TVSquad

For the longest time, I've kvetched about the fact that the television industry has stopped programming for Saturday night. For years, Saturday was a great night of television. I remember M*A*S*H and The Mary Tyler Moore Show, not to mention guilty pleasures like The Facts of Life and Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman. Even NBC's thrillogy, The Pretender and Profiler were fun. All those shows were Saturday night hits (some bigger than others).

Well, I'm not alone in missing Saturday TV; Oscar-winner Barry Levinson feels the same. Levinson is also a TV producer -- he did Homicide: Life on the Street and The Philanthropist -- and he thinks the networks are making a big mistake by not seizing on Saturday primetime. He knows the business pretty well and he's confused by the networks' strategy.

"I don't think the answer is to retreat," he told the New York Daily News. "When you give up Saturday night, you open the door for people to go somewhere else. Basically, they're shrinking their own audience."

(S0518/19) Well, the previews didn't lie. For weeks now, we've been told in previews and commercials -- not to mention numerous stories in the press -- that one of the principals would die on the finale of NCIS. The producers delivered; someone died. In one way, the death of Jenny Shephard, NCIS director, is the least painful loss, and also the most obvious. If you had Lauren Holly in the NCIS pool, you're the winner. For most of the episodes since the return from the strike, viewers have known that Ducky had determined that the director was sick. Jethro knew it; so did Jenny. But Jenny didn't know that Jethro knew. (Can you follow that?) Anyway, what it means in the big picture is that before tonight's two-hour finale, Jenny Shephard was the most likely candidate to bite the dust.

I'll be quick about this. When precisely did it become unbelievably easy to have sex in a parked car without any interruption? I'd like to think that I've had my fair share of late-night encounters, but never was it convenient to just go at it in the back of the car. Take last night's finale of The Sopranos. There was that one scene where Christopher and Julianna were getting it on in the passenger seat with the ferocity of a couple rabid dogs. But they were right in front of the diner's window! No one says anything. Everyone just continues to eat their greasy food and ignores the make-shift porno ten feet away in the parking lot. Maybe I'm just not adventurous enough. But something tells me that the second I decide to buy into this fable television has spun for me, I'll be spending my night in another place that TV has depicted as being incredibly easy to have sex in - a jail cell.