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SOAP SEASON 4 Long before Desperate Housewives, ABC took soap-opera conventions over the top. Racy for its time (for ours, even) the 1977-81 series features pitch-perfect work from Katherine Helmond, Richard Mulligan and Robert Guillaume, who reprised his sarcastic- butler role on Benson. The outrageous final season offers story lines involving a Latin American revolutionary, a possibly alien baby and a kung-fu fortress. Meanwhile, Billy Crystal, as one of TV's first gay characters, begins channeling the spirit of a 90-year-old Jewish man--which, come to think of it, he's been doing ever...
...Worlds star purchased a sonogram machine, which can cost as much as $200,000, to keep an eye on the fetus growing inside his fiancé KATIE HOLMES. Exhibiting some newfound restraint--no upholstered furniture was harmed--in a Barbara Walters interview airing this week on ABC, the actor, 43, said he and Holmes, 26, plan to marry next summer or early fall, after the baby is born. As for that sonogram machine, "I am gonna donate it to a hospital when we are done," the star said. O.K., as long as he doesn't expect to give the kid measles...
...Earl for NBC, which buys it from Fox's production studio.) But the deals may multiply quickly. DirecTV has said it is pursuing deals with other networks, and Fox, its sister company in News Corp., is experimenting with distributing shows online. NBC and others are exploring an arrangement like ABC'S with iTunes. And while the networks are selling the same shows they put on-air, expect future offerings to be sweetened, like DVDs, with extras and original content...
...enough people buy into the system, it could change the equation that determines a hit. Forrester estimates, for example, that Desperate Housewives earns ABC about 45¢ in advertising per viewer per episode, but clears the network about triple that when sold through iTunes. So if you buy the show, you are literally three times as important as someone watching for free. If watching VOD became widespread enough, the business model of "free" TV would be a little more like HBO's--in which what counts is not getting a lot of people to watch your show but getting a relative...
...course, you could envision a lot at this embryonic stage. "These are the first steps into new avenues," says Stephen McPherson, president of ABC Primetime Entertainment. "This is all a frontier for everybody." But whether the big new TV distribution medium ends up being iTunes or VOD or something else, the trend throughout entertainment is portability. Viewers can get pared-down mini-episodes of shows, including Desperate Housewives, on their cell phones through services including GoTV. Fox has created one-minute cell-phone offshoots of 24, and a mini-spin-off of Lost is forthcoming. Time Warner (TIME's parent...