"Heroes" continues to strike while the iron is cold: They're unleashing a bunch of dolls action figures of the characters, starting next month, when cheerleader Claire, time-bending Hiro, moody Peter, ineffectual Mohinder and bad-guy Syler hit stores. The gyp, of course, comes when you melt down your Claire doll and discover that it doesn't have the same indestructible superpowers that she does. On the other hand, when you misplace your Hiro doll, that proves it has slipped through the time-space continuum. And be careful around that Sylar doll - he might slice open your skull and swipe your brain after absorbing your special ability to spend your workday playing spider solitaire.

But, good news! This announcement came with some of the most hyperbolic press-release gibberish we've seen in months:

Some guy from NBC: "We are certain that the loyal 'Heroes' fans will feel that these figures reflect the action and excitement of the series." Yeah, seven-inch-tall chunks of plastic really wind me up with their visceral recreations of spectacular sequences - oh, wait.

Some guy from the toy company stamping these things out: "NBC has a rich and proud history and Mezco is very excited to become a part of that tradition. Having our first series of seven inch 'Heroes' action figures on display at the storied '30 Rock' building in New York City is truly a dream come true for us and seeing the excitement of the 'Heroes' fans as they view the figures makes the dream all the more sweeter." Man, dreams really aren't what they used to be.

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MTV is proud of the fact that it's a nonstop playground of advertising, product placement and, in general, hawking crap rather than trying to entertain viewers:

"Dario Spina, who handles [integrated marketing] for MTV's entertainment channels like Comedy Central and Spike, said ... 'That's the idea here; we want to blur the lines between the commercial breaks and the entertainment content.'"

Call me antiquated and old-fashioned, but I prefer having the option to mute the TV when the commercials come on so I can watch little wacky online films featuring Hillary Clinton trying to operate a coffee machine or Maria Bamford being exquisitely neurotic or Tim Fite smashing flowerpots or Tom Waits being Tom Waits. I don't want to be told to buy something I don't need, unless it's sweet, sweet booze.

The only example of this sinister plot I've witnessed is Stephen Colbert hawking a snack chip he clearly holds in at least a little disdain on "The Colbert Report" (Comedy Central is part of the MTV networks). I doubt other shows manage their plugs with such curdled irony.

Does everything have to be commercialized? It sickens me. Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm off to snack on some delicious Trader Joe's© pinwheels - which will I have? BBQ Chicken Breast or Havana Style? I'll let you know later!

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Here's a shocker: Media outlets have been reticent to follow a New York Times report (which we previously mentioned) about how media outlets were played for dupes by "military analysts" who were actually shills for the Iraq war. Actually, they're just taking a page from the Bush Administration playbook - if you don't 'fess up to a mistake, then it never happened.

Jon Stewart has always insisted that "The Daily Show" is not a news program, but
a new study by the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism, after following the show for all of 2007, has decided it's no more a news program than any other news program on the air. Which either means Stewart is wrong, or that Stewart is right and there're no news shows anywhere on TV.

I won't bore you with the details of the study, but the Project for Excellence in Journalism compared Stewart's show to the traditional news media's coverage of sundry issues, and found:

* "When Americans last year were asked to name the journalist they most admired, showing up at No. 4 on the list was a comedian. Jon Stewart, host of 'The Daily Show' on Comedy Central and former master of ceremonies at Academy Award shows, tied in the rankings with anchormen Brian Williams, Tom Brokaw, Dan Rather and cable host Anderson Cooper."

* "In its use of news video, The Daily Show is often quite documentary, culling through archives to show official hypocrisy, abuse of language, and spin. ... In its choice of topics, its use of news footage to deconstruct the manipulations by public figures and its tendency toward pointed satire over playing just for laughs, The Daily Show performs a function that is close to journalistic in nature--getting people to think critically about the public square."

* "'The Daily Show' not only assumes, but even requires, previous and significant knowledge of the news on the part of viewers if they want to get the joke. ... The survey also suggests 'Daily Show' viewers are highly informed, an indication that 'The Daily Show' is not their lone source of news. Regular viewers of 'The Daily Show' and 'The Colbert Report' were most likely to score in the highest percentile on knowledge of current affairs."

