Review: "Kids Pick the President"

As the race for the White House increasingly features the sights and sounds of grown-ups acting like children, on both sides of the television camera, it is a relief to see an election special in which everyone behaves. For tomorrow night's "Nick News with Linda Ellerbee: Kids Pick the President." (Nickelodeon, Sunday, 9 p.m.), Barack Obama and John McCain answer questions submitted by viewers aged 10 to 15. (They were taped independently, on the campaign trail.) It's kind of like a Town Hall meeting, but with none of the finger-pointing.

With their rhetorical volume dialed down to "reasonable" and their answers brief, the candidates don't sound miles apart on many on many of the questions, some of which go to issues not yet raised in the debates. (Global warming is bad. Education is good. Immigration: Strengthen the borders but show compassion to those already here.) Expected differences do emerge, of course -- McCain subtly promotes his low-tax, pro-business agenda, though I doubt "refundable tax credit" is a phrase that has much traction among middle-schoolers. Obama touts his college-tuition-for-public-service idea. Obama says that Iraq was a bad idea from the start, and McCain insists on leaving with "victory and honor." But he also makes a more impassioned stand against torture than he's been pitching to his hang-em-high adult crowd.

The last two questions give the respondents no chance to fall back on talking points. The first is about being picked last for games -- Obama sometimes wasn't because he was young, and McCain wasn't because he was little, and both recommend showing up until you're taken seriously. The seasonally appropriate second query wonders whether the hopeful Next Leader of the Free World had a favorite Halloween costume, and here the candidates are in perfect accord: They love them some pirate. McCain even thinks it might be a good way to dress for Congress, where he could "get my sword out and my dagger and get 'em back in line." Out of the mouths of adults.

Host Ellerbee, in red sneakers Tom Brokaw could never pull off -- I don't mean that they're stuck to her feet, although this makes an interesting picture -- has wise closing words regarding the whole red vs. blue thing: "I would like you to see this for what it is: a piece of media nonsense.... No matter what you may see or hear on television, we the people of the United States of America are not so easily categorized.... and if you insist on categorizing us by color, think polka dot." (But are the dots red, Linda, or they blue?)

Kids, or anyone pretending to be a kid, can cast a doesn't-really-count vote for president online at nick.com/kpp; the results will be released Monday, Oct. 20. But note that the children of Nick America correctly called four out of the last five elections -- and this year's candidates, as well. Ignore them at your peril, big people.

-- Robert Lloyd

A tip of the spinning merry-go-round hat to TV's Chucko the Clown, born Charles Runyon, who died Saturday at the age of 86. Back in the middle of the 20th century, he hosted birthday parties each weekday for the little boys and girls of greater Los Angeles.

Although I honor all hosts of local children's shows as heroes of a lost world of real community television, I can't make any particular claims for Chucko's artistry. I don't fully recollect him; I was tiny then. But he lasted eight years on KABC and one on KTTV, so he must have delighted more children than he scared, or delighted children more than he scared them. (He looks capable and comfortable in this clip.)

Still, photos show the character I do recall -- a straight-ahead Ringling Bros.-style white-faced, red-mouthed, star-eyed circus-poster clown. He looked like an expensive French pastry. And I can sing the first line of his theme song.

Indeed, some of my clearest early memories are attached to that show, not so much because I watched it but because I was on it, as a birthday-party guest. I remember as if it were yesterday, except from a lower vantage, standing backstage before the show, surprised by the unpainted, unfinished, bare-wood backsides of the scenery. It was my first brush with unreality, a lesson in illusion, or possibly laziness. In any case it made a lasting impression.

In the course of the program, I threw a plastic chip into a basket, held by Chucko himself, and won ... a sandwich. Afterward, all the other kids were given sandwiches too, so I had two sandwiches. That was another lesson in, what? Disappointment? Victory turning to sandwich-flavored dust in one's mouth?

It has been a bad year for TV clowns: Larry Harmon, who industrialized and franchised but did not create Bozo the Clown, died in July, the last local Bozo show (airing in Chicago) having folded its tent in 2001. Even Ronald McDonald, though he keeps up the charity work, has been retired from selling hamburgers over the air.

The clowns have not all gone away; the circus still comes to town. But within the mass culture, they have become quaint and marginal, and within the world of children's television they have lost their once mighty power to Muppet monsters and cartoon sea creatures. At the same time, their brand has been degraded by horror movies, serial killers and "The Simpsons." (Check out this "Evil Clown Generator.") This only underscores what might have been true all along, that there is something as disquieting as there is delightful about a grown-up with a painted face.

--Robert Lloyd

Paris Hilton has gone on television to find not just a new best friend, but a new best friend forever. Tuesday night, MTV premiered its latest reality series, "Paris Hilton's My New BFF," in which 18 complete strangers vie to fill that empty spot in Paris' life.

There are some kinds of celebrity that are apparently immune to scandal -- neither sex tapes, nor jail time, nor a catalog of youthful indiscretions posted permanently on the Internet have significantly sullied the star's reputation or made her less of a figure of fandom. This is because she seems really, really nice.

Although not even Paris thinks her life is hard ("I feel very blessed," she told David Letterman recently), it's not as if she doesn't do anything: Looking totally hot all the time takes effort, and expertise. (She looks totally hot even in her LAPD booking photograph.) And she earns money, too, millions every year -- she's affixed her brand to perfumes, jewelry, hair extensions. Her 2006 CD, "Paris," is not the worst record ever made by a person not otherwise known as a singer.

William Stulla, a man I only ever knew as "Engineer Bill," died Tuesday at the estimable age of 97. Some of my first memories of television, which is to say, some of my first memories of life, are of his show, which KHJ (now KCAL) ran weeknights at dinner time from 1954 to 1966. Perhaps because of his age, which was relatively advanced even then, or perhaps just because of his horn-rimmed glasses, he seemed the most eminent of the local kids-show hosts, the boss in my mind of a complement that also included Chucko the Birthday Clown (Charles M. Runyon), Sheriff John (John Rovick) and Tom Hatten, who played "Popeye" cartoons in a nautical setting. Later there were Hobo Kelly (Sally Baker), little person Billy Barty, and Gene Moss and his jelly-bean-eating puppet pal, "Shrimpenstein," though none with quite his gravitas, to slightly overstate his effect.

