dog made a raucous return to the airwaves Thursday night — his first appearance on "Late Night with Conan O'Brien" since his master, Robert Smigel, was sued by Pets.com for defamation and trade libel.

During the "press conference" — click here for a rough transcript — Triumph gleefully repeated his earlier charge, the one that got Smigel sued, that the Pets.com Sock Puppet is a blatant ripoff of himself. Triumph also mocked Pets.com as a failing concept whose stock "is going down faster than me on a Pekinese," and sang a parody of The Police's "Every Breath You Take" that included the lines, "Every joke you take/Every ripoff you make/Every rule you break/Like a dot-com fake/I will poop on you!"

Triumph's return had been promoted for two nights on the show. Not accidentally, the big moment came on what is by far NBC's most-watched night, in which Thursday's hugely popular prime time lineup raises all the late-night boats as well. For a lawsuit that was neither expected by the defendant nor publicized by the plaintiff, it has proven to be a huge boost to the fortunes of "Late Night." As for Pets.com, the Triumph fiasco is becoming more and more the kind of episode for which some desperate PR person concocted the line, "There's no such thing as bad publicity!"

Last week, after TV Barn broke the story of the Pets.com lawsuit, the show's executive producer Jeff Ross sounded eager to get on the air with a response as soon as NBC's legal eagles gave his writers the go-ahead. While their material proved to be less incendiary than Triumph's, everyone was in on the act Thursday night. O'Brien showed competing video clips of Triumph and "Crappy" (the show's new handle for the Sock Puppet) pointing out uncanny similarities between the two puppets' shtick. In one comparison, Triumph is seen tugging on a fake hot dog with real mutts, while "Crappy" does the same thing using a toy burger.

But O'Brien added that there was one telling difference between the two sock mutts: Triumph was a "pitcher" (with accompanying video, X-rated had it involved humans, of Triumph and two live dogs in a hotel room) while "Crappy" was a "catcher" (video of the Sock Puppet being licked by several live dogs).

Then O'Brien cut to the "press conference," which was about to begin "eight feet from where I'm sitting," on the stage that abuts the desk area inside NBC's tiny Studio 6A.

Triumph sprang into site, to great cheers. He spoke at first with mock solemnity, then delivered his famous riposte using a megaphone and echo effect: "However, I realize that I must also take responsibility for my own actions ... for making fun of Pets.com, a great supply company, and their puppet, a great, great puppet ... FOR ME TO POOP ON!!!"

Even if Pets.com drops its lawsuit against Smigel, this may not be the end of the matter. At press time, TV Barn was in receipt of a thick sheaf of materials and a videotape from the creators of Ed the Sock, a foul-mouthed sock puppet from Canada who's been on the air for a decade and considers both Triumph and "Crappy" to be ripoffs of himself. We'll review the evidence and report back on Monday. Stay tuned.

BET Arabesque: Telepics with a purpose

Now here's something you don't see everyday around Hollywood: A full-service movie production company run by, and largely staffed by, African-Americans. It's Directors Circle Films, led by Roy Campanella II, son of the famous Brooklyn Dodger. His company produced this season's 10-movie slate of telepics for BET based on the Arabesque novels. Produced on a shoestring, the Arabesque films have been surprisingly watchable, easily surpassing the quality of many network telepics made for several times the budget of these movies. Read more in my story in Friday's Kansas City Star

Pick To Click: Kansas City's Gift to Prime Time

Hallmark finds itself in the unenviable spot this weekend of having two of its TV blockbusters pitted against one another. NBC's "Jason and the Argonauts" and CBS's "Cupid & Cate," both air at 9 p.m. Sunday. But the choice shouldn't be too hard to make in most homes: Hallmark Entertainment's "Jason" is a manly tale of mythic proportions, while Hallmark's Hall of Fame presents a romantic weeper plainly directed at CBS' female-oriented Sunday night audience.

In "Cupid & Cate," Mary-Louise Parker is sleepwalking through her days as a resale-shop proprietor until Peter Gallagher arrives and sweeps her off her feet. Unlike most Hall of Fames, this one is shot in an actual American city, Washington, D.C., and some of the familiar sights of D.C. are shown here (the Capitol, the Thomas Sweet store). As in so many Hall of Fame movies, there are amazing coincidences a-plenty, not to mention the customary transparent metaphor (as Parker falls in love, she repaints her store in lively colors).