* "The presidential campaign and the policy debate about the war in Iraq, together added up to a quarter of the time spent on 'The Daily Show' (26%) for the year (2007, remember). This was significantly more than in the mainstream press, where the two stories commanded 18% in the same time period. ... Washington-related pieces, U.S. foreign affairs (especially the Bush Administration's Iraq war policy), and general politics accounted for 47% of the show's airtime in 2007. In that regard, by the numbers The Daily Show closely resembles in its topic agenda the news menu of many cable 'news' shows."

* "'The Daily Show' is clearly impacting American dialogue. ... Some of the show's sway as an information source could also come from language, and the sense that it is more candid, and thus somehow closer to one sense of accuracy than the more hidebound traditional media. 'My students tell me they read the news for facts, but they watch Jon Stewart for the truth,' Professor Steve Lacy of Michigan State University has observed."

Hence, PEJ's study concluded: "In its subject matter, 'The Daily Show' is indeed journalistic. Its topic agenda is highly focused on the public square, on issues of significance, particularly those focused around Washington. Its agenda is not dissimilar, indeed, from other cable talk shows. The language is even more blunt, and its point often more direct. 'The Daily Show' is no doubt entertainment, but it is entertainment, measurably, with a substantive point. It is, in its own way, another kind of No Spin Zone."

Bill O'Reilly, who dismisses "Daily Show" viewers as "pot-smokers," no doubt will love being compared to Stewart. He should be that talented.

Against my better judgment, I subscribed to Entertainment Weekly, the magazine famous for loving movies/TV shows/music based upon their hyper-charged marketing campaigns until, oh, six months or a year down the line, when they finally admit that, oh, yeah, they were cold lumps of merde in the first place and that any heat that steamed off of them was due in large part to the hyperbolic efforts of Entertainment Weekly itself.

So the most recent issue has been sitting around my place for nearly a week, and I've just now managed to coax myself into looking at it. And I looked at the cover, and that's about as far as I've been able to get. The headlines are idiotic.

For a "Grey's Anatomy" cover story, the headline reads: "Why is Ellen Pompeo smiling? Because her hit show is finally getting good again." Actually, it's because she's posing for a photo shoot, and smiling is generally what you do for one of those, and anyway, she doesn't look all that happy to begin with.

The other headlines: "Miley Cyrus: Get off her back!" (actually, people getting off on her back is what got her in trouble in the first place); "American Idol: Inside Their Fiercest Battle" (which no doubt explains why the show's ratings and buzz have slipped this season); and "Gossip Girl: Evil Has a New Name" (and EW actually likes "Gossip Girl;" this is only their fifth or sixth story on the show this season, which is really paying off, given that this week's episode was watched by a measly 2.1 million viewers - The CW's "Reaper" had nearly 2.5 million viewers last night, and without the benefit of a splashy new ad campaign).

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AMC today announced it's renewing "Breaking Bad" for a second season, after its truncated (by the writers strike) second season. "Breaking Bad" is that nasty little inspired drama/black comedy starring Bryan Cranston as a beleaguered chemist with cancer who decides to fortify his pathetic health-care plan by eliminating the health of patrons and competitors of his spanking-new crystal-meth business. So, with this and "Mad Men," AMC's officially on a roll. Thoughts, HBO?

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Miss those fun days of the writers strike? Fear not: Actors and producers are conspiring in their squabbling to plunge us back into those halcyon days of inactivity and gutting L.A.'s economy.

Per the AMPTP: "Negotiations were thrust into reverse by SAG's persistent refusal to acknowledge that the three deals already struck with the writers, directors and AFTRA reflect the economic realities faced by everyone in our industry, including actors."

Per SAG: "The AMPTP suspended negotiations with the Screen Actors Guild today over the objections of SAG's negotiating committee.The committee had urged that the AMPTP continue discussion and had offered to negotiate around the clock if necessary in order to secure an agreement."

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Fox's Monday-Tuesday schedule is a head-scratcher. They've kept "Hell's Kitchen" on Tuesdays after "American Idol," where it loses about half the audience. "House," meanwhile, is on Monday, where it's hardly struggling but is certainly not doing the business it has done on Tuesdays, where it'd reliably lure 18-23 million viewers after "American Idol." (Repeats of "House" have spent the season plugging any timeslot hole in Fox's schedule - do people realize these are new episodes and that it's been relocated?)

Perhaps it's a function of living in Southern California, but I have no need of or interest in the Weather Channel whatsoever. If I care about the temperature or the forecast, I'll simply click on my computer's dashboard icon and get it in five seconds, along with the date, the time, a calculator and an update on how much ink remains in my printer. Why would anyone need to flip through scores of cable stations to locate some happy shiny people who'll invariably be chattering away about the barometric pressure in Pittsburgh?