Every city with its own television station had their counterparts, some Cowboy This or Captain That, famous within broadcasting range and completely unknown outside of it. On a national level there was "Captain Kangaroo" and eventually "Mr. Rogers," with their higher budgets and perhaps loftier ambitions, but they came from somewhere else. It was clear to me that Engineer Bill lived in my town, and not some imaginary Neighborhood, and that there was the real possibility that I could get him to read my name on the air, or even invite me onto his show, were I to do the necessary groundwork -– there were always a couple of live tykes on board for Stulla to play off. I was never going to do that groundwork -– you had to write a letter, at least -– but I saw him once, at a supermarket personal appearance.

"Baghdad High" (HBO, premieres tonight, 9 p.m., with replays through Aug. 16.) The senior-year high school documentary has become a populous genre in itself -- “American Teen” being merely the latest and loudest example -- and even the idea of giving kids cameras to film it themselves is not new. But “Baghdad High,” shot in that embattled city over the course of the 2006-2007 school year -- which encompassed both the execution of Saddam Hussein and the Bush surge, and saw the rapid deterioration of security and infrastructure –- does bring a new slant to the form.

Shot mainly by four friends, fellow students at a middle-class boys' school whose cultural and religious differences (Kurd, Christian, Shia and half-Shia-half-Sunni) have no effect on their affections, it offers a close-up picture of Iraqi life that, while limited in scope, is more familiar than might be expected and more nuanced than what we are usually given to consider. It isn't the stuff of the nightly news or the special report: As a story, it lacks sensation, even with gunfire out the window, explosions in the distance and checkpoints on the way to school. Nothing much goes on: a little basketball here, some soccer there, a lot of hanging out, or just entertaining oneself in on one's own room. But it's full of casual details -– the look of a kitchen or a classroom or a front yard -- that brings the country to life in a way that ordinary journalism regularly fails to do.

That I think Ewan McGregor must be a really nice guy is based entirely on having watched “Long Way Round,” the highly likable 2004 Bravo series that documented a motorcycle trip he made alongside pal Charley Boorman (a sometimes actor and the son of director John Boorman) eastward from London to New York. Now comes “Long Way Down,” documenting a three-month ride from the top of Scotland to the bottom of Africa.

The current itinerary takes them through Scotland, England, France, Italy and 15 African countries. (It is a kind of a younger-generation version of Michael Palin's “Pole to Pole,” but with motorbikes, and therefore the possibility of motorbike accidents, and with camping out, and therefore the possibility of being eaten.) The first episode, which airs Saturday, Aug. 2, at 9 p.m. on Fox Reality, is all about the preparation, which is considerable, and ranges from deciding what shoes to take to survival training, including what to do when men in masks point guns at your head.

Scenic grandeur is suggested only at its end, as McGregor and Boorman finally set off south (escorted by McGregor's father and brother) through some green Scottish countryside, and in the coming attractions. (There will be pyramids and zebras.) Still, there is drama: McGregor manages to break his leg in a London motorcycle spill even before they go, and Boorman gets himself detained by police by speaking the word “bomb” in an airport. There is trouble securing the Libyan visas, and there is the thorny question of McGregor's wife, Eve, who has never ridden a motorbike, wanting to join them partway. It is not great drama so far –- it is humorous drama, if anything. But this is just the start.

It would be easy enough for this to come off as self-indulgent –- good-looking rich boys on a lark –- especially given that they are trailed by a support staff that includes a security expert (who doubles on camera) and a doctor. But they aren't pretending otherwise. (Those people on “Survivor” -- they're not alone, either.) And even with the backup, what they're doing is not easy, possibly dangerous, and definitely dirty.

--Robert Lloyd

“Campaign” (KCET, 10 tonight). After “Election Day,” this look at a city council race in Kawasaki, Kanagawa prefecture, Japan, is the second electorally themed “P.O.V.” presentation to air in a month. The propinquity of our current presidential death match may have something to do with this, but the subject holds an honored place in the history of documentary filmmaking: The 1960 “Primary,” in which John F. Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey compete for the Democratic nomination in Wisconsin, was practically ground zero for “direct cinema” (American “cinema verité” in loose terms); Richard Leacock, Albert Maysles and D.A. Pennebaker all worked on it. Fundamentally a comedy, though a bit of black one, “Campaign” follows the fortunes of party-picked candidate Kazuhiko Yamauchi, a 40-year-old coin and stamp dealer with no perceptible political ideas but a vague ambition to be prime minister, the way one might want to be a movie star or a famous novelist without ever learning to act or wanting to write. Shot over a frenzied 12 days, which seem to encompass the entirety of the highly ritualized campaign, it has the makings of a Preston Sturges, Frank Tashlin or Billy Wilder movie -- though as a leading man Yamauchi is not quite as lovable or redeemable a schnook as Eddie Bracken or Jerry Lewis or Jack Lemmon would have been. Criticized both from above and below for his bowing, his handshake, his eye contact, his very substance, it's only with his skeptical wife -- a modern woman who is advised to refer to herself not as a “wife” but a “housewife” -- or his old university friends that Yamauchi becomes remotely a person. (Director Kazuhiro Soda was also a school friend.) It is, of course, only a partial look at the process, and some of it looks funny just for being, you know, foreign -- but it takes no stretch of the imagination to see how mad our own elections might look from abroad or from here.

"Two Fat Ladies" (on DVD) after the jump:

"9 Star Hotel" (KCET, tonight, 10 p.m.). A haunting fly-on-the-wall documentary by Ido Haar that follows a group of undocumented Palestinian workers building the Israeli planned city of Modi'in in the days before the Separation Wall made even illegal work impossible. (Although the film doesn't say so, the city was planned by Moshe Safdie, who famously designed Expo '67's Habitat in Montreal, as well as L.A.'s own Skirball Cultural Center.) Living in low-lying improvised complexes of cardboard and tin in the hills above the town, they cook, sing, scavenge, try to stay warm, hide or run from the police -- not always successfully. And they talk, about all sorts of things, from attractive female border guards, to the Holocaust, to their families and their disappearing work. There is no rancor, only confusion and resolve. The film won best documentary at the 2006 Jerusalem International Film Festival.

"French in Action" after the jump.

Short reviews of coming distractions.

