Kennedy Center Honors

Just when it seems, in this year of Paris Hilton and Average Joe, as if television and American popular culture might have reached a point of hopeless decline, along comes The 26th Annual Kennedy Center Honors: A Celebration of the Performing Arts to say it ain't so - again and again and again and again and again for each of its five acclaimed honorees. This year's program honors country singer Loretta Lynn, rhythm and blues performer James Brown, director Mike Nichols, comedian Carol Burnett and violinist Itzhak Perlman.

The Kennedy Center Honors program is a strange hybrid. Part variety show, part awards program, part pop culture spectacle and national celebration, you might not think the parts would mesh - especially when the recipients range from Hollywood actors to Italian tenors on the same night. But in tonight's 24th annual edition of The Kennedy Center Honors: A Celebration of the Performing Arts, the disparate parts not only mesh, but they also click, crackle, sizzle, pop and light up the screen with moments of great entertainment and emotion.

Every year, CBS uses the slowest TV week of the year -- the week between Christmas and New Year's -- to showcase the annual "Kennedy Center Honors" program and spotlight the careers of some of this country's most talented performers. This year, the spotlight falls on Victor Borge, Sean Connery, Judith Jamison, Jason Robards Jr. and Stevie Wonder."The Kennedy Center Honors" never wants for worthy honorees -- everyone from Leonard Bernstein to Fred Astaire to B.B. King to Bob Dylan has been feted, each with a segment in which fellow performers pay tribute.

It is only fitting in a year when politics so dominated television that the networks' new fall season was largely ignored in favor of presidential coverage that the last big prime-time entertainment special of the season is steeped in politics. I am talking about the sublime Kennedy Center Honors at 9 tonight on CBS. This is the 31st, and I can't remember more than two that didn't leave me feeling inspired. Again, there is a great and diverse cast of recipients: choreographer Twyla Tharp, actor Morgan Freeman, singer George Jones, singer and film director Barbra Streisand, and rock musicians Pete Townshend and Roger Daltrey.

Tonight's TV programming sets up a conflict of interest for viewers interested in the cultural arts: Broadcast at the same time, on different networks, are a 90-minute tribute to Leonard Bernstein and this year's two-hour "Kennedy Center Honors." Having seen both on preview tapes, I'd hate to have to make that choice -- but I'd love to have to make it more often, rather than just during "dead week" in December, one of the few times the networks don't care much about ratings.* "The Nanny" (8-8:30 p.m., WBAL, Channel 11)

We are knee-deep in what is annually one of the worst stretches of the television season. Commercial overload, coupled with a three-week hiatus of new episodes as the networks reload for the launch of their midseason replacements, serve as a nasty reminder of how bad American television can get. And, then, there is The 25th Annual Kennedy Center Honors: A Celebration of the Performing Arts, a delight of holiday programming that connects us in our homes...

Capping a career marked by disability, a triumphant comeback and even an Oscar nomination, Baltimore pianist Leon Fleisher proudly joined a coterie of pop-culture figures this weekend in accepting the Kennedy Center Honors. The Peabody Conservatory faculty member, who spent nearly four decades playing a left-hand-only repertoire because of a neurological disorder, was feted alongside filmmaker Martin Scorsese, singer Diana Ross, comedian Steve Martin and singer-songwriter Brian Wilson.

Washington -- If this were England, Joanne Woodward mused they would be knighted. But this being America, they were simply -- and more democratically -- honored.But this also being Washington circa the Bush-Clinton transition, this year's Kennedy Center Honors -- celebrated this weekend by a head-turning celebrity crowd flocking to a city that usually makes do with committee chairmen and undersecretaries for its people-spotting -- seems more big-D Democratic than little-D democratic. Not only is any arts gathering assumed to be more Democrat-leaning, the annual Kennedy Center honors first were held in 1978 -- during the last period the big-Ds were in the Big Time.

I was not ready to see Bruce Springsteen bemedalled at the Kennedy Center Honors last week, and I still am not ready. It was less than a year ago the Boss did that fantastic slide across the stage on his knees at the Super Bowl halftime show, thrusting his crotch at 90 million Americans on live TV, and here he was, listening to various nobodies tell him how great he is, with a medal around his neck, and his neck looked a little jowly. The Kennedy Honors is for the Extinguished: It's America's way of saying, "Sit down and take a load off, time's up, old-timer."