Here's why: Because while watching, you can imagine the lurid, Axe-Body-Gel-TV-Commercial levels of lustily frenzied sexual tension between the meteorologists.

The Smoking Gun has a piquant little yarn about a sexual harassment suit that the Weather Channel is trying to keep quiet (obviously, not too successfully). Bob Stokes, a 50-year-old former Weather Channel anchor, was canned after arbitration found that he asked a 38-year-old co-anchor, "Will you lick my swizzle stick?", "leered at her chest, and followed her into the women's dressing room. He also allegedly questioned her 'over and over again, non-stop' about her sex life, and once noted, 'It tortures me when you wear those heels and skirt.'"

This is inconveniently becoming public as the channel is up for sale. I say this makes it an irresistible new landscape of Caligulan debauchery for the guy behind the American Apparel ad campaigns.

Thursday's season finale of "30 Rock" finds Jack (Alec Baldwin) estranged from GE/NBC/Universal/Kmart and trying his hand at politics in the waning days of the Bush Administration - "It's time for my Freedom Search©," he tells Liz (Tina Fey) on his cell phone, as a security guy in the background snaps on a rubber glove.

As gung-ho as Jack may be, he has entered a land of abject malaise: The offices appear to have been looted; since there are no pens to be found, government employees are left to scratch memos on Post-It Notes with straight pins. Jack's boss (Matthew Broderick, who manages to make stultifying blandness fairly hilarious), Cooter Burger (a moniker bestowed upon him by the nicknamer-in-chief) an interim chief while the acting chief is on trial on sundry corruption charges, strives to maintain an upbeat demeanor - when Jack asks about a leak in the ceiling spilling copious amounts of water onto the desk below; Cooter insists there's no leak: "I'll show you the study," he offers.

Jack wants out, but as we all know, no one leaves the Bush Administration unless they really screw up. So Jack cooks up a monumentally inept plan.

There's some inspired comedy in "30 Rock's" depiction of a dissolute, desiccated and rudderless government run to ruin, populated by toadies given to kneejerk banalities. When Jack, trying to rally the troops, declares, "Rome wasn't built in a day," one gormless career hack replies, "Well, that's one theory."

Meanwhile, Liz fears she's pregnant and, in the requisite subplot that just doesn't work, Kenny the Page (Jack McBrayer) is in a monumental struggle to get his application to serve as a page at the Summer Olympics in Beijing in on time.

Here's hoping the keep Jack stranded in Washington a bit longer when the show returns next season, because they're tapping a rich comic vein there. And here's hoping Liz quickly forgets her vow at the end of the episode, because what she proposes is a reliably proven killer of quality TV.

- "30 Rock:" 9:30 p.m. Thursday, NBC Channel 4.

Cable network Bravo announced on Monday sinister plans to make it impossible for the ordinary American to go anywhere in public without being reminded of the reality show "Top Chef." Of course, Bravo wasn't so honest as to phrase it that way: They called their nefarious plot "major retail and merchandising partnerships created to extend the Bravo brand beyond the television screen and directly into the viewers' environment."

Some of the strategy isn't surprising or, even, offensive. "Top Chef: The Cookbook," which has been out for a month, fairly seems a no-brainer. "Top Chef: The 2009 Calendar," while nothing I'd want to see on my walls, is harmless enough, as is this fall's cross-promotion with a kitchen-housewares company that'll give you the book free if you spring for $400 in cookware (though, again, I intend to spend $400 in cookware over the entire span of my life).

"Top Chef's" 20-city nationwide tour, likewise, is not particularly odious - it will feature former contestants offering cooking demonstrations. The "Top Chef" culinary school, also featuring the TV contestants as instructors offering classes this summer in New York City, is pushing it, but has not yet utterly lapsed over into brazen bad taste.

But I start to draw the line with the "Top Chef" mobile game - what does your cell phone have to do with fine dining? And Bravo really plunges into the ninth ring of hell with its "Top Chef Crusining Experience," launching in a year, also featuring former "Top Chef" contestants giving even more cooking demonstrations that serve as the only respite from the mind-numbing tedium that can only come from being adrift at sea for weeks at a time.

