Putting Whitman's poetry into motion

The America around Walt Whitman's birthplace in West Hills today is not exactly the one he heard singing. There are parking lots to the north, south and west, while that particularly vast one to the east, across Route 110, serves Walt Whitman mall. Listen and you hear the roar of an 18-wheeler, the whine of a hundred SUVs.

Or - if you have a dog-eared copy of Leaves of Grass handy - maybe even the poet's voice. "There was a child went forth every day, and the first object he looked upon ... that object became part of him...."

In the opening and closing seconds of tonight's PBS film (9p.m., WNET/13) on the American bard from Long Island, the first objects we look upon are boughs of green, luxuriant foliage. The camera picks its way through this jungle - remnants of the howling wilderness of Whitman's ancestors - when suddenly the scene breaks into the broad expanse of a beach. "As I ebb'd with the ocean of life," wrote Walt. "As I wended the shores I know."

And so, over the span of just a few paragraphs, you, too, can understand why any filmmaker who wends his way through the life of a great poet like this one must have lost his marbles. Poets' birthplaces can be in inconvenient places. The world they knew is hardly the one we know. Their medium was the page, and their language was the language of allusion and illusion. Yet there it is, on-screen, tonight: a big, strapping beautiful film that brings Whitman and his world to life, and latter-day relevance.

You also should know that tonight's two-hour "American Experience" is drenched in the sweat (and perhaps tears) of the man who made it, Mark Zwonitzer - a PBS star who also produced one of its finest "ethnic" specials, The Irish in America, a decade ago. "The thing that drove me to do this," he said in a phone interview, "is that I think Whitman is sort of a misapprehended character. Any time you become a rest stop in New Jersey or a mall in Huntington, then everyone knows your name, but they don't remember what [you're] all about." Yet, he adds, "It ended up being quite a daunting challenge. It almost destroyed my business and put great stress on my family. It was a very, very difficult project to make and the producer and a.p. went off to Greece for months to recover."

Zwonitzer eventually threw up his hands in semi-defeat: This wouldn't be just a portrait of the man - "a slightly slippery figure" - but of the magnum opus itself. What viewers see tonight are not only the usual academic talking heads - and very good ones, like University of Iowa Whitman expert Ed Folsom - but poets such as Martin Espada and Yusef Komunyakaa, or novelist Allan Gurganus. Threaded through all this is an artful, and photographic, rendering of Whitman's world - of Brooklyn tenements and Civil War battlefields, so vivid that you can almost smell the stench of each.

The film explores Whitman's homosexuality as well - often avoided by scholars who would prefer readers go to the work itself to pick up the graphic clues. (And there are many, indeed.) Tonight's film even includes - briefly - the only gay scene in "American Experience" history, as two young men embrace, kiss and then do whatever. That scene - and others - are designed to grab the viewer by the shoulders, shake them, then say: Whitman is the poet of blood, breath, appetites, lust and life. Whitman is you (just as he would have it).

The film is in two parts. The first covers Whitman's efforts to prevent the gathering Civil War, as if poetry (and Leaves of Grass, self-published in 1855) were the balm of love and healing. That effort failed - outrageously - and the second half follows Whitman as a humbled "nurse," tending to the sick and dying in hundreds of field hospitals around Washington:

"Of the dead on their backs with arms extended wide, I dream, I dream, I dream."

Oscar-winning actor Chris Cooper has had great success speaking others' words, but he was more than a little nervous about this most recent role. It was Walt Whitman, from whose works Cooper reads in the PBS American Experience film. "Initially, I was a little intimidated. Poetry is not something I've done before," says Cooper (American Beauty, The Bourne Identity, Lone Star and the new Married Life), who voices the Leaves of Grass author in prose and poetry. "Getting groups of words or even singular words the full import was a challenge," he says. "And to make it very intimate. (Whitman) wanted it to be more intimate."

Walt Whitman, written and directed by Mark Zwonitzer, tracks Whitman's experience as a provocative young writer and editor in mid-19th-century New York City, a visitor dazzled by New Orleans, a volunteer who helped injured soldiers during the Civil War and an infirm older man who amended Leaves of Grass in the years leading up to his death at 72 in 1892. Over time, the work grew from 12 poems in 95 pages to more than 300 poems in 400 pages.

Although Leaves of Grass is considered a great work and is a staple on reading lists, it was reviled by many critics after Whitman self-published it in 1855. He sold only about two dozen copies, and many people took issue with his rejection of traditional rhyme and meter and his celebration of the sensuality of the human body. Even one of his supporters, Ralph Waldo Emerson, tried to get Whitman to cut some of the more erotic material. "He was a man way ahead of his time to approach the subjects he did with such daring. It was very brave what he did and what he accomplished," says Cooper, who was introduced to Whitman's work as a child by his grandmother.

Walt Whitman, which is narrated by J.K. Simmons and features readings and commentary by poets and scholars, uses contemporary photographs and film to show the poet's relevance today. As poet Martin Espada reads Whitman's description of caring for a wounded soldier from Drum Taps, pictures of today's wounded soldiers are interspersed with those of Civil War combatants.

Cooper, who won an Academy Award for best supporting actor in Adaptation, can feel a connection to Whitman in the poet's love for the overflowing humanity of New York City, where the actor moved to start his career. (He recently filmed a vignette there with Robin Wright for New York, I Love You, an upcoming anthology film that will present short works by a number of noted directors and actors.) "The cultural diversity in New York was such an eye-opener for me, coming from Missouri. It was thrilling," he says.

Cooper says he felt a shared experience with Whitman when reading from Crossing Brooklyn Ferry: "Just as you are refresh'd by the gladness of the river and the bright flow, I was refresh'd; Just as you stand and lean on the rail, yet hurry with the swift current, I stood, yet was hurried."

"That's the beauty of his writing," Cooper says. "One hundred years later, he's talking to the person of the future." So, watch tonight and learn why someone who died 116 years ago still lives and breathes today. Plus, you'll never look at Walt Whitman Mall quite the same way.

The Simpson family values (part one)

A cartoon family whacked America's funny bone in 1989, eventually becoming the longest-running TV comedy ever. As The Simpsons jumps to the big screen this month, not everyone involved—including the writers, the voices, and Rupert Murdoch—agrees on what has made it a pop phenomenon. What follows is the first part of John Ortved's take on Simpson Family Values, an extended piece for Vanity Fair...
In January 1992, during a campaign stop at a gathering of the National Religious Broadcasters, George H. W. Bush made a commitment to strengthen traditional values, promising to help American families become "a lot more like the Waltons and a lot less like the Simpsons." A few days later, before the opening credits rolled on the animated sitcom's weekly episode, The Simpsons issued its response. Seated in front of the television, the family watched Bush make his remarks. "Hey! We're just like the Waltons," said Bart. "We're praying for an end to the Depression, too." While the immediacy of the response was surprising, the retort was vintage Simpsons: tongue-in-cheek, subversive, skewering both the president's cartoonish political antics and the culture that embraced them. Twelve months later, Bill Clinton moved into the White House. The Waltons were out; the Simpsons were in.

When The Simpsons had premiered on Fox, in 1989, prime-time television was somewhat lacking in comedy. Despite a few bright spots such as Cheers and the barbed, happily crude Roseanne, the sitcom roost was ruled by didactic, saccharine family fare: The Cosby Show, Full House, Growing Pains, Family Matters. Of the last—the show that gave the world Urkel—Tom Shales piously declared in The Washington Post, "A decent human being would have a hard time not smiling."

It was on this wan entertainment landscape that The Simpsons planted its flag. Prime time had not seen an animated sitcom since The Flintstones, in the 1960s, and the Christmas special with which The Simpsons debuted made clear that Springfield and Bedrock were separated by more than just a few millennia. In "Simpsons Roasting on an Open Fire," Homer takes a job as a department-store Santa after the family's emergency money is spent on tattoo removal for Bart. Following a motivational chat from Bart on the nature of Christmas miracles on television—meta-commentary was a Simpsons hallmark from the start—Homer risks his earnings at the track, on a dog named Santa's Little Helper. When the dog comes in dead last, the family adopts him. While the ending sounds a tad cheesy, and it was, the seeds had been planted: up against impossible odds, and one another, the family ultimately bonded together and overcame. And the gags were solid: Homer is despondent at the length of his children's Christmas pageant; a tattoo artist unquestioningly accepts 10-year-old Bart as an adult; the family's Christmas decorations are clearly pathetic in contrast to the Flanders family's next door. Critical reaction was nearly unanimous. "Couldn't be better … not only exquisitely weird but also as smart and witty as television gets," raved the Los Angeles Times. "Why would anyone want to go back to Growing Pains?" asked USA Today.

What followed is one of the most astounding successes in television history. The Simpsons went on to be a ratings and syndication winner for 18 years, and has grossed Fox sums of money measuring in the billions. It has won 23 Emmys and a Peabody Award, and was named the best TV show of all time by Time magazine in 1999. (The magazine also named Bart one of the 100 most influential people of the 20th century. "[Bart] embodies a century of popular culture and is one of the richest characters in it. One thinks of Chekhov, Celine, Lenny Bruce," the writer cooed.) But the most telling accolade is that The Simpsons is TV's longest-running sitcom ever, outlasting The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet's 14 seasons.

