Batting third, the short stop at CBS

I suppose this is as good a place as any to tell you about John Higgins, my friend and fallen comrade. Higgins (and that's what everyone called him; that's how he answered the phone) wrote for many years for the trade publication Multichannel News.  Then he moved to Broadcasting & Cable, where he worked until he died last Thanksgiving week of a heart attack at — this is the hard part — 45 years of age.

His stock in trade was the scoop. Not the scooplet, the piddly little stuff you see on blogs and websites, or the mountain-out-of-molehill that certain national newspapers put out there from time to time. No, our man Higgins knew everybody in the cable business and knew how to read their balance sheets and SEC filings as well as they did. Things did not escape his attention. As Judy McGrath, the longtime MTV executive, mused after his death, when you got a phone call from Higgins, you never quite knew if he was calling to shoot the breeze, or if he had the goods on you. 

That was Higgins' other specialty — the schmooze. You can't get the scoops without the schmooze, and Higgins did it so well. Higgins was my secret weapon when I went to New York for the upfronts. I stayed with him, saving my company buckets of money (although I would always take Higgins out at least once on Tony Ridder's dime) and gaining the companionship of one of the very few journos I opened up to completely.

Which is kind of funny, because Higgins — an aggressive reporter known by all for his gruff exterior and by most for his soft interior — was not exactly the guy you opened up to. If you were a little too vulnerable with him, he might laugh inappropriately in your face. And yet, you somehow knew that he cared. As I learned last December, a lot of journalists considered John Higgins to be their best friend. "In many ways," B&C editor Mark Robichaux said at his memorial, "he was my brother more than my own brother."

Higgins would introduce me to people at parties and I would make valuable contacts and overhear useful chatter. Since he was trade and I was consumer, he had nothing to fear from me. In fact, the first time we met he gave me a scoop. In 1994 I started writing a newsletter about late night television, pretty much on a lark. No business plan, no VC, just a desire to write and the revelation that I did a pretty good job working this little corner of the popular culture. Higgins found me. He prided himself on making new discoveries, whether it was an up-and-coming punk band or hip-hop artist or a restaurant that hadn't gotten written up yet in New York magazine or a website of interest. That was me (well, back then it was a mailing list of interest; same difference). He was in Chicago for a trade show and called me up. We had drinks downtown, and he told me Greg Kinnear wasn't coming back to the NBC "Later" show, having a movie career to tend to full-time. I didn't bother with a second source. After all, here was this pro telling me plausible truth, and he spoke with such casual authority, nonchalance even, how could he making this up?

I suspect a lot of folks were intimidated by Higgins just because of the confident vibe he gave off. You wouldn't know it to look at him. He was my height but much bigger. He wore black suits that hung off his big body like drapes. One time he and a friend, also dressed in black suit and white shirt and necktie, strolled into a restaurant on a sunny day. Their sunglasses were still on when the clerk looked them up and down and said, "And what would the Blues Brothers like today?" And without missing a beat Higgins shot back, "Four fried chickens and a coke, ma'am."  That was Higgins, a man of character who was a character.

After he died, hundreds of people packed into the MTV Lodge overlooking Times Square to pay tribute to him.  CEOs sat next to journalists and marketers. (Here's a photo gallery I put together of pictures taken by myself and B&C's photographer. That's me in the photo at left, talking to B&C's Jim Benson and Forest Evashevski.) Many kind and even more hilarious things were said about Higgins that night. I think it's the first time I've been to a memorial with that many speakers and they all had something original to say. "The qualities that made him a great researcher also made him a great friend," said Marc Rosenthal. Afterwards, many a glass was raised in his memory.

