Television Industry

Here's a little quiz, multiple choice. Complete the following sentence: Network television stinks because of: A. Producers. B. Advertisers. C. Networks. D. Dan Quayle. E. All of the above. You could make a case for any of these choices, but my own personal pick would be: C. Networks. Let's face it, if you've spent more than 20 minutes in the television business, you know you can run a network better than "those guys." Of course, whether you'd want to is another matter.

That 52-inch, flat-screen television on the family room wall may have a terrific picture, but there's a big drawback: It's an energy hog. State regulators are getting ready to curb the growing power gluttony of TV sets by drafting the nation's first rules requiring retailers to sell only the most energy-efficient models, starting in 2011.

How annoying is Jar Jar Binks? The comical, animated Gungan is so off-putting that even one of his creators says he found him hard to stomach at first. The floppy-eared, loose-jointed creature who made his debut in "Star Wars: Episode I The Phantom Menace" was an immediate hit with children, but many adults walked out of theaters loathing the character, who is on screen for 30 minutes.

Three, two, one . . . Bill Walton on TV, Bill Walton on the radio, Bill Walton writing in the Sporting News, Bill Walton up close and trying to become personal with the Establishment. "Imagine this: Bill Walton--media mogul," CBS announcer Pat O'Brien said. "Good Lord, the 1990s have arrived." A tie has replaced the headband. The beard is gone, the hair is cut, the Deadhead wants to become a talking head. "This just proves," said John Wooden, former UCLA basketball coach, "you never know."

YUNJI DE NIES TV reporter An education at Yale and the UC Berkeley School of Journalism plus a coveted internship at "Nightline" could hardly prepare Yunji de Nies, 26, for covering Hurricane Katrina. But she was one of only three reporters for WGNO-TV, a local New Orleans station, who opted to remain on the job once the storm hit. With water levels rising, De Nies and her crew abandoned their homes and camped out in neighboring Baton Rouge, making forays into the devastation.

On Hezbollah's Al Manar television, Lebanese are shouting in the streets for the fall of the U.S.-backed government. On government-linked Future TV, they are cheering it. On Al Manar, Prime Minister Fouad Siniora is a puppet manipulated by the United States. On Future TV, he is a national hero standing firm against the schemes of Syria and Iran.

North Carolina death-row inmate David Lawson and talk show host Phil Donahue were waiting Monday to see whether the U.S. Supreme Court would allow the killer's execution to be shown on television. Lawson, 38, is scheduled to be put to death by cyanide gas at 2 a.m. EDT Wednesday; Donahue wants to videotape the event and televise it. Lawson has said he was suffering from depression when he broke into what he thought was empty house in 1980.

Three shows and two Emmys later, the executive producers of "Frasier," "Wings" and the new NBC sitcom "The Pursuit of Happiness" have earned the liberty to do just about anything they want for their next project--from the most conventional family sitcom to something crazily original.

After years of bad blood and nearly three weeks of court testimony, Mexico's entertainment giant Grupo Televisa and the dominant Spanish-language TV company in the U.S., Univision Communications Inc., abruptly ended their four-year legal battle Thursday. The settlement averted a potentially disastrous outcome for Univision, which could have lost its pipeline of Televisa's popular soap operas, called telenovelas, that drive Univision's enormous ratings.