Not that I have anything against cruises (see previous sentence), but it seems like Bravo's missing a good bet by not expanding the cruise theme to also incorporate some of its other reality programming and casting a wider net for potential customers. Since patrons will be eating nonstop, it would only be thoughtful for them to also offer a "Workout" seminar so that customers will still fit into their clothing at the end of the trip. And "Project Runway" demonstrations would teach cruisegoers, who will be financially depleted by journey's end, how to make their own clothing out of asparagus and tin foil. They could share some crack with the star of "Being Bobby Brown," dabble in whatever the hell "Hey Paula's" Paula Abdul is on and then lose some more cash in "Celebrity Poker Showdown" matches (hey, on TV the word "celebrity" has become so diluted that reality-show contestants qualify nowadays - just ask Kathy Griffin, star of "My Life on the D-List").

And, of course, they could throw in the "Real Housewives" of Orange County and New York and the cruise would be transformed into a floating key party. Naturally, they'd film everything and have yet another reality show.

C'mon, Bravo! If you're going to be cynical moneymakers, take it to its logical, Kurtzian conclusion!

Back during the writers strike, Fox was finishing up a few episodes of "Family Guy" without input from creator Seth MacFarlane, and MacFarlane decried the maneuver as "a colossal d!ck move." A couple of weeks ago, MacFarlane and some "Family Guy" writers sued Fox for breach of contract for unpaid work on the "Stewie Griffin: The Untold Story" DVD.

Now, it's hugs and kisses all around. $100 million will do that for you.

That's how much TV Week says MacFarlane is getting for a four-year deal with Fox Television that will include his work on "Family Guy," "American Dad," an upcoming spinoff show featuring "FG's" Cleveland character, potential live-action comedies (MacFarlane executive-produced the short-lived sitcom "The Winner") and, if all goes according to plan, a "Family Guy" movie. Not bad for a show that got cancelled by the network - twice.

Let's go to Fox TV Chairman Dana Walden for the requisite press-release quote, which is gushier and less corporate-ese than usual: "Seth is an incredibly talented guy whose kindness and generosity are legendary in this business, and there's no one more deserving of the kind of success that he's had and will continue to have in the years to come. He's also about the most entertaining meeting you'll take as a creative executive, and everyone here lines up just to be in a room with him."

To celebrate, MacFarlane will allow you to be in a room with him: He and his "FG" co-star Alex Borstein will headline a live show, "Freakin' Sweet!", this Saturday evening at the Ahmanson Theatre, benefiting Center Theatre Group's New Play Production Program. After the show, MacFarlane will use his $100 million to buy all in attendance a steak and a highball. Well, maybe.

George Costanza's father's collection of TV Guides may be nearly complete: After last week's hatchet jobs on the magazine's editors, there's a sense the print edition is not long for this world. Macrovision bought Gemstar, TV Guide's owner, mainly for the technology that creates listings for the cable channel and online; the magazine itself was more or less thrown in as an afterthought, a white elephant that's hemorrhaging money.

This, after decades as the magazine with the highest subscription base in America. Today, of course, it's a shell of its former self, a People Magazine Lite cluttered with frivolous gossip and childlike cheerleading for just about every show and sorely lacking the one thing people for which used to subscribe to it - the listings, which people of a certain age will recall fondly, riffling through the black-and-white pages when the chubby little thing arrived in the mail and checking off the shows that sounded promising to them, making a mental note to try to catch them, but knowing that convenient reminder in digest form would be there on the living-room end table.

But as TV evolved, TV Guide devolved. Cable gave the magazine more to write about, but it also diffused the star power of its cover stories - there were no shows watched by 30 million people every week -which seriously injured newsstand sales. It got to the point where they were featuring cover stories that had nothing to do with TV - hawking the big movie opening that week or NASCAR or pop singers or something, anything that might catch the eye of those in a grocery-store checkout line, since fewer TV personalities had the ability to move large numbers of copies. And the glut of channels made printing listings a logistical and paper-wasting nightmare, and with them being available online and from your cable or satellite provider, and with the advent of telegrazing via channel surfing, listings became expendable. Which probably inspired more channel surfing.

Ah, well, 55 years is a good, long run. It will be survived by TV Guide Channel, an eternal if less slick version of "Entertainment Tonight," and its online presence, defined by giddy gossip and vague spoilers for shows' upcoming episodes.

(Full disclosure: I once toiled for a couple of years for the L.A. bureau of the Canadian edition of the magazine, which had separate owners and content. At the time, it, too, had the highest circulation of any magazine in Canada; today, it has been reduced to a mere online presence. It was one of the most exasperating professional experiences of my life, if in fact "professional" is the appropriate word to use to describe that publication.)

