Prime Time

Barry Levinson and Tom Fontana, the executive producers of "Homicide: Life on the Street," return to prime time tonight on BBC America with "Copper," starring Tom Weston-Jones. (That's Weston-Jones sitting with them in the picture above, taken in California where they were promoting the series.) Set in 1864 in New York, the series is cop drama meets frontier saga, and I like it. I loved "Homicide," "Oz" and Levinson's last TV effort, "You Don't Know Jack," a docu-drama look at Dr. Jack Kevorkian, starring Al Pacino, for HBO. But I hated "The Jury," a series the duo did for Fox. They've had some failed projects since "Homicide" and "Oz," but I think "Copper" could be a winner.

Mitt Romney's campaign got its shot at introducing Paul Ryan to America Saturday morning in front of the USS Wisconsin in Norfolk, Va. But the more important introduction in terms of mainstream America came Sunday night courtesy of '60 Minutes,' which scored the first sit-down TV interview with the Republican team. I'm glad Schieffer and '60 Minutes'  were the ones the Romney campaign chose to talk to. The veteran Washington journalist and the production team from the most successful news show in the history of the medium handled the conversation as well as it could be handled.

NBC will air a one-hour look at the career of Michael Phelps at 7 tonight, the network announced late Saturday night. "Michael Phelps: America's Golden Champion" will feature what the NBC Sports is calling an "exclusive" interview by Bob Costas done with the Phelps at the end of his final day of competition Saturday. "America's greatest interviewer sitting down with the world's greatest Olympic champion makes for an inspiring piece of television," NBC Olympics executive producer Jim Bell said in a statement announcing the prime-time special.

Does it feel as if NBC and its affiliates are getting a little greedy with its London coverage? As one who has defended the network's right to try and make as much money as it can off the games in hopes of offsetting the $1.18 billion it paid for rights, I have to admit even I have been getting a little queasy as to the way  that long-held patterns of network prime-time programming and affiliate news are being bent in pursuit of extra profits....

Maybe the best way to cut through all the spin and counterspin on the Olympics is this: Last week, NBC was saying it would lose money on the Olympics. Yesterday, it said it might break even. Today, the network is saying it could turn a profit on the $1.18 billion investment. "Yeah, we think there's a small chance, a chance we could make a little bit of money over the next couple of weeks," Mark Lazarus, chairman of the NBC Sports Group, said in a conference call from London Thursday when asked if the network might turn a profit on the games.

UPDATES WITH RESPONSE FROM NETWORK SPOKESMAN: NBC said Monday that the problems experienced over the weekend with its Olympics live stream had been worked out. Not exactly. But after a morning of signing in and getting bounced offline repeatedly, and then spending long stretches looking at freeze frames instead of action while the little wheel on the screen went round and round in the afternoon, I have to admit I saw both of Phelps' races in real time Tuesday -- sort of. I didn't actually see him touch the wall at the end of 4X200 freestyle relay where the American men took the gold and made Phelps the most decorated Olympian in history.

If viewers to WBAL's 6 p.m. news were confused, they had the right to be. Outside of a graphic that appeared onscreen during the sports portion of the news, the only mention of Michael Phelps' failure to win a medal in his first event Saturday came in a graphic shown onscreen during Gerry Sandusky's sports portion of the show. And Sandusky warned viewers to look away before the news of Phelps' fourth-place finish was shown on the screen if they didn't want to know. Sandusky never verbally reported the results, according to WBAL General Manager Dan Joerres.

Baltimore's Jim McKay anchored the first American telecast of the Summer Olympics in 1960 from a primitive CBS studio in Grand Central Terminal in New York City. Coverage of the Rome Games totaled 20 hours and cost the network $394,000 in rights fees. On Friday night, starting with the Opening Ceremonies, NBC Universal will launch what will ultimately total 5,535 hours of Olympics coverage across six network and cable outlets and one live streaming website over 17 days and nights.

I did not think I'd ever see a better medical documentary series than the Emmy-Award-winning “Hopkins 24/7” that aired in 2000 or its sequel, “Hopkins,” which won a Peabody Award in 2008. The backstage access, immediacy and range of gripping real-life drama that ABCNews Executive Producer Terence Wrong and his team captured at Baltimore's world-renowned medical institution were landmark. But with “NY Med,” which premieres at 10 p.m. Tuesday, Wrong surpasses his earlier work in terms of prime-time storytelling without sacrificing any of the cultural seriousness or grand reach of the Hopkins series.

Anthony Bourdain will join CNN in 2013, the network announced today. The chef, author, actor will host a weekend show focused on food, travel and 'cultures'. CNN has been under much corporate pressure to do something about its ratings, and the news of this hire is that it moves CNN off the news model it has been following for decades. It also appears to cede journalistic control as the show being produced outside CNN. It will be fascinating to see what this means about CNN's commitment to journalism.