Results tagged “billcarter”

Tonight at 9PM, The Sopranos will air its final episode on HBO. It marks six seasons over eight years where viewers got to know NJ mob boss Tony Soprano, his blood family and his mob family. Creator David Chase filled each episode with enough angst, passion, violence, and intensity to make pretty much anything else on TV seem half-hearted. As we approach the final hours before we say good bye to Tony, Carm, Paulie and everyone else who remains, we wonder what you think:

In a re-election year stumping opportunity, the Mayor visited Conan O'Brien's talk show last night and asked him to bring the Tonight Show back to NYC. And Gothamist says, "Please, do!" The AP says that Mayor Bling "jokingly tried to make a deal," offering to give O'Brien a park permit for the Late Night softball team if he stayed in NYC. Conan said, "It's not up to me, I work for the man. If he says 'yeah,' we're fine. So we'll talk." Is the man Lorne Michaels in this case? Or Jeff Zucker, which sounds like "hooker," not "f***er," as we learned when watching Fat Actress? When O'Brien was announced (finally) as Jay Leno's successor, the NY Times' Bill Carter suspected Conan and the gang would move to LA. Gothamist hopes that in the meantime, CBS develops another LA talk show, in the post-Letterman era, and The Tonight Show will have to stay in NY. For starters, Conan will need LOTS of sunblock if he's living in LA.

Carter reports on the TV business for the NY Times and wrote a book about the Leno-Letterman fight, The Late Shift. In our opinion, it's the best book about issues in current state of television - money, talent, and ego. And in today's paper, Carter analyzes the decision to give Leno a five year good-bye. The NY Daily News' TV critic, David Bianculli, who had complained about NBC giving the Tonight Show's 50th Birthday the short shrift the day before, thinks that NBC made the right decision. And after the jump, NBC's press release of Conan's statement last night:

Fear of TiVO has led NBC to create 1 minute short films during station breaks, in order to keep viewers on the channel and not only to keep watching NBC programming but also the advertisers who pay NBC dearly to advertise on the "Number One Channel for Viewers 18-49!" The Times' Bill Carter looks the scheme, called "1MMs", and its implications for the business.

Hmm, first came news that David Duchovny had signed on to play a love interest for Sarah Jessica Parker's Carrie Bradshaw on Sex and the City. Now, the Times' Bill Carter breaks who will be the final romantic interest for Carrie this season: Mikhail Baryshnikov. Baryshnikov will play an artist of "extreme importance," someone with the kind of "scale" that makes Big look like a high school sweetheart. But there is no word who Carrie will end up wtih.

Having experienced 26 years of "Jennifer Chung? Are you related to Connie Chung? Ha ha ha!" type banter, I've come to feel close to Connie Chung. She may not be an actual relative, but she was arguably the first Chinese-American role model out there, and a woman at that, with her high visibility as a newsperson. So news that CNN is cancelling her show comes with some disappointment, in both Chung and CNN. Chung has been on the three major networks, as well as CNN, and her tenures there have been mixed. I think she'd be good on a morning show, where she'd be able to impart some intelligence and gravitas for important issues as well as humor for lighter segments.

The insanely contentious wrangling between James Gandolfini and HBO over his salary may be coming to the a close: Bill Carter of the Times reports that both sides will probably drop their suits. This whole mess is like watching two babies fight. Yes, they are talented babies, and, yes, there are serious financial implications for both parties, but come on. That they are describing the negotiations as being like war is lame: "Executives on both sides even described the showdown in terms straight from the Cuban missile crisis. 'It's October 1962, and this is realpolitick,' one representative of Mr. Gandolfini said. An executive on HBO's side said, 'This can't be solved by us saying we'll take our missiles out of Turkey as soon as you give in.'" Everyone is getting all Art of War and self-important. I say leave war to the war mongerers.

since "The Last Picture Show." Anyway, Bob Balaban probably got the role of Warren Littlefield, president of NBC during the 90s, after producers of The Late Shift (the HBO film based on NYT writer Bill Carter's account of Leno and Letterman jockeying to be the number late night host in the post-Carson era) saw him as Russell Dalrymple, head of NBC, on Seinfeld.