Young Viewers

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.

My friend Kelly has been through a lot. In the 10 years I've known her, she's overdosed on diet pills, been badly burned in a house fire, joined a cult, landed in drug rehab, been stalked by a fellow addict, suffered a miscarriage, been shot in the belly, overcome amnesia, called off a marriage to her friend Brandon at the altar, been raped and then shot and killed her attacker. And all by the age of 25. Now I worry that she will make the mistake of marrying the wrong man. In a few days, she must choose between her fiance, Matt, a boring attorney, and her lifelong friend, Dylan, a tortured soul who has been through equal amounts of life trauma.

Maybe we don't belong here. We just don't fit in."That was Brenda Walsh (Shannen Doherty) of "Beverly Hills 90210," speaking last year shortly after she and twin brother Brandon (Jason Priestley) moved to California. They had gotten off to a rocky start at their new high school, but she was echoing a sentiment voiced by other characters on other shows that have become hits.Dr. Joel Fleischman (Rob Morrow) said much the same thing when he arrived from New York in the town of Cicely, Alaska, on "Northern Exposure.

OK, television lovers, get out your maps of TV Land, because we have a new locale to chart. It's an island called Glory, and it's somewhere between Dawson's Creek and Jessica Fletcher's Cabot Cove. And, if its architect, Kevin Williamson, can build on the foundation that he lays in tonight's pilot, Glory Island could be a regular weekly stop for millions of young viewers. Glory Days is a new WB series that is part murder-mystery-suspense and part twentysomething relationship drama from the creator of the feature film Scream and the WB teen drama Dawson's Creek.

Good heavens!Now there's a machine that will kick the &$?%! out of your television. And maybe replace it with something nice.It's called the Foul Language Filter, or, more formally, TVGuardian. It's a black box you hook up to your cable box or VCR that reads the closed-captioning signal encoded into a show.When the box picks up one of 100 or so words or phrases deemed offensive, it mutes the audio for a second or two. That way, you don't hear what you don't want to hear or, more to the point, what you don't want your kids to hear.

Young viewers of WGN, on North Arundel Cable TV channel 3, can watch"The Cosmic Challenge . . . For Kid's Sake," to learn about space, and enter a contest to win a trip to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's Space Camp in Huntsville, Ala.The show will bebroadcast at 8 p.m. Feb. 3.Viewers who learn enough about space to answer nine questions cansend their answers to WGN's Cosmic Challenge, 2501 Bradley Plcae, Chicago, Ill. 60618, by 5...

The new TV season hits rock bottom tonight with the debut of "Princesses" at 8 on WBAL (Channel 11).This sitcom, aimed at teen and pre-teen girls uses a potent fairy tale formula -- living to attract men and shopping for designer labels -- to teach sexism and consumerism. It's deplorable."Princesses" stars Fran Drescher, Julie Hagerty and Twiggy Lawson (the '60s-era model) as three women who, through a series of events, wind up sharing a fabulous, rent-free, penthouse apartment overlooking Central Park for a year.

Anyone still wondering why Connie Sellecca ran away fro ABC's "Baby Talk" last fall will get an answer tonight when the series debuts with Julia Duffy taking Sellecca's place.The first episode, which airs at 8:30 on WJZ (Channel 13), is a mess.The sitcom, based on the 1989 feature film "Look Who's Talking," was on ABC's fall schedule this year. But Sellecca bolted shortly after filming began, and the show was postponed.The premise is that Maggie Campbell (Duffy) is a single mom with an 8-month-old baby who talks.

In reviewing "Savage U,"  MTV's  sex advice show featuring Dan Savage, I predicted that it was going to be a culture-wars lightning rod at some point. The show debuted with an episode set at the University of Maryland April 3. Well, it didn't take long. On April 7, Brent Bozell, publisher of the right-wing media watchdog website NewsBusters went absolutely off the rails with a column attacking MTV and Savage as merchants of "smut. " Here's how Bozell started his column, and he was only warming up: MTV is now trying to lure young viewers with a saucy sex show in the “advice” category.

As one newsmagazine takes the high road, another goes low. Or, for every action, there is a reaction. As the CBS newsmagazine 60 Minutes scores record ratings with a steady diet of substance and interviews like the one correspondent Steve Kroft did on Sunday with President-elect Barack Obama, ABC's 20/20 tonight features an "exclusive" interview by Diane Sawyer with Ashley Dupre. She's the "high-end call girl" at the center of the scandal that brought down former New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer.