The Biz

In 2005, Bill Hemmer became one of the biggest on-air names from CNN to jump to Fox News Channel. He's traveled the world as a correspondent for FNC, but it's taken the 2008 Presidential campaign for him to emerge as a leading anchor for the channel. Paired with up-and-comer Megyn Kelly, Hemmer is now on three hours a day with America's Newsroom and a daily 5 pm show dedicated to political news, America's Election HQ. He's also become a fixture during FNC's primary coverage providing analysis through a multi-touch sensing screen nicknamed "The Bill Board" (not to be confused with CNN's "Magic Wall," although it's the same technology). The Biz caught up with Hemmer after another night of electoral number-crunching.

TVGuide.com: You've done a lot of reporting on big stories for Fox. But on cable news, it helps to have a destination where viewers can find you everyday. Are you finding that viewers have been rediscovering you lately?
Hemmer: I'm flattered that Fox chose Megyn and me to do America's Election HQ at 5. It's a necessary part of our programming. It has helped me have a voice on what I consider to be the most important story facing our nation today.

TVGuide.com: But I've got to believe you're happier.
Hemmer: Oh, entirely yes.

TVGuide.com: As a veteran of cable news, you had a reputation as a guy who could put in long hours on the air. It doesn't seem like you had the real estate to do that at Fox until now.
Hemmer: When I joined Fox there was no room at the inn. We were No. 1 across the board in households and demos. There was no wiggle room. I think we've seen now that opportunity to put all the resources of Fox News Channel together and to do it in that 5 o'clock program. It's been a terrific outlet for us.

TVGuide.com: You felt you had to wait your turn?
Hemmer: Entirely. I think everyone has to. That does not mean the next time a story breaks somewhere that I don't want to be the first one out the door.

TVGuide.com: Why do you think the on-air pairing with Megyn Kelly is working?
Hemmer: That elusive chemistry that people try to find - over the years you figure out that's something that can never be forced. From day one, we had that together on television. She's very eager and intelligent and she picked up television very quickly. She was a lawyer four years ago in the corporate world. She has the ability to grasp a lot of information quickly and interpret it and communicate it. Cable news is a job that requires you to be nimble mentally and emotionally and she has that.

TVGuide.com: You're a very seasoned guy, yet you look young. You don't look like you're sitting there with your daughter.
Hemmer: I take that as high praise. That's proof that it works and we've seen the ratings build.

TVGuide.com: How do you like using the Bill Board?
Hemmer: It's a giant walking, moving, breathing iPhone. I think it's a whole new universe that television is about to explore. You can do literally anything you want with that screen so long as you program it. The creator of it, Jeff Han, told me he did not think there would be a use for it in television only because he hadn't thought about it. Some people consider it a toy or a gadget. I consider it a valuable tool in our election coverage. Meaning and context on a story is very important. Viewers want to be able to decipher these enormous numbers and for us to give context and meaning to all of that, we need a device like the Bill Board.

The big TV story of the moment is the ratings decline of American Idol.

But let's get real — of course the show's numbers are down. Once a show has been No. 1 for a few seasons, it can only go one way. It's amazing that Idol held up as well as it has. By the time the current TV season is over, Fox projects that Idol's ratings will still be ahead of what they were in the mega-hit's second iteration that started in January 2003. In that year, the use of digital video recorders or TiVo was scant. There was no YouTube. The main business of iTunes was music. There were no hit TV shows to stream over the Internet. Digital cable and satellite TV have given viewers dozens more channels than they had just a few years ago.

New technologies have changed the TV viewing experience into a more personal endeavor. But Idol continues to thrive because it's still a collective, inclusive event that different generations can watch together. Almost every season, 30 percent of the audience is made up of viewers aged 35 to 49, a group that includes a lot of parents watching with kids.

Kids, teens and young women are the demos that are down the most for Idol this year. It makes sense. Young viewers are the most fickle and the first to tire of any show. If you started watching Idol when you were 8 years old, you're not likely to stick with it if you're trying to be a cool teenager. Young women have also been siphoned off by the surfeit of reality shows that appeared this season as a result of the writers' strike.

The fact that there are fewer African-Americans in the later rounds of the competition has likely led to a steep drop among black viewers. None of the most popular contestants specializes in country music, a genre that always fares well on TV. Of course, the make-up of the contestants is in the hands of the voting viewers once it gets to the Top 12. But Idol producers do need to take a look at the aspects of the show that they can control. Idol Gives Back is a lovely gesture, but it basically turns the show into a telethon for a week, and for the second consecutive year it drove some viewers away. Andrew Lloyd Webber? Must be a Brit thing.

Fox executives put the show and its ratings under a microscope every week to figure out what works and what doesn't. But if they play their cards right, the end of the Idol juggernaut will be a long way off. Idol may not be as big as it used to be, but it's still a lot bigger than everything else in prime time. As long as that's the case, it will be a powerful draw to advertisers and a big moneymaker for Fox.

So why the press pile-on regarding the ratings? Envious execs at the competing networks are putting the word out about the numbers, and Fox's scheduling chief Preston Beckman doesn't blame them. He'd be doing the same thing if Idol aired on another network. But he warns that the press and other TV outlets should be careful about wishing for Idol's downfall. The show has provided fresh faces and fodder for morning programs, late-night shows and the press.

"Idol has become a national event," he says. "The show not only helps Fox, but every broadcast network, every newspaper syndicate and every one of those entertainment shows. It feeds everything." — Stephen Battaglio

Related:
• Idol Boss Talks Shocking Exits, Sliding Ratings
• The Great American Idol Blog

This week will be a big one in the short life of the CW. Gossip Girl returns with the first of five new episodes and the backing of its provocative promo campaign built around the show's "OMFG" moments. The campaign is getting the freshman series some attention. But will it get the ratings that the CW SRSLY needs? The Biz talked with network president Dawn Ostroff about how she's banking on GG to turn the network's fortunes around.

