Word: hbo
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...free-market conservatives against family-values conservatives, free-speech liberals against Big Government liberals, and a normally pro-business Congress and White House against megacorporations. (Among them is TIME's parent company, Time Warner, which owns a major cable business, the WB broadcast network and several cable channels, including HBO and TNT.) A war that has TV programmers scrambling for cover--or at least pixelation--and has led Howard Stern to decamp from his broadcast-radio shock show for a satellite-radio gig in January...
...just a few years. In 1999 it was shocking for Fox's sitcom Action to use obscenities that were bleeped out. Now the same words are bleeped routinely (often barely) all over network TV--and go unbleeped on basic-cable networks like FX and ESPN, let alone Showtime and HBO. In an episode of Fox's since-canceled Keen Eddie, three men enlist a hooker to arouse a horse to extract semen from him. The PTC recently protested an episode of NBC's Medium in which the police burst into a bedroom to find a suspect in bed--with...
...tightly to their product. Semel, who was brought in to run Yahoo! after 30 years in Hollywood, is determined to change that. In November he hired Lloyd Braun, the former chairman of ABC Entertainment who greenlighted shows like Desperate Housewives and Lost and earlier helped develop The Sopranos for HBO, to head up a new media division in L.A. and spearhead the company's venture into Tinseltown. Next month the Silicon Valley--based Yahoo! will open its media headquarters in Santa Monica, a mere limo commute from Hollywood's major studios...
...curious thing is going on in the U.S. Even as the nation is writing gays out of the definition of its most exalted relationship, gay writers--like Housewives creator Marc Cherry and Nip/Tuck creator Ryan Murphy--are behind the TV shows that are most provocatively defining straight relationships. HBO's Six Feet Under, the multilayered story of the lives and loves of a family that runs a funeral home, sprang from the mind of gay screenwriter Alan Ball (American Beauty). Before it, HBO's Sex and the City, which set the standard for frank talk about women and love...
...unlike Larry David's self-lacerating HBO show, Fat Actress, with its cartoon conception of Hollywood, lacks any sophistication. The comedy is way broad (ba-dum-bump!) and when it hits, it's very funny, as when Alley complains about the double standard for chubby actors ("Jason Alexander looks like a freaking bowling ball!"). When it's bad--more often--it's amateurish. When she pitches a sitcom to Zucker, he answers, "Oh, I'm sure it will be huge. Enormous." This is as Cole Porter--esque as the repartee gets. Other plots hinge on black men who like...