You probably didn't know Higgins, who was well known in the trade but unknown even to most of my colleagues in TV criticism. I still think about him a surprising number of times every week. WWHD, I sometimes ask myself, much like I did when he was still just a phone call away. I'm thinking about his especially this week. He and I lived the upfronts all week together, and now I get to do it by myself. The big cable industry show is earlier in May, in Las Vegas.  I got an email after this year's show from Paul Rodriguez, who runs the online division at the National Cable & Telecom Association. "The first cable show Higgins misses and there's a murder next door and a battery charge," Paul wrote. He would've loved getting the scoop on those as well. Above all, I miss his generosity and his love of life that he modeled for so many of us. He died of a known heart condition and on his own terms, no doubt about that. But to echo what someone else said: I thought we were going to grow old together.

Well, back to the show. Sorry, I've been meaning to write that for months.

CBS streamed its upfront presentation over the Internet this year for journalists who couldn't make it to Carnegie Hall or the L.A. and Chicago closed-circuit simulcasts. As short as they made the show, next year they could give it out on a flash drive. Start to finish, the CBS upfront clocked in at 1 hour 8 minutes, beating Kevin Reilly's time on the NBC upfront by a cool 17 minutes. The head of Midwest sales for CBS said afterwards, "That's gotta be a modern record for a CBS presentation." Oh, so that's it.  Now suddenly the guys are having a contest to see whose is the shortest?

Anyway, as I was walking in a minute late to the Cindy Pritzker Auditorium at Chicago's Harold Washington Library — a suitably classy venue for retransmitting the CBS upfront — an announcer was telling the New York folks what would be awaiting them at the after-party at Tavern on the Green. I'm not sure if he mentioned ridiculously long lines and tight quarters.

The CBS upfront is in high-definition, so if you're keeping score, that's a thumbs-up to CBS and NBC, thumbs-down to ABC. Instead of Jo Ann Ross, the CBS head of sales, we see a CGI avatar of Jo Ann talking about the online world — I'm guessing the network now has some deal going with Second Life, or just wants to bask in its glow — and how much CBS plans to dominate it.

And then, with little fanfare and no film parody, out steps Leslie Moonves. "This is my 12th time playing Carnegie Hall," he says, "and I still can't sing. That's the kind of consistent performance you expect from CBS," and the crowd laughs knowingly at this old sales pitch from Les.  But Moonves says he is the "warmup act," and will be off stage shortly. Actually, they'll all be off stage shortly. 

I should comment on the set.  CBS spends more money, I think, than any other network cultivating the look of its upfront.  For a few years there all the hardware on stage looked like it had been covered with a cream-colored candy shell.  This year's stage looked like one of those virtual sets they use all the time on ESPN, a big grid pattern that starts at the top of the back wall and rolls down, like a big red carpet, to the floor and then from the back to the front of the stage. In the middle of this rug is a runner of lights that alternate between various Buckingham Fountain colors throughout the show: electric reds, blues and greens. Moonves's podium, and a long railing that runs across the set, are made of wood and steel.  All very tasteful and futuristic looking in a way a dot-com might have done it during that heyday a few years back.

This year's CBS upfront is greatly scaled down — no musical parody, no film parody starring Leslie Moonves, no big-name musical act — but it's still a cut above the others, a dazzlement of graphics, HD clip reels and Hollywood-quality pilot previews that make you want to give CBS the benefit of the doubt, even with that vampire show.

Moonves announces that "for the fifth straight year, CBS is America's most watched network ... and maybe the most talked about as well. In a universe with niche properties that brag about their tiny slice of the pie, we are the big tent where millions go every day."

Then he talks about DVRs, which is interesting because he does so without mentioning commercial skipping once. There is a whole tug-of-war going on behind the scenes between media buyers and networks about how performance will be measured. Program ratings are out; now the two big metrics, which also are brand new metrics introduced in just the past year, are "live-plus" ratings that include DVR usage for the 17 percent of homes that are timeshifting; and "commercial ratings," which are just like program ratings, only minus those pesky programs that keep interrupting the ads. I took away from what Moonves said or didn't say that he expects big money from those live-plus ratings and that CBS plans to downplay commercial ratings. The media buyers, I assume, will have something to say about that, and if everyone gets all chesty about it, we might not have these upfront sales wrapped up until Labor Day.