TVGuide.com: There was a lot of promise when the CW was created out of the most popular shows of the WB and UPN. Are you surprised that it hasn't been easier to get it to work from a ratings standpoint?
Dawn Ostroff: We had this huge challenge of migrating people. It was asking the consumer in every market to change channels, whether they were watching UPN or the WB. We put together the best of the two networks, but at the end of the day, people said, "What is this network?" It was like a blended family. What we want to try to do is create our own identity for the CW now that we have another year under our belt, and really identify what the CW is.

TVGuide.com: You're building the CW's image around Gossip Girl, but it hasn't been a big hit by traditional standards.
Ostroff: I think the word there is "traditional." Our audience tends to be a little bit younger and they are more open to consuming their content and new media in different ways. I think when you look at a show like Gossip Girl, you hear about it, you see it, there are rabid fans everywhere who can't consume enough of the show, the music, the wardrobe and it's all just [about] how you reach them. A hit takes on a different meaning and sort of a different way of reaching the viewer. I know that this show is a hit and I know it's going to be a bigger hit. It's interesting to hear that Gossip Girl is the No. 1 show downloaded on iTunes. The streaming numbers are quite large.

TVGuide.com: But you want higher ratings on the CW. Isn't that why you're not making the new episodes available online? [See: Gossip Girl Returns... But Not on the Web]
Ostroff: We've always given fans of the show a lot of online content and we plan on actually adding to that over the next few weeks. While streaming won't be a part of that, there will be more new short-form content available to Gossip Girl fans. We are, however, going to experiment and see if we can grow the ratings by keeping these five episodes exclusive to our airwaves.

TVGuide.com: You have two corporate parents, Time Warner and CBS Corp., who believed the CW would be profitable right away. Do you think they'll give the network the time it needs to grow?
Ostroff: They've been very patient and as far as I know they will continue to be patient. I think they are pleased in what they see in terms of Gossip Girl, in terms of it really helping us establish a brand and a lot of buzz for this new network. Gossip Girl is the poster child and it will be joined by a number of shows that are in that milieu. As you know, we're developing a new version of Beverly Hills, 90210....

TVGuide.com: Will that be ready for this fall?
Ostroff: We're working on it. I can't say for sure that it will be. I think we need a couple of shows that are going to be about the CW — not about what the WB was, not about what UPN was. Once we get a couple of those pieces in place, people will know what the network is and the network will start to establish its own following.

TVGuide.com: What are some of the other shows you have in the pipeline that would work to that end?
Ostroff: How to Teach Filthy Rich Girls is also based on a series of Alloy books, the same publisher as Gossip Girl. It's about a young woman in her twenties who winds up tutoring and trying to wrangle these billionaire 16-year-old twin girls being raised by their grandmother. Imagine the Olson twins 10 years ago or Paris and Nicole 10 years ago, totally running amok. The other one is Golden Hour, executive-produced by Simon Fuller, his first scripted show in the States. It's a medical show seen through the eyes of two young women, one who has her first day on the job as an EMT.

TVGuide.com: Would you say you're out of the comedy business?
Ostroff: We are looking at shows that are going to be game-changers for this network and I think it's harder and harder to find a comedy that's a game-changer. If there's something that we feel can really make a difference here, we will make it. Hour dramas and reality have a better chance of breaking out for us.

TVGuide.com: So what will the CW brand stand for going forward?
Ostroff: To a certain degree, female. Quality. Doing something that feels different, that feels special, that makes noise, that gets attention and has a youthful bent — which doesn't mean kids necessarily. It means contemporary.

If Katie Couric does leave the CBS Evening News anchor chair, here are the leading candidates to replace her and what they bring to the table.

Harry Smith
Pro: The longtime coanchor of The Early Show, Smith is familiar to the CBS audience and respectful of the news division's tradition.
Con: He's never gotten The Early Show out of third place.

Diane Sawyer
Pro: The popular Good Morning America anchor's contract with ABC News is up in the spring or summer of next year, and would be highly motivated to succeed where Couric failed.
Con: Will CBS News want to invest big bucks again when the evening-newscast audience continues to erode?

Scott Pelley
Pro: A highly respected 60 Minutes correspondent, he was once considered for the anchor job because his intensity was reminiscent of a young Dan Rather.
Con: He reminds people of Dan Rather.

Anderson Cooper
Pro: A leading TV journalist of his generation who could help draw viewers under age 50 to the evening news.
Con: May only be available if CBS News can work out a newsgathering partnership with CNN. (The two networks once had a conversation about CNN producing the evening news with Cooper out front, so don't rule it out.)

David Gregory
Pro: The go-to guy of NBC News is considered one of the best rising young talents in network news.
Con: He's an heir to Matt Lauer's anchor job on Today and NBC isn't likely to let him get away.

Bob Schieffer
Pro: CBS Evening News ratings went up when the chief Washington correspondent and Face the Nation moderator filled in after Rather left.
Con: He wants to retire. A return to the anchor chair would only be another short-term solution.

Chris Matthews
Pro: His contract with NBC News is up next year and he could draw cable news viewers who like big personalities.
Con: CBS News has long been dogged by charges of partisanship, and Matthews wouldn't help.

Which of these potential anchors do you think could fit the bill? What would you look for in a Couric replacement?

Who ever thought the presidential primary debates would be one of the biggest TV attractions of the year? Cable news channels have reaped record ratings and even the broadcast networks have been vying for the events because of viewer interest. It should only grow more intense when the two nominees meet in the fall. The debates are already scheduled for Sept. 26, Oct. 7 and Oct. 15. But getting the candidates to participate has never been easy according to a new book Inside the Presidential Debates (shop Amazon.com) by Craig L. Lamay and Newton N. Minow, a former FCC commissioner and vice chairman of the Commission on Presidential Debates, which has organized the face-offs in every election year since 1976. The Biz talked to the authors about what makes the debates so great.

