VIDEO: Jonathan Ames on creating "Bored to Death"

The creator, writer and producer of HBO's terrific new BORED TO DEATH spoke with me at TCA press tour about how his McSweeney's short story turned into a comedy series. I've also included a short clip from BORED TO DEATH's second episode that shows off the appealing camaraderie between stars Jason Schwartzman and Zach Galifianikis. (The six digit code you see on screen is an anti-piracy watermark from my HBO screener. I'm using this clip for criticism under the fair use provision of the U.S. Copyright Act. Don't try this at home.)

TV Barn TV Picks: "Taking Chance" on HBO

Welcome to the newest feature of TV Barn -- sneak previews! This week I look at HBO's "Taking Chance," starring Kevin Bacon as a Marine officer who escorts the remains of a private killed in Iraq to his final resting place; and "The Order of Myths," a PBS documentary about segregated Mardi Gras celebrations in Mobile.

(P.S. I'm going to try to produce these on Wednesdays from now on. "Taking Chance" repeats Feb. 22 and 24 and Feb. 26 on HBO2. Click here to grab the video RSS.)

Day 3 of Mumbai Held Hostage, and MSNBC is a no-show

On Thanksgiving Day, the fine TV critic of the Baltimore Sun, David Zurawik, and I quarreled politely over whether MSNBC was adequately covering the Mumbai terror situation on Wednesday.

Well, that was before a violent attack turned into a three-day ordeal. Unfortunately, by the time the killing in Mumbai was over, one network had decided to save some money and send everybody home for the Thanksgiving weekend, and I was feeling like an idiot for defending MSNBC. Take a look:

Keith Olbermann's female appeal

Sure enough, as I suggested a couple of weeks ago, it appears MSNBC and its number one talent, Keith Olbermann, have decided he has a woman problem. Appearing on "The View" was just the start -- this week, he made a triple-chocolate pumpkin pie with Martha Stewart. Next week, I understand Carson Kressley is going to show him just how beautiful he looks in the buff!

Tellingly, KO has used segments of "Countdown" to play back highlights of both appearances, and while KO contributes the requisite amount of eye-rolling at what a dork he is on these programs, even this gesture serves to underscore the larger point: KO is strong enough to be a man even on a show that's made for a woman.

The Obama victory rally video you didn't see

Before Barack Obama addressed 250,000 people in Chicago's Grant Park on Election Night, some other things happened. But you didn't see them because other than C-SPAN, no cable or broadcast network carried them. These other networks chose to put their talking heads on screen to talk over them.

These are the same networks that subject us to countless renditions of the national anthem and "God Bless America" at sporting events -- so why couldn't they have exposed America to the anthem and a rousing invocation by another longtime pastor friend of Obama's?

Here they are.

First, the anthem as sung by Kim Stratton (who has a brief Patti LaBelle moment there but recovers).

Olbermann signs new deal, no surprise; appears on "The View" - SHOCKING

NBC announced it has signed Keith Olbermann to a new four-year deal today, tearing up the existing one that he was only about halfway through. (Press release is below.) By his own measure, Olbermann has now been doing "Countdown" longer than he did "SportsCenter" on ESPN, although I don't think he was counting the leather jacket phase.

And apparently there is an Epatha Merkerson clause in there that calls for KO to improve his relationship with female viewers, now that Rachel Maddow is proving to be as big a draw some nights as "Countdown" is. Or at least, that's my pop explanation for KO's appearance today on "The View." For seven minutes he folded his gigantic frame into a chair meant for a size 0 woman, and endured the torture of five caffeinated frissonettes, who battered him relentlessly with questions of the beat-your-wife variety. Even Joy Behar, who probably agrees with KO on 90 percent of the issues, acted as though he was the moose galloping haplessly on the tundra and she was the one firing away from the helicopter.,

Most of Olbermann's answers I'd heard before, but he said two interesting things right at the end:

Joltin Joe! Scarborough F-bombs on MSNBC

Good to see Joe Scarborough is feeling really relaxed in his role as the morning man on MSNBC. So relaxed that, out of nowhere, he dropped this one on live television about an hour ago:

Mike Barnicle's reaction is instantaneous and priceless. Joe's delayed, stunned reaction as he receives word of his transgression in his earpiece is just about as good.