If Moonves mentioned VOD, I have no record of it, and yet video-on-demand is something that ABC's Anne Sweeney, the day before, correctly identified as a potential killer app, one that broadcasters can control much more easily than DVRs, because they can tell the cable company: Disable your fast-forward feature, and you can put our shows on VOD. But I guess CBS hasn't struck those deals yet.

Now Moonves is singing the praises of "CSI: Miami" and the amazing mashup that viewer did of David Caruso's many, many one-liners, usually delivered immediately after donning/doffing his designer sunglasses.  After about the sixth one, you really start to laugh at them.  I suspect this was a doctored version — the video was HD, that was my first clue, and a pretty logo splash was featured at the end — but this does seem to be the video that Mo Ryan, my partner in crime at the Chicago Tribune, extolled as the greatest YouTube video of all time. I also suspect that the guy who created the mashup is not the passionate "CSI: Miami" fan that CBS makes him out to be.

After a presentation by the network's caffeinated head of interactive, Quincy Smith, out comes CBS entertainment chief Nina Tassler in a pink pantsuit. "I can't wait to talk about the shows," she says. As usual, she will walk through the seven days of the week.  But she's got help from a friend, the original Big Red (sorry, Alan Kalter), "CSI: Miami's" David Caruso, on tape: "Our Mondays are so bright (whips on sunglasses), you gotta wear shades."

Mondays in the 8:30 hammock, it's "Big Bang Theory," about geeks who get all flustered when the somewhat hot Kaley Cuoco moves into the apartment next door. The cutdown is OK, but I give this one the benefit of the doubt because it's from Chuck Lorre, who perhaps can do wrong, but hasn't lately (after creating "Dharma and Greg" he co-created "Two and a Half Men").  By the way, for those of you on catchphrase patrol, we have a competitor to go with ABC's "No Bingo," it's "Big Bang's" use of the French phrase, "Bon douche." It's a lean market for catchphrases, that's for sure.

On to Tuesdays (Caruso: "Missing CBS Tuesdays ... would be a crime"). Now we come to "Cane," and I'll give you the Subliminal Man version: Jimmy Smits stars as a ruthless kingpin (ray liotta) of a business enterprise (burglary ring) who must occasionally resort to violence (ditto) to protect his family (maintain inexplicably bad marriage to virginia madsen).  This fall at 10 p.m. Tuesdays on CBS (ditto).

Really, from the cutdown it seems like Smits' character is more of a family guy than Liotta's character, and that kids are involved and used in a way to extract sympathy from the viewer.  But ultimately CBS is trading "Smith" for Smits and hoping viewers are attracted to the characters enough to overcome their revulsion that the good guys are also the bad guys, which is exactly what they rejected last year in "Smith."

After the preview, Smits comes out and talks up the show and his cast.

"In Miami," David Caruso says, donning his eyewear, "we call Wednesday el dia de la hump."  There you are — the biggest laugh line of the CBS upfront.

Now it's time to take a look at this ridiculous so-called reality show that's taking the place of our "Jericho" on Wednesday ... and oh no, I'm mesmerized by it.  The show is called "Kid Nation," and you'll be hearing a lot about it — 40 kids have 40 days to form their only adult-free civilization in an old New Mexico ghost town.  The preview reel is incredible.  This looks like the greatest reality show ever made. Forty kids form a government, hold town meetings, set up businesses, do chores, the whole shebang.  No one is voted off, but kids can choose to leave — like the teary-eyed boy who has half the room moisting up with him when he declares he misses his wheelchair-bound brother back home.  However, kids who leave miss out on a chance to get a gold star voted on by the town council, worth 20,000 smackers in the real world.  And of course, if they leave they can't be on TV anymore.  Hey, I had to throw that in to add a splash of reality to what is otherwise an utterly contrived and quite possibly most riveting TV gamble a network will take this fall.