TVGuide.com: One surprising fact in the book is how for 16 years there were no presidential debates because it was logistically impossible. The federal government's equal-time law required every declared candidate to be included. Now only those who reach 15 percent in the national polls make the cut.
Craig L. Lamay: The whole point was to ensure that minor-party or third-party candidates would not be excluded from press coverage, particularly in lots of communities where a television station might favor a particular candidate. The idea was to make sure all candidates' views get equal opportunity to be heard. The intention was good, but like many well-intentioned things, it had a downside.

TVGuide.com: But it was President Ford who really prompted the change in the law because he was so far down in the polls. He wanted to debate Jimmy Carter.
Newton N. Minow: Years later, Ford said, "I think the debates helped me. You've got to remember, I was 32 points behind and I almost won the election."

TVGuide.com: Your book points out how both Presidents Johnson and Nixon didn't want to debate their challengers, so the equal-time law wasn't changed. Now it seems that it would be impossible for a presidential candidate to avoid it.
Minow: Young people who have grown up with presidential debates expect them. I don't think any candidate can escape it.
Lamay: Absolutely. Remember in 1992 when President George H.W. Bush [who balked at debating Bill Clinton and Ross Perot] was followed around on the campaign trail by the guy in the chicken suit? If you avoided a debate today, you'd have millions of virtual chickens [all over the Internet].

TVGuide.com: I love the stories about the conditions the campaigns try to enforce for the debates.
Lamay: A lot of that kind of stuff is posing — like two roosters in a yard. It doesn't affect the substance of the debates at all. The negotiations for the first debate between Bush and Clinton were about the placement of water glasses. At one point, they wanted to put them on the floor. Then the campaigns realized that to pick them up the candidates would have to bend over and kind of moon a national television audience. Suddenly they both realized they should put them on the table.

TVGuide.com: Has it gotten harder to get the broadcast networks to schedule time for the debates because they've ceded so much news coverage to cable and are reluctant to preempt entertainment programming?
Minow: Not so far, but I think in time it's going to get tougher. As of now they're all going to carry it.

TVGuide.com: The first 2004 debate between President Bush and Sen. John Kerry set a record with 62.5 million viewers. Will a meeting between Sen. John McCain and Sen. Barack Obama or Sen. Hillary Clinton top that?
Minow: I think it will, absolutely. It will be higher and the debates will be repeated and distributed in all kinds of new ways on the Internet. Every American will have a chance to see them.

TVGuide.com: Will we ever have a presidential debate that's only shown online?
Minow: At some point that will happen.
Lamay: We did have some [like that] among the primary debates. I don't see why it wouldn't be in 2008, even if it were not done by the debate commission.

TVGuide.com: You've been around for all of the debates, Mr. Minow. What's your favorite moment?
Minow: I was at the debate in Cleveland in 1980 when Ronald Reagan said to Jimmy Carter, "Are you better off now than you were four years ago?" At that moment I knew the election was over.

Former CBS News veteran John Roberts is coming up on his first year as co-anchor of CNN's American Morning. While it's not getting the same ratings boom that the cable network is experiencing the rest of the day, AM's first-quarter audience is up 11 percent from a year ago as Roberts and co-anchor Kiran Chetry offer a more straight-ahead alternative to the entertainment/news hybrids that the broadcast networks and Fox News offer in the morning. But Roberts tells The Biz the program will be getting some adjustments when a new executive producer comes onboard.

TVGuide.com: Your anniversary on American Morning is the same day as the [anniversary] of the biggest domestic stories of last year, the Virginia Tech shooting.
John Roberts: On April 16 Kiran and I did our very first show together. I was in Washington, she was in New York. Literally at the end of the show the Virginia Tech shooting broke and we found ourselves on the road. It's a shame that was such a tragedy that threw us right into the thick of things. It was a good way to bond with her on the air, and the bond has grown since then.

TVGuide.com: American Morning isn't as breezy as the other morning shows. Nobody's standing outside with signs; you're sitting behind desks most of the time.
Roberts: We find our viewers turn out to be after real, actual news rather than lighter information. They don't come to us to learn how to cook a hamburger or the latest celebrity gossip. It's a little more business-like. There are some people who wake up in the morning who want to see a rock concert. There are other people who wake up in the morning and want to know what's going on in politics; they want to know what's going on in the world of the economy and in the international scene. For that information they can come to us. We're going to give them a quick digest of what's going on in the world. They can tune in for five or 10 minutes and learn pretty much what they need to know to start their day.

TVGuide.com: You'll have a new executive producer soon. Will that bring about any changes?
Roberts: We'll take the opportunity to just tweak around the edges of the show. The show as it is right now is fairly heavily scripted. I think going forward we'll try to pare back the amount of scripting that we've got and introduce a little more of an ad lib aspect to it, which will make the show a little looser, a little more accessible, and allow Kiran and I to draw on the experiences we've had as journalists, and convey that information to viewers. I'm looking forward to that, as too much scripting of a show can take away some of the spontaneity.

TVGuide.com: When you started out in TV journalism, you covered music. I hear you have a pretty serious guitar collection.
Roberts: I don't really collect them. I've got a couple that are collectible. I've got a couple of '59 Les Paul reissues that are really nice. I have a 1972 Ramirez 1A classical guitar with Brazilian rosewood, which is quite valuable. For 20 years, I suppressed the information that I played in a band when I was a kid. Now it's chic to be playing music, with people like Bob Schieffer and Mike Huckabee doing it.

TVGuide.com: What's on your iPod right now?
Roberts: Red Hot Chili Peppers to U2 to Kenny Chesney... you name it. I have very diverse taste in music. My musical dream would be to get up on stage and play guitar with U2.

TVGuide.com: How does CBS News look in your rearview mirror these days? You were part of it for a long time.
Roberts: I was. It was very hard leaving. It was my only home in the United States. I came down to the U.S. from Canada in 1989 and worked at the CBS station in Miami, then moved up to the network in 1992 and knew a lot of people there. But all the people who I knew, with a few exceptions, are gone. It's a different place than it was. CNN is such a terrific place to be. It's wonderful to be at a place that covers news. I remember at CBS it was terribly frustrating to be sitting on the anchor desk wondering if we were going to cut in — then being told no, there's an entertainment program on, we want to see what the other two guys are doing before we go ahead. Here, it's the race to be first on the air. We're doing an amazing job covering politics. I am so proud of this place. When you compare our coverage to others, it's like the difference between TV and radio. It's the quality, the technology and the depth of our journalists. It's a joy to watch.