And yes, we have a television reference for this television reference. Seems that what Joe (who was beamed in from D.C.) was trying to say was that the new Democrat press secretary will be nothing like that guy Rahm Emanuel who used to work for Bill Clinton. The more we're learning about Rahm, the more we're put in mind of Ari Gold, the character on "Entourage" widely thought to be modeled on Hollywood agent Ari Emanuel, whose brother is Rahm. Told you we had a TV reference.

The "Meet the Press" moment that will make Letterman's show

If you watch "Late Show with David Letterman" most nights, you probably think you could write some of the material ... but actually, in the opening desk bits of the show, the material more or less writes itself. Letterman's writers, like their NYC colleagues over at Comedy Central, specialize in found humor from the wide world of videotape (or whatever it is these days).

But whereas their boss, in his salad days, always added his personal snarky commentary to whatever bits of epehemera his staff picked up from the small-town news and whatnot, today Letterman often gets his biggest laughs from the "no comment" videos, carefully edited to make the subject look as idiotic as possible.

As soon as I saw this segment from John McCain's interview with Tom Brokaw on "Meet the Press," I knew it would show up on Letterman's show. It is 5:24 p.m. ET as I write this, so the show has not begun taping yet. (Special guest, Bill O'Reilly!) So this really is a guess, but an educated one. Watch.

(or download it)

So how much ELSE of the Olympics is being faked for TV?

Story updated with another sordid tale of Olympic fakery ...

The amazing sequence you see below appears to have been perfectly tracked by a helicopter-cam. If you didn't know these were fireworks "footprints" being shot off through Beijing, you might think you were seeing an opening shot from the hit TV show "CSI."

But it turns out, that comparison is unfair ... to "CSI."

Larry Moore gets baba-booey'd

After I wrote about KMBC-TV's "breaking news" coverage Tuesday night, John Landsberg of Bottom Line Communications sent along the rest of the story: An embarrassing moment when KMBC news anchor Larry Moore was pranked by a caller claiming to be a janitor at the gasoline plant that caught fire during Channel 9's "breaking news" coverage Tuesday night:

Ah, Baba Booey. Time for another flashback.

In 1996, just before I joined this newspaper, I wrote this piece for my Late Show News e-letter about the weird practice of putting unverified callers on live television. It stemmed from an incident that occurred on "The Rosie O'Donnell Show" when producers there put a live call on the air claiming to be from the mayor of Philadelphia, who had been in the audience the day before. In fact, the caller was Captain Janks, the notorious prank caller and member of radio jock Howard Stern's "Wack Pack," who seems to have never met a call screener he couldn't talk his way past. Janks called O'Donnell a "fat pig," and hung up.

Janks, who has gotten on CNN and MSNBC multiple times, as well as the Jerry Lewis telethon and countless local broadcasts, is in fact captain of a small army of mischief makers devoted to two things: the Stern show and disrupting breaking-news telecasts across the country. These listeners call into the newsroom — not hard, since most after-hours switchboards at TV stations will transfer you to the assignment desk with the press of a button — and from there it is, I guess, shockingly easy to get on the air. Their rebel cry is "Baba Booey!", the nickname of Stern's longtime producer Gary Dell'Abate.

Unfortunately for our Kansas City prank caller, he was upstaged that very same night by troublemakers in San Diego who managed to drive by and disrupt two live shots on local TV stations with their "Baba Booey!" cheers. Stern played the clips on his Sirius Satellite Radio show the next day and gave the pranksters his highest praise. As faithful show recapper Marksfriggin.com described it, Stern "said he loves when people do the Baba Booey thing. He said that if he was lucky enough to be walking by he'd do it and he'd say 'Baba Booey, Fafa Foohey...' "

Twice in recent weeks David Letterman's writers have worked "Baba Booey" references into Top Ten lists, so it's clear they love it, too. And you know, as a subversive activity, I do too. I mean, is there any godly reason why, in this day and age, news stations need to drag non-credentialed strangers onto the air? If a non-journalist sees or hears something interesting, LET THEM BLOG, and then the TV stations can link to that.