What's really striking about the clips from "Kid Nation" is how committed the kids are to making it work — "Lord of the Flies" this ain't.  One girl on the council gets chewed out by the hoi polloi for ordering others around. "This is a democracy! You can't do that!" exclaims one kid.  Later, a kid on the verge of tears ends a fight between two other kids when she screams, "Yelling is not the way to settle things!" And the audience in Chicago laughed empathetically.

What is it about being on TV that makes the grownups act like children while the kids behave like grownups?

On Thursdays — we're done with the Caruso-isms, get them on YouTube if you want them — there are no new shows but two big pieces of news: The first is that "Survivor" is going to China. (Note to Mark Burnett: Could you do something about that 1970s La Choy-Graumann's script for the word "CHINA" in the new "Survivor" logo? Thank you.)

The second is that "Shark" and "Without a Trace" are swapping time slots, after a test run of "Trace" in its old Thursday time slot last week proved to be a success.

Fridays brings the "Ghost Whisperer" companion "Moonlight," about a vampire who is falling in love after 60 years.  We're done with the WB vampire parody — no monobrow or iridiscent eyeballs to this vamp, played by the handsome Alex O'Loughlin.

As for "Numbers," Tassler says: "Now that we're the only crime drama in the hour, we're expecting even better numbers this year." NOTE TO ABC: MOVE "WOMEN'S MURDER CLUB." Move it to 10 p.m. and take on, if not take down, this show.

After a word from Dave and Craig (Ferguson "continues to be our rising star" and now draws "the largest audience for Late Late Show ever, under any host"), it's time for Saturday and Sunday recaps.  And that brings us to "Viva Laughlin," which Tassler typically oversells: "Believe me, you won't see anything like this on TV, at least not in America." At least, not if you're not one of the 50 million homes that gets BBC America, where the show that's being adapted, "Viva Blackpool," has aired and reaired.

And then there's a midseason preview reel for "Swingtown," which looks like "The Ice Storm" without the social commentary and with groovier music and period references galore (Harvey Wallbangers, anyone?).  Tassler promised the show would have "lots of sex," though judging from the reel not much of it will be on camera.

At the end, David Caruso walks out on stage.  He and Nina Tassler put on eyeshades and invite everyone to Tavern on the Green.  I'd love to, but...

Comments

[Roy]

Am I the only one to notice the words "Katie" and "Couric" were never spoken at yesterday's presentation (although I think she was brought up in the morning press conference).

[Ryan]

Don't CBS and NBC have deals in place to offer VOD where they have O-and-O's? I know I get CBS on my Comcast OnDemand, probably because KOVR in Sacramento is an O-and-O.

What's ABC offering (besides non-fast-forwardable commercials)?

[sam]

Doesn't KidNation break any child labor laws? Or child abuse laws. Talk about exploiting children for money. I expect this from Fox, not CBS. Crap shows all around.

[Aaron]

Sam, I'm pretty sure those kids are all wanting to be in show business.

Ryan, the fact that ABC is offering non-fast-forwardable commercials is a BIG deal at a time when studies are showing the vast majority of timeshifters FF over the vast majority of commercials.

Roy, I wish I were at the morning press conference — especially with my comments fresh in the mind of most/all CBS PR folks in the room. Mmm, discomfort. But let's be honest, there is nothing good to say about Katie right now, and "60" can use all the love it can get.

[Seth Arenstein]

Aaron,
What a sensitive tribute to Higgins, one of the few people who was a good cop and bad cop (and much more) rolled into one.

And how good of you to link to my piece about the memorial to him. It was likely the most entertaining and upbeat farewell for someone who left us so young. (An afterparty at a memorial? Only for Higgins--and completely appropriate.) I re-read my piece this morning and shed a few tears, but smiled too.

You said at TCA you were having trouble putting your thoughts about Higgins online. You needn't have fretted, they aged well.

[Ben]

what about "How I married your Mother?"

Is that coming back next season?