Not surprisingly, given its success, The Simpsons has spawned many imitators and opened doors for new avenues of animated comedy. Directly or indirectly, the show sired Beavis and Butt-head, King of the Hill, Futurama, Family Guy, Adult Swim, and South Park, which, nearly a decade after Bart's boastful underachieving, managed to regenerate a familiar cacophony of ratings, merchandise, and controversy when it premiered, in 1997. (The controversial label was perhaps deserved. Bart's greatest sin has been sawing the head off the statue of the town's founder; last year, on South Park, Cartman tried to exterminate the Jews.)

"It's like what sci-fi fans say about Star Trek: it created an audience for that genre," says Seth MacFarlane, the creator of Family Guy. "I think The Simpsons created an audience for prime-time animation that had not been there for many, many years. As far as I'm concerned, they basically re-invented the wheel. They created what is in many ways—you could classify it as—a wholly new medium. It's just wholly original."

"The Simpsons is the bane of our existence," says Matt Stone, co-creator of South Park with Trey Parker. "They have done so many parodies, tackled so many subjects. 'Simpsons did it!' is a very familiar refrain in our writers' room. Trey and I are constantly having our little cartoon compared to the best show in the history of television, The Simpsons. Why can't we be compared to According to Jim? Or Sister, Sister?"

Not that there aren't some debits on The Simpsons' ledger—for every King of the Hill, there was a Fish Police and a Critic. But over 18 years, The Simpsons has been so influential, it is difficult to find any strain of television comedy that does not contain its DNA. And yet the show's footprint is so much larger. Homer's signature "D'oh!" has been added to the Oxford English Dictionary. There's a "Simpsons and Philosophy" course at Berkeley (for credit), not to mention the hundreds of published academic articles with The Simpsons as their subject. Even conservatives have come around. "It's possibly the most intelligent, funny, and even politically satisfying TV show ever," wrote the National Review in 2000. "The Simpsons celebrates many of the best conservative principles: the primacy of family, scepticism about political authority. Springfield residents pray and attend church every Sunday." Next to pornography, no single subject may have as many Web sites and blogs dedicated to its veneration. The Simpsons has permeated our vernacular, the way we tell jokes, and how our storytellers practice their craft. If you look around, you can see the evidence, but as with any truly powerful cultural force, you can never see it all—it's buried too deep.


Such lofty significance was never the goal of Matt Groening, a native of Portland, Oregon, who, with writing aspirations, moved to L.A. in 1977, at the age of 23, immersing himself in the punk-rock scene and working on novels. He was freshly graduated from Evergreen State College, a hippie school in Olympia, Washington, with no grades, exams, or required classes. After several menial jobs, he began recording his disgust with life in L.A. in a comic strip, Life in Hell, which he sent to his friends back home and distributed at the record shop Licorice Pizza, where he found work behind the counter. The strip featured deeply cynical, existential ruminations from a bunny named Binky, his illegitimate, one-eared son, Bongo, and a fez-wearing gay couple—who may or may not be identical twins—named Jeff and Akbar. It found its way into the Los Angeles Reader and then LA Weekly, in 1986, and eventually caught the attention of James L. Brooks, writer-producer of Taxi and The Mary Tyler Moore Show, and writer-director of the film Terms of Endearment, among others.

Gary Panter, friend of Matt Groening's, cartoonist: The people I knew who were doing the mini-comics at the earliest were Matt, Lynda Barry, me.… Matt's earliest comics were about language.… He did a whole series of Life in Hell called "Forbidden Words." He would just name all these phrases that were overused in culture and forbid them from being used again. His comics were very ambitious, and his drawings very simple, but beautifully designed; it has clarity, and Matt's a great writer, and understands human psychology.

James Vowell, founding editor, Los Angeles Reader: Matt was always trying to sell Life in Hell as an idea to me for a weekly cartoon in the paper. He'd draw these little pictures on paper napkins … and occasionally I'd say, "Matt, why don't you make that chin a little smaller." He didn't need me to edit his cartoons, I guarantee you.… They became super popular almost immediately.

Polly Platt, production designer, Terms of Endearment: I was nominated for an Academy Award for Terms of Endearment, and I wanted to give Jim Brooks a thank-you gift. [Matt] did a cartoon called "Success and Failure in Hollywood." So I called Matt and I bought the original. [Jim] was thrilled! He just laughed and laughed, and hung it up on his wall in his office. It was a brilliant cartoon. Success and failure come out to exactly the same thing in the cartoon. I think it's people shooting each other.

My suggestion to Jim was that I thought it would be great to do a TV special on the characters that Matt had already drawn; I never envisioned anything like The Simpsons. At the time, Brooks was looking for a cartoon short to place before commercials as minute-long "bumpers" on The Tracey Ullman Show, a sketch-comedy series that Barry Diller, then C.E.O. of Fox Inc., had asked him to produce in 1987 for the new and struggling Fox network.

Jay Kogen, writer-producer, The Tracey Ullman Show (1987–89), The Simpsons (1989–93): They really wanted Life in Hell. But Matt was making a good bit of money on mugs and calendars from Life in Hell, and Fox wanted to own the whole thing. He said, "I won't sell you this. But I have this other family, called The Simpsons, that you can have." And then he proceeded to draw something on a napkin that legend has it he just made up on the spot. And they said, "O.K., we'll do that!"

Polly Platt: What's funny now, because he's so rich, is that I was driving home from my office at Paramount, very shortly after that, and I saw Matt sitting at the bus stop. He didn't even have a car. I had no idea he was so poor. I stopped my car and said hello and offered him a ride. We were going in different directions, or he was too proud, or whatever.

Art Spiegelman, Pulitzer Prize–winning cartoonist, Maus: I pleaded with Matt and advised him strongly from my elder-statesman position to not work with Fox. "Whatever you do, don't work with those guys! They're gangsters! They're gonna take your rights away!" He's never let me forget it.

Gabor Csupo, original animator, The Simpsons (1987–92): When Jim Brooks originally saw Matt Groening's drawings on his wall, it was all black-and-white, just the line drawing, no colour or anything. And that's how he wanted to do the show. And we said, "You know what? We gonna give you colour for the same price." And all of a sudden the eyes lit up and he said, "O.K., you guys are on." The characters were so beautiful but, let's face it, primitively designed that we thought that we could counterbalance that design with shocking colours. That's why we came up with the yellow skin, and the blue hair for Marge.

Michael Mendel, associate producer, The Tracey Ullman Show (1987–89), The Simpsons (1989–92): Matt would just show up with a two-page script and go, "Here it is. This is the cartoon we're doing this week." It was sort of guerrilla-style animation. We would hang out on the stage of Tracey Ullman, and in between block and rehearsal, we would grab [the actors] and record their lines. It was me and Matt and the animators and a couple directors—a really small group of people working on this little one-minute cartoon every week.

Wally Wolodarsky, writer-producer, The Tracey Ullman Show (1987–89), The Simpsons (1989–93): The Simpsons were viewed as poor relations by the writing staff of The Tracey Ullman Show, and we secretly always felt that The Simpsons was the funniest part of the show.

For the voices of Homer and Marge, the producers used Dan Castellaneta and Julie Kavner, actors who were already regulars on The Tracey Ullman Show. (Marge's rasp is Kavner's normal voice, almost uninflected.) Yeardley Smith, who auditioned using her own voice for Lisa, was a struggling actress with some Broadway and TV-movie credits. She had originally auditioned for the role of Bart, while voice actress Nancy Cartwright tried for Lisa. When they switched, Cartwright—who had followed the advice of her mentor, Daws Butler, the voice of Yogi Bear, to move to L.A. and try voice acting—attempted a version of a voice she had used on My Little Pony and The Snorks, and Bart was born.

The bumper episodes were amusing snippets of the dysfunctional family's daily life, focusing mostly on the kids being kids, and the grief they caused their parents: Bart and Lisa engage in a burping contest; Bart directs the pallbearers at a funeral as if he were the foreman on a construction site.

Though critics liked The Tracey Ullman Show, the series wasn't a big hit; but, then, neither was much else on the network. Still, Diller saw that the big-three networks were getting old and tired—they were losing viewers to cable and independent networks—and he was eager to experiment. In early 1988, he launched one of television's first reality programs, America's Most Wanted (Cops would follow in 1989), while taking the sitcom in lewd new directions with Married … with Children. When Brooks approached him with the idea of making The Simpsons into its own series, Diller eventually bit, thinking that the show might be, as he later put it, "the one that can crack the slab for us."

Barry Diller, former chairman and C.E.O., Fox: Everything was failing at the time, all those half-hour sitcoms: Mr. President, etc. We all thought the Simpsons were really cute, but their shorts weren't making any noise, nor was The Tracey Ullman Show, for that matter, which was unfortunate. I never saw it as a series. What made the difference was Jim Brooks. I know it was originally Matt's drawings, and I'm sure [executive producer] Sam Simon made his contribution, but the show never would have happened, or have been successful, without Jim Brooks.