“Elvis Mitchell: Under the Influence” (TCM, Mondays, 5 p.m. and 7:30 p.m.). It's always a pleasure to hear people talk intelligently about what they do –- something that happens too rarely in the product-pushing, gossip-addressing world of celebrity television. This new series -- hosted by Mitchell (of public radio's “The Treatment” and, I should tell you, my former colleague at the also-former Los Angeles Herald-Examiner) -- is ostensibly about what goes into forming an individual creative intelligence, but it doesn't much stick to its theme. (The better to converse.) Late director-actor Sydney Pollack opens the series tonight, name-checking Fellini, Antonioni, Kurosawa, Godard and Truffaut -- directors you might not immediately associate with the man who made “The Way We Were” and “Tootsie.” Next week brings an unusually thoughtful Bill Murray, who takes a sort of analytical taste test of golden-age movie stars, muses upon the actor's “physical intelligence” and remembers getting an education in American silent film while living in Paris. It becomes clear here in a way that shouldn't be surprising, but still sort of is, that Murray is not a comedian who became an actor but has been an actor all along, and has thought long on his craft and the medium that contains it. Turner owns every movie in the world, so illustrative clips are not a problem.

“Scare Tactics” (Sci Fi, premieres Wednesday, July 9, 10 p.m.). Revival of a fitfully interesting hidden-camera prank show, in which unsuspecting marks find themselves thrust into scenarios out of horror and sci-fi films. The lesson of the show, not that it is necessarily intended as such, is how easily human beings can mistake B-movie hokum for reality, although you only have to look at how people behave in the actual world to come to the same conclusion: that our minds have been institutionally primed for nonsense is what makes this show possible. Working at this or that temp job, the victims are suddenly faced with bizarre (yet somehow familiar) events: A woman gives birth to the spawn of Satan, a bad boss throws workers in the wood chipper, a hot-line operator faces a nut with a knife. The stunt goes on until the victim is made to say, “Yes, I'm scared,” at which point the lights come up and everyone has a good laugh. More funny strange than funny ha-ha, and the gag gets old but is still worth a look. New host Tracy Morgan on “30 Rock” is one of the funniest men alive, but here he is not.

"Bikini or Bust" after the jump.

Short reviews of coming distractions:

"The Tenth Circle" (Lifetime, Saturday, June 28, 9 p.m.) Family-based mystery (adultery, drugs, teenage strip poker, dead high school football star, skeletons in closet) with lashings of seriousness (references to Dante, Eskimo culture). Based on a novel by Jodi Picoult, reminding us once again that the phrase “New York Times Best-Seller” is meaningless in literary terms. Difficult to buy overall, and it loses focus, but there are some nicely handled moments, and the always-interesting but too-little-seen Ron Eldard is in it. Kelly Preston is fine as Eldard's wife, and Britt Robertson, who plays their possibly raped, potentially murderous daughter is very good, although the part bangs her around a little much, as she goes from reasonable to hysterical and back. The conclusion seems to be that the wages of inattentive mothering are disaster and death.

"Factory" (Spike, Sunday, June 29, 10 p.m.). A partly improvised comedy from Mitch Rouse, a creator of “Strangers with Candy,” which might lead you to expect this to be better than this is. Four factory workers, who come across as four improv comics in coveralls, try to avoid work as they grouse about or lie about the women in or out of their lives. Clearly flung at the Spike's male demo –- "Get More Action" is the network tagline, which implies a viewership not getting as much as it would like -- it has a slightly sour edge that some will just read as The Way Things Are. (The female characters aren't particularly happy, either; Ritalin takes off the edge.) I did like little round Mark Beltzman, who plays a shady used car salesman-cum-funeral director, and Christopher Allen Nelson (who seems to work more often as an SFX makeup artist) as the guy none of the principals like. It would be nice to see a show about factory workers, even a comedy, that took them seriously. First sitcom for Spike, a historic moment by definition.

"Election Day" reviewed after the jump. (It's good, so click on.)

Although I am drawn irresistibly to anything having to do with that big country across the sea, “Young & Restless in China” (KCET, tonight at 9) is an especially involving view of the formerly “sleeping giant” as it yawns, stretches, kicks off the covers and makes its way down to breakfast.

Shot over four years, Sue Williams' film tracks nine younger-generation Chinese men and women grappling with old traditions and new possibilities in a society that, in the words of entrepreneur Lu Dong, has gone in short order from an attitude of “serve the people and work for others, to an extreme” to one of “get rich as fast as you can and have a good life” -- from ration tickets to conspicuous consumption.

What would the old Chairman make of his country now? Miranda Hong is a marketing executive who works “in Beijing, in the advertising department of an investment company” --  a phrase that in every particular would have seemed nonsensical a generation ago. “Young & Restless” catches a complicated country in which marriages are still arranged even as women are giving up family for careers.

The best sports documentaries grab the lapels of we who ordinarily do not give athletics a second thought. “Back Nine at Cherry Hills: The Legends of the 1960 U.S. Open” (HBO, tonight at 10) tells a story that requires only the merest grasp of the rules of golf (hit ball in hole); its drama is all in the human striving, in the understanding or overcoming of one's self to better one's game.

The film commemorates the remarkable meeting of three generations of golf greats: Ben Hogan, 47, the game's dour graying eminence, who a decade earlier fought back from a near-fatal car crash to grace the cover of Time and inspire a Hollywood biopic; Arnold Palmer (born 1929), the friendly face of what had become the people's game; and 20-year-old Jack Nicklaus, a rookie phenom not yet in full command of his powers. (In “Star Wars” terms, the Obi-Wan Kenobi, the Han Solo and the Luke Skywalker.) Each went into the last nine holes of the 1960 Open within striking distance of the title.

It is also a story of fathers and sons. Hogan's was a manic-depressive blacksmith who shot himself when Hogan was a child; Palmer's an emotionally reticent country club groundskeeper who made Arnold understand that they were not themselves country club folk. Nicklaus, who was country club folk, was by contrast his kibitzing daddy's pride and joy –- distance was what he needed.

In terms of suspense, it of course helps not to know who won. (Many will, I didn't –- though I rooted sentimentally for Hogan.) The filmmakers happily let the game play out.

Coverage of this year's U.S. Open begins tomorrow at 10 a.m. on ESPN and at noon on NBC; the tournament runs through Sunday at Torrey Pines Golf Course in San Diego -– winner yet unknown.

-- Robert Lloyd

Hillary Rodham Clinton made her last appearance as a presidential candidate -– for the time being -- when she conceded the Democratic nomination to Barack Obama on Saturday morning in Washington. Speaking from a low stage in the light-filled, colonnaded atrium of the National Building Museum with the crowd arrayed before her and, as has become the custom, behind her, she seemed to be floating in a sea of love.