There's been a lot of David Gregory on NBC News lately. When he's not reporting from the White House, he's filling in for Matt Lauer on Today or Tim Russert on Meet the Press. Not enough for you? This week he starts anchoring his own nightly show on cable news channel MSNBC, Race for the White House with David Gregory (6 pm/ET), designed to feed the growing number of political junkies following the amazing 2008 presidential campaign. The Biz talked to Gregory about his new program, the recent rise of MSNBC and whether there's any chance he'll have a new network address in the future.

TVGuide.com: You're hours away from the first show. What are we going to see?
David Gregory: We're going to have a terrific panel. They'll be some swapping out, but not different faces every night. We want it to be a smart, fast-paced take on the race, day in and day out, by people who follow it closely and have different points of view. We'll start with Joe Scarborough [host of MSNBC's Morning Joe] and NBC News political director Chuck Todd. We'll have [MSNBC contributors] Eugene Robinson and Rachel Maddow. There are some others in the works as well. I also want to look at some smart takes that have been written during the day and "Here's what you should be paying attention to."

TVGuide.com: Network news divisions have to cover politics in an election year, but this cycle has been a real driver in terms of viewers and excitement. Why is it making such great television?
Gregory: You've got a campaign that keeps driving; keeps sustaining the coverage and keeps driving the conversation in different directions. It's not just about the raw politics. It's not just about the "inside the war room" machinations. That's part of what we'll talk about on the show because I think we're appealing to people who are following this really closely. But it's a national conversation about who we are. It's about race. It's about gender. It's about personality. It's about this vague notion of preparedness for a crisis. There's a lot to it. It keeps moving.

TVGuide.com: When there's a change in the administration, network news divisions usually use that as a time to make a change on the White House beat. Do we anticipate that happening for you in 2009?
Gregory: I don’t know. It's something that we're all thinking about in terms of what comes next with the new president. Especially with me, since I've been at the White House longer than anyone else in network TV. We don't have the answers for it yet.

TVGuide.com: You were doing the morning show on MSNBC after Don Imus was fired, but it didn't seem like you were really totally comfortable with the format. I'm sure you could have kept that job if you wanted it.
Gregory: In the end it wasn't for me at this time. It's a very challenging thing to do, and Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski [of Morning Joe] are doing a very good job of it. But it wasn't the right fit for me at this time. It would have required me pushing the envelope in terms of my opinions in a way I wasn't comfortable with. It demands more of the host's take on the world. I think it would have changed who I was. I wasn't prepared to make that shift.

TVGuide.com: I feel like we've seen this picture before on MSNBC in an election year. The ratings are up. Big-name talent from NBC News is brought in to do shows. But after the election is over it seems like the stars of the network go away and the channel goes back to being an also-ran. Is there any sense that's going to change this time around?
Gregory: I'm not going to speak for myself beyond this program through the election. But I've been around here for a while, and there is something different going on. There is a real commitment, a cultural melding that's gone on at NBC, which in part coincided with MSNBC [moving from the studios in Secaucus, New Jersey] coming into [the NBC studios at Rockefeller Center]. I think physical separation fed the idea of cultural separation. But at the highest levels at NBC, there is a commitment in practice, not just in theory, that we are one and the cultures really do mix. You see that in our election-night coverage. You see that in a show like Race for the White House. Internally, there is recognition of the excitement about what MSNBC is doing. That sense that it's a stepchild of the network has gone away. There's too much momentum built up right now to take a turn away from it.

TVGuide.com: With chief Washington correspondent and Face the Nation moderator Bob Schieffer retiring from CBS News next year, that network will be looking for a replacement in Washington. Do you have a long-term commitment to NBC News?
Gregory: I'm very committed to NBC. This is my home. There will be a time to talk about my future and we are approaching that time. We'll talk about it at that time. But what I would say is that this is my home and I love being here, and I'm very committed to NBC.

POLL: Are you watching election coverage religiously?

POLL: Do feel that the nation is more engaged in this presidential election than in the past two?

When it comes to showbiz connections in the 2008 presidential campaign, Sen. Barack Obama has Oprah Winfrey, Gov. Mike Huckabee has Chuck Norris, and Sen. John McCain has... Craig Turk?

It's a name familiar only to viewers who've studied the credits of Law & Order, Cold Case and Boston Legal, where Turk has written episodes. But he's also had key behind-the-scenes roles in McCain's presidential bids.

Back in 1999, Turk was a Harvard-trained lawyer working in Washington, D.C., specializing in election law and government ethics when McCain's campaign manager, Rick Davis, approached him about doing legal work for the candidate. Turk was hired as general counsel for the 2000 campaign and began riding McCain's Straight Talk Express bus.

The experience got Turk deeper into politics. He went to Montenegro to work on a sovereignty referendum for the European nation and consulted for developing political parties in Asia and Eastern Europe. "I loved the travel and the sense that I was making a difference," he says. "Coming to Hollywood is not something I ever considered much."

Turk was itching to put his experiences into a story and wrote a script called The Fixer. "It was about a young lawyer in D.C. who winds up getting into a series of events that put him in over his head," Turk says. A screenwriter pal from law school passed it on to an agent. Turk tried his hand at a Law & Order episode. It sold and he went on to a job at Cold Case, where he wrote an episode inspired by McCain's POW experiences in Vietnam. Turk put his law background to use at Boston Legal in 2006, where he’s currently a writer-producer. It’s turned out to be a good fit with his background. "At Boston Legal, you’re always dealing with political and social issues that are really timely," Turk says. "It’s a great forum if you’re interested in debate."