Rupert Murdoch, C.E.O., News Corp.: I was at a program meeting with Barry Diller and the people at Fox Network, and afterwards Barry said, "Come into my room, I want to show you something." And he had a tape there, of about 20 minutes in length, of all the little 30-second bits that had been through The Tracey Ullman Show. And he played it, and I just thought it was hilarious. I said, "You've gotta buy this tonight." He said, "No. It's more complicated than that." So we went forward from there.

Michael Mendel: Barry Diller just wanted to make specials and Jim [Brooks] put his foot down and said, "It's a series or nothing." The network wanted to play it safe, and they weren't sure if this was going to work. I don't think that happens today. I don't think anyone gets on the phone with Barry Diller and says, "Take it or leave it. It's a series."

Barry Diller: I wanted to do anything that did not involve making a commitment of 13 episodes. But Jim said, with six months of lead time, it wouldn't work any other way.

Michael Mendel: It was like, "I love them as one-minute cartoons, but as a whole half hour, I don't know." I didn't think they'd be able to hold people's attention. Great prediction on my part.

Rupert Murdoch: You look at it in today's figures, the risks [of making The Simpsons its own series] weren't that great. But at the time, we were very conscious of how much money we were spending on productions. It was certainly tremendously important in establishing the use of brand of the network.

Brooks's man in charge of developing the show was Sam Simon, a writer-producer who had worked with Brooks on Taxi and Ullman. Simon would depart The Simpsons after its fourth season, leaving behind much acrimony between him and Matt Groening over creative differences and compensation issues. Simon's lawyers negotiated a lucrative deal for him; he left without much severance, but retained a piece of the show. (He has made more than 10 million dollars a year since.) Many of the original staff remain loyal to Simon, crediting him with taking Groening's crude characters from The Tracey Ullman Show and making them into the Simpsons that the world knows and loves. Simon recently told 60 Minutes, "Any show I've ever worked on, it turns me into a monster. I go crazy; I hate myself." For his part, Groening has said, "I think Sam Simon is brilliantly funny and one of the smartest writers I've ever worked with, although unpleasant and mentally unbalanced."

Colin Lewis, postproduction supervisor and producer, The Simpsons (1990–97): Sam had problems with Matt from the beginning. The stuff with Matt, anyone will tell you, in terms of them feuding and not talking … that was consistent from the beginning.

Polly Platt: Matt did not get along with [Sam]. Nobody got along with him. He's kind of an awful person. If he was at any meeting, it just seemed that everyone would turn on each other.

Barry Diller: I was totally aware of their problems and often mediated them on behalf of everyone. For a while it was not a happy place. But I think it ultimately made the show better.

Michael Mendel: A lot of the foundation for the show and the reason why I think it's successful was laid down during those tumultuous times.

Jay Kogen: It was clear that there was animosity back and forth. It was a tough position for Sam to be in, because Matt was getting all the accolades. I would think that if you were pouring your life's blood into something and getting none of the credit, it would be irritating. If you look at the original Simpsons cartoons, those are closer to Matt's drawings, but Sam reshaped them and re-drew them. He had experience in sitcoms. He had also worked in animation. He's also a very talented cartoonist himself. He's really smart, and handled storyboards and all that stuff.

Brad Bird, supervising director, The Simpsons (1989–92); feature-film director, The Incredibles, Ratatouille: I think the unsung hero has always been Sam. I was in the room when he took some pretty mediocre scripts and just sat there in his chair, with all the writers in the room and a cigar, and went through, line by line. And he would get people to pitch lines … but 9 times out of 10 he came up with the best line. And if someone came up with a genuinely better line, he'd put that in.

Jay Kogen: Matt wasn't always in the room. So it's hard to fight with everybody and have a real say if you're not there. He's also a very pleasant, easygoing guy, and the writers' room can be a tough place. But, you know, ultimately Matt got what he wanted. When he pitched stuff, he got what he wanted.

With the enlarged scope of a series, a cast of characters outside the family was needed. There were Patty and Selma, Marge's spinster sisters, and Grandpa, Homer's neglected father. Moe the bartender, Homer's enabler, is the bitterest man in town, while the local-TV kiddie show is hosted by Krusty the Clown, a Friars-era showbiz hack. Homer's boss is the 104-year-old nuclear-power-plant owner, Mr. Burns, a throwback to the robber barons (with some Charles Foster Kane, Rupert Murdoch, and Barry Diller thrown in). To voice the supporting roles, the performing cast was filled out with veteran improv actors Hank Azaria (Chief Wiggum, Moe, Apu) and Harry Shearer (Principal Skinner, Mr. Burns, Kent Brockman). The late Phil Hartman helped create some of The Simpsons' best moments voicing the charmingly incompetent litigator Lionel Hutz and washed-up actor Troy McClure.

Josh Weinstein, writer–executive producer, The Simpsons (1991–98): When Jim and Matt and Sam first assembled a group of actors for the show, they didn't go for voice-over actors, people who did kids' voices and cartoon shows. They went for real actors and actors who had a lot of comedy, improv experience. Sometimes some of the best moments came from the actors themselves, and not from the script.

Hank Azaria: The hard stuff was the first two or three years, where we were finding the tone, sensibility, even specifically the voices of the characters. There was a lot of finding it in fits and starts. We would record all day long.

Michael Mendel: Fox had this really huge A.D.R. stage, and everybody [not just the actors] was in the room with the microphones. You couldn't make a noise while they were recording or you would ruin it. It was always a challenge to not laugh on top of these actors' takes because they were so funny. So people would be, you know, crawling under their desks not to ruin the take.

Blockbuster bids for Circuit City

Blockbuster Inc., attempting to reinvent its outdated video-rental business, has offered more than $1 billion in cash for struggling electronics retailer Circuit City Stores Inc. Blockbuster said it made the offer of $6 to $8 a share in a February letter to Circuit City Chief Executive Philip Schoonover, but decided to go public with it after the retailer refused to provide access to its books.

The proposal is a bold move: Blockbuster would take on a troubled and loss-making company with a greater market value than its own. Blockbuster had a market capitalization of around $630 million, based on Friday's closing price.

Circuit City fired back, challenging Blockbuster's ability to raise financing for any deal, and urging its stockholders to sit tight. In its first public comments on the offer, the Richmond, Va.-based retailer said "to date Blockbuster has been unable to satisfy Circuit City and its advisors that Blockbuster's proposal could be financed." Circuit City raised questions about the company's financing source and structure, adding that it "is unwilling to provide Blockbuster with additional detailed due diligence information and embark on a highly conditional undertaking until [its] questions are answered satisfactorily."

The bid is part of Blockbuster's efforts to transform itself into a one-stop entertainment hub. Combining with Circuit City would significantly boost Blockbuster's retail footprint, giving it a broader customer base to which it could sell a range of video and electronics products. The Dallas-based company brought in a new chief executive, James Keyes, last year to refocus its limping business, which has suffered fierce competition from upstarts such as Netflix Inc., as well as video-on-demand services and movie downloads.

Since taking the reins, Mr. Keyes has been slashing costs and making changes to its online plan, including shedding unprofitable customers by raising prices. Blockbuster has also been improving the availability of titles and adding more merchandise for sale in its stores. The turnaround efforts showed signs of paying off in the fourth quarter, with net income more than tripling. On Monday, Blockbuster projected first-quarter net income of $30 million, compared with a year-earlier net loss of $49 million.

In a conference call Monday, Mr. Keyes said Blockbuster believes that for Circuit City shareholders, the offer is "simply too attractive to ignore." He added the offer has the full support of activist investor Carl Icahn, who holds a large stake in Blockbuster. "Our view of the change that's occurring in consumer electronics and the movie-rental business is one of convergence," said Mr. Keyes. He provided Apple Inc.'s stores as an example of "a user-friendly one-stop shop with solutions for the consumers" that he sees as a sort of model for a combination of Blockbuster and Circuit City.

Mr. Keyes foresees that within six months of the proposed merger's closing, customers would likely see movie and game rental available at Circuit City stores. Further down the line, he also sees hardware like portable-media players being sold at Blockbuster locations. But buying Circuit City is a radical step, if Blockbuster succeeds. Circuit City has also been trying to shore up its fading business amid fierce competition. It replaced thousands of staff with lower-paid employees, a move that severely upset its business.

The retailer's problems have attracted a proxy fight with investor Mark J. Wattles, who has disclosed a 6.5% in Circuit City and demanded the removal of Mr. Schoonover and the nomination of five people to the board. Mr. Wattles has been lobbying for Circuit City to consider selling itself, among other things. In 2005, Mr. Wattles quit as chief executive of Hollywood Entertainment to pursue a buyout of the video-rental chain. After Blockbuster made a hostile offer for Hollywood Entertainment, Mr. Wattles sought to acquire about half the chain's stores. However, Blockbuster dropped its offer when the Federal Trade Commission raised concerns and the chain was later acquired by rival Movie Gallery.

