Raging Planet - Tornado
Raging Planet
9/8c Discovery
Take a thrilling ride right into the heart of the planet's most amazing forces — revealing the speed of twisters and the lethal force of lightning bolts. The show features the most spectacular footage of these occurrences ever shot as well as interviews with people who have come face to face with these stunning mega-storms.
Read on for previews of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, There Goes the Neighborhood, Law & Order: Criminal Intent, Roast of Joan Rivers and Entourage.
read more
Regis Philbin
Call your lifelines: ABC wants to make more Millionaires.
The Alphabet network will bring back host Regis Philbin for an 11-night primetime run of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire to celebrate the game show's 10th anniversary this summer. The show will premiere Aug. 9 and run through Aug. 23.
The quiz show was an instant success when it debuted in August 1999 and popularized the phrase, "Is that your final answer?" Ratings began to fall, and the primetime series was cancelled in 2002. Today host Meredith Vieira then began emceeing a syndicated daytime version of the show, which is still airing.
Aside from the anniversary...
read more
Question: Since about 2000, I've tried to find one place on the TV lineup where there are three continuous hours of television that I want to watch. I think it began with Millionaire, The West Wing and Law & Order, and then there was Gilmore Girls, Veronica Mars and Judging Amy. My favorite trifecta was last season's Ugly Betty, Grey's Anatomy and Men in Trees, which was fun while it lasted. Now, to my surprise, this year I have an all-freshman guilty-pleasure trifecta on Wednesdays: Pushing Daisies, Gossip Girl and Dirty Sexy Money, although that will soon be complicated by another guilty pleasure, Project Runway. I know that since you get screeners you don't necessarily watch TV live or in order, but do you have a trifecta?
Answer: It's not so much that I get screeners (fewer than you'd imagine this time of year) but that, like others who watch TV in high volume with an eye for time management in a DVR age, I tend not to watch TV in real time. That often means that I start the evening by
...
read more
Drew Carey by John P. Filo/CBS
In what qualifies as beyond a last-minute delivery, CBS dropped a screener of tonight’s premiere of the new Power of 10 game show on my desk this morning. (It sneak-peeks tonight at 8 pm/ET, then moves into its regular time period a night later on Wednesday, also at 8.) Now that I’ve seen it, I want to get the word out to any fellow game-show fans out there: Don’t miss it! And in particular, don’t miss this first hour.I like the game well enough — it’s all about playing percentages, trying to guess how many people responded a certain way to provocative questions in a nationwide poll — but what I really like is Drew Carey, who’s instantly proving his chops as the right choice to assume the Bob Barker role on The Price Is Right this fall. Carey puts both the contestant (in this case, an instantly likable 19-year-old pre-med student named Jamie) and the viewer at ease with his nimble wit. "You think you know it all at 19. You know nothing," he ge...
read more
Angela Kinsey, Ben Silverman and Jenna Fischer by Kevin Parry/WireImage.com
NBC Universal president and CEO Jeff Zucker said he doesn’t envision any changes to the NBC's 2007-08 fall schedule even though he's changed top entertainment executives at the network. NBC made it official late Tuesday that Ben Silverman, who brought The Office and Ugly Betty to American television, will become co-chairman of the network’s entertainment division and production studio. Marc Graboff, president of NBC Universal Television, West Coast, has also been elevated to co-chairman."The timing of the announcement has nothing to do with the fall schedule," said Zucker. "The reaction [to the lineup] has been incredibly strong.” He said he’d been trying to bring Silverman into the network for some time, and only recently learned that he was ready to make a move. Silverman will be in charge of creative decisions at the network and studio, while Graboff will handle the business side. The announcement means goodbye to Kevin Reilly, the NBC entertainment president ...
read more
Who Wants to Be a Millionaire will make its debut in China in May, says Reuters — but with only celebrities competing (to comply with local regulations), and perhaps a different title, as 1,000,000 yuan only add up to US $129,000.... Illinois senator/presidential hopeful Barack Obama hosts Crucible of Courage, a Biography Channel special commemorating Black History Month, on Feb. 22 at 9 pm/ET.... This sounds important to somebody: Famed tenor Placido Domingo will, for the first time ever, sing the baritone, title role in Verdi's Simon Boccanegra at Berlin's Staatsoper Unter den Linden in 2009, his rep tells the AP.
read more
NBC jumped the shark in 2004.The Apprentice was the hottest show on television. We're talking absolute must see TV that was oozing buzz. NBC tried to capitalize on the show's success and put all their eggs in the Donald's reality basket.I said it then, and I'm saying it now — moving The Apprentice to anchor Thursday nights sent the network right over the fin. ABC learned its lesson with Millionaire. CBS always had CSI and Everybody Loves Raymond to go with Survivor and The Amazing Race.Thursday nights belonged to NBC. It lost Friends and Frasier (which had jumped the shark years ago) and had nothing in the pipeline. First to fourth wasn't an "if", it was a "when".I understand how tempting it is to lead off each night with a game show or reality show (i.e. inexpensive show). It's also another big mistake. Deal or No Deal is getting pummeled into the ground as I type as the contestants get more and more "wacky".So you're Jeff Zucker... what do you do? Glad you asked.1. Pluck C...
read more
Sunday's 90-minute Flavor of Love 2 season finale drew 7.5 million total viewers, making it VH1's highest-rated telecast ever and the No. 1 cable telecast for the night, but not the top non-sports telecast in all of basic cable for the entire year. That honor goes to the season opener of TNT's The Closer... Celebrity guest hosts will spell a busy, busy Meredith Vieira for "a couple of days" during the Who Wants to Be a Millionaire season currently in production, says the New York Daily News.... Megan Mullally, Dakota Fanning, Andie MacDowell and Beau Bridges have joined the guest list for the CMT Giants special honoring Reba McEntire, airing Nov. 18.UPDATED to correct one ratings superlative assigned to Flavor of Love 2 by the Hollywood Reporter.
read more
Regis Philbin and Simon Cowell, America's Got Talent
Somewhere along the line, miraculous multitasker Kelly Ripa must have inspired cohost Regis Philbin to return to his own juggling act. Just as he did when he launched the Who Wants to Be a Millionaire phenomenon, Philbin will balance his morning Live with Regis & Kelly act with a prime-time reality show, America's Got Talent (premiering Wednesday at 9 pm/ET on Fox).
read more
My favorite TV moment this week (granted, I've been on the road and haven't watched a lot) occurred early Wednesday morning, as Matt Lauer defused the mawkish sentiment on the Today set in the wake of Katie Couric's long-awaited announcement that she would be leaving soon for CBS.
"Also coming up in this half hour..." Lauer quipped, as the Today crew (a great group, as I can attest to from the experience of being on the show a handful of times) broke into laughter.
What I loved about that gag was how it underscored the fact that life on Today would go on, no doubt quite robustly, after the Katie Couric era ends. (There have been so many: the Bryant Gumbel-Jane Pauley era; the Barbara Walters-Hugh Downs era; and so on).
This is a historic shift, no question, and shouldn't be underestimated even as it's overanaly
read more
