Reports The Hollywood Reporter, Barack Obama has purchased a half-hour of primetime on CBS on Wednesday, Oct. 29. Obama is close to a deal with NBC as well, it says, and may strike one with Fox, depending on a possible baseball conflict.

Smart idea or waste of money? I guess it depends what you do with it. If you're not roadblocking every network, you may just be driving ratings up for whatever network isn't carrying your mega-ad—unless you offer something that stokes genuine curiosity. (Hey, maybe he could get Sarah Palin to show up!) If you do roadblock every network—well, people are going to get ticked off that you roadblocked every network, aren't they? It will be interesting to see what he does with the time, anyway.

Obama's airtime purchase, at 8 p.m. E.T., will knock Gary Unmarried off the air for the night. That's change we can believe in!

Kath and Kim seems to be on its way to being the second-worst-reviewed new show next to Knight Rider (you go, Ben Silverman!), so I feel like I should say the one good thing about it that I neglected to mention in my review—they picked an awesome theme song:

There's not much to add to that. Weep with me, mankind.

*That is, "than are watching the television program Pushing Daisies." Not "than are pushing daisies." The legions of history's dead fortunately still vastly outnumber Knight Rider's anemic 2.2 rating. Also, I suspect there's considerable overlap between those two groups.

Tonight sees the debuts of the American adaptions of Life on Mars, Eleventh Hour, and Kath and Kim, which are from Britain, Britain and Australia respectively and are surprisingly good, a bunch of hoo-hah and painful, respectively. Busy with a print deadline, so I'll refer you to my earlier roundup review of this season's imports to elaborate.

Well, I'll elaborate just a smidge on the good one, Life on Mars.

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How bad has the financial crisis gotten? Today's Dr. Phil devotes itself to the economy, with a roster of guests including CNBC's James Cramer and economist/game-show-host Ben Stein.

To be fair, it's not as if Dr. Phil just discovered personal finance. He, along with daytime-TV fixtures like Suze Orman, have long been giving viewers advice focused on avoiding, and getting out of, debt. Indeed, tough, common-sense advice about cutting up those credit cards and not buying what you can't afford has been as much a staple of daytime TV as relationship counseling. (Or, for that matter, pie-in-the-sky systems like The Secret, which tell you that yes, you can have anything you want.)

Which makes you wonder how much people pay attention to any of the advice on daytime TV. We're Americans; we love to be lectured, or see others lectured, for their profligate habits as we nod along. Then we need to put a big-screen TV on credit, so we can watch even better.

In any case, the Dr. Phil episode plans to put into perspective some of the hyperventilating commentary on the markets lately, some of it by Cramer, who explains to the Doc his widely publicized advice that people should pull any money they'll need in the next five years out of the market. (Actually fairly routine advice—stocks are not generally meant for that time frame of investing—but phrased in Cramer's usual dramatic style.) Cramer doesn't believe he contributed to a market panic: "It would be pure arrogance for me to think that I had that much power. I believe that whether I had stayed home in bed or gone to work that day it wouldn't have mattered."

Meanwhile, Stein adds, “I question, Dr. Phil, whether retirement as a concept is even going to exist in ten years." Way to dial back the scare talk, guys!

Brief spoilers for Project Runway coming up after the jump:

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