Time Warner Trims Three
Three veteran Time Warner Cable execs
are exiting in a major restructuring of the top ranks. Vice Chairman and COO
John Billock and President
Tom Baxter, both at the end of their
contracts, will exit over the next several months, with their jobs consolidated
into a single president/COO position. Executive Vice President and Chief
Marketing Officer Chuck Ellis is also heading
out the door.
Insiders say Time Warner Cable Chairman and CEO Glenn Britt wants a more efficient management structure.
Billock heads marketing, ad sales and corporate affairs, while Baxter runs the
cable company's system operations. Warner restructured its management ranks
in 2001, when Britt took the top job and Billock and Baxter were installed atop
the country's second-largest MSO.
PTC Slams CBS “Orgy”
The Parents Television Council has
filed a complaint with the Federal Communications
Commission over CBS' Dec. 31
rebroadcast of an episode of Without a Trace containing what the PTC said
were scenes of a “teen orgy party.”
PTC says it complained about the episode when it first aired but that
the complaint was never addressed since it was part of CBS parent
Viacom's consent decree settlement with the
commission.
“The fact that this shocking episode aired only days after the
consent decree was announced proves that CBS has no intention whatsoever to
abide by the spirit or the letter of that agreement,” said the group.
Back in November, Viacom agreed to pay $3.5 million to settle all
outstanding indecency fines, proposed fines and complaints against it except
Janet Jackson's Super Bowl “wardrobe
malfunction,” which it is expected to challenge in court.
PTC had to lodge the complaint for its Central and Mountain time zone
viewers. The show aired at 9 p.m. there. On the East Coast, it aired at 10
p.m., which is within the FCC's 10 p.m.-6 a.m. safe harbor for indecency.
PTC also said it was mailing the FCC a copy of the episode. CBS
declined to comment on the PTC complaint.
Shine Rises at Fox
Fox News Channel has promoted prime
time production chief Bill Shine to senior
vice president of programming. Shine was primarily responsible for the
production end, keeping Fox News' evening shows on track. The promotion puts
him in charge of all programming throughout the day, including greater
responsibility for developing new shows.
Shine says no one should expect any big changes. “It's not a
matter of 'fixing' something, but improving things that we have throughout
the day. With the success of the network, I think there is even more room for
our ratings to go up.” Shine replaces Kevin
McGee, who was recently put in charge of Fox's radio syndication
unit.
Ex-Marketwatch Columnist Settles With SEC
Former CBSMarketWatch.com columnist
Thom Calandra has agreed to pay $540,000 to
the Securities and Exchange Commission to
settle a complaint against him.
The SEC charged that Calandra had “betrayed his reader's trust,”
by using his column, “The Cassandra Report,” to make over $400,000 in
profits by “scalping”—buying low-priced shares in thinly traded stocks,
then selling them after he had promoted them in the newsletter to artificially
inflate the price.
Calandra said of the resolution, “I am happy to have finally reached
a settlement with the SEC on this matter. It has been a challenging year, to
put it mildly.”
Alley Excises Craig Crack
A line using the “f-word” to describe Jenny
Craig has been removed from the pilot of Showtime series Fat Actress.
Worries over the FCC? No. This is pay
cable, home of such colorful vocabulary lessons as The
Sopranos.
In fact, the f-word is still in. Instead, a Jenny Craig reference was
excised, in deference to the star of the show, Kirstie
Alley, who has been hired as the company's spokeswoman.
CBS' Dramatic Developments
CBS has ordered a new pilot from
Jerry Bruckheimer, the man behind
CSI: Crime Scene
Investigation and five other CBS hits.
The network has signed the pilot for American Crime, a drama about the struggles
of a criminal prosecutor who fights suburban injustice while balancing the
challenges of being a new mom. Executive-produced by Bruckheimer,
Jonathan Littman and Jim
Leonard, the pilot is one of at least three Bruckheimer projects in
development pipelines for next season. He's also working on
E-Ring, a
Pentagon drama, for NBC, and an untitled drama
for The WB about a pair of mismatched lawyers.
The network has also ordered a pilot for a science-fiction drama about a team
charged with making “first contact” with a mysterious alien life form.
A female government contingency analyst leads the group of scientists
and military personnel in Threshold, which is executive-produced by
David Heyman and David
Goyer, written by Bragi Schut and
directed by Goyer. Co-owned Paramount is the
studio.
Reality Vet Tops Twentieth First-Run
Twentieth Television has tapped a
reality-show veteran to head up first-run programming development and
production.
Paul Buccieri, currently executive
producer of Endemol's upcoming
NBC reality show I Want To Be a
Hilton, is joining Twentieth Television in the newly
created position of president of programming, effective Jan. 17. High on his
to-do list will be A Current
Affair, the company's first-run revival of the access
magazine, as well as a daily talk show hosted by Suze
Orman. Buccieri will oversee all first-run program development and
production for the distributor, reporting to Twentieth Television President and
COO Bob Cook, who is in charge of both
first-run and off-net.
Buccieri executive-produced reality show The Next Great Champ
for Fox, which is co-owned with Twentieth.
Before joining Endemol, Buccieri was senior VP, program development,
for Chris-Craft/United Television, and before
that senior VP of non-fiction programming at All American
Television.
BET Rebrands
Black Entertainment Television will
launch a new on-air look and logo for its 25th anniversary in 2005.