She was late to the event, as to the concession. Her delay in acknowledging Obama as the presumptive candidate -– expected on the night of the last primaries -- kept eyes, cameras and cable news commentary unusually focused upon her. And as concession speeches go, it was something of a celebration and a self-celebration. It was both a private moment -- a thank you to the people who supported her campaign, and clearly still do -– and a political event, with ramifications for Obama, the Democratic Party and herself. Her speech contained a resounding endorsement of her former opponent (six minutes in, it was inevitably noted, but she circled back to it at the end), a reminder of what she had accomplished and a list of work to be done. She was centered and gracious and impossible to lampoon.

As with her opponent, the symbolic import of her candidacy is undeniable. The first presidential contest in which neither of the two front-runners was a white male, Clinton v. Obama was bound to excite
passions, positive and negative. Whether it made a difference in the primaries, Clinton was subject throughout her campaign to gender-based ridicule that would have cost people their jobs had the point been race or religion. (“Many of the most prominent people on TV behaved like middle schoolers,” party chairman Howard Dean told the New York Times.) Within the popular culture that helps define and in some ways contain the political culture, sex is the last arena where people are allowed, even encouraged, to act like pigs.

Chris Matthews' contention during MSNBC coverage of the New Hampshire primary that "the reason she may be a front-runner is her husband messed around"; Mike Barnicle's description of her (on MSNBC's “Morning Joe”) as "looking like everyone's first wife standing outside a probate court"; William Kristol's statement on “Fox News Sunday” that "white women are a problem, that's ... you know, we all live with that"; and Tucker Carlson's, on MSNBC's “Tucker,” that “when she comes on television I involuntarily cross my legs” -- these are all lines that might be delivered on situation comedies without comment. Indeed, it's the sort of thing you hear on television every day.

And yet television has also painted the future. “Could a woman really serve as commander in chief?” Clinton asked Saturday morning. “Well, I think we answered that one.” But the fact that she was the presumptive nominee even before primary season began means we were already prepared for the possibility. Just as a long line of black presidents on big screens and small makes the actual election of an African American seem inevitable -- indeed, it may be imminent -- so does the fictional depiction of strong women in what were once exclusively male roles signal a real-world sea change: I thought of Clinton recently while reviewing a new cop show, “In Plain Sight,” starring Mary McCormack as a federal marshal, one of a host of easy-to-believe tough women the media now unapologetically offers, from vampire-slaying Buffy to Mary McDonnell as the president of all humanity on “Battlestar Galactica.” In dreams begin possibilities: A Madam President is only a matter of time.

-- Robert Lloyd

Critic's Notebook: What I learned from Chucko

A tip of the spinning merry-go-round hat to TV's Chucko the Clown, born Charles Runyon, who died Saturday at the age of 86. Back in the middle of the 20th century, he hosted birthday parties each weekday for the little boys and girls of greater Los Angeles.

Although I honor all hosts of local children's shows as heroes of a lost world of real community television, I can't make any particular claims for Chucko's artistry. I don't fully recollect him; I was tiny then. But he lasted eight years on KABC and one on KTTV, so he must have delighted more children than he scared, or delighted children more than he scared them. (He looks capable and comfortable in this clip.)

Still, photos show the character I do recall -- a straight-ahead Ringling Bros.-style white-faced, red-mouthed, star-eyed circus-poster clown. He looked like an expensive French pastry. And I can sing the first line of his theme song.

Indeed, some of my clearest early memories are attached to that show, not so much because I watched it but because I was on it, as a birthday-party guest. I remember as if it were yesterday, except from a lower vantage, standing backstage before the show, surprised by the unpainted, unfinished, bare-wood backsides of the scenery. It was my first brush with unreality, a lesson in illusion, or possibly laziness. In any case it made a lasting impression.

In the course of the program, I threw a plastic chip into a basket, held by Chucko himself, and won ... a sandwich. Afterward, all the other kids were given sandwiches too, so I had two sandwiches. That was another lesson in, what? Disappointment? Victory turning to sandwich-flavored dust in one's mouth?

It has been a bad year for TV clowns: Larry Harmon, who industrialized and franchised but did not create Bozo the Clown, died in July, the last local Bozo show (airing in Chicago) having folded its tent in 2001. Even Ronald McDonald, though he keeps up the charity work, has been retired from selling hamburgers over the air.

The clowns have not all gone away; the circus still comes to town. But within the mass culture, they have become quaint and marginal, and within the world of children's television they have lost their once mighty power to Muppet monsters and cartoon sea creatures. At the same time, their brand has been degraded by horror movies, serial killers and "The Simpsons." (Check out this "Evil Clown Generator.") This only underscores what might have been true all along, that there is something as disquieting as there is delightful about a grown-up with a painted face.

--Robert Lloyd

Paris Hilton has gone on television to find not just a new best friend, but a new best friend forever. Tuesday night, MTV premiered its latest reality series, "Paris Hilton's My New BFF," in which 18 complete strangers vie to fill that empty spot in Paris' life.

There are some kinds of celebrity that are apparently immune to scandal -- neither sex tapes, nor jail time, nor a catalog of youthful indiscretions posted permanently on the Internet have significantly sullied the star's reputation or made her less of a figure of fandom. This is because she seems really, really nice.

Although not even Paris thinks her life is hard ("I feel very blessed," she told David Letterman recently), it's not as if she doesn't do anything: Looking totally hot all the time takes effort, and expertise. (She looks totally hot even in her LAPD booking photograph.) And she earns money, too, millions every year -- she's affixed her brand to perfumes, jewelry, hair extensions. Her 2006 CD, "Paris," is not the worst record ever made by a person not otherwise known as a singer.

William Stulla, a man I only ever knew as "Engineer Bill," died Tuesday at the estimable age of 97. Some of my first memories of television, which is to say, some of my first memories of life, are of his show, which KHJ (now KCAL) ran weeknights at dinner time from 1954 to 1966. Perhaps because of his age, which was relatively advanced even then, or perhaps just because of his horn-rimmed glasses, he seemed the most eminent of the local kids-show hosts, the boss in my mind of a complement that also included Chucko the Birthday Clown (Charles M. Runyon), Sheriff John (John Rovick) and Tom Hatten, who played "Popeye" cartoons in a nautical setting. Later there were Hobo Kelly (Sally Baker), little person Billy Barty, and Gene Moss and his jelly-bean-eating puppet pal, "Shrimpenstein," though none with quite his gravitas, to slightly overstate his effect.

