Nobody will miss George Lopez

In the suddenly cluttered world of late-night talk shows, there isn't much of an audience. Of course there are the regular viewers such as college students, second-shift workers, prostitutes with time between tricks, insomniacs, drug addicts and senior citizens who get up REALLY early but in the grand scheme of things those aren't truly huge numbers. And none of those segments of the population are going to sit through two or more hours of late-night talk shows. Especially when you factor in all of the late-night talk show choices. There's The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, Conan O'Brien, The Colbert Report, David Letterman, Nightline, Jay Leno, Chelsea Handler's Chelsea Lately, Jay Leno's Tonight Show, Jimmy Kimmel Live, Jimmy Fallon, Craig Ferguson and Last Call with Carson Daly.

Throw George Lopez in the mix and that adds up to a whopping 14 late-night talk/comedy show options. Even for a couch potato with a drug habit and insomnia that's overload. Most working-class folks are in bed, at the latest, by 11 PM (here in the central time zone, at least) and that leaves, at the mmost, an hour of late-night viewing potential. The simple fact is that people are still hard-wired to think that only the big three networks have late-night talk show options. Yeah, Conan's departure from NBC at least helped a few people to remember that the little cable outlet TBS has late-night talk as well but habits are hard to change.

I, for one, love Conan's style of entertainment but I almost always forget he's even an option. Out of habit, I flip my TV to WCCO and start getting ready for bed. I can count the number of times on one hand that I've remembered that Conan is on at 10 PM also. That fact alone said that, unless TBS was willing to lose money to keep an original program on the air, George Lopez's Lopez Tonight was destined for cancellation.

With tonight being the final episode of Lopez Tonight, I truly doubt that even a sliver of the population will miss his show in a month. Nobody will miss George Lopez beause nobody knew he was even on TV. Sadly, I can see Conan meeting the same fate in a year or two unless either Letterman or Leno retires. There just ins't enough audience at 10 PM or 10:30 PM who are willing to stick around for a complete hour of talk and comedy.

My take on TNT's Falling Skies

A drama focusing on a post-apocalyptic United States six months after aliens initially visit then violently kill and incapacitate the military and leadership network of Earth and take over the major cities around the planet. That's the basic outline of TNT's first foray outside of police and lawyer procedurals and it's probably the cable channel's best series to date and proves that while the networks cater to the lowest common denominator and continue to cast a wide net and appeal to everyone, quality actually has a place and it's increasingly on cable.

Starring Noah Wyle as as sort-of second-in-command of the human resistance after large groups are forced to split up due to the advancing detection methods of the aliens, referred to as Skitters, the show definitely has a dark theme to it. The series definitely does not lack action as I only found myself waiting for things to pick up the pace a couple time throughout the 90 minutes of the 2 hour series premiere I was able to watch.

If you like edge-of-your-seat drama that leaves you wondering what kind of fresh hell awaits you in the next scene, this is just the show for you. It's the kind of series that would never stand a chance on one of the big four networks as was proven in the past year with both The Event and ABC's reboot of V being cancelled at the end of the season.

It's also the sort of series that would have been a perfect fit for Sci-Fi back when it was still Sci-Fi and not SyFy.

I have a feeling that the remaining episodes of Falling Skies will continue along the vein of human interaction and cooperation as they battle against both the child slavery aspect of the alien takeover and fight against the further demise of society in general. It's a common theme when anyone imagines a post-apocalyptic scenario -- society goes straight to shit as everyone fends for themselves instead of being civilized and banding together to reform some semblance of a society.

That will obviously be the b-plot of the series in the coming weeks but I can't wait to see what happens when the resistance captures one of the aliens and am crazy curious to find out just why the aliens chose Earth and what their ultimate purpose is with the planet.

Check out Falling Skies Sundays at 9 PM C/T on TNT.

ABC cans All My Children and One Life to Live

Chalk up another victory for piss-poor unscripted filler programming. ABC's decision to give two of their three daytime soaps the ax is yet another slit to the throat of scripted television. Think I'm wrong? Flip around next time you're home sick from work and see the sad excuses for programming that exist during the daytime hours. Outside of a few cartoons for the kids on a couple cable channels and the mostly decent offerings from PBS, the rest of the channels are tenth-run movies or talk shows.

Maybe we have Oprah Winfrey to blame for the proliferation of talk shows. After all, her's was the first barnburning success story in the daytime talk format but those that have copied and badly altered the format are the ones to truly blame. I get it, though. Daytime TV viewership is home to some pretty dismal numbers due to the fact that the stay-at-home mom crowd is about as large as the number of polar bears living in Iowa but even a mom who spends her days wrangling a gang of rugrats deserves to be entertained and that entertainment used to come in the form of scripted daytime dramas (soap operas) but now comes in the form of 4 hours of the Today show on NBC, an hour of local news, Rachel Ray cooking something and a couple hours of doctor-themed talk shows.

