Deadline

Does anybody still read a newspaper, anymore? I mean, yes, you can go to the websites of just about every printed press still in business and, depending on if they demand you become a subscriber, look at today's top stories, read about the latest entertainment news... even get in a game of Wordle!

But I'm talking about going to a kiosk, plopping down your folding green and your silver, picking up a physical stack of printed paper and reading it.

The fact that we collectively don't do that much anymore, makes this series seem even more quaint than it otherwise might have been.

This is kind of a spinoff series from the "Law & Order" franchise. Series creator Dick Wolf wanted to produce a show that tackled the kinds of stories that were actually seen in the New York papers. Does that fact, in the year 2000, when this show aired, make this the first program that featured stories that were "RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES!" Maybe not, but perhaps it was the first to admit it, even as they ran the boilerplate disclaimer that "this story is fiction."

Oliver Platt, always moody, glib and intense, got to use his complete acting palette in the character of Wallace Benton, (he prefers "Wally," thank you very much) a journalist for a tabloid rag called The New York Ledger, which, if you get a good look at the newspaper's masthead, is clearly modeled after The New York Post.

I think they wanted to make Platt's character a kind of Jimmy Breslin type: a hardnosed, hard drinking honcho, who wrote hard hitting pieces with a bit of a hard head. Jimmy Breslin... Wally Benton... I'm not saying, I'm just saying.

There's plenty of reasons for Platt's writer to want to hit the bar. His wife, played by Hope Davis, is divorcing him but she's lingering around, because she continues to work at the Ledger. His editor, played by Bebe Neuwirth, is always against everything he says before he says it. And the the wealthy owner and publisher, played by Tom Conti (and obviously aping Rupert Murdoch - except he's Scottish, not Australian), has higher ideals for the paper, which maybe puts him in line with "Citizen Kane?" Suffice it to say, they didn't get THAT right!

New York is all over this series, top to bottom, and the stories were, like most of Dick Wolf's work, pretty worthwhile, if not a little far-fetched... Like the fact that Benton was also teaching a course on Journalism at Columbia University. He ropes his young interns into helping him investigate his latest story, including cub reporter Lili Taylor.

Even though this would have existed in the L&O Universe (The Ledger was referenced multiple times as a source for info and copies of the paper itself appeared on episodes in that group), this absolutely was a stand alone show and it featured a bit more humor than you would find in those other shows, even as the format of the program followed the standards of all of the other shows in that canon. But maybe that's why it didn't make the cut? If they added in more crossovers (and those would have been completely natural in the course of this series) it could have helped anchor the audience a bit more, early in the run, so they might have had a more solid foundation. A few years before, David E. Kelley did his infamous crossover with "Ally McBeal" and "The Practice" on two different networks, so there was precedence.

Finally, the message of the show might have put off some viewers - that being: print journalists are good-hearted seekers of the truth, wherever it leads them, and are working hard to get the story right. That seems difficult to deal with now, with so many newspapers shuttering their offices and fewer and fewer resources dedicated to that element of news gathering. Where have you gone, Wally Benton... our nation turns its lonely eyes to you. Woo-woo-woo.

The evil NBC network has cut off the 3rd and the final new addition to the Monday night line-up...the question is, why? I can understand why "Daddio" and "Tucker" got canned (both horrible shows, by the way). Now that this show is gone, the whole new Monday prime time is gone. This makes me as mad as the Presidential election the other day, and that means mad!

Anyway, enough of my griping. Let me talk about the show. This show was perfect in almost every way. From the creator of "Law & Order", this show had to be good, and it was. It's got all the elements arranged in one hour of programming: comic relief, high drama, romance; you name it, you were guaranteed to get it. I'm sure you know the scoop already: Oliver Platt stars as the award-winning writer for the New York Ledger, and it's a playout of "digging up the dirt" which is so important in today's society (especially in tabloids). Platt's character was a "fresh new face" in the TV world, and so was the rest of the cast. I especially liked seeing wonderful actresses such as Bebe Neuwirth and Lili Taylor in a show like this. I was fascinated by the way events were played out in this show, especially the last episode before it was taken off of the air. I looked forward to this show long before the series debut, and looked forward to it every Monday...until now.

The burning questions are sadly unanswered when the show withered away. SO much stuff was left at a cliffhanger for me, because we barely got to know some of the characters. Why did NBC have to cancel such a wonderful show? If another network could buy this show like PAX did for "Mysterious Ways", then I would be content. Otherwise, just leave me hanging off a cliff until you get a show just as good. 9.5/10

Oliver Platt is a genius. One could simply repeat that for 100 lines and sum up this series - and anything else in which this rotund brilliant actor appears. He became Porthos in the bouncy Three Musketeers; he was amazing as Hector in the sadly under-rated Lake Placid; he was the perfect barrister in West Wing. Platt shares an ineffable star quality with Orson Welles and that enviable talent with which Roger Ebert described M. Emmet Walsh which I hereby paraphrase: "No motion picture featuring Olliver Platt can be all bad." In this he joins the company of the great Ian Holm and very very few others. As the star of this sadly-missed series Platt had the chance, for far too short a time, chew the scenery in his own series as a talented, irritating, self-centred, brilliant human being. How much of this is Platt and how much acting is irrelevant. It is simply a pity that the show was so quickly cancelled because, to say it once more, Oliver Platt is a genius.

I think this show is great. I didn't watch it when it was actually on NBC, but when Bravo played a few of the episodes last week I fell in love with it. I think that it had amazing actors and actresses, and it was quite funny at times. It was interesting.

Why NBC had to cut this show? Because of the rating? They don't know yet that sometimes, a show needs time to grow? They don't remember that Seinfeld was not a very successful show the first year? It reminds me of an episode of The Simpsons where Homer is the coach of a young football team and has the need to cut everybody off!

It was a good show, not the best ever but a good show. I personally think that it's good enough to keep it on the air, at least for an entire season.