Image via Wikipedia   It is time to get sentimental about “Friday Night Lights.” And with “Friday Night Lights.” The fifth and final season of the series about life in a small Texas town where high school football is king has already run on DirecTV’s The 101 Network. Now it hopes to get ...

Image via Wikipedia   Regular readers of this blog and my former TV column at the Buffalo News know that I often start some columns of notes after using the phrase “This is What I’m Thinking.” But they may have forgotten the origin. It came from a phrase that Paul Reiser (see above) often said ...

Image via Wikipedia   The headline in TV Topics Sunday about tonight’s new ABC comedy, “Happy Endings” played off the title: “A ‘Happy’ group of friends.” Even though “Happy” is in quotes, the headline suggests that this group of six friends approaching or just beyond their 30s ...

Image by Getty Images via @daylife   Channel 4 has borrowed or stolen most of Channel 2’s recent good ideas – including its news rundown and focus on internet deals. Now it apparently has decided to use one of Channel 2’s bad ideas as the model of a new 8 a.m. weekday show on CW 23, “Winging ...

Image via Wikipedia One major character exits NBC’s “Law & Order: L.A.,” one major character returns to “House.” Clearly, it is a pretty big night in broadcast TV by non-sweeps standards. The 150th episode of “House” (8 tonight, WUTV), is more intriguing, the two-hour “Law and ...

Image via Wikipedia   How is this for kismet? The man who now owns WNGS-TV in Springville is a former Hollywood helicopter TV news reporter. Phil Arno, 60, a former news photographer in Buffalo who spent 18 years in Los Angeles working for TV stations and writing scripts, now owns the independent ...

Image via Wikipedia This is what I’m thinking: * If there were more CBS affiliates like Channel 4 in Buffalo, Katie Couric (see right) might have survived as the anchor of “The CBS Evening News.” While Couric’s national newscast remains deep in third place nationally, it is second in Western ...

Image via Wikipedia   It was a little more than two years ago that I wrote a story in the local newspaper  about on-air staffing levels in local TV.  The websites of Channel 2, Channel 4 and Channel 7 gave a pretty clear picture of what was happening.  They also illustrated a TV news market that ...

  It was amusing to pick up Saturday morning’s copy of my alma mater and read a headline at the top of page 1: “WNLO-TV Enters the Local Morning Show Sweepstakes. Page C1.” Enters the sweepstakes? That makes no sense since WNLO-TV has been running two hours of the local morning show “Wake Up” ...

  Cover of Dana Delany It’s another lazy Sunday, time to borrow a page from my alma mater’s editorial page and remind blog readers what I wrote about all last week in case they want to catch up. Monday: I wrote about Channel 4 reporter Rich Newberg’s testimony in the Riccardo M. McCray murder ...