I suppose this was inevitable (which doesn't make it any less depressing): TV Land, of all people, is determined to diminish its brand, so they're doing a reality dating show in which a cougar has her pick from a bunch of younger guys.

It was announced today (wouldn't this be something you'd want to keep quiet?); it'll air in 2009. Here's the requisite press-release-ese:

"We are thrilled to unleash this wild project onto TV Land's schedule and join other successful and fun-filled shows like 'High School Reunion' from Mike Fleiss," stated Keith Cox, executive vice president, original programming and production. "The TV Land audience is looking for entertainment with interesting and compelling storylines -- something Fleiss has proven he can deliver to our audience."

OK, just what audience out there is not looking for "interesting and compelling storylines?" And didn't NBC do something along these lines only they had younger women in the mix, as well? And didn't that utterly tank?

No title yet, but why they just don't go with "Cougar on the Prowl" is beyond me. And why ape the tired old "Bachelor" format? Just follow some desperate ladies around as they hit bars (the cameras will likely help them score) and capture them in their natural habitat and it can be repurposed as "Wild Kingdom" episodes.

It boggles the mind: McDreamy could've been McCranky.

Patrick Dempsey auditioned to play another iconic TV doctor, "House."

"I was one of many people up for that," he told me in a recent interview. (And yeah, like Warren Zevon's werewolf of London, his hair is perfect.)

"It wouldn't have been the right role for me," he conceded. This is a much better fit.

"Otherwise, I would've gotten it, you know, if I was right for that. But I knew when they had me come back, I knew I wasn't going to get it."

Things seem to have worked out well for Dempsey anyway - and, of course, for Hugh Laurie, as well.

More on Dempsey in Sunday's paper or at LA.com, if those guys see fit to post it.

For the broadcast networks, the past TV season has been one that all involved would pretty much like to forget. But, outside of Fox, no one's looking ahead with much gleeful anticipation, either.

The writers strike has played havoc with the networks' ability to cobble together schedules for the 2008-09 season, with fewer pilots to choose from to fill more holes in the schedules.

The Hollywood Reporter notes, however, that Fox should be fully loaded: It has a "Family Guy" spinoff, "Cleveland," two dramas from cult-fave showrunners, J.J. Abrams' "Fringe" and Joss Whedon's "Dollhouse" (starring Eliza Dushku), a Bernie Mac sitcom and two potential animated series based on live-action sitcoms - "Sit Down, Shut Up," developed by "Arrested Development's" Mitch Hurwitz and based on an Australian sitcom about dysfunctional high-school teachers, and, um, "The Pitts," based on a mercifully short-lived Fox sitcom a few seasons back. The idea being, I guess, that the latter will be more palatable if the characters really are cartoons instead of being broadly cartoonish.

At CBS, there's yet another Jerry Bruckheimer show, "Eleventh Hour," "Exit 19," starring Geena Davis as a single mom/police detective, "The Mentalist," which sounds a little like a serious version of "Psych" and starring Simon Baker and the comedies "Single White Millionaire" (starring Fred Savage) and "Worst Week."

ABC has been the busiest and most ambitious, developing 20 projects including the "Harry Potter"-inspired "Captain Cook's Extraordinary Atlas" and David E. Kelley's take on the British lost-in-time cop drama "Life on Mars."

The Beleaguered© CW has only three pilots in the works: a "Beverly Hills 90210" remake, a "Gossip Girl"-y "How to Teach Filthy Rich Girls" and medical drama "Austin Golden Hour." The CW just doesn't care.

(NBC has already announced its schedule for 2008 and beyond.)

In the past, upfronts were lavish affairs, with comedy bits, musical numbers and plenty of star power. No longer: Now that the networks are crying that they're just as poor as you and I, they're downgrading from a circus to an afternoon tea. Only Fox will present a traditionally blustery upfront and blow-out party (though it'd be nice if they could keep it from becoming the bloated leviathan of two years ago). ABC's presentation will last less than an hour; CBS's will include talking up its other media to advertisers; neither will have a post-upfront party. Meanwhile, The Beleaguered© CW will only have a party (to celebrate the simple fact that they're still on the air?), which they'll interrupt briefly to reveal what little they have to offer.

"It was really a half-assed idea when I pitched it to Carol," says Chuck Lorre, adding, "It's mind-boggling that it's happening."

