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Tom opens calling it the "hardest fought season ever. " I'm not sure about that, but I will say that this is one with a lot of strong competitors, few loathsome personalities, and a satisfying final three. It starts with the pro dancers (the "real" pro dancers, not just the troupe) dancing to a song I would probably know if I were 20 years younger, but I'm not and the only 16-year-old in this house is a cat. At the end of the song, we get the pros walking the floor with their celebrity partners.

Thursday morning, ABC senior White House correspondent Jake Tapper posted a TwitPic of "Good Morning America" co-host Robin Roberts with the cutline "woman of the hour. " I can appreciate a newsperson congratulating a colleague, and I have to admit I was glad ABC News and not NBC News got the exclusive interview with Barack Obama to which the cutline referred. Headlines and history were made in the interview with Obama saying he was in favor of same-sex marriage. But the image struck me as part of a wrongheaded discourse generated by ABC and propagated by many of my critic colleagues celebrating Roberts and the network for getting this "scoop.

Steve Bornstein, president of the ABC television network, resigned yesterday as the struggling network made its first major move to improve its image with advertisers who will be spending tens of millions of dollars on fall lineups in coming weeks. Bornstein, 50, has been head of the ABC network for only a year, and is not of particular importance as an individual executive and programmer. What's significant about his resignation is how plain it makes the fact that the Walt Disney Co., which owns ABC, is deeply unhappy with the network's performance.

The new ABC reality TV series "Ball Boys" opens with the motto: "Every great moment in sports leaves something behind. " This network series set in a Baltimore sports memorabilia shop tells the stories of what happens to some of the stuff left behind. That's not a bad premise. Think of it as a jock lover's version of "History Detectives. " But that's not all that's happening in the series, which takes viewers inside Robbie's First Base in Lutherville, where they will meet owners Robbie Davis Sr. and Robbie Davis Jr., as well as workers Lou "Sweet Lou" Brown and Robbie "Shaggy" Reier.

ABC announced yesterday it has canceled the acclaimed drama Once and Again. While it has one of the most devoted audiences on television, Once and Again never generated ratings numbers large enough to match that fan loyalty. It will end its three-year run with a series finale April 15. Part of the problem is that the show - which stars Sela Ward and Billy Campbell as a couple dealing with the everyday obstacles of their blended family - bounced around ABC's schedule. The network shuffled it around to seven different timeslots in its three seasons, finally placing it at 10 p.m. Mondays midway through this season.

The following editorial appeared in the Chicago Tribune Nov. 24: IN THE battle of the networks to compete with cable TV's edgy and uncensored fare, a recent special on ABC scored unexpected attention - from the government. The Victoria's Secret Fashion Show opened more than a few eyelids when its televised lingerie exhibition uncovered body areas seldom seen on network TV. It also prompted about 600 telephone calls and e-mails to the Federal Communications Commission, according to Commissioner Michael Copps.

In a bold move that reflects a revolutionary realignment taking place in American media, Disney-ABC will begin next month offering four of its most popular series, including Desperate Housewives and Lost, on the Internet for free. In doing so, the network will become the first to offer prime-time programming to Internet users without asking them to pay for it. Dubbed "experimental" by the media conglomerate, the strategy addresses viewers' growing desire to choose when and where they watch their favorite shows and the need of advertisers for their commercials to be seen by the targeted audience.

The news that Charles Gibson will be leaving Good Morning America to anchor World News Tonight solves one problem for ABC but raises another. Gibson's departure this week opens a spot at Good Morning America just when the show's producers were hoping to have a solid team in place to battle NBC's powerhouse Today show, which will lose longtime co-anchor Katie Couric after Wednesday. As soon as Gibson's move was announced last week, speculation erupted about the future of the show, a perennial runner-up to Today.

LOS ANGELES - Indicating that there is nowhere ABC won't go for viewers, the network yesterday announced an off-beat fall promotional campaign that targets men's restrooms, among other places. The restroom campaign will be on behalf of the prime-time sitcom "Norm," starring Norm MacDonald. Spoofing its own "Must See TV" slogan, ABC will put posters on the walls in front of restroom urinals in New York and Los Angeles featuring MacDonald next to such headlines as "Must Pee TV." And, using CD-ROM technology, MacDonald will "speak" to those standing at the urinals.

Top-rated ABC yesterday announced a fall schedule so conservative and seemingly uninspired that the biggest news is what isn't on it: The critically acclaimed, cutting-edge "My So-Called Life," starring Claire Danes and Baltimore native Bess Armstrong."