Blockbuster itself was the target of a proxy battle before Mr. Keyes came on board. Mr. Icahn fielded his own slate of candidates for the board and pressured then chief executive John Antioco to step down. Mr. Icahn dropped his proxy battle after reaching an agreement with Mr. Antioco and his management team. Mr. Antioco stepped down last year.

How they get each other

The creators of How I Met Your Mother long maintained that once the promise of the title is met -- that is, once the character Ted Mosby encounters his future wife -- the show is over.

But not so fast. Co-creator Carter Bays says the series doesn't necessarily have to end that way. "We've been coy about it, we've gone back and forth about it, but there is no reason why this story ends the moment he meets her," he said.

The series, scheduled to finish its third season May 19, is loosely based on the lives of Bays and co-creator Craig Thomas. It's narrated from more than 30 years in the future, with middle-aged Ted (voiced by Bob Saget) telling his teenage children how he and their mother first crossed paths. The stories are told in flashbacks, so viewers mostly see 20-something Ted (Josh Radnor) and his pals -- ex-girlfriend Robin (Cobie Smulders); pickup artist Barney (Neil Patrick Harris); and the happily married Lily (D.C. native Alyson Hannigan) and Marshall (Jason Segel).

In the narration, Ted has referred to the lead female characters as Aunt Lily and Aunt Robin, making clear that neither is the future matriarch in question. Though the show has hinted at her identity a couple of times, it's not going to be revealed this season.

But Bays and Thomas have plenty of other stories to tell. This week, Marshall gets shouted down by his boss, "Artillery Arthur" (guest star Bob Odenkirk) -- or, as Segel put it, "The wheel of abuse finally lands on Marshall." The traumatic moment leads to the end of Marshall's brief career as a high-paid corporate lawyer and sets him back on course to become a do-gooding environmental lawyer.

Segel, whose movie "Forgetting Sarah Marshall" opens Friday, said he's happy to see his character on track again. "Marshall has such a pure heart, so I like to see him achieve his goals," he said. "I'm happy he ends up turning his back on the corporate world. I'm very proud of him. And I'm glad we get to see me at work. You get to see Marshall in 'schlubby husband' mode most of the time. It's nice to see me in a suit. I'm finally suiting up."

Marshall's turnabout is one of several that How I Met Your Mother viewers will see as this season winds down. The overarching story will be that Ted, whose romantic relationship with Robin ended at the end of last season, comes out of his tailspin. In the process, he begins to question why he hangs around with a lothario like Barney. "Ted had been turning into Barney, so we're putting him back on track as the nice guy we all fell in love with in the first place," Bays said. "The second half of the season will move him a little closer to what Marshall and Lily have, but as a result, it will make him question having a Barney in his life. Some big events will put that in motion."

Also coming up this season, Robin will revisit her teenage alter ego, '80s pop starlet Robin Sparkles, who starred last season in an upbeat, deliciously silly music video called "Let's Go to the Mall." This time, the "HIMYM" gang will discover another video -- but this one is a love ballad filled with teen angst. "It's an episode about how when your first love comes back, someone you had a strong relationship with, you return to the person you were back then," Smulders said.

The Canadian-born Smulders said she relishes the chance to again wear Robin Sparkles's jelly bracelets and cool graffiti coat. "I love getting to play Robin -- a Canadian pop star, an anchorwoman for a ridiculous news station and this girl who is more of a tomboy than anything," she said. "I feel very lucky."

As do many people connected with How I Met Your Mother. The show's move to 8:30 p.m. in early March improved its ratings, and a March 24 guest appearance by Britney Spears gave the series its largest audience of the season, 10.6 million viewers -- a 35 percent spike.

Bays promised that "earthquakes are coming" in the story lines. But the mother stays out of the picture. For now.

How I Met Your Mother is on Mondays, 8:30 p.m., CBS

Dead girl on a boat

Weekend TV reviewed: Pushing Daisies

I remember when the greatest praise you could heap on a programme, particularly an American import, was that it was “dark”. Twin Peaks was dark, American Gothic darker, and - until Dexter came slashing along - Six Feet Under darkest. Even Desperate Housewives, before it turned irremediably silly, was applauded for being a black comedy, narrated from beyond the grave. If, as a programme-maker, you wanted kudos, it would be best you thought David Lynch not Walt Disney.

But, what is this? Pushing Daisies, an American fantasy that goes all out to be a sunny delight? Could light be the new dark? Michael Grade, high commander at ITV, thinks so. Noting the success of cheerful shows such as Kingdom and Britain's Got Talent, he sees house prices falling and viewers demanding escapism. This, presumably, is why he has scheduled Pushing Daisies for ITV1 at prime time on Saturday nights, the first time an American drama has done such heavy hauling for ITV since, I imagine, Columbo.

Bryan Fuller, the creator of Pushing Daisies, said somewhere that he was greatly influenced by the French film Amélie in developing his series, which was an unexpected hit in the US in the autumn. He doesn't seem to realise that for quite a few people, "infected" might be more to the point than "influenced", that particular brand of fairy-tale archness not being to everyone's taste. As it happens, I don't count myself as an out and out Amélie-hater, but even if you absolutely adored Jean-Pierre Jeunet's film, you may not be in the clear with Fuller's extended whimsy about a man who can bring the dead back to life. Pushing Daisies makes Amélie look like Ingmar Bergman's Scenes from a Marriage.

Ned discovered his special gift when he was just nine years old, after his dog, Digby, got sideswiped by a truck and Ned was able to bring him back to life with a single touch. When Ned's mom keeled over with an aneurysm, just as she was popping a cherry pie into the oven, he revived her immediately, only to discover that there were two catches to his talent. If the revived person lived for more than a minute, someone else nearby had to die, and if Ned touched them again, the magic was permanently reversed, something Ned found out when his mom leaned over to kiss him good night, instantly turned blue and repeated her fatal pratfall.

If you're worried about the thought of a nine-year-old coping with his mother's sudden death, then don't be. Death here is treated, even by the recently dead, as more of diverting curiosity than a tragedy, and not something to be attended by anything even remotely resembling sorrow. The characters who die do so with a cartoon suddenness, and, by and large, are treated as disposable. The closest you're going to come to the unappeasable yearning of grief is Ned's amorous passion for Chuck, the childhood sweetheart he restored to life and must ever after leave untouched. Chuck is played by Anna Friel, the latest British actress to take a leading role in a US drama. I can't really tell how good the accent is, but she looks lovely. Someone told me the other day that 95% of straight men are in love with Anna Friel. And that's a fact. And the other 5% are clinically insane. So Ned is in love with Chuck (he's one of the 95%), but he can't touch her or she'll drop down dead. Imagine it! Bummer.

Pushing Daisies has a Tim Burton look about it - all super-stylised, bright colours, kinda trippy. It looks like a paint commercial, has that Amélie kookiness, Terry Pratchett fantasy, and death - death's big this year. Our own Jim Dale narrates: he's big over there too, he reads the Harry Potter books. The script tears along at a hundred miles an hour, full of puns and witticisms. Olive (it doesn't matter who Olive is) desperately attempts to connect to someone disconnected. Chuck lies in the dark, considering how she came to be lying in the dark. Dying's as good an excuse as any to start living. There's a shop called the Boutique Travel Travel Boutique.

Yet, where Pushing Daisies badly needs a heart, it has art direction instead: a welter of Fisher-Price colours and whimsical inventions, such as Ned's pie shop, with its crimped-crust roof, or Chuck's guardian aunts, Vivian and Lily, a retired synchronised-swimming duo who share "matching personality disorders and a love of fine cheese". That combination of symmetry and arbitrary quirkiness is also true of the direction, which frames scene after scene as a camp tableau in which pattern-making matters far more than content. This is a drama in which even the murderer uses pink plastic bags with smiley faces on them to asphyxiate his victims, so that the corpses end up beaming perkily at their own demise. It is also a drama (and you might want to have a waterproof bag at hand before you read this) in which a hug is described as "a Heimlich manoeuvre to help you cough up a wad of fear and anxiety".

You can get some idea of the thing's almost pathological candy-coated escapism from an exchange between Ned and his sidekick, Cod, a private detective who uses Ned's gift to solve murder cases. "Been watching the news lately?" Cod asked (at a time, as it happens, when Iraq was going from bad to worse and the credit crunch was just beginning to bite)."Yeah, but there doesn't seem like much going on in the world besides a dead girl on a boat," replied Ned.

Thanks to the US writers' strike, Pushing Daisies runs for only eight weeks, but I'll be happily amazed if it remains in the 9pm Saturday slot that long. Grade's best bet is that it provides cult appeal to inbetweenagers who will watch it with their parents. It is wittily written, if over reliant on the cutesy voiceovers, and beautifully cast. As Chuck, Anna Friel shows an unexpected talent for smiling. Her more tangible rival for the pie- maker's hand is a very short, very funny blonde waitress played by Kristin Chenoweth, Annabeth from The West Wing. Set in a timeless, sunny world of its own, half Fifties, half now, Pushing Daisies is Lemony Snicket for grown- ups, a Series of Fortunate Events. If it were only the sort of thing I liked, I think I would like it very much

The hottest women not on TV

When Creative Artists Agency makes the rounds in Hollywood, pitching the screenwriting talent of Tassie Cameron, they like to market the Toronto native as “the girl who writes like a guy.”