Every city with its own television station had their counterparts, some Cowboy This or Captain That, famous within broadcasting range and completely unknown outside of it. On a national level there was "Captain Kangaroo" and eventually "Mr. Rogers," with their higher budgets and perhaps loftier ambitions, but they came from somewhere else. It was clear to me that Engineer Bill lived in my town, and not some imaginary Neighborhood, and that there was the real possibility that I could get him to read my name on the air, or even invite me onto his show, were I to do the necessary groundwork -– there were always a couple of live tykes on board for Stulla to play off. I was never going to do that groundwork -– you had to write a letter, at least -– but I saw him once, at a supermarket personal appearance.

"Baghdad High" (HBO, premieres tonight, 9 p.m., with replays through Aug. 16.) The senior-year high school documentary has become a populous genre in itself -- “American Teen” being merely the latest and loudest example -- and even the idea of giving kids cameras to film it themselves is not new. But “Baghdad High,” shot in that embattled city over the course of the 2006-2007 school year -- which encompassed both the execution of Saddam Hussein and the Bush surge, and saw the rapid deterioration of security and infrastructure –- does bring a new slant to the form.

Shot mainly by four friends, fellow students at a middle-class boys' school whose cultural and religious differences (Kurd, Christian, Shia and half-Shia-half-Sunni) have no effect on their affections, it offers a close-up picture of Iraqi life that, while limited in scope, is more familiar than might be expected and more nuanced than what we are usually given to consider. It isn't the stuff of the nightly news or the special report: As a story, it lacks sensation, even with gunfire out the window, explosions in the distance and checkpoints on the way to school. Nothing much goes on: a little basketball here, some soccer there, a lot of hanging out, or just entertaining oneself in on one's own room. But it's full of casual details -– the look of a kitchen or a classroom or a front yard -- that brings the country to life in a way that ordinary journalism regularly fails to do.

That I think Ewan McGregor must be a really nice guy is based entirely on having watched “Long Way Round,” the highly likable 2004 Bravo series that documented a motorcycle trip he made alongside pal Charley Boorman (a sometimes actor and the son of director John Boorman) eastward from London to New York. Now comes “Long Way Down,” documenting a three-month ride from the top of Scotland to the bottom of Africa.

The current itinerary takes them through Scotland, England, France, Italy and 15 African countries. (It is a kind of a younger-generation version of Michael Palin's “Pole to Pole,” but with motorbikes, and therefore the possibility of motorbike accidents, and with camping out, and therefore the possibility of being eaten.) The first episode, which airs Saturday, Aug. 2, at 9 p.m. on Fox Reality, is all about the preparation, which is considerable, and ranges from deciding what shoes to take to survival training, including what to do when men in masks point guns at your head.

Scenic grandeur is suggested only at its end, as McGregor and Boorman finally set off south (escorted by McGregor's father and brother) through some green Scottish countryside, and in the coming attractions. (There will be pyramids and zebras.) Still, there is drama: McGregor manages to break his leg in a London motorcycle spill even before they go, and Boorman gets himself detained by police by speaking the word “bomb” in an airport. There is trouble securing the Libyan visas, and there is the thorny question of McGregor's wife, Eve, who has never ridden a motorbike, wanting to join them partway. It is not great drama so far –- it is humorous drama, if anything. But this is just the start.

It would be easy enough for this to come off as self-indulgent –- good-looking rich boys on a lark –- especially given that they are trailed by a support staff that includes a security expert (who doubles on camera) and a doctor. But they aren't pretending otherwise. (Those people on “Survivor” -- they're not alone, either.) And even with the backup, what they're doing is not easy, possibly dangerous, and definitely dirty.

--Robert Lloyd

“Campaign” (KCET, 10 tonight). After “Election Day,” this look at a city council race in Kawasaki, Kanagawa prefecture, Japan, is the second electorally themed “P.O.V.” presentation to air in a month. The propinquity of our current presidential death match may have something to do with this, but the subject holds an honored place in the history of documentary filmmaking: The 1960 “Primary,” in which John F. Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey compete for the Democratic nomination in Wisconsin, was practically ground zero for “direct cinema” (American “cinema verité” in loose terms); Richard Leacock, Albert Maysles and D.A. Pennebaker all worked on it. Fundamentally a comedy, though a bit of black one, “Campaign” follows the fortunes of party-picked candidate Kazuhiko Yamauchi, a 40-year-old coin and stamp dealer with no perceptible political ideas but a vague ambition to be prime minister, the way one might want to be a movie star or a famous novelist without ever learning to act or wanting to write. Shot over a frenzied 12 days, which seem to encompass the entirety of the highly ritualized campaign, it has the makings of a Preston Sturges, Frank Tashlin or Billy Wilder movie -- though as a leading man Yamauchi is not quite as lovable or redeemable a schnook as Eddie Bracken or Jerry Lewis or Jack Lemmon would have been. Criticized both from above and below for his bowing, his handshake, his eye contact, his very substance, it's only with his skeptical wife -- a modern woman who is advised to refer to herself not as a “wife” but a “housewife” -- or his old university friends that Yamauchi becomes remotely a person. (Director Kazuhiro Soda was also a school friend.) It is, of course, only a partial look at the process, and some of it looks funny just for being, you know, foreign -- but it takes no stretch of the imagination to see how mad our own elections might look from abroad or from here.

"Two Fat Ladies" (on DVD) after the jump:

"9 Star Hotel" (KCET, tonight, 10 p.m.). A haunting fly-on-the-wall documentary by Ido Haar that follows a group of undocumented Palestinian workers building the Israeli planned city of Modi'in in the days before the Separation Wall made even illegal work impossible. (Although the film doesn't say so, the city was planned by Moshe Safdie, who famously designed Expo '67's Habitat in Montreal, as well as L.A.'s own Skirball Cultural Center.) Living in low-lying improvised complexes of cardboard and tin in the hills above the town, they cook, sing, scavenge, try to stay warm, hide or run from the police -- not always successfully. And they talk, about all sorts of things, from attractive female border guards, to the Holocaust, to their families and their disappearing work. There is no rancor, only confusion and resolve. The film won best documentary at the 2006 Jerusalem International Film Festival.

"French in Action" after the jump.

Short reviews of coming distractions.