But there was no work in early November, when the Writers Guild of America went on strike. That's when McCain's campaign, at the time way down in the polls, asked Turk to travel with the candidate for a while. "Initially my role was to make him laugh," Turk says. "He was constantly amused by me telling him that before I joined the campaign I had spent time walking in circles with a picket sign in my hand." Turk advised McCain on campaign issues, but during downtime, they'd talk about TV. "He has young kids, so he's surprisingly fluent in pop culture," Turk says. "When I told him there was going to be a long strike, he said, 'Oh, what does that mean for Damages?' He's a very hip guy."

Turk is back at work for Boston Legal while McCain appears headed for the Republican nomination. Turk plans to be involved in the general election campaign this fall. "The TV season allowing, I'll be back on the road," he says. "I have tremendous respect and affection for John McCain, and I feel like he'd be an incredible president."

Folk singer Pete Seeger was a major part of the soundtrack of the '60s, backing up his music with a lifetime of tireless antiwar and environmental activism. As such he'll be the subject of the next American Masters, which premieres Feb. 27 on PBS. The executive producer of the film is another prominent progressive — legendary TV mogul and philanthropist Norman Lear. The producer of classic sitcoms such as All in the Family, Maude, The Jeffersons, One Day at a Time (we could go on) has been active in getting young people registered to vote. He still makes hits, too, but now it's for his label Concord Music Group (James Taylor, Joni Mitchell and Paul McCartney are on his roster). He's also half-owner of Village Roadshow Pictures (which produced I Am Legend), and owns a copy of one of the world's most famous historical documents. The Biz recently checked in with him.

TVGuide.com: You're certainly at a stage in life where you can be choosy about your projects — so why Pete Seeger?
Norman Lear: There is an American myth we live with and he is the only one I can think of who has lived the life. He's a real frontiersman. He built his house in upstate New York 50 years ago with his hands. He ventures out to speak his piece. He expresses himself day and night, anywhere on any subject. With his hands and his voice he's lived his life close to the earth.

TVGuide.com: The film tells how Seeger was blacklisted from television in 1963. It's surprising that the residue of 1950s McCarthyism was still around then.
Lear: That residue is alive today. If you dare under [these] circumstances to criticize the Iraq War, you're against the troops. It's a very hard time in this country to be a certain kind of dissenter – which makes (Seeger's story) vital at this moment.

TVGuide.com: You've taken your own activism online with a voter-registration website, DeclareYourself.com.
Lear: It's a major effort to turn out the youth vote. We've registered well over 300,000 new voters since July. America Ferrera and Hayden Panettiere are spokespeople for Declare Yourself. It's amazing. In 2004 we registered 1.2 million. We started in 2002, with the tour of the Declaration of Independence. It morphed into this.

TVGuide.com: You own a copy of the Declaration. Where is it when it's not on tour?
Lear: In my house. In a temperature-controlled box. In a temperature-controlled room. But it's out most of the time.

TVGuide.com: You want people to see it.
Lear: That's why it's with us. We bought it to travel and share. There are only 25 that exist in the world. The kick that I get out of it is that it was one of those printed the night of July 4, 1776. It is the country's birth certificate.

TVGuide.com: There have been reports that you hang out with NBC Entertainment chairman Ben Silverman.
Lear: I really like him. In the land of the walking dead he's a live one. He says what he thinks. He's a great guy. But I wouldn't say we hang out. We've spent some time together, but we don't hang out.

TVGuide.com: He's a big fan of yours.
Lear: Well, I'm crazy about people who are crazy about me.

The Writers Guild of America strike is history — or as one network executive put it, "Our long regional nightmare is over." Scribes are back to work and now we can obsess about how many new episodes of Desperate Housewives are left. But let's take a look at what was really won and lost in this battle.

PROS

For the writers: It took courage and foresight for the guild members to take a significant short-term loss to ensure that they'll have a piece of TV's future. By fighting to get a two percent stake in income generated by digital distribution of shows, they recognized how the TV-viewing experience is undergoing a fundamental change — a new generation is now watching on computer screens, iPods and mobile phones. Now that the writers have that piece of that action, you can bet they'll never give it up in future contracts.

For the networks: Though ratings began to sag, the financial impact of the strike wasn't that significant. They learned that, like most other countries in the world, they can get by with giving viewers more reality programming (still not covered by the guild). They were also able to press the restart button on a TV season that suffered from the worst new-program development in years.

For the studios: From the early days of the strike, there were rumblings that the studios would use the job action as an opportunity to clean house and get rid of writer-producer deals that weren't generating any hits. It wasn't an empty threat, as dozens of deals were terminated.

CONS

For the writers: They have lost a couple of time slots to reality shows that got some ratings traction during the work stoppage (American Gladiators, The Moment of Truth), and may lose more by the time the dust settles. There also may be some disappointment when they actually see how much (or little) they earn from digital distribution in the short term.

For the networks: Executives talked boldly about how the strike could be an opportunity to restructure the business. There was discussion about getting rid of the expensive process of developing pilots, which required throwing money at the same pool of actors, writers and producers at the same time and then scrambling to launch dozens of new shows in the fall. Major changes might have happened if the strike had lasted through June. But it didn't. The pressure is on to get back to network TV as we know it.

For the entertainment conglomerates that own the networks and studios: They've been telling Wall Street that they've got this digital thing licked and that plenty of profits will be rolling in. But their line to the union was that no one knows how much anyone is really going to make from it. Apparently the directors believed that revenue generated by digital distribution would be so meager that they didn't hold out for a percentage in their contract. What are the companies going to tell Wall Street now?

For viewers, Super Tuesday was a dizzying night of spinning graphics, graphs and maps. But it would mean nothing without the number crunchers who sift through the exit polls and the vote count. TV Guide took a seat at the Fox News “decision desk” as the results rolled in to get a feel for how the electoral sausage gets made.

