Degeneres

CBS yesterday named Ellen DeGeneres host of The 57th Annual Primetime Emmy Awards telecast to be broadcast at 8 p.m. Sept. 18 on CBS. "We are thrilled," said Nina Tassler, president of CBS Entertainment. "She's an incredibly multi-talented performer whose comedic skills and energy promise to deliver an Emmy Awards broadcast to remember." DeGeneres emceed The 53rd Annual Primetime Emmy Awards on CBS in 2001. "Ellen has demonstrated her extraordinary ability to connect with the television viewing audience," said Dick Askins, chairman of the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences.

At Salon.com, Mary Elizabeth Williams is not happy with the Associated Press Stylebook 's abandonment of the nonsensical prohibition of hopefully as a sentence adverb, and collaterally not happy with me for my part in prodding the editors toward that decision. Unfortunately, whatever merit her argument might have had was vitiated by her resort to the Hoary Shibboleths to bolster her authority. "Yet I'm lax about ending sentences with a preposition," she said, and well she might be, since we have long since abandoned the eighteenth century's English-must-be-like-Latin approach to usage.

NO ONE CAN PREDICT how the 21st century will regard tomorrow's episode of "Ellen," in which actress Ellen DeGeneres "comes out" as a lesbian in fiction, as she did recently in fact.Will the situation comedy be remembered as a cultural watershed that begat a greater acceptance of homosexuality? Or will it amount to fleeting ratings gimmickry relegated years from now to a trivia question?This much we know: On prime-time TV, trivia comes much more easily than watersheds. When Captain Kirk kissed Lieutenant Uhura on "Star Trek" 30 years ago, it did nothing to smooth the path for interracial relationships.

Towson University's students will have a featured spot on "The Ellen DeGeneres Show," although what they'll be doing and where they'll be doing it remains a mystery. The show's producers have received permission from Towson to stage an impromptu gathering at 7 p.m. Wednesday somewhere on campus, said Gay Pinder, a media relations specialist for the university. Details of what those gathered will be asked to do, as well as where they will be asked to do it, are still being ironed out and will be communicated via Twitter as the time gets closer.

LOS ANGELES - Ellen DeGeneres says she learned something about television viewers from her last sitcom experience and that, as a result, she doesn't want her new show to be about social issues the way the landmark Ellen was. "It's very hard to do a sitcom about very important political issues," DeGeneres said during a press conference yesterday to promote The Ellen Show, her CBS series that premieres Sept. 17. "I don't think people want to see that. They want to just laugh, and I understand that now. This time, it's all about being funny," she said.

Richardson family attends viewing Liam Neeson looked distraught yesterday as he greeted grieving family members and friends who attended a private viewing for his wife, actress Natasha Richardson. Neeson and sons Micheal, 13, and Daniel, 12, attended the viewing at New York's American Irish Historical Society, as well as Richardson's mother, Vanessa Redgrave, and her sister Joely Richardson. The viewing followed Thursday night's tribute on Broadway, when theaters dimmed their lights for the Tony Award-winning actress, who died from bleeding in the skull caused by the fall she took on a ski slope.

Degeneres on the road Before her sitcom, and before all the coming-out/dating Anne Heche hoopla, Ellen DeGeneres was a stand-up comedian. Now she's back on the road, on a tour that hits Washington's Lisner Auditorium April 16 and 17, and which culminates in shows in New York that will be filmed for an HBO special. It's been a busy year for DeGeneres: Her talk show makes its debut in September, she has a book due in the fall, and she recently lent her voice to the Disney-Pixar animated film Finding Nemo, due in May. To catch the stand-up star as she perfects the material for her TV special, call Ticketmaster at 410-492-SEAT, or check out www.ticketmaster.

What a mess.Despite trying so hard to be equal parts "Fargo" and "Double Indemnity," "Goodbye Lover" succeeds only in being leaden. It's an unfunny black comedy and an unmoody film noir featuring one of the least enjoyable casts of characters in recent memory. And it's directed with great solemnity by Roland Joffe, who seems under the impression he's still making "The Killing Fields."Patricia Arquette is Sandra, the movie's fatal femme, a blond dynamo with a wicked pair of legs and an even more wicked disposition.

New series featuring Ellen DeGeneres and Richard Dreyfuss are expected to headline CBS' announcement of its fall schedule today in New York. Overall, the network will add five new dramas and two sitcoms to its lineup - several still targeted at the older baby boomer demographic CBS has stuck with in recent years. But the two series expected to be officially canceled - "Diagnosis Murder" and "Nash Bridges" - draw some of the oldest audiences anywhere on television. The network, which suddenly found a way to attract young viewers last year with "Survivor," which primarily appeals to audiences in their 20s and 30s, might also add another reality program to its fall schedule with "The Amazing Race" from producer Jerry Bruckheimer.

If it truly is more blessed to give than to receive, there must be a special place in heaven for TV hosts. First in line at the Pearly Gates? Has to be Oprah Winfrey, who presented Pontiacs to an entire studio audience earlier this season and then handed out $15,000 worth of her "Favorite Things" to a screaming, sobbing mob of teachers. Next is Ellen DeGeneres, who raised more than $450,000 for hunger-relief organization America's Second Harvest in her recent "Thanks-for-Giving" fund-raising drive, then followed up with "12 Days of Giveaways," rewarding audiences with such trinkets as digital cameras.