But rather than take offence at a comment some might construe as sexist, Cameron finds the whole thing highly amusing. “Hey, I like guys,” cracks the 38-year-old. “I listen to men. And if you look at what I've done, certainly a lot of it is very male-centric cop stuff,” says Cameron, whose TV credits include Would Be Kings, The Robber Bride and The Eleventh Hour. “I guess when I write, I channel my inner Hunter Thompson and go to town.”

So it's fitting, then, that Cameron, daughter of journalist and author Stevie Cameron, is now in charge of the six-person team, four of whom are women, scripting the first 12 episodes of the psychologically charged elite-cop series, Flashpoint, set to air on CTV and CBS this summer. “Here I am on Flashpoint, a brawny testosterone show, says Cameron, “and I feel right at home.”

In the last 10 years, female screenwriters in Canada have made huge strides, muscling their way onto TV screens, leaving an indelible stamp on comedy, drama, and action series across network schedules. In fact, while women used to be a distinct minority in writing rooms, their numbers are now on par with men, who typically used to be hired to write action and comedy, while women were relegated to handle emotional and romantic scenes that required that “female touch.”

Cameron's script for The Robber Bride joins an impressive list of 33 others – 15 of which were written or co-written by women – short-listed as finalists for Monday night's Canadian Screenwriting Awards in Toronto. Cameron says gender divisions, for the most part, have disappeared, and that women are being snapped up to work on the most high-profile, demanding projects in the country.

Tracey Forbes, another Toronto writer, whose credits include the cult hit Buffy the Vampire Slayer, as well as Falcon Beach and ReGenesis, agrees that she's seen a marked difference in the “makeup of the writers' rooms I've been part of. “On my first couple of shows, I was the only female writer in the room,” she says. “Buffy was the first show in which I wasn't the token woman. But if there are more of us now, it's just a sign of the times. To work in a story room, you've got to be confident enough to throw out your good ideas and your bad ones,” adds Forbes, who is also part of Cameron's team on Flashpoint. “These days, girls are raised to be more assertive. Good writers – regardless of their sex – can write anything. Women can write kick-ass action. And men can write a heart-wrenching breakup scene.”

But while women writers are making their mark in part by conquering territory once claimed almost exclusively by men, it hasn't hurt, either, that Canadian networks are hungry for female viewers, especially those 25 and older, a coveted demographic for advertisers. Last year, at the launch of CBC Television's winter schedule, Kirstine Layfield, executive director of programming, made no secret of the fact that the public broadcaster was looking for new shows aimed specifically at a younger female viewership. “We're trying to be more inclusive,” Layfield said. “This is our opportunity to include women more aggressively into the mix. Women are huge followers of drama.”

This past week, CBC announced two new big-budget pickups: The Session, about a 32-year-old woman able to revisit the mistakes of her past; and The Wild Roses, the story of a Calgary-based family of women fighting for what they see as rightfully theirs. The latter was created by Cameron, her sister Amy, and Miranda de Pencier. “Because viewership is skewing more female, the shows being brought to the screen are in reaction to the viewership,” says Daegan Fryklind, another finalist at Monday night's awards show, for her work on CTV's Robson Arms. “So if these are strong female leads, then they need strong females in the room to write the material they need,” adds the 38-year-old, who also was part of the team on CBC's recently cancelled drama jPod. “But I've never felt anyone only hired me because I'm a woman. I bring myself to the table, ovaries and all, so what?”

Semi Chellas, one of Canada's most sought-after TV writers (The Eleventh Hour, Who Named the Knife, Of Murder and Memory) splits her time between projects here and in the United States. She says the industry has come a long way from the day a decade ago that she, along with pal and fellow screenwriter Karen Walton (The Many Trials of One Jane Doe, Queer as Folk, Ginger Snaps), attended a party hosted by a broadcaster at the Toronto International Film Festival.

“We were both in our 20s, in our little black dresses, in a sea of men,” recalls the 38-year-old Chellas, laughing. “It felt strange, but there was no one else in the room like us. That's utterly changed now. I know so many women running shows, writing television and movies. There are a huge number of exciting women's voices out there. Now if it were only the same for female directors.” The reason for the shift, she adds, is simple: “Our industry is maturing. When I came out of the Canadian Film Centre, there weren't a lot of people making a living as screenwriters. But opportunities have started to expand, for everyone.”

Walton, 42, splits her time between Toronto and Montreal. She got into writing after entering a 1993 CBC Radio drama contest, and shocked the hell out of herself by winning. “Television has a longer, and more diverse, history of writing. But even the craft of feature-film screenwriting – as a profession in both French and English – is growing, it seems, every year,” says Walton, who is co-writing her first French-Canadian feature film with Jean-Marc Vallée (C.R.A.Z.Y.)

Esta Spalding, who was a premed student and poet before her career as a screenwriter, says she owes her change in profession to Chris Haddock, the creator of Da Vinci's Inquest and Intelligence. “I was a poet for a number of years, and I moved out to Vancouver with my husband, who was doing his PhD,” says Spalding. “I couldn't find a teaching job, so I applied as a secretarial assistant to Chris. He wouldn't hire me as his secretary because I didn't have secretarial experience.” Haddock had, however, read her poetry. “He was in development for Da Vinci's and he invited me to sit in on the writers' meeting,” recalls Spalding. “He hired me as a story editor for the first season after convincing the CBC that a poet who had spent a great deal of time in morgues and autopsies would be an asset to the story team,” recalls Spalding, 40, who worked three seasons on the show.

“I feel that there's a lot of work for screenwriters. I've never felt – and maybe I've been insulated – I was being hired because I was female,” says Spalding, who worked on The Eleventh Hour (with Chellas) and Would Be Kings (which she co-wrote with Cameron), and is part of the Flashpoint team. “I guess it's the good work of our mothers opening up doors in every sector of the professional world.”

Gemini Award-winner Anne Marie La Traverse, co-producer, with Bill Mustos, of Flashpoint, says the composition of their predominantly female writing squad was something of a fluke. “It was not part of an overall plan or design,” she notes. “Instead, it came about through a series of instinctive choices that we made in reaction to how these particular writers responded creatively to the material.”

On the opposite end of town from the Flashpoint headquarters, Vera Santamaria is part of the eight-person team, three of whom are women, working on CBC-TV's Little Mosque on the Prairie. “I see more women, but it's still a male-dominated sector,” says Santamaria, 29, who cut her TV teeth writing on Degrassi: The Next Generation. “But there is real value in having different viewpoints in the room. The guys in our group say this is the largest number of women they've ever worked with in a comedy room. We bring a different sensibility, which is not a matter of being male or female. What's funny isn't a matter of your sex.”

As far as Forbes is concerned, the people who end up getting hired are, first and foremost, just great writers. “You also have to look for people you think you will like and respect, because you're stuck with them day in, day out,” she says. “Chemistry in a room is critical. Writers of any gender need to be comfortable throwing

The view from the top is hopeful

As an actor and model, Cameron Diaz has travelled around much of the world. But this time, she's gone to the top of it – i.e. the ancient Incan city of Machu Picchu – in a new, albeit temporary role as teacher.

Diaz is among a group of A-list celebrities taking part in an eight-part MTV series called 4REAL, aimed at showing the network's youthful audience examples of young leaders working for hope and change around the globe.

The first episode – airing Monday at 8 p.m. – features Diaz and series co-creator Sol Guy as they scale the Andes with Puma Singona, a Quechua shaman struggling to preserve the knowledge of his ancient culture in the modern world. "People are definitely interested in what celebrities are doing so, yeah, it's a clever way to trick people into learning and participating," says Diaz.

"Young people are doing extraordinary things around the world to try to really help their communities," adds Guy. "In a ... world of doom and gloom and all this negativity, we really wanted to tell these positive stories of things that were working and people that were doing these fantastic things."

Future episodes involve Joaquin Phoenix's visit to Yawanawa in the Amazon, Casey Affleck travelling to the Pawnee reservation in Oklahoma and rapper K'naan in Kibera, the largest slum in East Africa, in Nairobi, Kenya.

Monday's episode follows Diaz and Guy as they participate in a winter solstice ceremony and an insider's tour of Machu Picchu, where Singona is a guide. Along the way, they sleep rough, learn that young Peruvians are deserting their communities for the big cities and dodge a phalanx of paparazzi.

Diaz says the culture of the Quechua is under siege in an era of modernization and globalization. "There's nothing wrong, there's nothing to be fixed in that culture. It's worked for so long, for thousands of years. (But) now we have these people who didn't used to have a problem with poverty who now do. So how do we help them preserve their culture as well as integrate?" Diaz said.

