Live Shot

As an insider in the TV business, I loved this show. It was exactly right. I'm sorry it went away so quickly...I hope TV Land gets it (along with the six original "Police Squad" episodes) and offers it in their Museum of Television History.

This show should have lasted much longer than the partial season it aired. It was an original, witty, satire of local LA news. Because they were on a new network, they were able to take chances the other networks never would. It was funny and twisted, full of great one liners. It used popular music to set a mood better than most shows even today. The use of Sting's version of "Fragile" is still a vivid memory. The network should have given it a little more time to find it's legs - if only so we could find out what kind of repercussions came from Lou's startling announcement in the final aired episode.

And the cast was brilliant -- a character actor lover's paradise! Nearly everyone in the cast was a great character actor - only a couple of complete unknowns -- Birney, Coburn, DeJesus, Velez, Yagher, Pollack, Austin, McGill, Byrd, Anderson, Canada -- how can you go wrong? I may be the only person to still have some of the episodes on video (I have 5) and still watch them occasionally. That is perhaps the best testimony on this show's quality -- 10 years on, I'm still watching my videos.

I agree with earlier reviewers about this show; it was fast moving and a blast to watch. I particularly remember the sideline business that the studio crew was running using the station's on-location equipment - selling wild amateur videos of bikini-clad babes firing off automatic weapons! (Which were inspired by a security video from a convenience store robbery.) Intelligent and (otherwise) topical, the scripts where worthy of much higher ratings than this program ever received. I was hoping it would catch on, but in the hyperchanging cyclone of TV programming, this memorable series was here and gone in the veritable blink of a eye...

This was high quality offering from UPN's first season. It was a smart, flashy, behind the scenes drama about an L.A. tv news program. The writing and stories were uniformly good, the look and feel of the show very slick (almost to a fault), the use of background music exceptional. The actors were all good and worked together well. A minor drawback was that all the actors were so good-looking to the point of straining credibility.