The daily digest ... for May 5, 2000: Last week's cable ratings are out from Nielsen (by way of Turner Networks), and while we won't do this every week, here are the 10 highest-rated channels (daylong ratings, not prime time): Nickelodeon/Nick at Nite, TBS, Lifetime, USA, Cartoon, TNT, A&E, MTV, Discovery and ESPN. With the exception of Cartoon, all of these networks have been around between 12 and 21 years, and are carried in nearly 100 percent of cable homes. What's more interesting is the list of the second 10, numbers 11-20: History, WGN, FX, AMC, CNBC, CNN, TLC, Comedy, Sci-Fi, HGTV and TV Land — several of which have neither seniority nor universal carriage on their side. (Ratings are based, not on the whole cable universe, but each network's universe. TV Land's ratings are for the 50 million or so cable homes where it's carried and exclude the 30 million homes where it's not.) Unfortunately, with the exception of HGTV, which is backed by the E.W. Scripps Co., all of the "upstart" channels are owned by cable's biggest and most powerful programmers. Which suggests that these newer channels didn't get where they did just because they were good ideas ... And here's a sure sign that "South Park" is cooling off: Last week's episode was tied for 10th place — with a movie on Lifetime. Oh, the humiliation ...

Time Warner Cable may have been the baddie this week for pulling the plug on ABC in seven markets, but we hasten to remind readers that there are similar disputes going on around the country — and that the current mood in the industry suggests more such showdowns to come. Take a look at Broadcasting & Cable's annual list of the 25 largest cable operators, just out this week. Once again it shows the effects of industry consolidation: Millions of customers are held by just the top 10 cable operators. Then the list drops off rapidly to much smaller companies, many of which could easily be this year's prey for the cable giants. If Kansas City's system (310,000 customers) were a standalone instead of being managed by Time Warner Cable, it would rank 12th on B&C's list. Bottom line: There are several cable companies with the power to turn off the nation's largest broadcasters in millions of homes should their retransmission-agreement talks go awry. And unlike Time Warner, the others don't have a pending mega-merger to worry about.

Previously on TV Barn:
4 May: Here comes the O.J. miniseries
3 May: "Later" with Dick Wolf
2 May: Time Warner and ABC make up ... for now
1 May: Time Warner, ABC go to war; the V-chip (II); Dave returns to England
28 April: Reader mail: Pets.com-troversy, Fox News vs. the others, TV Barn spam
27 April: What happened to the V-chip; more on puppets
26 April: Fox News Channel rocks; Scully directs "X-Files"
25 April: Pets.com sues over sock puppet
24 April: Earth Day on ABC; Elian on display

On this date... in 1993, at the end of a stunningly bad season of episodes ripping off other TV and movie projects, NBC decides this will be the final "Quantum Leap." Dr. Sam Beckett leaps into a bar in the mining town of Cokesburg on his own birthdate, Aug. 5, 1953, where he learns from a bartender named Al (ala "Wizard of Oz") that he has always the power to leap home. (Series creator Don Bellisario and star Scott Bakula both say this bartender represents God.) Beckett's final leap isn't home but into the Vietnam era, where he lets his buddy Al's first wife Beth know he's not "Missing In Action," thus saving Al's marriage, which may have endangered his own cosmic existence as the closing frames reveal: "(Beth) and Al have four daughters and will celebrate their 39th wedding anniversary in June. Dr. Sam Beckett never returned home." (Had the network renewed the series, viewers would have seen an alternative ending.)

May 6: in 1982, on "Diff'rent Strokes," poor Willis has to chose between two women — both his girlfriend (Janet Jackson) and his stepsister Kimberly want to sing in his band. Decisions, decisions. Well, at least it wasn't LaToya.

May 7: In 1951, CBS offers the less fortunate a chance to "Strike It Rich." Contestants whose sad-sack stories are deemed "appealing" or "interesting" enough (translation: pathetic and entertaining) by the show's producers compete for audience affection, then for a chance to bet portions of $30 on a series of quiz questions. If they blow it in this round, there is always the "Heart Line," where the home audience can phone in offers of charity. As the show gains popularity, some 3000 to 5000 letters pour in each week from hopeful contestants-to-be. By 1954 several dozen of the downtrodden have make their way to New York only to be stranded, raising the ire of The New York City Welfare Department. -- Tom Heald

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