Audience

Presidential elections always challenge the press: The pace of events and competitive pressure invariably war with the media's duties to provide balance and perspective. Readers, viewers and listeners inevitably become more critical news consumers as their personal preferences solidify. This year, the polls instruct us, the country is likely to approach November so exquisitely divided that serious analysts actually wonder whether Michael Moore's anti-administration agitprop might tip the electoral scales.

LES PETITS Chanteurs d'Aix-en-Provence (The Little Singers from Aix-en-Provence) delivered a spellbinding performance Sunday at St. Michael's Roman Catholic Church in Mount Airy. Nearly 300 people were treated to an evening of powerful voices and melodic harmonies of these very talented French boys and young men. The choir is made up of about 40 French boys and young men ages 7 to 20 from the city of Aix-en-Provence, a vacation paradise in southeastern France and the birthplace of painter Paul Cezanne in 1839.

When visitors come, you want to show off the good stuff. Crabs on the Fells Point waterfront. Sailing the Inner Harbor. Walks around Fort McHenry. The dolphin show at the aquarium. An afternoon Orioles game. Recently, I had guests who wanted to see the other Baltimore, the one with the bodies and the bloodshed, the one with the boarded rowhouses and empty neighborhoods, the one TV news and TV entertainment have blurred into one macabre pageant of urban ills, dysfunction and misfortune.

The stunning Lena Olin once said she found men most attractive when they didn't think they were attractive. She was speaking of Oliver Platt in Casanova, but she might have been talking about Paul Giamatti. He earned a cult following by bringing gusto to roles such as the officious, tyrannical radio programmer called Pig Vomit in Private Parts. He won widespread acclaim as the cantankerous cartoonist Harvey Pekar in American Splendor. But he found a whole new following as the depressed, divorced novelist and wine expert in Sideways who stumbles into love with that knockout Virginia Madsen.

Overall, the effort was none too shabby for a show that took a year to plan and closed on its opening night.In fact, the debut of First Night Annapolis, a safe, family-oriented New Year's Eve celebration of culture and the lively arts, was a lot of fun. It was a very nice evening, spent with thousands of friends and neighbors who just wanted to have a good time.Everyone and everything seemed to cooperate to make the evening work. The night was brisk and clear, and people who missed one event just shrugged and went off to find another.

It takes more than faith to pull off a comedy about nuns who can-can, crack one-liners and reprimand audience members for chewing gum.So, the cast and crew of "Nunsense II -- The Second Coming" rely on clever staging and their own backgrounds to present the frenetically paced, show-within-a-show -- within the confines of a theater-in-the-round.The play, running through Oct. 3 at Toby's Dinner Theatre in Columbia, is the sequel to "Nunsense," a similarly paced production. Both were written by Dan Goggin.

HBO's "Game Change," the docudrama about the John McCain and Sarah Palin presidential campaign in 2008, was a big ratings winner for HBO in its Saturday premiere drawing 2.1 million viewers. That was the largest debut audience for an HBO movie since Something the Lord Made" in 2004, according to the Hollywood Reporter. Read that here . That film about a pioneering medical worker at Johns Hopkins was also filmed in Maryland, by the way. It drew an audience of 2.6 million.

The premiere of Sunday night's series finale of HBO's The Wire was seen by 1.1 million viewers, according to Nielsen Media Research. That represents about 4 percent of homes that subscribe to HBO - or less than 1 percent of the American TV audience. By comparison, the June 10 finale of HBO's crime drama The Sopranos drew 11.9 million viewers, according to Nielsen. The cable channel's surfer series John from Cincinnati was seen by 1.2 million viewers Aug. 12 - the last night it aired before being canceled at the end of its first season.

Baltimore provided one of the nation's strongest TV and online audiences for the inauguration of President Barack Obama on Tuesday, just as it did during the primaries, caucuses and debates last year. Baltimore had the fourth-largest audience in the nation with 44.3 percent of all TV households watching live inaugural coverage between 10 a.m. and 5 p.m. Tuesday. That translates to about 487,000 homes. The Raleigh-Durham market in North Carolina was the top audience with 51.2 percent of homes tuned to live coverage.

How many times have we found ourselves talking back to a talk show, knowing darn well nobody's listening but the dog?"I bet every one of us has seen a talk show and wanted to raise our hand and ask a question like, 'How could you have been so stupid?' " says Mike Easterling.For frustrated fans of TV talk shows, the WJZ-TV program manager offers a little comic relief in the form of a play he's written, "Talk Show.""It's a spoof on the television talk show genre and it's interactive," Mr. Easterling says.