When I wrote about this phenomenon 12 years ago, a more serious matter was on my mind than just the "Rosie O'Donnell Show":

On the night that TWA Flight 800 went down, all of the New York stations broke in with special reports, and coverage continued for several minutes before returning to prime-time programs. Later, NBC 4 broke in again, with what it thought was an exclusive: a telephone interview with a Coast Guard official claiming to have information on the downed airliner. Of course, it was a Stern listener, and while one could definitely feel Chuck Scarborough's pain as he realized, on camera, he'd been hoodwinked, it is still a valid question whether we would be better informed by an actual Coast Guard official on that phone line. You didn't have to be a news director to know that little solid information would be available from the wreck until much later -- even a passenger list takes time to compile. But all reason seems to go out the window at NBC 4 and other stations when an "exclusive" is on the line.

And let's take this discussion beyond pranksters for a moment. Remember the Sago Mine news disaster? CNN's Anderson Cooper let anyone standing within 10 feet of him broadcast unconfirmed rumors of the miners' rescue — rumors that turned out to be horribly wrong. If anything, the Baba Booeys out there should serve as miners' canaries, early warning systems that little can be gained from putting strangers on the air, and much can be lost, credibility-wise.

TV Barn: Rachel Maddow on Obama and talk radio

"30 Days"

"30 Days" and what else to watch this week

That will get better as we go along, I'm sure. But TV Barn is now, after several false starts, officially in the video age.

If you're getting too much choppiness, try viewing it at the KansasCity.com video jukebox.

Related story: "30 Days" super thanks to Spurlock

But wait there's more: What to watch June 1-7

Upfronts: That was the week that was not much of a week, except for: "Dollhouse" video!

My week-in-review piece is up:

Kansas City Star | The fall TV previews, such as they were

For whatever reason, the following pithy observations were cut from the story:

In hindsight, the moguls should have put their negotiating prowess to work a few months ago and struck a deal with their show writers before there could be a strike. Still, most of us had expected that things would be pretty much back to normal by now. Clearly that’s not going to be the case.

ABC chief Steve McPherson never let on to advertisers, but “Wipeout” is a blatant knockoff of the Japanese stunt game show “Takeshi’s Castle,” which you may have seen on the Spike cable channel, where it was dubbed into English and retitled “MXC.” Four producers talking into a camera and two carbon copies of shows that have aired elsewhere — this is ABC.

And my favorite, regarding the NBC Universal Experience:

Lights blared. Music pulsed. Reporters who emerged from their “Experience” spoke as if they had survived a passage through one of Dante’s circles of hell.

"Gas tax holiday" video; also, I can't get enough Bill O'Reilly dance mix!

And now for something a little lighter for your weekend enjoyment ... some harmless video chicanery, courtesy of the YouTubers.

Freddy Rhoads, a KU student who goes to my church and has helped me with some of my fumbling documentary video efforts in the past, sent me this mashup he made about the gas tax holiday. Maybe "mashup" isn't the right word for it, but I enjoyed it.

Hillary Clinton on "The Daily Show" - one show too many

Bad lighting, a crowd of zombies behind her, the always unfortunate satellite bounce and a voice that sounds like it's gone into overtime ...

I understand what Sen. Clinton was trying to do here. If she's to keep this campaign going beyond Tuesday -- and by the way, why is everybody so opposed to that notion? Do people want to shift the conversation back to the Middle East? The price of oil? What? -- anyway, if she's going to endure, she'll need more than white mature female voters in her corner. Hence her visit to Letterman, "SNL," and now Talk Stew.

Sundance wrapup video

See that milk carton over my shoulder? It's a tchotchke from Morgan Spurlock's new movie, "Where in the World Is Osama bin Laden?" Photos.