Richardson family attends viewing Liam Neeson looked distraught yesterday as he greeted grieving family members and friends who attended a private viewing for his wife, actress Natasha Richardson. Neeson and sons Micheal, 13, and Daniel, 12, attended the viewing at New York's American Irish Historical Society, as well as Richardson's mother, Vanessa Redgrave, and her sister Joely Richardson. The viewing followed Thursday night's tribute on Broadway, when theaters dimmed their lights for the Tony Award-winning actress, who died from bleeding in the skull caused by the fall she took on a ski slope.

With baby boomers approaching retirement, age-related macular degeneration (AMD) is a coming epidemic that will affect millions of Americans, according to the National Institutes of Health. Based on published data, an estimated 8 million Americans ages 55 and older are at high risk to develop the disease, which causes blindness. Until recently, AMD was a poorly understood disease with little progress in research. Major breakthroughs have been made in understanding the disease, but there is more that needs to be done, says Dr. Morton F. Goldberg, chairman of the National Neurovision Research Institute of the Foundation Fighting Blindness in Owings Mills and former director of the Wilmer Eye Institute at Johns Hopkins Hospital.

The losses continue to mount. A baseball nation laughs as a baseball clubhouse weeps. Fans can't eat, players can't sleep and the Orioles just can't win. There is hope, though. There is reason for optimism. As the Orioles take their nine-game losing streak on the road, I've figured out how to snap them out of this funk. I've found the secret! Or more accurately, The Secret. You've heard about The Secret, right? It has been featured on Oprah and spoofed on Saturday Night Live. Wikipedia calls it a cultural phenomenon, which sounds pretty legit to me. It's a school of positive thinking built around the Law of Attraction - yes, we're getting technical here, so roll up your intellectual new-age sleeves - wherein one's thoughts can control the entire universe.

What's the best treatment for macular degeneration? The short answer is a new drug called Lucentis, approved by the Food and Drug Administration in June, although the drug has side effects, is extremely expensive, and is useful for only the rarer form of the disease. Macular degeneration and its new treatments were the focus of five separate articles in last week's New England Journal of Medicine. There are two kinds of macular degeneration - a disease of the retina that affects more than 9 million Americans and is a leading cause of blindness in people older than 55. In the "dry" form, which 90 percent of patients have, there is a loss of the light-sensing cells in the retina and the cells that nourish them.

When his car breaks down, a U.S. marshal stumbles upon a town where the government has been secretly stockpiling geniuses. As you'd expect, it's a pretty kooky place. Joe Morton stars in Eureka (9 p.m.-11 p.m., Sci Fi). Network VERONICA MARS -- 8 p.m.-9 p.m., WUTB, Channel 24 / Her boyfriend dumps her, kidnaps a baby and runs. Then things get worse for Veronica. UPN. HOUSE -- 8 p.m.-9 p.m., WBFF, Channel 45 / After the Baltimore "thing," Stacy and House try to act normally. Fox. GILMORE GIRLS -- 8 p.m.-9 p.m., WNUV, Channel 54 / Sure, Luke likely would have hated the recital, but he's mad Lorelai didn't invite him. WB. ACCORDING TO JIM -- 8 p.m.-8:30 p.m., WMAR, Channel 2 / The more Cheryl says he reminds her of Jim, the less Dana likes her new beau.

Hitting the right notes with musical and pre-taped segments in a television award show can be tricky. A cautionary example might be that of Rob Lowe dancing with a woman dressed as Snow White in the opening of the 1989 Oscar telecast. The juggling act becomes even trickier when a telecast primarily known for its glitter and glitz comes on the heels of a national catastrophe. In 2001, for example, the Emmy Awards show was twice postponed before finally airing in the wake of terrorist attacks.

I'm a little wary of writing advance reviews of newsmagazines these days, since current events -- Haiti being the most recent example -- have a way of taking precedence and pre-empting, if only temporarily, the segments sent out for preview. However, tonight's scheduled "Turning Point" report is sufficiently riveting to take the chance.* "Baseball" (8 p.m.-10:30 p.m., Channels 22, 67) -- Ken Burns, I suspect, is the historian's equivalent of a classical-music critic -- the closer he gets to the present day in terms of his chosen field, the less fun he has. The last quarter-century of baseball is crammed into this final installment, and, with instant replay rising to the fore and making images almost too common, there's a little less grace in this concluding episode than in all those before it. I also feel, quite strongly, that Mr. Burns ended "Baseball" prematurely, before getting to the 1993 Phillies-Toronto Blue Jays World Series.

An estimated 42 million viewers tuned in to see Ellen Morgan come out, making Wednesday's episode of ABC's "Ellen" one of the highest-rated shows of the season.The audience, which was three times as large as normal for the sitcom starring Ellen DeGeneres, will probably make "Ellen" the most-watched show of the week.In comparison, "ER" was No. 1 last week with an audience of about 37 million viewers. January's Super Bowl XXXI was seen by just under 129 million American viewers. And the last episode of "M*A*S*H" -- broadcast in 1983, when there were fewer people and fewer televisions -- had an audience of more than 50 million.