How will Lifetime transition from "woman in distress seeks revenge" movies to "hot tranny mess" is beyond us, but The NY Times reports that NBC Universal, Bravo's parent company, has lost their precious “Project Runway" to the "femme-centric" (per Variety) network. NBC Universal filed a lawsuit in Manhattan today, accusing the show's owner, the Weinstein Company, of violating rights by pairing up with Lifetime, which offered $150 million. From the Times:The suit asserts Harvey Weinstein,......

WNBC’s newscast rebranding (back to "News 4 New York") was not the only change this week for the station. Vickie Burn, from NBC's DC affiliate WRC, is the new Vice President of News & Content aka news director, replacing Dan Forman. (The rebranding was just coincidental, according to the station.) Rumor has it that WNYW will get a new news director as well: Dianne Doctor, former news director at WNBC and WCBS. She is......

Don’t adjust your television sets, because since Monday WNBC has been using "News 4 New York" in on-air mentions and on-screen graphics, switching gears from "Newschannel 4" (and "Newschannel 4 HD"). If you are from the Tri-State Area, you may remember the station used "News 4 New York" from 1980 until 1995. The old CGI opening included a bolt of lightning and a giant 4 heading towards the viewer (out of the Statue of Liberty's......

After audiences shoo-ed off Bee Movie, Jerry Seinfeld is looking to create some buzz on the small screen again. The NY Post is reporting that "the comedian will be playing himself in an exaggerated reality, in a show set in New York." Reportedly it will be a rip off of Curb Your Enthusiasm, Larry David's HBO series (David co-created Seinfeld). The series is said to be aiming for a June premiere, but what's in store?......

Senator John McCain at a campaign stop in San Antonio, TX by Eric Gay/AP CNN, NBC, and the AP are projecting Senator John McCain will clinch the Republican presidential campaign, after winning the primaries in Texas, Ohio, Vermont and Rhode Island and clinching the 1,191 delegates needed. A source tells NBC that President Bush has invited McCain to the White House tomorrow and will endorse him. McCain will be having a victory party in......

Photograph of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama debating in Cleveland by Kiichiro Sato/AP Senator Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama faced off for the 20th time last night in Cleveland, Ohio, as they head towards the big March 4 primaries next week. The rivals for the Democratic presidential nomination "traded insults," as they accused each other of negative attacks regarding their health care policies. The NY Times described Clinton as "relentless" - insisting on "responding......

Part of the NBC 2.0 philosophy has been to put cheap programming on air as a measure to cut corners and save money. Even before the writers' strike this has meant a string of programs that are “unscripted,” such as cheesy game shows and of course the requisite fakeality nonsense. So taking quarterlife, a Web 2.0 based online show/online community from the creators of thirtysomething, My So-Called Life, and Once and Again, and sticking it......

CBS and NBC Boldly Go On Line With Classic TV CBS has started streaming some of its back catalog of programs on its website, or to me more accurate the back catalog of programs the companies that now comprise CBS. The biggest highlight is that all three seasons of Star Trek in original form are available. Also offered are two seasons of The Twilight Zone, and the first seasons of Hawaii Five-O, MacGyver, and Melrose......

Photograph of KITT braving the streets of NYC by neps on Flickr Thankfully NBC’s new version of the classically cheesy 1980s show Knight Rider (Sunday 9:00 p.m., WNBC 4) is not a remake, but a continuation of the old in this two hour movie/back door pilot. Of course, this means there are some changes, such as the presence of David Hasslehoff being reduced to a cameo, the two leads are ex-soap stars (the way the......

After Hillary Clinton's started airing a commercial in Wisconsin questioning why Barack Obama declined to appear in another debate, Obama came back with his own ad. The voiceover says:After eighteen debates, with two more coming, Hillary says Barack Obama is ducking debates? It's the same old politics, the phony charges, and false attacks. On health care, even Bill Clinton's own labor secretary [Robert Reich] even says Obama covers "more people" than Hillary and does......

Hillary Clinton's February flop continued today as voters in Virginia, Maryland and D.C. turned out for Barack Obama by nearly two-to-one margins (in D.C. he won by 75% to 24%). According to exit polls, Obama not only did well with young voters, blacks and independents but, surprisingly, with certain demographics Clinton's been counting on: senior citizens, women and blue collar voters. Polls suggest 49% of those who voted for Obama were white and voters over......

Rangers 5, Canadiens 3: Fans who tired of FOX's marathon Super Bowl pregame show may have migrated to NBC to catch this inspired effort by the Rangers. Playing in Montreal -- did any of them get to watch the Super Bowl, or even want to watch? -- the Blueshirts scored five unanswered goals after trailing, 3-0, early in the second period. Chris Drury had the go-ahead goal, and Scott Gomez, Michal Rozsival, Martin Straka and......

Photograph of Giuliani, with wife Judi next to him, speaking to supporters in Florida by John Raoux/AP After early results put John McCain and Mitt Romney in a "too close to call" race, McCain won the Florida primary. Rudy Giuliani, who once led national polls, looks like he'll finish in third place (though Mike Huckabee is a close fourth as of 10PM), which is actually his best finish after the primaries and caucuses in......

The NY Times' editorial board has made its endorsements for the upcoming primaries. While the Times' selection of Hillary Clinton over Barack Obama is interesting (the Times cites experience), we're very taken with the editorial about the Republican candidates. The Times thinks John McCain is the best Republican candidate and notes some problems with him. But the heart of the editorial is an evisceration of former mayor Rudy Giuliani:Why, as a New York-based paper, are......

