"Friday Night Lights" on, "Daisies" pushed; show me the "Dirty Sexy Money"; too bad "Practice" isn't private

On this fall's deja-view TV schedule, Wednesday is an especially striking instance of the old being made new again. Four series will be relaunched, including the critics' favorite "Friday Night Lights," which begins its third season on DirecTV's channel "The 101."

First, though, we turn to ABC, which is airing three untested series back-to-back-to-back on Wednesdays. All three shows were launched last year, and all three had their seasons cut short by the TV writers' strike.

"Pushing Daisies" is still an enchanting confection but hard to imagine making a weekly habit. "Dirty Sexy Money" still hasn't decided if it wants to be the next "Boston Legal" or "Brothers and Sisters."

And as for "Private Practice," months of time off have done little to improve the train-wrecky quality of virtually every scene of this "Grey's Anatomy" spinoff.

Now I'm REALLY on vacation....

You'd never know it from reading TV Barn, but Mrs. TVB and I have been traveling in Canada for a week. But since we both wanted to see the debates and, um, I had a few unfinished stories to file, our evenings were not as recreationally inclined as one would have liked. (Though I do like my job, and these are exciting times, so it wasn't exactly drudgery.)

Anyway, I have a review going up on Tuesday and then that's going to be it for about a week. The newsletter next week will have updated late night lineups from Sue but will otherwise look remarkably like this week's edition. I might post a review of my new LG Dare phone, VZW's totally satisfying response to the iPhone, with video from our trip, but otherwise the line will go silent for a few days.

Dave to do rare Friday taping, wants to comment on VP debate

CBS has confirmed to TV Barn that David Letterman, newly energized by his insertion into the presidential race, has decided to break with his usual routine of taping his Friday show on Monday. (No, it's not you -- the jokes are awfully generic on Fridays.)

Instead, he will tape next Friday's show day and date, so that his writers can feed him jokes about the Thursday vice presidential debate between Joe Biden and Sarah Palin.

Obama won. The Indies have spoken. Not that anyone will remember in five days.

Let me say three things at the outset about Friday's first presidential debate between John McCain and Barack Obama:

1. Obama won. Anyone who tells you otherwise either wanted him to run laps around McCain (like the gaggle of media types at FishbowlNY, whose neurotic liveblog I finally had to turn off), or else isn't voting for him no way, no how (like CNN contributor Bill Bennett, who concocted a fantasy of McCain tap-dancing on Obama's chest the final 45 minutes). We'll get to my reasons below.

2. Regardless of who you thought won, it's not going to matter in a week. The pollsters at Gallup found little game-changing in 50 years of presidential debates.

3. If Obama had agreed to the 10 town-hall debates that McCain proposed in June, it might have created a permanent poll shift. Given the high quality of Friday's debate, how great would a summer's worth of them have been? (Previously on TV Barn, I ripped into the three myths that Obama used to justify avoiding the town halls.)

More from the fastest 90 minutes on television:

Three myths about those town-hall meetings Obama refused to do

So there's going to be a debate tonight. But in announcing that he was going to attend his first showdown with Barack Obama tonight, Sen. John McCain took yet another opportunity to note that he had challenged his opponent to 10 town-hall debate meetings way back on June 4, the day after Obama clinched the Democrat nomination ... and had been turned down cold.

"I also wish Senator Obama had agreed to 10 or more town hall meetings that I had asked him to attend with me," he told Charles Gibson last night. "Wouldn't be quite that much urgency if he agreed to do that, instead he refused to do it."

Yes, it is getting annoying -- TNR took the occasion to update the Rudy Giuliani formulation to suit McCain: a noun, and those 10 town-hall meetings.

Here's the problem: McCain was right. Righter than he will ever know.

Katie Couric: anchor, reporter ... shooter?!?

Got this interesting and somewhat technical email from my friend Tom Roche, who works for the big Crawford video works in Atlanta, edited the great "Space Ghost Coast to Coast" and has been reading my stuff since the Reagan Administration.

I think most of us can agree that Katie Couric just had the best week ever -- what with her nailed-it interview of Sarah Palin and her talk with Palin's running mate that most people saw via David Letterman's show. But did you know that when Katie goes to do these talks, she often picks up a camcorder herself and shoots content for the broadcast and CBSnews.com website? And did you know it sometimes goes less than swimmingly?

"The View," Letterman, Leno - of course they influence how people vote

When David Letterman spent 40 minutes of his show last night ripping John McCain for cancelling his appearance on the show at the last minute -- and then gradually expanding his personal, peevish complaint into a brilliant critique of the McCain campaign, it brought to the fore once again an argument I made here a couple of weeks ago: that trusted talk-show hosts can introduce ideas into the mainstream that the MSM can't, or with greater force than the "on the one hand, on the other" MSM can muster.

But not everybody gets it. Above, you see that CNN's "Showbiz Tonight" was asking viewers whether they were going to base their vote on something they heard on "The View." I've also heard from readers that my point is moot because right-wing talk show hosts have much larger audiences than Jay Leno. Both miss the point.

"ER": Sometimes the good die old

This summer I got to tour, at long last, the set of "ER," the medical drama that begins its 15th and final season on NBC at 9 p.m CT tonight.

And I was reminded of why that show set everyone on their ear 14 years ago. Why the so-called "war of the hospital shows" turned quickly into a rout, with "ER" becoming the No. 1 show in television and "Chicago Hope" turning into a soap opera occasionally punctuated by Mandy Patinkin bursting into song.

McCain running away from debate -- who's he kidding?

UPDATE 2: I've posted sort of a counterpoint to this piece, which criticizes his opponent: Three Myths About the Town Hall Meetings Obama Refused To Do

UPDATE: He's not fooling Letterman either! From tonight's "Late Show":

What was I just saying about late night talk shows having the guts to say what MSM journalists will not?

Above: Is this the real reason
McCain's avoiding a debate
on the economy? (538.com

John McCain doesn't like televised debates that much. Instead, he prefers to do town hall meetings, the informal Q-and-A sessions where he can engage the people directly without interference from that pesky news media. And no wonder: he revived his 2008 presidential bid by barnstorming the country doing town halls.

Today, McCain announced that he wants to skip Friday's first presidential debate with Barack Obama because it's in the "national interest" to deal with the impending financial situation.

I think these facts are not unrelated. If McCain succeeds in cancelling Friday's debate, that would leave just two scheduled opportunities for his opponent to engage him directly on national television ... and one of them would be a town hall meeting.

A cheat sheet for the home stretch of "Project Runway 5"

By Gregg Winsor Special to TV Barn

I find "Project: Runway" riveting, even though it's a show about fashion design -- a topic I know absolutely nothing about, since my sense of fashion comes from whatever's on the pallet at Costco. The show pits designers against each other on challenges like who can make the best dress out of materials bought at a supermarket, or who can make the best prom dress for a group of demanding high school girls. Creative and skilled people make great-looking designs out of virtually nothing within just a few hours.

Since we're down to the final five contestants on this final season for "Project: Runway" on the Bravo network, you might want to take a look at what's been going on. Even though season five has been, by far, the weakest season in the show's history, it's still far, far better than any episode of a show that involves some poor schmuck in a safety helmet hurtling toward a Styrofoam wall with a human-shaped cut-out.

"Gary Unmarried" or "Knight Rider": Which is funnier?

Let me just say at the outset, I know which of these two shows debuting tonight was designed for me: "Gary Unmarried," of course, which stars Jay Mohr, who's close to my age and plays a single dad with a disagreeable ex -- not unlike some people I know.

And then there's "Knight Rider," a show clearly aimed at a viewer one third my age. The star is a Ford Mustang that talks, solves complex problems and can turn itself into a pickup truck in about five seconds ... while going 100 mph. Reality TV it ain't. But kids loved the original, which starred German sensation David Hasselhoff and a Pontiac Trans Am, and so, like salmonella in the kitchens of the unvigilant, it has returned.

I like "Gary Unmarried." It's like other sitcoms I've seen of late involving newly broken-up households (remember when the sitcom single dad was a widower instead of a divorcee?). It's directed by James Burrows, a comedy legend who directed every "Will & Grace" ever. It's got lots of laughs.

But not as many laughs as tonight's episode of the new "Knight Rider."

"Mad Men" fans - this you gotta see!

If you are in the market for a graphic design artist and are a big fan of "Mad Men," then have I found a prospect for you.

An artist who goes by the name of Dyna Moe has been designing wallpapers based on each new episode of the second season of AMC"s newly minted best drama of the year. Above is Joan with, of course, the Xerox machine.

DTV alert! KMBC is changing channels from 7 to 29 (yes, 29); also, why "Oprah" isn't in HD yet

A number of readers have written in telling me their stories about trying to pull in digital TV signals using their new converter boxes. (For those of you who have every TV set in your house hooked up to cable or satellite, you may skip this article.)

"The worst High Def station in Kansas City is KMBC," reads one letter. "Their picture quality is horrible compared to the others. What do you know about KMBC's High Def signal?"

Here's what I know. KMBC is the only station that is broadcasting digitally on VHF -- channel 7 to be exact. But not for much longer.

I predict you'll like 'The Mentalist'

Two weeks after 9/11, CBS unveiled an oddly appealing little drama series on Tuesday nights called "The Guardian." It starred someone few Americans had heard of, an Australian actor named Simon Baker, as a soft-spoken attorney who, in order to avoid being disbarred for a drug conviction, agreed to perform community service as a legal advocate for kids in trouble.

Social work is not a sure-fire idea for a hit prime-time TV show, but "The Guardian" stuck around for four years of modest ratings thanks in large part to its unlikely lead actor. And so, in its usual conservative fashion, CBS has signed up Baker for another series (his third with the network) that marries his "Guardian" role to a "CSI"-style police procedural. "The Mentalist" is safe, predictable, manufactured crime drama ... and it works.

"Worst Week": And after the first week?