“Elvis Mitchell: Under the Influence” (TCM, Mondays, 5 p.m. and 7:30 p.m.). It's always a pleasure to hear people talk intelligently about what they do –- something that happens too rarely in the product-pushing, gossip-addressing world of celebrity television. This new series -- hosted by Mitchell (of public radio's “The Treatment” and, I should tell you, my former colleague at the also-former Los Angeles Herald-Examiner) -- is ostensibly about what goes into forming an individual creative intelligence, but it doesn't much stick to its theme. (The better to converse.) Late director-actor Sydney Pollack opens the series tonight, name-checking Fellini, Antonioni, Kurosawa, Godard and Truffaut -- directors you might not immediately associate with the man who made “The Way We Were” and “Tootsie.” Next week brings an unusually thoughtful Bill Murray, who takes a sort of analytical taste test of golden-age movie stars, muses upon the actor's “physical intelligence” and remembers getting an education in American silent film while living in Paris. It becomes clear here in a way that shouldn't be surprising, but still sort of is, that Murray is not a comedian who became an actor but has been an actor all along, and has thought long on his craft and the medium that contains it. Turner owns every movie in the world, so illustrative clips are not a problem.

“Scare Tactics” (Sci Fi, premieres Wednesday, July 9, 10 p.m.). Revival of a fitfully interesting hidden-camera prank show, in which unsuspecting marks find themselves thrust into scenarios out of horror and sci-fi films. The lesson of the show, not that it is necessarily intended as such, is how easily human beings can mistake B-movie hokum for reality, although you only have to look at how people behave in the actual world to come to the same conclusion: that our minds have been institutionally primed for nonsense is what makes this show possible. Working at this or that temp job, the victims are suddenly faced with bizarre (yet somehow familiar) events: A woman gives birth to the spawn of Satan, a bad boss throws workers in the wood chipper, a hot-line operator faces a nut with a knife. The stunt goes on until the victim is made to say, “Yes, I'm scared,” at which point the lights come up and everyone has a good laugh. More funny strange than funny ha-ha, and the gag gets old but is still worth a look. New host Tracy Morgan on “30 Rock” is one of the funniest men alive, but here he is not.

"Bikini or Bust" after the jump.

Short reviews of coming distractions:

"The Tenth Circle" (Lifetime, Saturday, June 28, 9 p.m.) Family-based mystery (adultery, drugs, teenage strip poker, dead high school football star, skeletons in closet) with lashings of seriousness (references to Dante, Eskimo culture). Based on a novel by Jodi Picoult, reminding us once again that the phrase “New York Times Best-Seller” is meaningless in literary terms. Difficult to buy overall, and it loses focus, but there are some nicely handled moments, and the always-interesting but too-little-seen Ron Eldard is in it. Kelly Preston is fine as Eldard's wife, and Britt Robertson, who plays their possibly raped, potentially murderous daughter is very good, although the part bangs her around a little much, as she goes from reasonable to hysterical and back. The conclusion seems to be that the wages of inattentive mothering are disaster and death.

"Factory" (Spike, Sunday, June 29, 10 p.m.). A partly improvised comedy from Mitch Rouse, a creator of “Strangers with Candy,” which might lead you to expect this to be better than this is. Four factory workers, who come across as four improv comics in coveralls, try to avoid work as they grouse about or lie about the women in or out of their lives. Clearly flung at the Spike's male demo –- "Get More Action" is the network tagline, which implies a viewership not getting as much as it would like -- it has a slightly sour edge that some will just read as The Way Things Are. (The female characters aren't particularly happy, either; Ritalin takes off the edge.) I did like little round Mark Beltzman, who plays a shady used car salesman-cum-funeral director, and Christopher Allen Nelson (who seems to work more often as an SFX makeup artist) as the guy none of the principals like. It would be nice to see a show about factory workers, even a comedy, that took them seriously. First sitcom for Spike, a historic moment by definition.

"Election Day" reviewed after the jump. (It's good, so click on.)

Although I am drawn irresistibly to anything having to do with that big country across the sea, “Young & Restless in China” (KCET, tonight at 9) is an especially involving view of the formerly “sleeping giant” as it yawns, stretches, kicks off the covers and makes its way down to breakfast.

Shot over four years, Sue Williams' film tracks nine younger-generation Chinese men and women grappling with old traditions and new possibilities in a society that, in the words of entrepreneur Lu Dong, has gone in short order from an attitude of “serve the people and work for others, to an extreme” to one of “get rich as fast as you can and have a good life” -- from ration tickets to conspicuous consumption.

What would the old Chairman make of his country now? Miranda Hong is a marketing executive who works “in Beijing, in the advertising department of an investment company” --  a phrase that in every particular would have seemed nonsensical a generation ago. “Young & Restless” catches a complicated country in which marriages are still arranged even as women are giving up family for careers.

The best sports documentaries grab the lapels of we who ordinarily do not give athletics a second thought. “Back Nine at Cherry Hills: The Legends of the 1960 U.S. Open” (HBO, tonight at 10) tells a story that requires only the merest grasp of the rules of golf (hit ball in hole); its drama is all in the human striving, in the understanding or overcoming of one's self to better one's game.

The film commemorates the remarkable meeting of three generations of golf greats: Ben Hogan, 47, the game's dour graying eminence, who a decade earlier fought back from a near-fatal car crash to grace the cover of Time and inspire a Hollywood biopic; Arnold Palmer (born 1929), the friendly face of what had become the people's game; and 20-year-old Jack Nicklaus, a rookie phenom not yet in full command of his powers. (In “Star Wars” terms, the Obi-Wan Kenobi, the Han Solo and the Luke Skywalker.) Each went into the last nine holes of the 1960 Open within striking distance of the title.

It is also a story of fathers and sons. Hogan's was a manic-depressive blacksmith who shot himself when Hogan was a child; Palmer's an emotionally reticent country club groundskeeper who made Arnold understand that they were not themselves country club folk. Nicklaus, who was country club folk, was by contrast his kibitzing daddy's pride and joy –- distance was what he needed.

In terms of suspense, it of course helps not to know who won. (Many will, I didn't –- though I rooted sentimentally for Hogan.) The filmmakers happily let the game play out.

Coverage of this year's U.S. Open begins tomorrow at 10 a.m. on ESPN and at noon on NBC; the tournament runs through Sunday at Torrey Pines Golf Course in San Diego -– winner yet unknown.

-- Robert Lloyd

Hillary Rodham Clinton made her last appearance as a presidential candidate -– for the time being -- when she conceded the Democratic nomination to Barack Obama on Saturday morning in Washington. Speaking from a low stage in the light-filled, colonnaded atrium of the National Building Museum with the crowd arrayed before her and, as has become the custom, behind her, she seemed to be floating in a sea of love.

She was late to the event, as to the concession. Her delay in acknowledging Obama as the presumptive candidate -– expected on the night of the last primaries -- kept eyes, cameras and cable news commentary unusually focused upon her. And as concession speeches go, it was something of a celebration and a self-celebration. It was both a private moment -- a thank you to the people who supported her campaign, and clearly still do -– and a political event, with ramifications for Obama, the Democratic Party and herself. Her speech contained a resounding endorsement of her former opponent (six minutes in, it was inevitably noted, but she circled back to it at the end), a reminder of what she had accomplished and a list of work to be done. She was centered and gracious and impossible to lampoon.