The net's new tag line will be “It's My Thing,” billed as more
“down to earth.” The star in BET's logo, which has been on the left side,
next to the B, will shift to the right side to suggest less emphasis on the
star and more on the viewer, according to BET President Debra Lee.
At the Critics Tour in L.A., the network announced three shows for
first quarter 2005: the second season of reality show College Hill (which
will return Jan. 27 at 9 p.m.); a four-part series on social and political
issues called The Cousin Jeff
Chronicles (premiering March 2005); and
Rip the
Runway, a hip-hop fashion show (premiering March 24).
Logo Catches 'Angels'
In an unusually large spending splash, MTV's startup gay network Logo has bought basic cable rights to
HBO epic AIDS miniseries
Angels In
America. The acclaimed six-hour series is a major
purchase for a startup channel, particularly at MTV Networks, which tends to
scrimp on programming for new networks. “It's something we had to have,”
says Brian Graden, Logo president and MTV
programming president. He wouldn't disclose the terms, but other HBO
miniseries have sold for more than $5 million.
News Corp. Recapturing Fox
News Corp. said it plans to buy the
18% of Fox Entertainment Group it doesn't
already own. News Corp. is offering to acquire the shares by trading its own
stock, 1.9 News Corp. shares for every Fox share. That values the deal at $4.9
billion.
Fox is primarily composed of News Corp.'s U.S. entertainment assets,
Fox's broadcast and cable networks, TV stations, and 20th Century Fox movie studio. News Corp. sold the chunk
to the public in 1999 for $2.8 billion, giving the then-Australian company a
U.S. trading currency. Taking Fox public has proved something of a
disappointment, as it has fairly consistently underperformed News Corp. shares
in the market.
Stations Bite on Big Apple 'CSI'
King World has sold the latest entry
in CBS' CSI franchise, CSI: NY, in 75% of
the country for weekend broadcast syndication starting in 2008.
Stations are getting 6.5 minutes of ad time to sell in the show, with
the syndicator getting 7.5 minutes.
The quick sale is no surprise. CSI: NY's big brother,
CSI, is
going gangbusters on weekends, averaging a 5.3 national household rating
season-to-date. That makes it by far the top-rated show among the weekend
hours. This week, CSI was the sixth-rated show in all of
syndication, consistently ranking in the top 10.
CSI:
NY is cleared on stations in the top-30 markets,
including WCBS New York, KCBS Los Angeles, WBBM Chicago, KYW Philadelphia, and
WBZ Boston.
Hollander Heads Infinity
Viacom has named Joel
Hollanderchairman and CEO of Infinity
Broadcasting, the 183-station radio group once headed by former
Viacom President Mel Karmazin. Hollander, who
had been president and COO since May 2003, succeeds John
Sykes, who is moving to the TV side to oversee new MTV cable
networks.
Tim Green To Host 'Current Affair'
Fox Sports commentator and former
National Football League star
Tim Green will become the new
Maury Povich, hosting Twentieth's
reincarnation of syndicated magazine show A Current Affair, said Bob Cook, president
and chief operating officer of Twentieth Television (both Twentieth and Fox are
owned by News Corp.). A Current
Affair is slated for a spring launch on the Fox O&Os
and will also be available to other interested stations at that time.
TNT Green-Lights Drama Duo
Turner Network Television has
green-lit two new original recurring dramas, The Closer, starring Kyra Sedgwick, and Rush, starring Gary
Cole. Both shows will receive a 13-episode order and will premiere
in summer 2005. The
Closer is a police drama about a detective who transfers
from Atlanta to Los Angeles to head a special unit of the LAPD on sensitive,
high-profile murder cases. Rush is about an elite crime-fighting team,
made up of federal and local law enforcement agencies, which works undercover
to nab L.A.'s 100 most-wanted fugitives.
King Takes $2.5 Billion Swing
Boxing Promoter Don King has sued
ESPN for $2.5 billion, charging that he was
defamed in a SportsCentury biography.
King charges that the May 14, 2004, airing of the bio “intentionally
and recklessly portrayed Don King in a false light.” ESPN spokesman
Mike Soltys wasn't commenting, but he
pointed out that SportsCentury is “a Peabody and Emmy
Award-winning series of more than 250 biographies that is widely respected for
its journalistic quality.
FCC General Counsel Exits
Federal Communications Commission
General Counsel John Rogovin is exiting to
become a partner in the communications law firm of Wilmer, Cutler, Pickering, Hale & Dore. Deputy
General Counsel Austin Schlick succeeds
him.
Food Sets Table for 2005
Food Network said it is preparing to
plate 10 new series for 2005, including the much-promoted Iron Chef spin-off,
Iron Chef
America, which debuts Jan. 16 at 9 p.m. (Its first new
show, a rundown of top cook-offs dubbed Food Network Challenge, debuted Jan. 9).
Also on the new series menu: Take It
Off (premiering March 2005), a show featuring “Calorie
Commando” Juan Carlos Cruz;
The Dave Lieberman
Show (April 2005), about eating and entertaining like
royalty on a shoestring (potato) budget; and The Next Food Network Star, in which one
lucky cook gets a taste of Food Net stardom.
Correction
In the Jan. 10 issue of B&C,
the corporate parent of WOAI San Antonio was incorrectly identified. The
station is owned by Clear Channel.