That seems recipe seems like an awful lot of the same ingredients. Take, for instance, local NBC affiliate KARE-TV. KARE-TV is home to one scripted hour of television outside of the 7-10 PM primetime block. The rest of the hours consist of local or network news/entertainment programming, Jeopardy! and many hours of talk shows which all seem to cover the same topics. I understand that a talk show costs far less to produce than an hour of scripted television but with ABC bringing shows entitled "The Chew" (a food/cooking show) and "The Revolution" (a weight loss series) it seems like, in an effort to cut costs, the networks are almost desperate to copy or even sink below their cable television competition.

With each passing day I lose more hope for the continued existence of over the air network television and while I'm no fan of daytime soaps, today's loss -- bringing the remaining total to four soaps across the big three networks -- seems to say that the networks will do whatever it takes to cut costs to the bone while still raking in the same amount of advertising dollars as always. Hell, none of the big three networks actually program new content on Saturday evenings and Friday evenings are mainly reality fare so it's only a matter of time until the big three networks take on The CW model and go five nights a week with only two hours each night.

I'm only half joking with that last prediction but it's time for the networks to get serious. Slashing costs and going the route of more unscripted content is not going to one-up their cable competition. Like any business, it's time for the suits to be held accountable and it's time for them to come up with real, long-term solutions because drivel like "The Chew" and "The Revolution" are nothing more than placeholders.

Why broadcast in HD?

Much has been made in the past decade about High-Definition (HD) broadcasting. It was touted as the biggest advancement in television since color TV. I remember first seeing a High-Definition broadcast during some incarnation of the Winter Olympics as I wandered through the Rochester, MN Best Buy store. I am fairly certain that the local NBC affiliate, KTTC, wasn’t yet broadcasting in HD (this may have been as far back as 1998, more likely 2002) but they had a handful of many-thousand-dollar plasma televisions showing the most kick-ass picture that I had ever seen on a TV. I know it was a hockey game being broadcast but beyond that I can’t remember anything else.

Fast forward about a decade and I actually own two HD sets. But I still only receive a handful of channels -- mainly the local Twin Cities signals - in High-Def. This is one part my own frugality (I refuse to pay an additional $7.95/month for a box from Mediacom which forces me to use their shitty remote and make room for a clunky, ass-ugly box) and another part the fault of the companies broadcasting the very content we watch. The first local affiliate I received was KARE-11. KSTP, FOX 9 and WCCO followed within a year but then things stopped. It took another year of so before Mediacom Cable started re-transmitting High-Def signals for KPXM (Ion) and WFTC just arrived on my TVs a few months ago along with WGN. I’m still holding out for KSTC (45) and that’s where the story really begins.

KSTC-45 has the rights to the Minnesota Timberwolves, Minnesota State High School League playoff games and the Minnesota Wild. While I haven’t caught either an NBA or NHL game on KSTC I did pass by and watch a few seconds of a high school hockey state playoff game last night. To put it bluntly it looked like shit.

The picture was best described as muddy and grainy, the audio sounded like it was first being passed through a bucket of thick Mississippi River mud and I could barely read the scores in the graphics bar at the top of the screen. And to top it all off, it was still being broadcast in standard definition (the old not-widescreen 4:3 aspect ratio).

Why, in 2011, are any sports being shown not in full widescreen high definition? I am not sure if this is an issue with the broadcast equipment being used by the folks producing the high school games for KSTC or if the fault lies with KSTC themselves.

I do know that a huge amount of responsibility lies with Mediacom, my cable television provider, for not granting its customers access to the last broadcast television station in the Twin Cities not available in high definition. The other gripe about the lack of high definition broadcasts lies, again, with cable providers. They are viewing the advent of high definition not as a way to provide a better experience to their viewers but instead as yet another way to profit. Why should I, as a customer, pay any additional money per month for what is essentially a duplication of services? Both of my televisions, equipped with internal QAM tuners, receive unencrypted HD signals. The logical thing for cable providers to do is send those HD signals from all subscribed packages to customers’ televisions unencrypted. They already do this with the shitty analog version of every channel I subscribe to, I just want the digital (and HD) version in the same way. My television (and every decent TV sold in recent years) supports this and it would remove a huge burden from the cable companies. They would no longer have to supply clunky Motorola cable boxes to receive the signal. Things could go back to a simple plug and play format -- the way they were meant to be. Even new TVs still have a co-ax input so it’s a logical process.

And if Mediacom -- and other cable providers -- would just loosen the reigns a bit they’d have happier customers instead of angry people like me who just want to watch some Minnesota Wild playoff games in full widescreen high definition.