The northern part of Seattle Center’s former Fun Forest amusement-park site is set to become something called “Center Square.”

Which leads to the rather obvious question: Paul Lynde or Whoopi Goldberg?

I know your show has even less to do with Seattle than Frasier did. But simply bringing an insane mass murderer on to randomly slaughter people is a cheap writing copout, along the lines of Dallas’s year-long dream.

Helen Wagner, who spoke the first line of dialogue on As the World Turns in 1956 and was the show’s matriarch ever since, has died at age 91. Her death comes four months before the show’s scheduled last episode is to air, and approximately two months before that episode is to be taped.

Sonicsgate, the locally made documentary about the theft of Seattle’s oldest pro sports legacy and the locals who aided and abetted it, can now be viewed online in its entirety. And here’s (most of) ESPN’s Outside the Lines episode about the sad saga, which does a decent job of summarizing the main tragic plotlines.

Twenty years tonight, Twin Peaks debuted. It is impossible to fully state the series’ effect on me as a TV fan, a story teller/listener, and an explorer of Northwestiana.

As for the show’s lasting effect on TV itself, that’s easier to describe.

At the dawn of the cable era, the oldline networks didn’t know whether long-form scripted programming had a future. Twin Peaks proved the format could indeed work. Even though the show itself only ran 32 hours plus a prequel movie, it showed how different recombinations of drama and humor and atmospherics and pacing and production design and editing could be seamlessly added into the medium.

Before Twin Peaks, TV drama with continuing characters (as opposed to detective/whodunit formulae) meant Dallas and its spinoffs. After Twin Peaks, it meant The Sopranos, Deadwood, Lost, Mad Men, Desperate Housewives, The Wire, etc.

The American political/cultural landscape is To Sir, With Love.

Obama is Sidney Poitier.

The tea partiers and the far-right wingnuts are the classroom rabble.

The middle-of-the-road Democrats are the other teachers, cowering in the faculty lounge, willing to put up with the abuse until retirement age.

I wanted to like the premiere of KING-TV’s new morning talk show New Day Northwest. And I still want to like the show. We need all the pro local media we can get. Host Margaret Larson is a seasoned broadcast journalist; she’s also worked in PR for several humanitarian groups. The show’s director, Steve Wilson, was a key member of KING’s old Almost Live! team.

That said, the initial telecast was a disappointment.

There was a cutesy dog training segment, with a plea for viewers to send in their cutesy dog pictures.

There was a PCC cooking-demo lady preparing a salad by simmering some ingredients on a range (?).

There was a cross-promo with the host of another KING show (Grant Goodeve of the travelogue show Northwest Backroads).

There was one human moment, when the guy who wears the Seahawks mascot costume showed up in street clothes. He discussed what happened when he was diagnosed with one of the diseases his character goes around raising money against (MS).

I’m not part of the show’s target demographic. But I can still tell what is and isn’t compelling TV. And I’d really like New Day to evolve into more of the former.

Some industry insiders, including the NBC execs who want to be taken over by Comcast, claim old fashioned antenna TV just can’t compete against cable’s superior business model. Now, Max Fisher claims “cable TV is doomed.”

• Curling really is the greatest game of all time.
• Apolo Anton Ohno is in line to replace the disgraced Tiger Woods as the champion all-around ad spokesman for everything. This does not, however, mean anyone will care about speed skating until the next Winter Games.
• I can see why the Intl. Olympic Committee chose to add more “x-treme-y” events and not to add women’s ski jumping. Why simply stick on an extension to a legacy Olympic sport when you can instead grow your young, hip, edgy, more marketable side?
• The whole thang’s already a fiscal disaster for the Vancouver and B.C. governments. But the province’s zeal in attracting the Games is understandable if you know how it works. Over recent decades, successive provincial leaders have staked their political careers on “megaprojects,” big govt.-subsidized development schemes that invariably funnel money from the taxpayers to politically-connected landowners and construction firms. The Olympics are simply the biggest, costliest megaproject of them all.
• NBC’s coverage sucks because the network’s stuck in a coverage model invented decades ago by ABC sports exec Roone Arledge. He operated from the premise that too few Americans intrinsically cared about these sports, so instead he’d put on a drama serial. Pretaped profile pieces turned these athletes into instant celebrities (even if, in real life, they were often bland workaholics). Armies of videotape editors would slice-n’-dice the competition footage into “shows,” carefully timed to draw and keep the biggest possible mass audience for the longest possible viewing time. But we’re not in the three-network era anymore. In the age of cable + Internet, audiences are fragmented into little pieces based on shared intense interest—such as those who are intensely interested in winter sports. The more you care about any of these events, the more you’re disgusted by what U.S. TV does to them.

As the recession drags on, Toyota’s got a TV spot hawking its minivan as a great place in which to sleep.

The creator of Gumby and longtime Buddhist has walked into the Tibetan Book of the Dead.

I’m old, but I’m not old enough to remember the live TV anthology dramas seen in the DVD box set The Golden Age of Television. But I am old enough to remember when these particular eight kinescope films were reshown on PBS in 1981.

Producer Sonny Fox, who’d compiled the PBS series, mostly selected stories that had remained famous via feature-film remakes (Patterns, Requiem for a Heavyweight, The Days of Wine and Roses, No Time for Sergeants, et al).

The box set presents the shows exactly as Fox had re-edited them. The plus in this: the introductions and cast/writer/director interviews Mr. Fox had added at the beginning of each installment. The minus: some of the closing credit sequences are truncated or missing.

Because so many pre-1978 live (and even taped) TV shows were never copyrighted, many other DVDs of live anthology episodes are now on the market, as single discs and in sets. They tend to include the original credits, and often even the original commercials. Criterion, which released this set, could have done likewise.

As for the plays themselves, you get nine and a half hours of raw, Actors’ Studio-style over-emoting, performed by actors who were already famous or who became famous or who aren’t even trivia answers now, performed within tiny studio sets under harsh monochrome lighting.

Utterly fascinating.

Knute Berger at Crosscut mourns the decline of soap operas (evinced by As the World Turns’ cancellation) with a tribute to his late aunt, one of the show’s, and the genre’s, most enduring performers. Berger rightly notes that “the soaps are the daily newspapers of daytime TV, once everyday staples that are now dying off like dinosaurs in a meteor-induced dust cloud.”

Kansas City Star TV critic (yes, a few daily papers still have one of those) Aaron Barnhart describes the past 10 years as having been a time when “technology put culture in the hands of many people.” In other words, gadgets and the Intrawebs and infinite cable channels allowed people…

…to produce, consume and comment on culture, exercising powers that had previously been off-limits to the untrained. They broke the back of the music business with the aid of iPods and social networks. They humbled the newspaper industry with the help of Google. They raised the existential question of what exactly are radio and television.

Barnhart ought to know about what online communications can do. After all, he originally broke into professional media-punditry by posting a weekly David Letterman fan newsletter to Usenet discussion boards.

Three months after CBS extinguished Guiding Light, the network’s axing the only other remaining Procter & Gamble-owned soap opera, the 53-year-old As the World Turns. The last episode is scheduled for next September.

(Yes, conspiracy theorists, it looks like the network staggered the cancellations so P&G couldn’t offer both shows as a package to another outlet.)