There is a reason more people watched the Grammys this year than did the Oscars last year: The Oscar telecast has truly come to suck. Sunday night's 84th Annual Academy Awards was actually painful to watch. I cannot think of any major TV franchise that has become so disconnected from cultural relevancy as the Oscar telecast has in recent years. And this one with Billy Crystal was truly pathetic. As I listened to Crystal doing schtick from Las Vegas circa 1960, I wondered if in 1917 Russia the czar had a comedian like Crystal working the palace in St. Petersburg, telling tired jokes from the 19th Century to keep those inside the crumbling walls of privilege distracted from the Bolsheviks in the streets who were about the change the world.

In November, I advanced one of CNN's  debates with a piece hoping aloud that Wolf Blitzer would not let Newt Gingrich bully him as the the former Speaker of the House had been doing to other debate moderators. Here's a bit of what I wrote: And so it is that I will come to TV tonight hoping to see one of the few anchors who has the stature and the credibility to call out Gingrich take the candidate of bluster on for his phony game of pounding the press by telling moderators how "stupid" (one of his favorite words)

ABC will enter the cable-dominated TV terrain of such shows as "Pawn Stars" starting March 24 with the debut of "Ball Boys," a 12-episode, Saturday-afternoon, reality TV series set in Baltimore County at Robbie's 1st Base. ABC announced the show on its portion of the TCA press tour in Los Angeles. Here's an account from "Channel Guide" magazine: Ball Boys comes from the producers of Pawn Stars and will follow the action at Robbie's 1st Base in Baltimore, and the family-like relationships of the sports fanatics who work there, Robbie Sr. and Junior, Sweet Lou and Shaggy.

Jason Winer was directing Julie Bowen on first episode of "Modern Family" when inspiration struck. "In the initial draft, Julie's character was described as mildly controlling and neurotic," Winer says of the suburban sitcom mom. "But what she didn't have in that draft was this idea that she was formerly a bad girl who had kind of reformed herself. " Winer thought the extra history could add an important dimension to Bowen's Claire Dunphy — and make a difference to the story featuring her teenage daughter, Haley, who just starting dating.

Through the magic of television, America and 180 other countries will watch tonight as ABC's Extreme Makeover: Home Edition unveils a new home for a 24-year-old quadriplegic patient at Baltimore's Kennedy Krieger Institute. But in fact, Brian Keefer has been living in the house since it was finished in June, and he says it gives him "so much independence, it's incredible. " Keefer was paralyzed from the chest down in a gymnastics accident in 2008 and has been a patient at Kennedy Krieger since.

The national TV audience for Baltimore's Grand Prix on Sunday fell short of projections offered by the city when the deal bringing the race to the Inner Harbor was first announced. Sunday's race was seen by an average of 591,000 viewers, according to Nielsen Media Research figures released Wednesday by NBC. That was one-sixth of the TV audience of 3.5 million viewers projected last year by the office of Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, who also predicted the Grand Prix telecast would "change the way the world sees Baltimore.

Chances are, you will remember your neighbor Marcy's guacamole, the beer-shilling frogs and the Phil Collins halftime spectacular from Sunday's Super Bowl better than anything from the four-hour pre-game show, and John Filippelli hopes to change that. Filippelli is the vice president of production for ABC Sports, and it's under his watch that the network's Super Bowl telecast falls. It's telling that the other day on a media conference call he was willing to invest the most promotional capital on the pre-game show rather than ABC's main game coverage.

ABC will enter the cable-dominated TV terrain of such shows as "Pawn Stars" starting March 24 with the debut of "Ball Boys," a 12-episode, Saturday-afternoon, reality TV series set in Baltimore County at Robbie's 1st Base. ABC announced the show on its portion of the TCA press tour in Los Angeles. Here's an account from "Channel Guide" magazine: Ball Boys comes from the producers of Pawn Stars and will follow the action at Robbie's 1st Base in Baltimore, and the family-like relationships of the sports fanatics who work there, Robbie Sr. and Junior, Sweet Lou and Shaggy.

I am too tired to go crazy about this. And there really are so many hugely more important things going on the world practically every day. But ... I cannot let the addition of HLN host Nancy Grace to the lineup of ABC's "Dancing with the Stars" pass without comment. It is such an exquisite example of how calculating and exploitative prime-time network TV can be. Here is what I find debased about the selection of Grace: She probably got the job and the $500,000 that goes with it because she decided on her own that Casey Anthony was guilty and then, ignoring any sense of respect for the judicial system or fair play, pounded away on Anthony's alleged guilt day and night.

The band members met for the first time just two hours ago, but they're already hard at work on a rock classic, and to be honest, it's not sounding half-bad. A rhythm guitarist pounds out G and F chords. A bass player settles on a solid beat. A singer steps up to the mike. "The things they do look awful c-cold," he croons, sounding every inch a latter-day Roger Daltrey, longtime frontman of The Who. "Hope I die before I get old. " But something's amiss with the keyboard player.