Television Programming

If Current TV journalists Laura Ling and Euna Lee hadn't followed their guide across a frozen river separating China and North Korea on a fateful morning in March, their story about human trafficking in the region would have likely drawn modest attention. Instead, Ling and Lee were captured by North Korean soldiers, creating an international incident that threw the work of their scrappy documentary unit into limbo and brought newfound attention to the program's brand of often-risky investigative journalism.

In the opening of ABC's new drama "FlashForward," the world's population blacks out at the same moment and has a vision of events on a day in April 2010. ABC executives, particularly Entertainment Group President Steve McPherson, may also be having visions of what the future will look like seven months from now. By then it will be clear to them whether the network's risky move to premiere twice as many new shows as its rivals this fall has paid off or not. The Walt Disney Co.-owned network, which last season ranked third in prime time, is facing its toughest programming challenge in years.

Berle Adams, a onetime big-band booking agent who co-founded Mercury Records in the 1940s and later became a senior executive at MCA before launching his own successful business as an international television program sales representative and distributor, has died. He was 92. Adams, who had been ailing during the last year, died Tuesday at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, said Ken Kleinberg, his son-in-law. "One of the things that's exciting and fortuitous about his life is he rose to great stature during a period when the music business was young and the television business was young," said Kleinberg, an entertainment lawyer.

Can you have too much love? That's what VH1 is starting to wonder. The Viacom-owned cable network, whose top five shows this year all have the word "love" in the title, is reassessing its heavy reliance on dating and relationship shows. Although the network says it was already plotting a new direction, that shift has taken on greater urgency since one of its reality show participants, Ryan Jenkins, apparently killed himself after becoming the lead suspect in the murder of his former wife Jasmine Fiore.

The Oprah Winfrey Network seems to have everything needed to succeed: some of the best creative minds in the business, strong financial backing, a loyal audience and enthusiastic advertisers eager to buy commercial time. But more than 20 months after the announcement that Winfrey was teaming with Discovery Communications Inc. to create a cable channel that celebrates her ethos, "Living your best life," not much has happened -- except for a revolving door of executives. Three top programmers abruptly left the Los Angeles-based network in recent months, and development spending has been cut. OWN was supposed to have launched by now, but its debut has been pushed back to mid-2010.

When 14-year-old Ashley Rosario went looking for her favorite Cartoon Network shows such as "Chowder" and "The Marvelous Misadventures of Flapjack" and instead found reality programs, she did what any normal teenager does these days. She made a video complaining about it and posted it on YouTube. "I'm scared for Cartoon Network," said Ashley, of Melbourne, Fla., adding that she was "outraged" by the channel's new direction and that she wasn't "the only one who feels this way." She's right.

"Heaven and hell" is how Eileen O'Neill describes her first year at the helm of TLC, the cable network that is home to the controversial hit reality show "Jon & Kate Plus 8." "Heaven" is TLC's spectacular growth over the last 12 months, with its prime-time audience leaping 43% and now pulling in an average of more than 1 million viewers every night.

A federal judge in Los Angeles on Friday handed Univision Communications a major victory in its hard-fought battle with its programming partner from Mexico, underscoring Univision's exclusive rights in the U.S. to the wildly popular Spanish-language soap operas that fuel its huge ratings. Grupo Televisa, Mexico's largest entertainment company, had sought the judge's permission to transmit to U.S.

Walt Disney Co. Chief Executive Bob Iger wasted little time setting the tone for this year's Allen & Co. conference in Sun Valley, Idaho. Getting into his rental car after checking in at the Sun Valley Resort here, Iger held court with the media for a few minutes and declared: "People are going to pay [for] content. . . . We're not worried about monetizing content."

Driven by a need to overhaul its program development process and cut costs, Walt Disney Co.'s ABC has finalized a complex consolidation of its ABC Entertainment and ABC Studios operations. The restructuring and creation of the ABC Entertainment Group, announced in January but completed only Thursday, will combine many of the business and creative functions of the two units.