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"And Chew regurgitated"

With that single unplanned remark, Dennis Miller showed why listening to "Monday Night Football" is not going to be the excruciating exercise it has been the past two years. Toward the end of the second quarter of Monday's Hall of Fame Game — the beginning of the NFL's five-week exhibition season — San Francisco 49ers rookie receiver Eric Chew took a kick, tried to turn the corner on the sidelines and was hit, whereupon the ball popped out of his clutches and tumbled out of bounds. No sooner did Al Michaels finish calling the play than the Emmy-winning HBO comic brilliantly leaped in with, "And Chew regurgitated!"

Sure, it may have gone over the heads of a few million listeners, some of whom write sports columns for newspapers and have been waiting to write Miller's obituary for six weeks. But Citizen Arcane was not asked by ABC Sports executive Don Ohlmeyer to dumb down his schtick for the masses. And thank the Lord he wasn't. Although he'll have to stop using "indeed" as his favorite interjection, Miller on Monday night more than vindicated Ohlmeyer, who made the gutsy call to put him in a broadcast booth.

With Dan Fouts assuming the role of obsequious third man, Miller stole the show. He was prepared, had his facts in order, and nearly always found something to make the common sound uncommon. I kept waiting to hear what he'd say next. Apparently so did Michaels, who spent the past two years sweeping the inept Boomer Esiason under his feet. But Miller forced Michaels to stretch, and the veteran play-by-play man seemed to enjoy it. Early on, in an observation that sounded like it was being read off a blue index card, Miller noted that the game was being played in Canton, Ohio, which sat on "the Tigris and Euphrates" of the great sport of football. Michaels quipped, "You could have Three Rivers' Stadium here: the Tigris, Euphrates and Cuyahoga."

Miller was more nimble than any of the San Francisco quarterbacks. At one point Fouts, a former 49ers announcer, praised future Hall-of-Famer Jerry Rice for renegotiating his deal so he could stay in San Francisco. Miller immediately turned the coin over, noting that team VP Bill Walsh must've thought "Rice still had something in the tank," because Walsh was the same guy who let two of the weekend's Hall of Fame enshrinees — Joe Montana and Ronnie Lott — finish up their careers elsewhere.

That's why you let somebody of Dennis Miller's caliber into the booth. Not because he's funny; not because he's never played the game; but because it takes a great broadcaster to marshal acres of minutiae and spoon it out over the course of three hours, entertaining as he goes, never wearing thin. Dennis Miller is a great broadcaster. He and Michaels are going to make Mondays fun again.

Of course, that's just my opinion. I could be wrong.

"Andromeda": Roddenberry's latest posthumous series

by John Zipperer

Just a year after Kevin Sorbo jumped ship on producer Sam Raimi's "Hercules," he's back in syndication. Sorbo will star as Captain Dylan Hunt in "Gene Roddenberry's Andromeda," the latest series (after "Earth: Final Conflict") to be culled from the late producer's slush pile.

"Andromeda" tells the story of Captain Hunt and his crew in the service of the Systems Commonwealth High Guard. They travel the stars trying to fight back the forces of entropy in a system that has experienced tragic upheavals. The Commonwealth is big enough to cover three different galaxies, so maybe we'll see aliens that are differentiated by more than the wrinkled foreheads that were the stock-in-trade of "Star Trek: The Next Generation" and its two follow-up series.

Producing the new series will be some familiar "Trek" names. One of the executive producers is Majel Roddenberry, Gene's widow, who also shepherds "Final Conflict." Others in the executive-producer-heavy title category are Allan Eastman, Adam Haight, and Jay Firestone. The show's head writer is Robert Hewitt Wolfe, who wrote more than 30 episodes of "Star Trek: Deep Space Nine" and served as a producer for two seasons of that program. The "DS9" churned through a lot of writer/producers, but a lot of talent developed in that writing pool.

In a recent interview with the Slipstream Web site (from the folks who bring us the Trek Nation Web site), Wolfe gives us a peek inside the ongoing production of "Andromeda." In the incredibly insular world of Hollywood screenwriting, "Trek" became well-known as a show whose producers were willing to read and buy spec scripts from previously untried writers (perhaps because many of the producers themselves were writers and understood the dreamers on the other end of the submission). Wolfe says that's a possibility on "Andromeda," but not at first. "In order to take spec submissions, we need a small army of readers and a phalanx of lawyers to draw up and maintain the necessary paperwork. I think it's worth it, but, ultimately, the expenses and risk fall on the shoulders of [the production companies], so it will be their call."

I'm not sure which is the right way to go. "Trek" has benefited from the discovery of some good talents by looking outside the usual Hollywood circles. Then again, "Babylon 5" started out by having a wider circle of writers (albeit from within science fiction writing circles) before the show's creator/producer, J. Michael Straczynski, went on a binge and began writing every script himself. Yet the stories didn't suffer, at least until Straczynski started compressing his five-year storyline into the show's fourth season when it looked like season five would never come.

"Andromeda" has been given a 44-episode commitment and is sold in 178 markets (96 percent of the U.S.). Besides Sorbo, it stars Keith Hamilton Cobb as Tyr Anasazi, Lisa Ryder as Beka Valentine, Lexa Doig as Andromeda, Laura Bertram as Trance Gemini, Gordon Michael Woolvett as Harper, and Brent Stait as Rev Bem. I can't wait.

| Visit the official "Gene Roddenberry's Andromeda" Web site. |

Zippy's Sci-Fi Loft continues ...

Pick to click

Last week Court TV enjoyed a sort of homecoming when it welcomed back O.J. Simpson for a one-hour interview. Simpson, of course, put Court TV on the map in the mid-'90s _ and then both pretty much vanished from sight. But in the past year Court TV's ratings have been on the upswing. Gone are those low-rated trial programs; in their place, reruns of "Homicide" and edgy stories of true crime and punishment.

This week Court TV turns its camera on Hollywood with special programming at 7 p.m. each night, featuring celebrities in trouble. Tonight, watch as Mickey Rourke and Evel Knievel have brushes with the law. Then relive the court battles of daytime hosts Oprah Winfrey, Jenny Jones and Bob Barker. Wednesday, pop stars John Lennon, Brian Wilson, Diana Ross and 'N Sync face the music.

On this date...

in 1977, who's the white retired marine in a CBS sitcom keeping the playground clean? "Szysznyk!" Can you pronounce it? Ned Beatty's sitcom with the bizarre mouthful of a title does well against reruns, but tanks when brought back in December. -- Tom Heald

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