Lorre is the co-creator and executive producer of "Two and a Half Men." "Carol" is Carol Mendelsohn, executive producer of "CSI: Crime Scene Investigation." The "half-assed idea" was for the two shows to swap out writers for an episode.

And so, Mendelsohn and "CSI" EP Naren Shankar put together an episode of "Two and a Half Men" (airing Monday) in which a dead body turns up and forensics investigators try to figure out if Charlie Sheen can add murder to his celebrated list of other vices, and Lorre and his colleage Lee Aronsohn cooked up a "CSI" episode (airing May 8) involving the murder of a sitcom star.

"Burning inside of me was the desire to do an autopsy on a sitcom diva," Lorre said in a phone press conference this morning.

"I wanted to fulfill Chuck's fantasy," said Mendelsohn, and we won't pursue that one any further.

When Lorre first suggested the cross-over episodes - which won't involve the casts, but will feature what he calls "Wonderful little cameos that are a wink at the audience" - Mendelsohn said she took the idea to Shakar, whose response was, "What a nut."

"We took it to the network and no one really took us seriously," she added.

Shankar recalled the shows' stars' responses:

Bill Petersen: "Are you crazy?"

Charlie Sheen: "Are you serious?"

Shankar confessed that he and Mendelsohn learned something about writing comedy: "We learned that puns are the lowest form of comedy."

"We learned it again and again and again," Mendelsohn added.

So, which show is funnier?

Mendelsohn said, "The 'Two and a Half Men' episode is one of the funniest I've seen."

"We're not patting ourselves on the back," Shankar quickly adds. "That's a tribute to Chuck and Lee. They did an incredible job."

"I laughed myself silly," Mendelsohn continued. "I loved their cast."

"It's a good thing that the comedy's funnier than the drama," Shankar conceded.

Aronsohn said, "It's safe to say that this is one of more dramatic episodes of 'Two and a Half Men,' and one of the funnier episodes of 'CSI.'"

"We managed to make a mutt out of both shows," Lorre semi-boasted, adding that this has given him a case of crossover fever that Katie Couric's current woes might help cure:

"If there are any changes in 'The CBS Evening News,' I'm throwing my hat in the ring."

- "Two and a Half Men:" 9 p.m. Monday, CBS Channel 2.
- "CSI: Crime Scene Investigation:" 9 p.m. May 8, CBS Channel 2.

What's this world coming to if you can't pose for a few pictures without getting a world of grief? Poor Miley Cyrus has had to apologize and blame herself for a Vanity Fair photo in which she appears to be topless and her hair is kind of frazzled, and people who can do the math know what that's supposed to mean.

Disney, who has been down this road before with former Mouseketeer Britney Spears and "Fully Loaded" Lindsay Lohan, launched an immediate crackback. Vanity Fair, in that Vanity Fair sort of way, issued a desultory yawn at the very idea that people who might be offended at something actually exist. And Jamie Lynn Spears complained that, like, why was Miley getting all this attention for a silly picture when Jamie herself has gone to all the trouble of getting knocked up?

(To be honest, I find Annie Liebowitz's work insufferably smug in general, and that one shot with pop Billy Ray busted my Ick-o-meter. And what's Vanity Fair doing, profiling the star of a Disney Channel show, no matter how rich?)

Anyway, to celebrate her bold new career direction, Cyrus announced her spectrum of upcoming projects and plans:

* A remake of "Chinatown," with her taking Faye Dunaway's role and Billy Ray essaying the part of Noah Cross.

* New single: A cover of The Andrea True Connection's "More More More."

* Dating Marilyn Manson.

* Striding the catwalk introducing Jean Paul Gautier's new leather collection.

* The inevitable online video, "Hannah Mountana."

The CW may not care about "Reaper," even though it's getting about the same number of viewers as "Gossip Girl" without any of the marketing hype, but ABC Studios, its producers, do, so they sent out a screener of tonight's episode.

In it, Andi (Missy Peregrym) sees Sam (Bret Harrison) behead a demon. As you might imagine, this is not good. Sam makes a deal with the Devil (Ray Wise) to get permission to explain his job to Andi. This is worse. Ben's (Rick Gonzalez) social life experiences an uptick. This, believe it or not, could be even worse.

