Viewers

A failure of the Comcast Cable television system left many would-be viewers in the downtown area unable to watch last night's city election returns and a live cable television broadcast of a presidential debate in Baltimore. Comcast customers in postal ZIP codes 21201 and 21202 discovered only "snow" on their screens if they tried to tune to any Comcast channel -- including the debate among Democratic presidential candidates at Morgan State University, broadcast on cable by the Fox News Channel, and results of the municipal primaries.

The fate of a recurring character on NBC's Law & Order: Criminal Intent will be placed firmly in the hands of the show's viewers. In what may be a first for TV, producers and cast have shot two endings for the episode airing tonight, which revolves around the character Nicole Wallace, played by Olivia D'Abo. Wallace will die on one coast and live on the other. Viewers then will have a chance to vote online on whether she comes back. "Cool counts, and that's all we thought, that this would be pretty cool," said series star Vincent D'Onofrio.

A Philadelphia nightclub party was where 28-year-old Jessica Scott made her video-dating debut. In front of a camera at the party, sponsored by the cable company Comcast Corp., she was asked about her worst date. Her ideal date. If she had a superpower, what would it be and why? Then Scott set up a profile on Comcast's partner in the dating service, hurrydate.com. About a week later, her profile was on television, and the e-mail started flooding in. Scott found that watching videos of potential dates gave her a true sense of their looks and personalities.

A few years ago, it looked like Court TV was all about courtrooms, FX Network was for tough guys, and AMC ran only movies. In the coming months, however, cable TV viewers will start to see things change. Court TV has just become TruTV. FX ads will explain "There is no box" that its shows fit into. And AMC will launch its third original scripted program. As cable TV has exploded into hundreds of channels, networks must grow increasingly sophisticated to stand out amid the competition and maintain their double-digit annual growth.

The first thing Paul Romer, the executive producer of "Big Brother," wants viewers to know is that his new "reality" series premiering tonight on CBS is not "The Truman Show" and he is not Christoff, the beret-wearing, television producer-Svengali played by Ed Harris in that film. "The big difference between `The Truman Show' and `Big Brother' is that `The Truman Show' was fiction, and `Big Brother' is real," Romer said in a telephone conference call to promote the series that puts 10 strangers in a house for three months and lets us play peeping tom via 28 cameras and 60 microphones.

There will be no Top-10 lists, no behind-the-scenes peeks into Jay's Garage, no Mess O' Potamia (or anything else), no eerie forecasts of what life will be like in the year 2000. In fact, there likely will be no original late-night programming at all for the near future, at least not until show-business writers agree to end their strike and go back to work. The Late Show with David Letterman's lists will be blank, The Tonight Show with Jay Leno's garage will be padlocked. The Daily Show's reports on Iraq will go mute, and the crystal balls at Late Night with Conan O'Brien will reveal nothing.

Ten years ago, fishbowl programming as we now know it began with a simple premise - stick seven attractive young people with strong personalities in a cool apartment. Then start the cameras rolling, sit back and watch. Sure, the strangers in the first cast of MTV's reality show "Real World" in 1992 seemed more hip and artsy than most people we knew in our real worlds. But the interactions in their very public petri dish rang true enough that we watched anyway. "This is the true story of seven strangers picked to live in a loft and have their lives taped.

Dan Rather, clearly disturbed that many Americans seem to be regarding President Clinton's trial with a shrug, signed off CBS' coverage last Thursday with a not-so-mild slap at the public apathy.CBS was just about to complete its broadcast of the opening statement by House prosecutor Henry Hyde, coverage the ratings would later show drew about 1.5 million fewer viewers to the network than on a normal weekday afternoon. But Rather and most of his network news colleagues, who can read poll results as well as anyone else, already knew Americans were tuning out the proceedings.

It's a weekend of air mattresses, sleeping bags, couches, pets and even some kids in TV newsrooms as Baltimore's network-owned and affiliate stations went to "all hands on deck" to try to cover one of the area's biggest storms in decades. "Covering a storm like this is energizing and frustrating at the same time," Michelle Butt, news director at WBAL-TV, said Saturday morning. "When you have a storm like this, it takes a toll on your equipment and your people. Things break, people get stuck out in worsening conditions, and you worry for your staff's safety.

With viewer interest in this election at an all-time, television-age low, the question is how the networks and cable channels plan to find an audience for tonight's coverage.At CBS and ABC, the answer is computer-generated bells and whistles with lots of talk about "virtual set technology" and "touch screen interfacing" -- talk that stops just short of promising viewers they will see the flying cows of "Twister" whizzing past Dan Rather and Peter Jennings as the exit poll data gets chewed to a prime-time cud."