6:30 pm The Fox decision-desk team includes academics, a pollster, a veteran election-results analyst, and Fox News senior vice president John Moody, who’ll make the final determination on when anchor Brit Hume will call a race. The polls are still open, but the team is already poring over exit-poll numbers from the research firm that delivers the numbers to all of the networks. But instead of being holed up in a back room, they are smack in the middle of the news channel’s Super Tuesday set — a mix of lucite, steel and plasma TV screens that could serve as the set for a futuristic musical stage production. The team, who look they like belong in a university mathematics department, seem a bit out of place in the high-gloss production. But that’s the point, says Fox News vice president David Rhodes. “We thought the best way to deal with this issue is maximum transparency — to put as much of this process as possible on camera to demystify it. Let the viewers see a journalistic and academic process.”

6:45 pm In a room just outside the set, a buffet dinner is being served — and Fox political analyst Michael Barone is in line with plate in hand. Since the studio is on the West Side of Manhattan, he knows he’s got a shot at getting some decent Italian food. The author of The Almanac of American Politics, Barone has been to every U.S. county with more than 300,000 residents, as well as all 435 congressional districts; he’s a walking encyclopedia of census and demographic data and voting patterns. Barone will spend the night interpreting the decision-desk data for viewers, throwing in some insights of his own. As a teenager, he remembers coloring a map of more than 3,100 U.S. counties according to the 1960 vote count for President Kennedy. “I still know those numbers pretty well,” he says. “I’ve been doing that for the intervening 45 years.” While he sits down for his meal, former Bush White House advisor Karl Rove stops by to say hello. As they chat, it’s apparent that Barone already has a clear idea of what’s going to happen tonight.

7 pm The first polls have closed, and Fox can call Georgia for Sen. Barack Obama, even though none of the raw vote has been counted. “There are some races where we can make reasonably true projections,” says Moody. On his computer screen he has exit-poll data showing Obama with 60 to 70 percent of the Democratic primary vote. “It is nearly statistically impossible for Hillary Clinton to catch up with Obama,” he says. But exit polling in other states isn’t as clear. Rhodes is scrutinizing the numbers in New Jersey, where polls will close at 8 pm. “Clinton should have been very strong,” he said. “Instead it’s a race.” The real headache the desk is anticipating is the delegate-rich state of California. The exit polling showed Sen. John McCain with a slight lead on the Republican side and a significant lead for Clinton — but that won’t be enough to call the race when the polls close at 11 pm. “Forty percent of the electorate in California votes early or absentee,” says Moody. “Because the state is deliberate in counting that early vote, we may not have an answer tonight. It almost harkens back to the ’50s and ’60s — the happy days when everybody went to bed and woke up and found out who won.”

9 pm As the polls close and the races are called, it’s Rhodes’ job to send e-mails to the anchors and correspondents with the results. The whole time he is being spun by the campaigns. The Clinton camp says snow and ice in New Mexico have held down a turnout of the Latino vote. Then another missive arrives telling how Clinton scored a decisive win in Massachusetts despite Sen. Ted Kennedy’s endorsement for Obama. Obama operatives are at it, too, with an e-mail suggesting that Clinton should have done better in her home state of New York.

9:10 pm Moody gets a slip of paper from his decision desk with Clinton’s name circled. His analysts believe she’s won New Jersey, even though exit polls suggested Obama was closing in. While there are more votes to be counted, Fox goes with what Moody says is “an aggressive call.” But those are few and far between nowadays, after all of the networks botched the Florida vote in the 2000 presidential race: Under no circumstances does any news division want to live through that again. “Wanting to be first won’t influence the call,” says Moody. “We don’t like to be beaten on it, but we have to be right. It’s only eight years since 2000. While we’re more humble, we’re more confident.”

10:45 pm The results for 20 states are already in, but the desk is still struggling with the race in Missouri. The Associated Press has called it for Clinton, but the desk believes there are too many uncounted votes in St. Louis to write off Obama. Still, the real anticipation is over California. Mitt Romney appears to be catching up to McCain in the exit polls, but there’s no on-air discussion about that before the polls close. “This is when Brit earns his money,” says Moody. “He has to vamp for a while.”

11:45 pm As data comes in from California, analyst Arnon Mishkin spots a trend he’s noticed throughout the night: Actual votes show Clinton running stronger than exit polls indicated. “Obama’s people seem much more willing to answer exit-polling questions than the Clinton people,” Mishkin explains. He surprises Moody by saying they should call the state for Clinton.

12:12 am After some deliberation, the desk decides to give California to Clinton and McCain. MSNBC calls the race for Clinton just moments before Fox gets on the air with the news — and then follows Fox on the McCain win. On Super Tuesday, it’s a game of seconds.

Who knew that the 2008 race for the White House would become a hot network prime-time show? NBC is likely to join CBS and ABC in expanding the number of hours they devote to covering Super Tuesday on Feb. 5, the day when 24 states will have primaries or caucuses to help choose a party ominee. "Everyone has been surprised at the public's level of interest," one network news exec tells The Biz. "But if there wasn't a writers' strike, would we be having this conversation?"

Maybe not. It probably wasn't a tough choice for CBS to pull a repeat episode of The Unit to give Katie Couric an extra hour to cover what will be a fairly complex story, as the distribution of delegates based on the voting results can vary by state.

But if the 2008 race continues to be a battle royale between Sen. Barack Obama and Sen. Hillary Clinton on the Democratic side, and Sen. John McCain is still fighting it out with Mitt Romney in the GOP race, the broadcast networks may find themselves closer to reversing another trend. You can bet that if no clear winner comes out of Super Tuesday, you'll hear more talk about the nominees being chosen at the party conventions scheduled for late summer. Such a scenario would likely put the networks back in the business of extended coverage of the events.

Since 1988, the networks have cut back on the number of hours they've devoted to the conventions, and for good reason. With the nominations wrapped up earlier in each presidential election cycle, the conventions became nothing more than infomercials for the Democrats and Republicans — and boring ones at that.(Ted Koppel famously left the Republcans' '96 gathering in San Diego before it was over because there was nothing going on. As 24-hour cable news reached critical mass, the broadcast networks have pretty much ceded convention coverage to them. In 2004, more viewers watched the final night of the Republican National Convention on Fox News Channel than on ABC, NBC and CBS.

