July 7, 2008 12:55

We Belong Together / Like Traffic and Weather

...and speaking of the environment, the long pursuit of the Weather Channel has ended, with NBC Universal and associated investors pulling together an estimated $3.5 billion deal to buy the network. That may seem like a lot of money for a channel you're accustomed to watching for as long as it takes to get to Your Local Weather on the 8s, but it could just be money well spent.

For my money (and my money is considerably less than $3.5 billion), TWC is about as fascinating a story as a boring TV channel can be. It's one of the great success stories of the early cable era, in which success meant basically being the first to take on-air ownership of a lucrative concept (e.g., MTV = music); and it adapted that success to the Internet by moving early with its weather.com site. Weather may seem dull in theory, but it's the very definition of information that's always in demand, and TWC owns a good chunk of it where cable TV is concerned.

More recently, the channel has done a better job of hanging on to viewers even when there's no big weather news. And as Gawker pointed out in a joking-but-not-really-joking post, global climate trends indicate that weather news is only likely to get bigger. With half the world flooding and the other half burning to a crisp, the end-of-the-world business could be very, very good to NBC.

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July 7, 2008 11:58

Dead Tree Alert: Smug Warning

There was a great episode of South Park in which the environment is threatened by a massive "cloud of smug" generated by hybrid-car drivers. Some of the shows on the celebrity-obsessed eco-channel Planet Green—the subject of my latest print Time column—generate a cloud of smug so vast it threatens to blot out the sun:

One of Planet Green's most promoted--and most vapid--shows is [Adrian] Grenier's Alter Eco, in which the HBO star and several fashion-plate friends bring eco-consciousness to the deprived world of upscale Los Angelenos. They visit organic restaurants and sip biodynamic cabernet sauvignons. They build a home compost bin for a chef from Spago and work on a "green" mansion large enough to dry-dock an aircraft carrier. And they cap off each episode by sitting down to cocktails or dinner and telling one another how awesome they are. ("Why are you such a mensch?" Grenier asks a pal.) In Alter Eco, environmentalism exists not to save the world but to ennoble people who are richer, thinner and cooler than you will ever be.

It's fitting that the smug Alter Eco's title is a twist on the word ego, because the show is a perfect marriage of sanctimony and self-regard. It's ecotistical. It's compostentatious.

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July 7, 2008 10:25

New York Times Declares War on Fox News

A blog post about a newspaper column about a TV network publicity department's treatment of newspaper reporters: if this post were any more inside baseball, it would be made of solid cork. But for those of you interested in the sausage-making end of the TV-news business—or who just like seeing two media giants throw down—David Carr's column in today's New York Times is a must-read.

In a nutshell: Last month, the Times published a rather boilerplate story about cable-news ratings, which noted that CNN has gained on No. 1 Fox News Channel in the ratings this election season—an unremarkable objective fact which has been widely noted for months. But FNC was miffed over the bad publicity, and one morning on Fox and Friends it aired a rant about the story, complete with doctored photos of the reporter of the article, Jacques Steinberg, and his editor. Some of Steinberg's colleagues were especially upset about the photo, which they said was altered into an anti-Semitic caricature. (About which: my anti-Semitism meter is usually pretty sensitive, but the picture to me doesn't resemble the classic, hook-nosed racist cartoon so much as it seems simply intended to broaden Steinberg's figures and make him look simian. I'm also not sure that's particularly much better.)

If it is possible for an august newspaper of record to bob its head and say Oh NO, you DIH-n't, that is essentially what the New York Times did today. The subtext of Carr's column: Fox News, it is on.

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July 7, 2008 9:39

The Morning After: Aces

I've said time and again that I don't really watch TV sports, but I make an exception once a year for the Wimbledon finals, so yesterday I saw most of the vast, epic match between Rafael Nadal and Roger Federer. What amazes me watching tennis from a TV standpoint, however, are the advances in computer-pinpointing precisely where a ball landed in relation to the line, complete with graphics down to the fraction of a millimeter.

It was ironic, for instance, to see Nadal challenge a line call (and get a ruling in his favor) on a Federer shot that landed barely out, and have the action narrated by John McEnroe—who, in his day, would have had to have an operatic fight with a line judge over the call. Now the machines bloodlessly make the correction without anyone having to exercise their lungs.

There's something sadly John-Henry-versus-the-steam-drill about it all. Who will teach our children to curse in public if not tennis pros?

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July 7, 2008 8:24

Back

I'm back from a week in North Carolina, where I sampled the barbecue but not the tobacco. (Seriously, not to engage in state stereotyping, but at a Food Lion my first night in the state I saw the largest display of brands of chewing tobacco I've seen in my life.) If anybody finds a pair of glasses on a beach somewhere on the Outer Banks, those are mine.

I'm bad/indifferent enough at my job that when I take a vacation, I actually try to take a vacation. This extends to TV; my viewing was limited to a preview of Mad Men (on which I am sworn to temporary secrecy) and a DVD of Into the Wild. Other than that, my TV exposure consisted of the travel choices of the Tuned In Jrs., who, God help me, have discovered The Flintstones. Which has not aged well.

What did I miss? What's on your mind? And what TV shows have your children discovered that you wish they did not know existed?

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