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.)

Seattle’s first TV station, KSRC-TV (soon to become KING-TV) signed on for the first time on Thanksgiving 1948. The debut telecast was a live high school football game, from the then-new (and apparently now doomed) High School Memorial Stadium.

In honor of this occasion, Feliks Banel offers a list of Seattle’s 25 most memorable live TV moments. In chronological order, they begin with that first local telecast and end with the Pike Place Market’s centennial concert on the Seattle Channel. In between are the first and last J.P. Patches shows, Mt. St. Helens, the Kingdome implosion, the WTO protests, and Cobain on Saturday Night Live.

Banel didn’t include, but I would’ve, the Seattle World’s Fair opening (KING, 1962), the last hour of the Dog House restaurant (KCTS, 1994), the weird Jay Leno-hosted party at the Microsoft campus for the launch of Windows 95 (KOMO, KING and KIRO, 1995), the Sonics’ final game (FSN, 2008), and perhaps one or two particularly naughty cable access shows.

Both Canlis and the Sorrento Hotel’s bar now have special cocktails named after characters in the Twilight novels and movies. Sorry, but  this is the only Cullen I’ve ever admired.

Was intrigued (if not completely satisfied) by the new Prisoner miniseries, which finished a three-night run on AMC Tuesday. It was well produced and exquisitely acted, even though the ending explained too much. (I won’t spoil it for you future BitTorrent DVD viewers.)

The old show mixed Swinging London iconography with Cold War politics, 007-esque spying with Big Brother paranoia.

The new show mixed Matrix psycho-techno-babble with corporate oppression, social-gaming fantasies with the suffocating terror that is Reagan-Bush era “family values.”

And it was fun to hear the Brian Wilson music samples. Because most of those were from Smile, which had been composed at the time of the original Prisoner series but not finished until 2004, they added a time/space distortion field that perfectly fit the story’s psycho-consciousness distortion field.

…to two eternal ’80s TV icons:

• Edward Woodward, the cool yet concerned operative in The Equalizer (and the doomed police investigator in the original Wicker Man), and
• Ken Ober, the funny and affable host of Remote Control (one of MTV’s first nonmusical shows), who afterward disappeared into Playboy Channel comedy spots and sitcom production work.

Yes, the Animation exhibit at the Pacific Science Center is one big ad for Cartoon Network.

But it’s also educational. Really.

You see, animation (even CN’s unapologetically 2-D animation) involves a lot of math, geometry, spatial relationships, optical theory (“persistence of vision”), and maybe even a daub of artistry. And that’s even without CGI. (For the purposes of this exhibit, CN’s shows are billed as being produced in traditional cel animation; in reality, even something as simplistic-looking as Code Name: Kids Next Door uses a lot of digital compositing, coloring, and assembly.)

Nickeodeon’s got a “Worldwide Day of Play” promotion today. The kiddie kable channel is airing nothing from noon to 3 p.m. except a logo for the promotion and the scrolling words (also read by a male announcer):

“Today is Nickelodeon’s Worldwide Day of Play! Turn off your TV, shut down your computer, put down that cell phone—yes, YOU!—and go ALL OUT! We’ll see you back here at 3.”

Just last nite, I was talking with my Scots drinking buddy about the early days of British TV, when both extant channels would shut down for long stretches of time every day, such as between 1 and 4 p.m. From my friend’s description, it seemed to have made the whole televisual ritual more special by being less ubiquitous.