Diaz was also impressed with the simplicity and purity of Singona's teachings – passed down by his grandfather – and the emphasis on the four elements: earth, wind, fire and water. "It reminds us that everything comes from this planet. We don't go to some place else to get plastic," Diaz says. "Aspirin and every medicine that we use to fight disease ... all of those things may be synthetic, but there's no Planet Synthetic. Every synthetic comes from something natural and then it's the process that man puts it through that synthesizes it."

Canada also features in the series, with Guy and actor Eva Mendes visiting community leader Liz Evans in Vancouver's drug- and crime-ridden Downtown Eastside. "The message and the reality is that you don't have to fly halfway around the world to see issues and solutions," Guy says. "I learned a lot down there, man, in my own neighbourhood. It changed the way I see people that are dealing with those issues. I'll never look at someone who's homeless or going through a drug addiction or mental instability (the same) again. I learned so much down there, as much as I did anywhere in Africa or South America."

The trip to Peru was a turning point for Diaz, who says she intends to find more ways to use her star power to educate others. "This is the train I'm on. I'm in love with this planet. It's amazing, the people that I've met all around the world. In every place that I've gone, what I find are similarities more than any differences," she says. "Everywhere that I've been, from Africa to Nepal to Paris, France to Iceland and Peru, the thing that I find is that we're all the same. We're all human beings, we all want the same things, we want to be loved, we want to be safe. Everybody is trying to achieve the same thing in their lifetime. That's a passion of mine, to help people understand how we all coexist on this planet."

4REAL airs Monday at 8 p.m on MTV

50 greatest comedy sketches of all time?

There's no more sure-fire way to kill something's intrinsic comedic value than to try to examine what makes it funny. The minute you start thinking, you stop laughing. So why, then, have Nerve and IFC.com devoted an enormous amount of time, manpower, monetary resources, server space and posh catered lunches to the pursuit of ranking the boob tube's finest sketch comedy offerings?

In part, they're here because magical new technology (*coughYouTubecough*) allows you to do more than just pontificate for paragraphs on end — now you can pontificate for paragraphs on end and provide audiovisual evidence to back up those pontifications. They provide the context, share their thoughts and feelings, and let you commence with the guffawing and, naturally, the disagreeing. After all, the comedy sketch — short, sweet, completely silly or shot through with social commentary — worms its way into the public mind like nothing else, and has easily made the leap to the web when other forms have faltered.

Any list is bound by the limitations set on it — consciously and unconsciously — by its creators: they kept their 50 selections to stuff that's appeared on television by choice, and to what's appeared in English out of necessity. One must also bear in mind the availability of material; who knows what comedic treasures are lost to us because they simply don't exist anymore?

But of the sketch comedy that remains viewable, this is some of the best. Is the list definitive? That's for you, the audience to tell them. And they're sure you will, loudly and angrily. Before you do you, though, remember: it's comedy. Best not to overthink it...

The 50 greatest comedy sketches of all time

Underbelly success leads to terrorism thriller

Bouyed by the success of Underbelly, the Nine Network is developing a second true crime series based on a high-profile legal case.

Nine's head of drama, Jo Horsburgh, confirmed it was talking to Screentime, the production company that created the critically claimed series on the Melbourne underworld, about the new series. While it will be made by members of the Underbelly production and writing team, including Des Monaghan, Peter Andrikidis and Greg Haddrick, the project is not related to the string of gangland murders.

"We are in discussion with Screentime to develop another true crime series but it's not Underbelly and it's not a prequel or a sequel," Horsburgh said.

The Sun-Herald understands the two-part series, False Witness, will focus on international terrorism. The Film Finance Corporation has approved funding for the series, which has already been sold to Britain. Its makers describe it as a "high-octane thriller based on the West's worst nightmare: a threat they do not see coming". The series will be set against "the heavily researched feature backdrop of bickering intelligence agencies, fallible police forces and international tensions".

Underbelly is a ratings hit with 1.2million viewers tuning in to Wednesday's episode that finished with the shooting of Jason Moran, played by Les Hill. Nine was prohibited from broadcasting the 13-part series in Victoria due to concerns it might prejudice the trial over the killing of gangland patriarch Lewis Moran, played by Kevin Harrington.

A number of people depicted in the series are involved in police investigations or matters before the courts, making it difficult for any network to make a sequel. Convicted drug trafficker Tony Mokbel, played by Robert Mammone in the series, is in Greece fighting extradition.

Meanwhile, after an impressive turnaround in ratings in the wake of flailing viewer numbers in 2007, Nine is hoping its new mystery-drama series Canal Road will live up to the unenviable task of following in Underbelly’s hugely successful footsteps when it premieres next week. If the credentials of Canal Road’s creators and cast are anything to go by, theory dictates the broadcaster will be in luck.

The show’s architects, those behind McLeod’s Daughters, were not shy in their bid to break through what have until now been deemed socially acceptable limits for a mainstream television offering. The series, which revolves around a central Melbourne medical-legal centre, tantalises viewers with the promise of regular appearances by a high-class escort and a generous helping of steamy sex scenes. “It’s really exciting — when we had a cast screening (it) was just awesome, I don’t think any of us had any idea that the show was so different,” says Peta Sergeant, who plays parole officer Holly Chong in the series. “It’s not like anything that’s on TV at the moment.”

Although pre-screening critical responce has been luke warm, loyal followers of McLeod’s Daughters and Blue Heelers-style productions will at least find it inoffensive and watchable enough. And there are the odd head-turning moments, including a confronting rape scene involving Sergeant’s character in episode two. “That sort of stuff is so challenging, I’ve lost so much sleep over it,” Sergeant says of that and other “challenging” scenes. “But you do it, you get there and nail it and that’s so exciting, to work on something that really stretches you. It’s really exciting as an actor to get a script and go ‘whoa, OK, I have to match this and make it work’.”

Sergeant labels Canal Road “groundbreaking” and says audiences will relate to it. “If you look at the success of (Australian) shows like Secret Life of Us and Love My Way . . . they’re driven by the staple, core characters and people grow to become very attached to those characters,” says Sergeant, who is arguably one of the stand-outs of the series despite its impressive cast of established Australian actors. “I think that’s something Canal Road has managed to do — we’ve got something like nine or 10 people and the stories really revolve around the drama of those core characters.”

This core cast includes Brooke Satchwell (Neighbours, White Collar Blue), Alyssa McClelland (All Saints, Small Claims), Diana Glenn (Satisfaction), Grant Bowler (Wildside, Always Greener, All Saints) and Sibylla Budd (Secret Life of Us).

As with Underbelly, which was banned in Melbourne by a Victorian Supreme Court judge for fear of prejudicing gangland patriarch Lewis Moran’s murder trial, Canal Road did not come without its challenges — there were reports the series caused headaches for its production team last year after executives demanded late script rewrites to remove a lesbian tryst — and Nine will be hoping this investment pays dividends come ratings reporting time.

Despite the delay in its release (filming began in March last year), the debut episode is likely to draw as many viewers as its underworld sibling, if only thanks to cleverly packaged promos which have successfully piqued curiosity.

Time will tell whether this “groundbreaker” will do just that.



Canal Road premieres on Wednesday at 9.30pm on Nine and WIN.

Further reading: Canal Roads dark side

Murdoch seeks to make interacvtive TV his space

Media mogul Rupert Murdoch has teamed up with his daughter Elizabeth in a bid to make his online social network MySpace the leader in the hot new interactive TV space. “The convergence of the TV business with new social media is creating huge possibilities to reach global audiences,” Travis Katz, MySpace managing director international, said at the MIPTV audiovisual trade show.

Katz spoke shortly after MySpace, the world’s most popular social network which owned by Murdoch’s News International, announced a deal with Shine Group, headed by his daughter Elizabeth, that will enable its content to be distributed to television and traditional media outside of America and on DVD.

“Sites like MySpace are pushing out the boundaries of what media can do,” Katz said, and agreements like the one with Shine “will take us to the next level”. The deal includes developing local versions of MySpace programs in the 26 countries where the site operates. It will also enable MySpace to distribute its own TV content -- such as shows Roommates and Quarterlife -- as DVDs and to merchandising outlets worldwide.

The accord comes as the networking site is about to launch new TV series including a new coming-of-age drama, I love Chieftown, about an up-and-coming band trying to make it big. The 60 short four-to-five minute episodes, known as “webisodes”, are to launch after the summer, neatly tying in with MySpace’s plans to let unsigned bands sell their music on the site’s new music download service.

Horror movie fans can look forward to Beyond the Rave, the first new movie since 1976 from horror veterans Hammer Films and the first to be released solely through MySpace. Complete with gore and vampires, it will be unlike a routine trip to the movies as fans will be encouraged to interact. “We want to weave users into the story,” Katz said, such as helping shape aspects of the plot or appearing in episodes.

Transforming members into story tellers is something that MySpace’s slightly more female-skewed competitor, Bebo, has already been busy doing for some time. Bebo President Joanna Shields pointed out here that the site’s 42 million plus members worldwide are more sophisticated today about what they want to watch.

The number one social media site in Britain and New Zealand that has a core audience of 16-24 year-olds, Bebo has pioneered the new wave of online interactive web TV shows. Its wildly successful KateModern series attracts 300,000 views for each of the show’s weekly five episodes, while its new interactive online soap Sophia’s Diary has notched up 50 million views since it launched.

