TV Wars

I exposed my utter ignorance and lack of awareness of recent changes in the showbiz arena few days ago.

My wife inadvertently noticed my consternation at not seeing Paula Abdul seated amongst the idol judges while watching a rerun of "American Idol rewind".She gladly informed me that she had left for another contract and had now been replaced by Kara DioGuardi.

In shame, I rushed to google idol judges for 2008/2009 and was able to confirm the addition of Kara.What was still a misery was whether Paula is still one of the judges.The official Paula Abdul website had news on every other thing including the new series of "Hey Paula" and her forthcoming TV appearances but nothing on her Idol status.

I have always liked Paula. I hope she stays on the idol.I must confess though, that I am not an avid idol fan.That explains my ignorance of the planned changes.

What is really of greater interest to me,however is the forthcoming battle royale between the Fox network and ABC.

The producers at ABC have taken the audacious decision of going head to head with Idol by placing their greatly anticipated reality TV series "Homeland Security" on Idol air time.

Several idol fanatics will rush to tell me that there will be no contest there.However, having seen some sneak-peeks of the new ABC series,I'm not very sure.

It will be equally interesting to see how Jay Leno fares in his head-t0-head match-up against AC-360.I have never stayed up late to see Leno,even though I know he's one of the funniest in America.The major news networks always play snipets of his previous night's jokes,so I'd always felt I didn't miss an awful lot.

NBC is losing many battles on all fronts,and it will be a major breakthrough if Leno wins this one against CNN's Anderson Cooper who is now actually bigger than TV...he's a celebrity in his own right.

What will be sufficient consolation for many of us with a busy schedule anyways is that DVR continues to be a life saver.None of these programs lose the appeal on playback...they are not the superbowl,so I am perfectly happy to watch them all on playback marathon on a lazy Saturday.

Yipee!!

OMC