As with her opponent, the symbolic import of her candidacy is undeniable. The first presidential contest in which neither of the two front-runners was a white male, Clinton v. Obama was bound to excite
passions, positive and negative. Whether it made a difference in the primaries, Clinton was subject throughout her campaign to gender-based ridicule that would have cost people their jobs had the point been race or religion. (“Many of the most prominent people on TV behaved like middle schoolers,” party chairman Howard Dean told the New York Times.) Within the popular culture that helps define and in some ways contain the political culture, sex is the last arena where people are allowed, even encouraged, to act like pigs.

Chris Matthews' contention during MSNBC coverage of the New Hampshire primary that "the reason she may be a front-runner is her husband messed around"; Mike Barnicle's description of her (on MSNBC's “Morning Joe”) as "looking like everyone's first wife standing outside a probate court"; William Kristol's statement on “Fox News Sunday” that "white women are a problem, that's ... you know, we all live with that"; and Tucker Carlson's, on MSNBC's “Tucker,” that “when she comes on television I involuntarily cross my legs” -- these are all lines that might be delivered on situation comedies without comment. Indeed, it's the sort of thing you hear on television every day.

And yet television has also painted the future. “Could a woman really serve as commander in chief?” Clinton asked Saturday morning. “Well, I think we answered that one.” But the fact that she was the presumptive nominee even before primary season began means we were already prepared for the possibility. Just as a long line of black presidents on big screens and small makes the actual election of an African American seem inevitable -- indeed, it may be imminent -- so does the fictional depiction of strong women in what were once exclusively male roles signal a real-world sea change: I thought of Clinton recently while reviewing a new cop show, “In Plain Sight,” starring Mary McCormack as a federal marshal, one of a host of easy-to-believe tough women the media now unapologetically offers, from vampire-slaying Buffy to Mary McDonnell as the president of all humanity on “Battlestar Galactica.” In dreams begin possibilities: A Madam President is only a matter of time.

-- Robert Lloyd

Review: 'Paris Hilton's My New BFF'

Paris Hilton has gone on television to find not just a new best friend, but a new best friend forever. Tuesday night, MTV premiered its latest reality series, "Paris Hilton's My New BFF," in which 18 complete strangers vie to fill that empty spot in Paris' life.

There are some kinds of celebrity that are apparently immune to scandal -- neither sex tapes, nor jail time, nor a catalog of youthful indiscretions posted permanently on the Internet have significantly sullied the star's reputation or made her less of a figure of fandom. This is because she seems really, really nice.

Although not even Paris thinks her life is hard ("I feel very blessed," she told David Letterman recently), it's not as if she doesn't do anything: Looking totally hot all the time takes effort, and expertise. (She looks totally hot even in her LAPD booking photograph.) And she earns money, too, millions every year -- she's affixed her brand to perfumes, jewelry, hair extensions. Her 2006 CD, "Paris," is not the worst record ever made by a person not otherwise known as a singer.

William Stulla, a man I only ever knew as "Engineer Bill," died Tuesday at the estimable age of 97. Some of my first memories of television, which is to say, some of my first memories of life, are of his show, which KHJ (now KCAL) ran weeknights at dinner time from 1954 to 1966. Perhaps because of his age, which was relatively advanced even then, or perhaps just because of his horn-rimmed glasses, he seemed the most eminent of the local kids-show hosts, the boss in my mind of a complement that also included Chucko the Birthday Clown (Charles M. Runyon), Sheriff John (John Rovick) and Tom Hatten, who played "Popeye" cartoons in a nautical setting. Later there were Hobo Kelly (Sally Baker), little person Billy Barty, and Gene Moss and his jelly-bean-eating puppet pal, "Shrimpenstein," though none with quite his gravitas, to slightly overstate his effect.

Every city with its own television station had their counterparts, some Cowboy This or Captain That, famous within broadcasting range and completely unknown outside of it. On a national level there was "Captain Kangaroo" and eventually "Mr. Rogers," with their higher budgets and perhaps loftier ambitions, but they came from somewhere else. It was clear to me that Engineer Bill lived in my town, and not some imaginary Neighborhood, and that there was the real possibility that I could get him to read my name on the air, or even invite me onto his show, were I to do the necessary groundwork -– there were always a couple of live tykes on board for Stulla to play off. I was never going to do that groundwork -– you had to write a letter, at least -– but I saw him once, at a supermarket personal appearance.

"Baghdad High" (HBO, premieres tonight, 9 p.m., with replays through Aug. 16.) The senior-year high school documentary has become a populous genre in itself -- “American Teen” being merely the latest and loudest example -- and even the idea of giving kids cameras to film it themselves is not new. But “Baghdad High,” shot in that embattled city over the course of the 2006-2007 school year -- which encompassed both the execution of Saddam Hussein and the Bush surge, and saw the rapid deterioration of security and infrastructure –- does bring a new slant to the form.

Shot mainly by four friends, fellow students at a middle-class boys' school whose cultural and religious differences (Kurd, Christian, Shia and half-Shia-half-Sunni) have no effect on their affections, it offers a close-up picture of Iraqi life that, while limited in scope, is more familiar than might be expected and more nuanced than what we are usually given to consider. It isn't the stuff of the nightly news or the special report: As a story, it lacks sensation, even with gunfire out the window, explosions in the distance and checkpoints on the way to school. Nothing much goes on: a little basketball here, some soccer there, a lot of hanging out, or just entertaining oneself in on one's own room. But it's full of casual details -– the look of a kitchen or a classroom or a front yard -- that brings the country to life in a way that ordinary journalism regularly fails to do.

That I think Ewan McGregor must be a really nice guy is based entirely on having watched “Long Way Round,” the highly likable 2004 Bravo series that documented a motorcycle trip he made alongside pal Charley Boorman (a sometimes actor and the son of director John Boorman) eastward from London to New York. Now comes “Long Way Down,” documenting a three-month ride from the top of Scotland to the bottom of Africa.

The current itinerary takes them through Scotland, England, France, Italy and 15 African countries. (It is a kind of a younger-generation version of Michael Palin's “Pole to Pole,” but with motorbikes, and therefore the possibility of motorbike accidents, and with camping out, and therefore the possibility of being eaten.) The first episode, which airs Saturday, Aug. 2, at 9 p.m. on Fox Reality, is all about the preparation, which is considerable, and ranges from deciding what shoes to take to survival training, including what to do when men in masks point guns at your head.