Even more innovative from a business point of view is Bebo’s achievement in weaving advertising into its shows, Shields said. Bebo’s hugely successful entertainment formats and its fast-growing worldwide users were instrumental in AOL’s decision to spend 850 million US dollars to acquire it last month. User-generated content (UGC) by members though has trailed off significantly, Shields said.

With Bebo having demonstrated that advertising can make money in the social network space, and vice-versa, Shield appealed to the media industry to come and “follow audiences online”.

History Channel to access US Library of Congress

The US Library of Congress will open its vaults to the History Channel in a deal to bring the library’s vast public collections to a larger audience, it's expected to be announced tomorrow.

The History Channel and its numerous sister channels will draw from the historical content preserved by the Library of Congress for original specials and documentaries. “We’re pleased to join forces with History in this effort that will help better fulfill our mission of making knowledge more accessible and useful to the Congress and the public,” Librarian of Congress James Billington said in a statement.

Billington said there are over 138 million items in the library’s collections, meaning plenty of fodder for historical stories previously untold. Such items include a Gutenberg Bible, George Washington’s copy of the Constitution, the first United States map and the contents in Abraham Lincoln’s pockets the night he was assassinated.

In contrast to an exclusive deal made in 2006 between the Smithsonian Institution and CBS’s Inc.’s Showtime Networks, the History deal is non-exclusive, meaning all items will still be publicly available.

Abbe Raven, president and CEO of A&E Television Networks — which owns the family of History channels — said the deal will “result in millions of Americans having better access and knowledge of history by utilizing the collections of one of the nation’s greatest institutions.” A spokesman for A&E said that no money was changing hands in the deal. Content will be co-branded to both History and the Library of Congress.

The A&E networks also include A&E, Biography, History International, History En Espanol, Military History Channel and the Crime & Investigation Network.

Boxing clever

Which box is bigger on the inside than it is on the outside? asks AA Gill. Here’s a clue. Your children were watching it at 6.30pm on Saturday, April 5. That’s right. It’s the television. You can get the whole world and the universe and God and multiple deities and Simon Cowell in your telly.

Your kids were watching Doctor Who, who merely has a telephone box. The beginning of the new series attracted 40% of the television audience, which sounds a lot more than 8m, but, in television terms, it’s what is known as Tristram’s goal: that is, young people on a Saturday evening. Why young people should be any more moreish, pert and attractive than the rest of us, I’ve never worked out. Maybe they’re more susceptible to the advertising. But, then, they don’t have any money and they don’t pay the licence fee, and there’s no guarantee that, if they like Doctor Who, they’re going to grow up to love Panorama. But the Doctor does donate an audience of 7m to I’d Do Anything and then on to Casualty.

Now, which box looks bigger on the outside than on the inside? David Beckham in those risible knicker ads. Golden Balls was on Headcases (Sunday, ITV1), which is the son of Spitting Image, a topical, political satire done as electronic Punch & Judy. Satire is tricky stuff to get an audience to switch on to. To begin with, you have to make assumptions about how nerdily au fait they already are about politics, how much they’re going to get. It’s also a genre that, at its best, is cruel, wholly unfair, relentlessly vicious, partisan and increasingly brutal as it scents blood. But, when it comes to its audience, it has to sing to the choir. It needs you to already agree with its objectives. Satire is not reasoned debate, it’s not point-scoring. Nobody’s mind was ever changed by a satire. Its purpose is to add flint and venom to an already held prejudice. And it takes time to find like-minded souls and to settle its level of sophistication.

Given those excuses, Headcases still has a long way to go, all of it uphill. It just is satire no-mates. The computer graphics are boring, clumsy and cack-handed, and the characters don’t look like who they’re supposed to be. I had no idea who a third of the characters were. Gordon Brown doesn’t look like anybody you’ve ever seen before and doesn’t sound remotely familiar. And if you can’t get the prime minister right, it’s going to be tricky. The genius of Spitting Image was Fluck and Law’s puppets. Before they’d even opened their mouths, they were mortally wounding.

The spitting Hattersley, the slug Kenneth Baker, the two Davids. It would have been better to have gone for South Park-style cutouts than these softly nervous, unimaginative, courtroom-lite likenesses. Then there’s the content. For all its clan of credited writers, the laugh-to-gag ratio was about what you’d expect from a Robert Mugabe speech. Mostly, we watched with a strained smile, willing it to come up with something properly shocking and unfairly cruel. But it didn’t happen. The setups were either generic old jokes or too obvious to be going anywhere. No politician is going to dread Sunday evenings or walking into the office on Monday morning. Neither are they going to be asking for stills to frame in their loos. The producers seem to have forgotten or failed to understand that the root and drive of satire isn’t humour but anger; that comedy is the bow, fury the arrow.

It would be nice, just once, to be able to say something positive about Louis Theroux that wasn’t, “He’s got a talented brother.” If you’re a television critic, you can’t help bumping into him in your living room occasionally. And it’s wearying, always ignoring him and turning over. So I watched Louis Theroux’s African Hunting Holiday (Sunday, BBC2) with, if not high hopes, then knee-high hopes. This is a story I’ve done myself in print. How would Louis tackle white Africans breeding game to be shot by white Americans with crossbows? Within two minutes, it was déjà vu, but without that French sense of mystery and expectation. Louis has one programme format that fits all scenarios. If it doesn’t fit them, they get it anyway. He is still, after all these years, doing that faux-geek business, the whispered questions, the conspiratorial chumminess, the fake squeamishness, the ingenuous slowness, the winking confusion. It doesn’t matter if he’s talking to fundamentalist Christians, porn stars or Paul Daniels, the routine is identical, the outcome the same. The world is really just there to be his straight man, the feed for his cowardly, retrospectively edited mockery.

The denouement of this show was: would he or wouldn’t he shoot a warthog? Of course he wouldn’t. Not doing it, whatever it is, is Louis’s leitmotif. In this instance, he was so set on the rails of his limited shtick, he missed the real story roaring in his face: the truly endangered and threatened species here were the Afrikaners, the unlovable but grudgingly admirable farmers. The breeding and ritualised murder of wild animals that were once plentiful and free but are now caged and culled is the perfect metaphor for their own species and lives. They were such a rich and interesting subject, but he was only interested in bagging as many of them as he could, not realising how very, very like the fat American hunters he was. They, too, just wanted big dumb heads to hang on their walls.

Clowns (Monday, BBC2) is one of those programmes that made you think: “Why on earth has no one made this programme before?” Everyone who is a parent or was ever a child, which pretty much covers the audience, knows about these slightly desperate, borderline spooky men who turn up at kiddies’ parties. Their lives were as weirdly furious and thwarted as you’d always expected. But they were also very strange and touching and quietly funny in an unslapstick way. There are few things that can be as humiliating, exhausting, unrewarding and pitifully life-destroying as being an indoor clown. The cruellest curse of an adult life is never, ever being taken seriously. This film blissfully and tenderly did do that, and if Peter Fincham, who’s just taken over at ITV, isn’t at this very moment commissioning a pilot for a sitcom about three children’s entertainers, then he wasn’t paying attention.

Groening makes feature-length DVD of Futurama

Whether it’s with The Simpsons or Futurama, Matt Groening is always the naughty boy making fun of a bad dad – and his new DVD shows no signs of him growing up, reports Bryan Appleyard.

I congratulate Matt Groening, creator of The Simpsons, on Bender’s Big Score, a new feature-length DVD version of his sci-fi show Futurama. It is, I tell him, the most elegantly deranged plot he has ever devised. “Ha-ha-ha . . . er . . . well, we have . . . er, yes . . . ha-ha . . . er. I won’t deny it. I was starting to deny it, but I think you’re right . . . er . . . ha-ha . . . we were . . . here’s . . . We have resisted over the life of the series . . . er . . . er . . . time travel for the most part.”

Hesitant to the point of neurosis, self-deprecating, instantly likeable, Groening is remarkable in show-business history. This is, in part, because of his heroically low-key public persona, but mostly because of his two main creations – The Simpsons, argu-ably the most successful TV show of all time, and Futurama, definitely not the most successful TV show of all time. Futurama’s relative failure is, of course, grist to the Groening mill. At the beginning of Bender’s Big Score, the Futurama logo surmounts the caption “It just won’t stay dead!” and, in the first few moments of the film, the Fox network executives who canceled the series in 2003 are dismissed as “brainless drones” and “asinine morons”, who, we are told, were fired, beaten up, killed and ground into a fine pink powder with, apparently, many useful applications. Fox, of course, still airs The Simpsons.

Would you, I ask Groening, describe yourself as subversive? “As far as subversion goes, if you are being subversive, you still have to deny it. So, whether or not we are being subversive, I do deny being subversive.” Hesitant, self-deprecating and likeable, but also very, very clever. But what, you might ask, is he all about? This is my theory: he is all about manhood seen through the eyes of a child.