"Reaper's" one of those shows that started out charmingly enough, what with the beheadings and all, but sort of crumpled under the demands of churning out a full season of episodes. There are a couple of laughs, but the plotting is sloppy and the direction that tries to distract you from the low-budget production in fact underscores the clunky way they avoid, um, executing certain maneuvers. Tyler Labine, amazingly enough, has not grown tiresome as Sock and in fact remains amusing, even though his punchlines aren't as sharp.

If The CW cancels this - which looks likely - ABC Studios should just move the show over to ABC Family. Its ratings couldn't get any worse, and could just possibly improve.

- "Reaper:" 9 tonight; The CW (Channel 5).

By the way: All the Coachella coverage has been diverted to the Daily News music blog. First entry: The Raconteurs save the day, plus the Verve, Fatboy Slim, Swell Season and Vampire Weekend; also, the exasperating ineptitude of every single Coachella employee on the face of the planet, why more old people in Palm Desert need to get cell phones so the phone companies will improve their crappy coverage in the desert, semi tanker trailers cuddling as art and the scourge that is marijuana.

Expect little in the way of Televisionary insight from me today (as if you have ever expected any) as I am soon to be en route to the Coachella music festival, just so I can discover what a true clusterf@%& of a traffic jam is like from which I will issue dispatches on the whole crazy hippie-vs.-Yuppie scene, what desert-sun-induced third-degree burns feel like, the resonant moral lessons to be cadged from a mob mentality … oh, and, yes, the music. There will be music.

We’ll also discuss how just how much tinier the already sizably tiny Prince looks from a football field or two away.

And what a 75-year-old or so man is thinking, performing Pink Floyd’s “Dark Side of the Moon” 30 years after the fact.

And what Sean Penn’s doing there onstage. (Really!)

Slow news day:

Since the economy’s bad, a cable-TV trade magazine thoughtfully suggests things you should cut from your budget before you axe your cable: Food, clothing, gasoline – you know, inessentials. But not subscriptions to cable-TV trade magazines.

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Even though The CW ceased screening episodes of “Gossip Girl” online in an effort to force viewers to actually watch the show the old-fashioned way, it had the same old lousy ratings it usually has: 2.4 million viewers, just as many as it gets for “Reaper,” except “Reaper” doesn’t have an expensively ambitious marketing campaign behind it.

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That p!ssing match between Viacom and CBS we discussed yesterday is stepping up: Viacom hired a former Showtime executive to run the cable network it created to show its movies on instead of selling them to Showtime.

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Yet again, the definition of the word “celebrity” trends downward as NBC announces the participants in its upcoming reality show “Celebrity Circus:” Antonio Sabato, Jr., former soap star and professional underwear wearer; Blu Cantrell, who made a record earlier in this century; Christopher Knight, who has made a career out of having played Peter Brady once upon a time; Janet Evans, who played in the Olympics back during the first President Bush’s Administration; Jason “Wee Man” Acuna, a “Jackass,” and Rachel Hunter, a woman who poses for pictures in various states of undress.

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TeeVee people are so sneaky: They’re getting the word “f@ck” on TV without actually saying the word “f@ck.”

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“Criminal Minds”’ season finale proffers a real head-scratcher for the Feds, per the press release: “(P)eople who seem to have nothing in common are being killed at random.” Uh, doesn’t that happen, like, all the time?

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And it’s a good thing this “Scarlet” TV show is advertising like crazy on the Internets, because otherwise, I wouldn’t know it exists: No one has sent me anything about it. It’s about some chick with a red eye. Honest, even its website doesn’t tell you anything about it, except to inform you that it’s a “hit new TV series” (before it has even aired) and it will change the face of TV forever, which is not true because plenty of incomprehensible television has preceded it.

A couple of months ago, I turned up on imdb.com, thanks to appearing in a Spanish documentary on Hollywood (I’d provide a link to that initial incredulously gloating entry, except that yet another problem with this blog server is an inability to distinguish Permalinks to entries older than a month. Boy, you get what you paid for).

I thought, hmm, this is interesting, and then, when my STARmeter jumped more than 1000% the following week – more than George Clooney, who at the time was nominated for an Oscar – I thought, momentarily at least, wow, this is exciting, and expected scads of big-bucks offers to come pouring in.

And, of course, they didn’t, and I quit looking at my imdb.com page. But in a rare idle moment this week, I returned, only to discover that my STARmeter rating has leapt 34% from last week, even though I have done absolutely nothing to merit this (not that I did anything to deserve an imdb.com listing to begin with). How did my rating ascend this late into my cinematic irrelevancy? No idea, since I don’t subscribe to the site’s deeper information. Anyone who does who can explain this to me might just get a cheesy TV-promo tchotchke in the mail.

Here we were, all convinced that if anyone’s bullet-proof in the Television industry, it’s Les Moonves, and then along comes this story about someone who sounds even more bloodthirsty than CBS’s COO: Philippe Dauman, who wants to rule Viacom once Sumner Redstone keels over or steps down or whatever it is media moguls do to create raging turf wars.

Recently, Viacom-owned Paramount Pictures flipped Les the bird, refusing to take his lowball offer for showing its movies on Showtime and announcing its own cable-TV channel. (They may have been hacked off by Les’s announcement of a CBS Movies division that obviously hasn’t come to anything yet.) CBS and Viacom split up their assets in 2005, but Dauman want’s to … well, let’s let the New York Post explain.

“(D)auman's ultimate goal, which factored into the Paramount-Showtime negotiations, is to continue driving CBS' stock price down to the point where Redstone can justify booting Moonves. … ‘Dauman's dream is to get rid of Moonves and put Viacom and CBS back together again,’ said one source who has worked with both execs.”

Chinks in Moonves’ Tiffany-encrusted armor have been showing in the past year. As with all the networks, ratings are down, pretty seriously; CBS hasn’t had a new hit in a while (the one new show from this past season that has been renewed for 2008-09, “The Big Bang Theory,” has sort of limped along since returning from the writers strike) and it recently had a show, “Secret Humiliations of the Stars,” cancelled after but one airing. And we probably don’t have to bring up that whole Katie Couric thing again.

So time to hire that food taster and get someone besides your chauffer to start your Town Car, Les. We’d prefer Les to stick around, even if he does keep “Big Brother” on the air, because he’s good with the insults aimed at his competition.

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You know what else may be in trouble? “American Idol,” that’s what. Well, not really, but people do like to be drama queens and so any downtick in the ratings for such a colossal ratings behemoth apparently merits a measure of hand-wringing.

But also, it’s a pretty significant downtick – in past seasons, the show generally got, like, 30 million or so viewers an episode; last week, just a hair under 23 million watched the world’s splashiest amateur hour. These days, if a lot of network shows lost 7 million viewers, they’d have negative ratings, so that’s a fairly significant drop. Nonetheless, it’s still the most-watched show on TeeVee, so it won’t be going anywhere anytime soon. Your call as to whether that’s a good thing.

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Finally, The New York Times tries to divine some meaning, some bigger picture, some essence of the Zeitgeist out of George W. Bush’s appearance on “Deal or No Deal” last night, and fails. But it was a fool’s errand to begin with – no one could find meaning in Bush or “Deal or No Deal.” Let’s just say America has become its own self-parody and be done with it.

The people putting together “Ugly Betty: The Book” had a problem: They hit upon the fairly inspired idea of presenting it as an issue of Mode magazine, but that made it a trade paperback and would shave $5-$10 off its cover price.

Enter the trusty cardboard slipcase and all was right with the world.

“Ugly Betty: The Book” (Hyperion, $25) is for undying, undiscerning fans. It offers a lavish number of photos of the stars and has interviews with all the principals, but not really probing interviews, just generic “How-I-got-the-job” interviews – it’s an EPK* in handy book form.

There are some witty snippets from scripts strewn throughout, but it would’ve been nice had they offered even more. There are a few amusing beauty tips from the show’s characters’ perspectives.

But – and this seems a major oversight – the book, for all its color and flash, doesn’t fully exploit the show’s distinctive and hilarious production design. Outside a couple of shots of Wilhelmina’s office and some props, there’s nothing celebrating Mode’s splendidly outré office design. There’re precious few shots from the show’s silly fashion shoots, as well.

Instead – and this is where I got insulted – there’s about 20 pages of product placement, labeling the Dolce & Gabbana and Yves Saint Laurent dresses and the Prada and Jimmy Choo shoes worn by the characters. Had the book been online, you no doubt could’ve clicked through to purchase all this stuff. Yes, they made it look like a magazine, but they priced it like a hardcover. They shouldn’t’ve taken up so much space with advertising.

To paraphrase a line from the show: “Ugly Betty: The Book” is superficial, but at least it knows it’s superficial.”

* EPK: Electronic Press Kit, in which talent are interviewed by publicists, who lob them softballs.