Sam is having a bad week. In fact, you could say he's having his worst week since the last time he went to visit his prospective in-laws and accidentally set their house on fire.

Well, the show is called "Worst Week," after all, and as you might guess, Sam's fortunes aren't going to get any better next week, either. Although it will be hard to top what we see in the first half hour of tonight's pilot -- comically bad driving and ill-timed phone calls and impolitic utterances and people stepping in the wrong place at the wrong time and even a man mistaken for a corpse. "Worst Week" is Rube Goldberg meets Murphy's Law meets the parents. And it's hysterical.

After I was done splitting my sides, though, I had a question for this bright new comedy on CBS: How can things possibly be this bad -- I mean good -- next week?

What was up with that Palin incest sketch? Raise your hand if you found it appalling

If you haven't seen the offending portions of this weekend's "SNL," I've made a low-res video of the relevant clips below.

KOGO's Chip Franklin and I talked about this "SNL" sketch that used insinuations of incest in the Palin family as a punchline ... twice.

(or download now)

And here's the video. Judge for yourself:

What's working ... September 22

1. "John Adams." The best television show of the year walked off with more Emmys than any program has ever won.

2. Reality at the Emmys. I agree that reality TV shows need to start paying "producers" for what they really do -- write -- but it's silly to use that as a reason to ban reality from the Emmy Awards. Reality dominates the Top 20 Nielsen ratings, and the best shows stand out for a reason: they're well made. That should be honored, period.

3. Strong sophomores. Three shows had their promising first seasons cut short by a strike. Now NBC's "Chuck" (Sept. 29), and "Life" (Sept. 29) and ABC's "Pushing Daisies" (Oct. 1) are back and better than ever, with terrific second-season premieres.

... AND WHAT'S NOT

1. "The Wire." The best television show of the decade departs with zero, repeat zero, Emmys and two nominations in five years. Snappy rejoinders cannot do this injustice justice.

2. Nielsen sues Wikipedia. The ratings giant ordered a copyright takedown because the free encyclopedia dared to use Nielsen market designations like "Chicago" and "Kansas City" in Wikipedia articles.

3. Probst over Seacrest. He gave an excellent Emmy acceptance speech, but the "Survivor" host does just two hours a year of live TV. Seacrest does 50 hours of "Idol" live every season and has a much longer job description. He deserved the first reality-host Emmy.

Amber alert annoyance

Ha! Can you tell I'm not in market today? The station that aired the Chiefs game was, of course, KCTV-5. I'll forward this email (privately!) to management there.

But if WDAF could please to unblock the Gmail, I'm sure more than I would appreciate it.

EMMYS: Little shows that could, did; cable eats networks' lunch; reality bites

The channel formerly known as American Movie Classics made its grand debut at television's fancy ball Sunday night, as its series "Mad Men" and "Breaking Bad," in their first year of eligibility, took home two of the gaudiest prizes at the 60th edition of the Primetime Emmy Awards. (Above: Creator Matthew Weiner and the crew and cast of "Mad Men.")

The wins by cable networks AMC and FX also added some surprise and spark to a broadcast that veered from lifeless to cringeworthy.

What worked and didn't work for me Sunday night:

"John Adams" winning big. The 13 Emmys for HBO's latest historic miniseries masterpiece made history itself. No program had ever won more than 11 Emmys in a single year (when the eight prizes from last week's Creative Arts Emmys are added).

Little shows that could. "Mad Men," a little-watched drama about advertising men and their lives in the early 1960s, won best drama for AMC, a channel that had never aired a one-hour original scripted program before July 2007. "Mad Men," FX's "Damages" and AMC's "Breaking Bad" all took home major Emmys.

The Emmys liveblog: Revenge of the writers

Seattle, Sunday morning.

So, I'm not in Kansas City right now, but in Seattle, land of evergreens and rainy season, where my vacation is about to begin ... just as soon as the Emmys are over.

As you may know, Seattle is in the the Pacific Time Zone, where many live TV events air on a two-hour delay. Since my colleagues at the Kansas City Star are counting on me to meet their deadlines, which are inconveniently pegged to Central Time, I'll be watching the festivities on an East Coast TV station via satellite.

6:10 p.m. CT: Jimmy Kimmel is hosting his pre-Emmys special. Think "anti-Barbara Walters" and you're in the neighborhood. Tinkly music, gauzy lens, Jimmy doing deadpan interviews in a fancy mansion. If you have the sound down, you almost think he's playing it straight. But then, you see Olympic swimmer Michael Phelps laughing. Had you had the sound up, you'd know Jimmy had just asked him, "You pee in the pool, right? Which country leads the world in peeing the pool?"

6:14 p.m. CT: Hilarious fake clip from "Grey's Anatomy" starring Phelps in a Speedo as "Dr. McSwimmy." (Interesting: Every time the camera shows him from the front, there's a black spot with the word CENSORED over his package. Was that deliberate or did standards & practices demand it?) Phelps is pretty much two eyebrows and a couple of paddle feet. So the fact the interview was actually pretty entertaining says a lot for Kimmel and his staff.