When, in 1987, The Simpsons was just a series of shorts on The Tracey Ullman Show, its hero was Bart, the bad boy. When it became a fully fledged show, Homer, the dissolute dad, rapidly took over. Did he expect this to happen? “I always thought Homer was going to be the centre. At the beginning, Bart was definitely the centre. But I knew as soon as it became a series that Homer would become the centre because there are more consequences to his mayhem and there is only so much mischief a 10-year-old boy can do before it becomes predictable.”

Futurama is set a thousand years in the future. Its hero is Bender, a swaggering robot. “I think Bender is a true advance in the depiction of robots. Bender is the first defiantly heterosexual robot in the history of science fiction. When you look back, they’re all either asexual or gay . . . There’s also something about women and robots. Women don’t understand the unique fascination and appeal of robots. Perhaps their behaviour reminds women of what they don’t like in their men.” Gay? “I’m thinking of the robots in Star Wars – they’re definitely gay.” As a child, he was fascinated by his toy robots but also afraid of them. “The problem with robots is you can’t reason with them. They’re robots, and if they want to kill you, they will. You can’t talk them out of it.” He recalls The Phantom Creeps, a television series with Bela Lugosi, which had a robot hidden in a wall panel; if you pressed a button, it came out and strangled you. Futurama is, he says, a tribute to those nightmares.

Homer and Bender – stick with me here, I’m serious – both have names ending in -er, they are doers, active, masculine, both cause mayhem by doing too much. Their mayhem is hugely, uncontrollably creative. Bender has a chest cavity from which almost anything might appear. And Homer seems to have a near-infinite capacity for doing the wrong thing.

“However, the writers on The Simpsons are finding it hard to come up with more ways for Homer to do something bad enough that you’ve never seen before, but not bad enough to drive Marge away. You don’t want the divorce, which is the logical next step for many of Homer’s stupidities – the end of the marriage. But we’re trying not to do that. Don’t worry, it’s not going to happen . . . Yeah, we can keep it up.”

Bender and Homer are extreme males.

The women around them are, in contrast, moderates. Leela, in Futurama, is a conventionally hot space babe, despite having only one enormous eye, who is constantly trying to get things back on track. Marge in The Simpsons is the dogged, occasionally irate but endlessly tolerant home-maker. Lisa, the older daughter, is a thoughtful but intensely orthodox liberal. Maggie, the younger, is just a baby, but in The Simpsons Movie, also just out on DVD, she comes into her own as a practical fixer for the family. Female moderation has the effect of casting an even more vivid light on male extremity.

Both Bender and Homer loom. They are often seen from below, from the perspective of a child. They are frightening, fascinating and exotic in the extremity of their schemes and appetites. The joke is, of course, that they can always be subverted. Whether Groening admits to subversion or not, the naughty boy getting his own back on Dad is the mood of much of his comedy. Describing one plot line, he says it was “probably the most underhanded sarcasm we’ve ever had on the show – and presented with such innocence and glee”. Black humour softens the pain caused by the bad dad.

As in all the greatest comedy, this is a joke that toys with tragedy. Groening’s father-fear is accompanied by a bleak sense that the world is an irredeemably awful place. He’s still doing his comic strip entitled Life in Hell. And one device in Futurama is a coin-operated suicide booth – Bender tries but attaches a string to his coin so he can get it back. “Fox were worried we were positing a future in which people wanted to kill themselves. They wanted a fun, happy-go-lucky future. But I thought that was just a utopia, and utopia is boring – you’ve got to have dystopia.”

In spite (or perhaps because) of the underlying bleakness, the bad dads are, in the end, lovable. The mayhem-makers anchor their families by being wicked but not quite wicked enough. And their failings are put in perspective by the presence of much more sinister grandad-like males – Mr Burns, the decrepit and evil businessman, and Homer’s father in The Simpsons, and the mad scientist Cubert Farnsworth in Futurama.

Which means that, in a deep sense, Futurama is simply an alternative perspective on the primary dynamic of the Groening psyche. So, since The Simpsons perspective has been such a global success for so long, why isn’t Futurama? Well, for a start, the latter isn’t exactly real. “In the course of doing Futurama, I came to the realisation that one of the reasons The Simpsons resonates the way it does is because people relate to human beings, even though they have cartoonishly yellow skin, more than they can relate to robots and cyclops and alien crab creatures.” As a result, Futurama ran for just four years on Fox – The Simpsons will hit 20 years in December 2009 – before moving to the Cartoon Network. The latest deal between Fox and Comedy Central is for four feature-length DVDs, which will be shown on TV as 16 episodes. This is scarcely a failure, but the contrast with The Simpsons is stark. Yet now it’s back.

“I always told fans the show wasn’t dead. We had this idea that we would bring it back, Star Trek-style, and go on to greater glory. On the Cartoon Network, we’ve built up this cult following that I think far surpasses the enthusiasm for the show when it was on the regular network. The original plan was to take this cartoony, grotesque world and really stick to serious sci-fi concepts. That’s part of the show’s success and could be the secret of its failure as well.”

Of course, the sci-fi automatically limited its appeal and loaded the demographic with young males. But, also, the space adventurers are not a family and, therefore, they are less globally recognisable. “The Simpsons is basically about children and middle-aged parents, and we had left out young adults – unmarried people in their twenties, making their way in the world. If you want to reduce Futurama to its basic premise, it is a work-place ensemble comedy, set in the future, and we use sci-fi themes – that’s the situation.”

Millions of words have been expended on the significance of The Simpsons, not many on Futurama. But having watched Bender’s Big Score, I suspect it contains just as much food for thought. Groening, without question, is one of the few geniuses of popular entertainment. Typically, however, he tends to see his impact on the world as limited. He says the main effect of The Simpsons is the “large number of other animated projects that don’t look like anything else”. He does say, however, that the show may have helped America get over some of its hang-ups.

“I think in the beginning The Simpsons alarmed some people for its depiction of disrespect and disobedience and blasphemy, and it seems to me that people have loosened up and realised that the Simpsons are not bringing down the culture. Maybe it’s lightened America up a little.”

“Lightening up” here means liberalising. Groening is a Democrat, though he declines to endorse either Hillary or Obama, saying both were better than McCain and certainly better than Bush. But lightening up also means getting the joke, seeing the ultimate futility of human aspiration. The Simpsons is about the intimate mess of the world; Futurama is about our ultimate bafflement. It all makes sense in laughter.

Has he got another show in mind? “Yes, I think about it a lot. But the problem with animation is it’s really time-consuming. If I could figure out a way of not caring, I’d have it made. But you want everything to be great and so . . . ” He also promises this year he’ll get his website – www.mattgroening.com – together. At the moment, it’s just a picture of a big, dumb rabbit. And he’s working on Life in Hell. But he will do another show. He’ll have to. He’s 54, but he’s still the little kid staring up at the monstrous dad. One way or another, he’s going to have to get that fixed.

Futurama: Bender’s Big Score is out now on 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment

Goggles return as TV and film go 3D

Once 3D entertainment meant fumbling aroundwith a pair of multi-coloured spectacles that made you dizzy, before settling down in the cinema to watch a plotless film that involved a giant plastic shark coming out of the screen to get you.

But not even desperate 1980s cinematic experiences such as Jaws 3-D were enough to kill off our desire to feel part of the action. Now, after almost two decades on the audio-visual scrapheap, 3D is mounting a comeback... straight into your living room.

This summer, owners of a specific model of plasma TV screen will be able to marry it to a PC for the price of a couple of video games and create an instant 3D multi-media centre capable of showing films, games, TV programmes and eventually web pages. The sense of depth promises to be so realistic that viewers will want to reach out and grab the images, say the firms behind the technology.

A whole range of new films are being made as the new wave of 3D cinema allows such realism to be created on much lower budgets than in the past. And while viewers will, for the next few years at least, have to wear a pair of glasses, the manufacturers promise that these bear little resemblance to the geeky goggles with red and green plastic lenses that fell between the cinema seats all those years ago. A recent demonstration of the product by Samsung in Seoul, revealed the pictures to be sharp, and the company insists that you can watch for hours without getting a headache.

The system is expected to attract hard-core gamers. New titles such as Medal of Honour are already 3D-enabled. But much broader appeal is predicted. Last week, one of Hollywood's biggest studios threw its weight behind the 3D revolution. Disney subsidiary Pixar has announced that all its future films will be in 3D, with the first release, Up, set for July 2009. It follows in the footsteps of Shrek creator DreamWorks, which made a similar decision in 2007.

"I have seen the future of movies, and this is it," Jeffrey Katzenberg, DreamWorks' CEO, said at an industry event last summer. "I couldn't be any more confident or certain about it." Live-action Hollywood also sees huge commercial potential in 3D. For example, a big-budget family version of Jules Verne's Journey to the Centre of the Earth is set for release in July.

The BBC is also at the 3D cutting edge. It used pairs of special cameras to film Scotland's victory over England in the Calcutta Cup rugby international at Murrayfield earlier this year. 3D images were beamed to a cinema at its Riverside studio in London. The audience reported it was much more like being at the game than watching it on ordinary television.