We can’t get excited about or honestly recommend any of the rubbish spewed forth by the WGA strike-hurting networks in place of actual scripted programs. At this point, we would like to never see the Endemol logo on air again. (Apparently Endemol is Dutch for “mindless garbage television.”) So we were a bit surprised when we heard that NBC actually was importing a version of one of our favorite British programs, Top Gear. Top Gear,......

Last November American Gangster went head-to-head with Bee Movie at the box office, but now the film faces an off-screen battle. The NY Sun reports that Former DEA agents are suing NBC Universal for being falsely depicted on-screen. They feel their characters were portrayed as villains and the lawsuit, filed yesterday in federal court in Manhattan, claims "the movie defamed hundreds of DEA agents and New York police officers by claiming at the end that......

Due to the Writer's Guild of America strike, Hollywood's party, the Golden Globes Awards were transformed from a boozy, fun dinner party to a press conference where presenters from entertainment programs like Extra! and E! News got to announce the winners. Yes, it was as painful as it sounded (Giuliana Rancic, it's not about you); many said they couldn't believe they were announcing the winners but said they would prefer it with the stars.......

If you are as big a fan of reality shows as we are, Fox’s Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles (Sunday, 8:00 p.m., WNYW 5) is very welcome. Thanks to the WGA strike, there will be only eight episodes, but still this looks like an action packed romp based on the popular film series. Despite being based on the space time continuum bending robot filled movies, this has an all new cast with Lena Headley and......

NBC News to Cover Golden Globes To plug the giant hole in the network’s schedule this Sunday, caused by the WGA not giving a waiver to Dick Clark Productions for the Golden Globe Awards, NBC has handed the whole thing over to its news division. First at 7 p.m., there will be a two hour Dateline NBC filled with interviews of those actors will ignore the Screen Actors Guild’s request to boycott the show (to......

Senator John McCain won the Republican primary in New Hampshire, with the race being called for him early on. Senator Hillary Clinton beat Senator Barack Obama by a few thousand votes in a very close race. Comebacks all around! Update, 11:06PM: During her victory speech, Clinton thanked the voters of New Hampshire and asked them to give the country the comeback it needs. Unlike her Iowa background of friends like Madeline Albright and Wesley......

Things got a little ugly since the Golden Globes fell victim to the writers' strike. Here are two quotes from both sides of the picket line: “We [WGA] are grateful to our brothers and sisters in SAG for their continued solidarity and support. The entire awards show season is being put in jeopardy by the intransigence of a few big media corporations. We urge the conglomerates to return to the bargaining table they abandoned and......

As The Daily Show and Colbert Report are just moments away from filming their first shows in quite some time, picket lines are standing strong outside of their studios. WGA spokeswoman Sherry Goldman tells us, "These pickets will be against the media conglomerates – NBC and Viacom - and not the specific hosts who we understand were forced to return to the air without their writers who remain on the picket lines." Just because the......

Darren Starr’s Sex in the City like Cashmere Mafia was set to debut at the end of November, but was put off due to the writers' strike. So don’t get too attached to this series, since there appears to be only seven episodes produced of the 13 ordered. Still it beats NBC’s similar Lipstick Jungle to air, which seems not to have a launch date announced yet. On its surface the show looks like a......

The new season of the Apprentice premiered on Thursday with its celebrity (or "celebrity" - if you consider Omarosa from the Apprentice's Season 1 a celebrity) twist. The show received its best ratings in two years, winning the 9PM timeslot for viewers ages 18-49. The Donald said, "I was really happy. I wasn't expecting this." We missed watching it, but NBC offers episodes online - you can see the premiere here - so we......

Former NBC News reporter John Hockenberry now a Distinguished Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Media Lab writes an interesting piece in the January/February Issue of Technology Review about his time at the network’s Dateline NBC. He claims that Dateline really cared about ratings and how it would mesh with the other shows on the NBC schedule. None of this is really a shock, nor is his tale of how a proposal to go......

That just happened! Senator Barack Obama won the Democratic Iowa Caucus with at least 37% of the vote (projections are changing). Former Senator John Edwards got 30% of the vote while Senator Hillary Clinton got 29%. The media is playing this as a huge failure for the Senator from New York, given how powerful the Clinton machine has seemed. Also stunning: There were 82% more Democratic voters in this year's caucus compared with 2004,......

Law & Order returned for its eighteenth season with two episodes last night. As producer Dick Wolf is wont to do, things on the show have changed. The cast changes have definitely skewed things younger and has made the show seem more like Law & Order: The Next Generation. Which isn't a bad thing, since it seemed more like a natural evolution. And don’t worry, we won’t reveal the endings of the episodes in......

Last week everyone from writers on the picket line to bored couch potatoes were abuzz with news that the late night heavyweights would be returning with all new shows. Last night was the big night (Letterman, O'Brien, Kimmel, Ferguson and Leno all returned), and both Conan O'Brien and David Letterman took the stage showing solidarity with strike beards intact. Letterman threatened to shave his later on Conan's show, saying that he'd probably be helping his......

A sparkling new 700-pound ball, tons of confetti, and over a million people helped ring in the New Year from Times Square last night/early today. Mayor Bloomberg and police Police Academy valedictorian Karolina Wierzchowska, who also served in the Iraq War, hit the switch that brought the famous Times Square New Year's ball down. The Daily News called it a "shimmering pole dance," and it was the 100th time Times Square has had a......

We interviewed hundreds of people this year, from long-time rockers to the designer of New York’s subway map. Here are a few conversations you may have missed:On the day Radiohead’s In Rainbows was released exclusively online, musician Jonny Greenwood talked about the “experiment.” Doctor for the uninsured Jay Parkinson told us how to save $1,250 on our next MRI. Beastie Boy Adam Horovitz wondered why they can't make a quiet truck. Actor/Director John Turturro......