Word: cbs
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...CBS is currently developing a TV movie for next season to tell the Elian Gonzalez saga, which includes a 4 1/2 month legal battle for custody of the six-year-old. The broadcast will last approximately...
When the Nielsen ratings are released, CBS executives will find that "Walker, Texas Ranger," "Touched By An Angel" and even the much ridiculed "Falcone" will have had more viewers than the final round of the 63rd Masters Tournament...
...Warner Bros. set in Los Angeles isn't a NORAD bunker. But the similarity is no accident. When executive producer George Clooney and crew re-create Sidney Lumet's 1964 nuclear chiller Fail-Safe, with CBS execs and director Stephen Frears (High Fidelity, Dangerous Liaisons) watching nervously from a trailer outside, they'll be facing another cold war-era specter: live television. Airing at 9 p.m. E.T. (delayed P.T.), this pet project of Clooney, a longtime lover of live TV whose father Nick was a newsman and variety-show host, will be CBS's first theatrical production in 39 years...
...CBS's production is faithful to the gripping (if didactic) original, in which an accidental bomber launch against Moscow triggers a chain of excruciating decisions. In a way it's a natural for live TV--taut, unfolding largely in real time. But the original drew its charge from the threat of war with an empire that no longer exists (though its weaponry does). So why do it now? Because George Clooney wanted to. He made Fail Safe a priority when he pitched shows to CBS; the network in turn insisted that he act in it (he plays a bomber pilot...
...course, you could make Fail Safe without doing it live, but you would lose the "What if they goof?" factor. As with game shows, TV is borrowing from its past here to address 21st century ratings worries. "Television is marked more and more by event programming," says CBS-TV president Leslie Moonves. (CBS recently announced plans for a live version of On Golden Pond.) Says consultant Ethel Winant, who was an associate producer of the 1950s' live-TV anthology Playhouse 90: "The actors are naked in front of millions of people...[and] the audience is part of that experience...