But a brokered convention could be compelling unscripted programming at a time when the broadcasting networks will be dealing with whatever long-term effects the writers' strike will have.

A political junkie's fantasy? Perhaps. "I think the odds are still against it but it's increasingly likely every week that goes by," says ABC News senior political correspondent Jake Tapper.

The parties certainly don't want it. "Because the conventions are so late, the idea that you'd go three months between divvying up all the delegates and still not having a nominee — I don't see either party [having] the stomach for that," says NBC News political director Chuck Todd. "Something would break, someone would push things one way or another. But everything in this campaign has gone the opposite of what we think."

It sure would make for some great TV. And by the end of this summer, we'll probably need it.

American Idol is back. The ratings for the first two nights weren't as big as last year, but still much bigger than everything else in prime time. But will AI stand out as the writers' strike leads the networks to flood their schedules with reality competitions and game shows? The Biz caught up with Fox's master of reality Mike Darnell to get his thoughts on Idol and the rest of TV's unscripted landscape.

TVGuide.com: So you're not worried about the ratings decline that Idol experienced its first two nights?
Mike Darnell: I couldn't be happier with these numbers. I'm about as excited as I've ever been for the show. In Season 7, (in audience share) it's still in the 30s. That's an amazing thing for a television show. With DVRs and everything else, and it's so much bigger — it's increased its span between it and the next biggest show.

TVGuide.com: Wasn't there anticipation that you might do better this season because of the strike?
Darnell: I never had that anticipation. No one here did. The strike is relatively meaningless with a show like this. This show carries its own wind. No one competes with us anyway, to be frank. In fact, from what I can tell, our competition is a little harder this year because there are more reality shows on — that's all anybody's got to offer right now.

TVGuide.com: How do you feel Idol has been different this season, based on what you've seen so far?
Darnell: You don't want to do too much different when you've got the biggest show on television. You want to make some changes, but minor [ones]. You know, we let them play instruments in Hollywood and those types of things. I know what everybody has been saying — maybe the judges are a little gentler — but I don't see it. I think there is a good ratio of good to bad — maybe a [more] even keel of good talent to bad talent on the auditions show. That's what I think the difference is.

TVGuide.com: What has the strike done to the market for reality shows? Is there a scramble going on right now?
Darnell: No. For me, reality is a big part of the network. This time of year is my big time anyway because of Idol, and I always plan something to come on after Idol. Last year it was Are You Smarter than a 5th Grader? This year it's Moment of Truth. I would say the only difference for me right now is that we may pick up a few more full-fledged series as an in-case scenario, depending on how long the strike goes.

TVGuide.com: Are you surprised that reality shows that have been around for a while, such as Supernanny and The Apprentice, can come back and do decent numbers?
Darnell: Not really. Part of it is lowered expectations. Three years ago, you would have written that an eight share was a failure. Now an eight or nine share is OK. Those shows you mentioned have declined, but the decline has been less than their scripted brethren. They were doing 12 and 13 shares; now they're doing eight or nine shares. The failures (in network television) are doing five shares. Maybe the general TV critic population thought these shows would fade quickly. But they seem to be as durable as scripted shows, maybe even more so.

TVGuide.com: Is American Gladiators going to be a long-running hit for NBC? Is its popularity driven by nostalgia?
Darnell: I think most of the appeal is based on nostalgia. And because of that it will have a short shelf life.

TVGuide.com: Is the aftermath of the strike going to be a larger percentage of reality on the schedule?
Darnell: If the show is good, it won't matter that the strike is over. If the show is bad, it won't matter that the strike is on. The audience isn't basing their like or dislike on whatever shows are on. During summer it's mostly reality shows. There are between 30 and 35 reality shows on. They mostly bomb. Why? Not because there is competition. It's because they suck. The audience will stay with what's good and dump what's bad. Summer is a great example of how just because something is on doesn't mean people are going to like it.

TVGuide.com: On Jan. 23, Fox will debut Moment of Truth, in which contestants answer personal questions and a lie detector will reveal if they're honest. It looks pretty wild in the promos. Is it the edgiest thing you've done?
Darnell: In the last three or four years, no question about it. It's the edgiest psychological thing I've ever done. I've done edgier sexier things and edgier violent things like The Chair, but nothing like this. It's a fascinating show.

TVGuide.com: Are you able to take a gamble on a show like this because of the strike?
Darnell: This was planned, strike or no strike. Every few years or so it's good for us to do something that gets people talking.

TVGuide.com: Because it reminds people you're Fox?
Darnell: Exactly. It gives us that little Fox edge. It's healthy. You get in trouble when you do too many of them. But if you let a couple of years pass, it's good to have something like this.

When the 2008 presidential campaign is over, one of the lasting TV images will be Fox News Channel chief political correspondent Carl Cameron cruising along the nation's highways in its Election Link vehicle, which looks like one of the channel's flashy screen graphics on four wheels. Cameron gave The Biz his take on life along the campaign trail in between filing reports from South Carolina, where primaries will be held on Jan. 19 and 26.

TVGuide.com: You were once the political director at WMUR-TV in New Hampshire, where the presidential campaign is the story all year round.
Carl Cameron: One of my greatest claims to fame in my Channel 9 days was when the O.J. Simpson trial went to the jury. Every TV station in the world led with that, and WMUR at my insistence led with (then California Governor) Pete Wilson dropping out of the presidential race.

TVGuide.com: What's your take on the surprise results in the primary in the state?
Cameron: One of the things I said so incessantly, in fact some people asked me to stop repeating it, is sometimes New Hampshire likes to reverse what Iowa does. You can never rule that out. Because of the nature of the holidays, because of the nature of the weekend between it and the fact that there were three debates that weekend, you just couldn't trust the polls.

TVGuide.com: What is life like in the Election Link vehicle?
Cameron: Cramped. Exciting. Unpredictable. We're sitting in the passenger seat of a car. There's a camera on the dashboard, a camera on the roof and a regular camera, which we can actually remove from the vehicle, that uses a Wi-Fi connection and can go around for a quarter-of-a-mile radius. We've been able to interview candidates in their buses while they're moving. In the past that had to be done on tape. In the Election Link vehicle we've done it live. One is already here in South Carolina and another is on its way from New Hampshire.

TVGuide.com: You've been covering campaigns for Fox since 1996. What's been the major difference for you in this presidential cycle?
Cameron: The sheer length of it. My producer Jake Gibson and I went out in November of 2006 right after the midterm election. We covered Iowa governor Tom Vilsack's announcement. We rode with him from New Hampshire on his announcement day to Iowa in his plane — in the calendar year of 2006. Of course, he was out of the race in January. We were on the road then, three weeks out of the month. Somewhere in the neighborhood of 42 or 43 weeks of the 52 weeks of 2007 we were on the road, and that was absolutely unprecedented. It's a function of the money, of the compression (of the primary and caucus season) and that you have no sitting vice president or president running. That hasn't happened in 80 years. It's historic.

TVGuide.com: With so much saturation coverage on cable news and the Internet, are political TV ads breaking through the way they used to in this campaign?
Cameron: Yes and no. Ads don't break through in Iowa and New Hampshire as much as they do elsewhere. In Iowa and New Hampshire the people who viewed those ads, in great number, have actually seen the candidates in person and often have the opportunity at town meetings to hear them explain this stuff. The attacks that end up in commercials are actually things that have been part of the news cycle, in some cases as much several months in advance. So the attack ads don't do as much damage in New Hampshire because the voters know what the reality is, because they live it. In later states, where the voters are not going get exposed to the actual candidates, those ads really cut deep.

TVGuide.com: Tell me some of the more unusual things you've seen on the campaign trail this time around that you haven't seen before.
Cameron: I'm seen Mike Huckabee get set up to play with a band and stall while the band went out to its van to get sheet music and shuttle it to him behind closed doors to see if he could play it. I've seen Mitt Romney talk with staff and friends about the relative merits of having a hair out of place or being mussed up or not. This is not unique, but it's kind of like the thing you'd see at the end of a movie. Because John McCain was tortured, his arms don't raise above shoulder height. It makes it difficult for him to put on his jacket. I've seen him struggle with his coat and a staffer or his wife had to come help him.

TVGuide.com: Do you ever get home during the campaign?
Cameron: Yeah, I do. I've not been home for a month now. Normally I get home every week or two for a day and a half or two. I have a couple of teenaged sons in Maryland. When I go home it's basically to get off the plane, go see the kids for the weekend, and get [back] on a plane and go.

TVGuide.com: Otherwise they're seeing you on TV most of this year just like everybody else.
Cameron: We've mastered doing homework with iChat — video conferencing on laptops.

TVGuide.com: How do you stay so charged up all the time?
Cameron: There is absolutely no story anywhere in the world that is this significant. It's the struggle for leadership in the free world. That's better than any adrenaline or Red Bull you could possibly imagine.

CBS' The Early Show has gone through a lot of changes over the years, but it hasn't managed to significantly move the ratings needle against NBC's Today or ABC's Good Morning America. Another attempt to jump-start the program starts Jan. 7, when for the first time since the late 1990s the program will be carried in its entirety by all of the CBS affiliates. There's also a new addition to the anchor team as Maggie Rodriguez moves from the Saturday Early Show to join Harry Smith, Julie Chen, Dave Price and Russ Mitchell on weekday duty. Executive producer Shelley Ross brought The Biz up-to-date about the changes ahead.

TVGuide.com: So set us straight on what will change in terms of the affiliates.
Ross: [What will change are the] viewers in very important cities like Las Vegas, Nashville and Baltimore, which represent about 23 percent of our affiliates, won't get the full Early Show. They just get parts of it and they get local programming. They dip in and out of our show. To those viewers, there is not a lot of continuity. Sometimes they get great segments but sometimes, if we place an exclusive interview at the top of the show, they're not seeing it.

TVGuide.com: For example?
Ross: We had exclusive coverage when the Nevada police came out and asked the public to identify a 3-year-old child who was being assaulted on a pornographic video. We not only did the story first, we had asked for exclusive coverage behind the scenes about how the police department cracked the case. We had all this incredible coverage, but we weren't seen in Las Vegas.

TVGuide.com: But no more of that kind of thing as of Jan. 7.
Ross: Correct.

TVGuide.com: So this is the first time in a while that the show is on the same playing field as the other shows. That's good, right?
Ross: We'll have some advantages and we'll have some things that are not advantages. People have to get adjusted to a national show and [to not getting] as much of their local weather and their local personalities. That is a shift. We're expecting a hiccup in that area. It's a long march. It's a long process we're in. We have a lot of bridge building to do with affiliates.

TVGuide.com: You've also got a new set, new graphics....
Ross: It's a new environment to wake up to. If you're flipping channels you can mistake the morning shows — they start looking like each other. It's going to look fresh. There will be cleaner, clearer information on the screen.

TVGuide.com: Any other new faces besides Maggie Rodriguez?
Ross: Laila Ali (Dancing with the Stars) is going to be one of our contributors. She will have a unique beat — her beat is really fitness, but more of a "personal best/finding the champion within." We want different voices. Some of the contributors who Early Show viewers have seen over the years may fade out and more resources [may be] put in the hard-news side of it. We're also beefing up the West Coast. I think what was not exploited enough here is having Julie Chen on the West Coast. Everyone always says all network news is too New York-centric and too Washington-centric.

TVGuide.com: What do you really need, though, to get viewers to sample the show and break their habit of watching Today or GMA?
Ross: A big sea change comes with a story cycle. With Good Morning America, there was a bump when Diane Sawyer and Charlie Gibson came aboard. But the real sea change came after Sept. 11, 2001. When a story becomes a national viewing event and we all watch it together, you have to be ready on it and you have to be innovative. Who knows when it happens, but those are the opportunities you have to make.