Scenic grandeur is suggested only at its end, as McGregor and Boorman finally set off south (escorted by McGregor's father and brother) through some green Scottish countryside, and in the coming attractions. (There will be pyramids and zebras.) Still, there is drama: McGregor manages to break his leg in a London motorcycle spill even before they go, and Boorman gets himself detained by police by speaking the word “bomb” in an airport. There is trouble securing the Libyan visas, and there is the thorny question of McGregor's wife, Eve, who has never ridden a motorbike, wanting to join them partway. It is not great drama so far –- it is humorous drama, if anything. But this is just the start.

It would be easy enough for this to come off as self-indulgent –- good-looking rich boys on a lark –- especially given that they are trailed by a support staff that includes a security expert (who doubles on camera) and a doctor. But they aren't pretending otherwise. (Those people on “Survivor” -- they're not alone, either.) And even with the backup, what they're doing is not easy, possibly dangerous, and definitely dirty.

--Robert Lloyd

“Campaign” (KCET, 10 tonight). After “Election Day,” this look at a city council race in Kawasaki, Kanagawa prefecture, Japan, is the second electorally themed “P.O.V.” presentation to air in a month. The propinquity of our current presidential death match may have something to do with this, but the subject holds an honored place in the history of documentary filmmaking: The 1960 “Primary,” in which John F. Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey compete for the Democratic nomination in Wisconsin, was practically ground zero for “direct cinema” (American “cinema verité” in loose terms); Richard Leacock, Albert Maysles and D.A. Pennebaker all worked on it. Fundamentally a comedy, though a bit of black one, “Campaign” follows the fortunes of party-picked candidate Kazuhiko Yamauchi, a 40-year-old coin and stamp dealer with no perceptible political ideas but a vague ambition to be prime minister, the way one might want to be a movie star or a famous novelist without ever learning to act or wanting to write. Shot over a frenzied 12 days, which seem to encompass the entirety of the highly ritualized campaign, it has the makings of a Preston Sturges, Frank Tashlin or Billy Wilder movie -- though as a leading man Yamauchi is not quite as lovable or redeemable a schnook as Eddie Bracken or Jerry Lewis or Jack Lemmon would have been. Criticized both from above and below for his bowing, his handshake, his eye contact, his very substance, it's only with his skeptical wife -- a modern woman who is advised to refer to herself not as a “wife” but a “housewife” -- or his old university friends that Yamauchi becomes remotely a person. (Director Kazuhiro Soda was also a school friend.) It is, of course, only a partial look at the process, and some of it looks funny just for being, you know, foreign -- but it takes no stretch of the imagination to see how mad our own elections might look from abroad or from here.

"Two Fat Ladies" (on DVD) after the jump:

"9 Star Hotel" (KCET, tonight, 10 p.m.). A haunting fly-on-the-wall documentary by Ido Haar that follows a group of undocumented Palestinian workers building the Israeli planned city of Modi'in in the days before the Separation Wall made even illegal work impossible. (Although the film doesn't say so, the city was planned by Moshe Safdie, who famously designed Expo '67's Habitat in Montreal, as well as L.A.'s own Skirball Cultural Center.) Living in low-lying improvised complexes of cardboard and tin in the hills above the town, they cook, sing, scavenge, try to stay warm, hide or run from the police -- not always successfully. And they talk, about all sorts of things, from attractive female border guards, to the Holocaust, to their families and their disappearing work. There is no rancor, only confusion and resolve. The film won best documentary at the 2006 Jerusalem International Film Festival.

"French in Action" after the jump.

Short reviews of coming distractions.

“Elvis Mitchell: Under the Influence” (TCM, Mondays, 5 p.m. and 7:30 p.m.). It's always a pleasure to hear people talk intelligently about what they do –- something that happens too rarely in the product-pushing, gossip-addressing world of celebrity television. This new series -- hosted by Mitchell (of public radio's “The Treatment” and, I should tell you, my former colleague at the also-former Los Angeles Herald-Examiner) -- is ostensibly about what goes into forming an individual creative intelligence, but it doesn't much stick to its theme. (The better to converse.) Late director-actor Sydney Pollack opens the series tonight, name-checking Fellini, Antonioni, Kurosawa, Godard and Truffaut -- directors you might not immediately associate with the man who made “The Way We Were” and “Tootsie.” Next week brings an unusually thoughtful Bill Murray, who takes a sort of analytical taste test of golden-age movie stars, muses upon the actor's “physical intelligence” and remembers getting an education in American silent film while living in Paris. It becomes clear here in a way that shouldn't be surprising, but still sort of is, that Murray is not a comedian who became an actor but has been an actor all along, and has thought long on his craft and the medium that contains it. Turner owns every movie in the world, so illustrative clips are not a problem.

“Scare Tactics” (Sci Fi, premieres Wednesday, July 9, 10 p.m.). Revival of a fitfully interesting hidden-camera prank show, in which unsuspecting marks find themselves thrust into scenarios out of horror and sci-fi films. The lesson of the show, not that it is necessarily intended as such, is how easily human beings can mistake B-movie hokum for reality, although you only have to look at how people behave in the actual world to come to the same conclusion: that our minds have been institutionally primed for nonsense is what makes this show possible. Working at this or that temp job, the victims are suddenly faced with bizarre (yet somehow familiar) events: A woman gives birth to the spawn of Satan, a bad boss throws workers in the wood chipper, a hot-line operator faces a nut with a knife. The stunt goes on until the victim is made to say, “Yes, I'm scared,” at which point the lights come up and everyone has a good laugh. More funny strange than funny ha-ha, and the gag gets old but is still worth a look. New host Tracy Morgan on “30 Rock” is one of the funniest men alive, but here he is not.

"Bikini or Bust" after the jump.

Short reviews of coming distractions:

"The Tenth Circle" (Lifetime, Saturday, June 28, 9 p.m.) Family-based mystery (adultery, drugs, teenage strip poker, dead high school football star, skeletons in closet) with lashings of seriousness (references to Dante, Eskimo culture). Based on a novel by Jodi Picoult, reminding us once again that the phrase “New York Times Best-Seller” is meaningless in literary terms. Difficult to buy overall, and it loses focus, but there are some nicely handled moments, and the always-interesting but too-little-seen Ron Eldard is in it. Kelly Preston is fine as Eldard's wife, and Britt Robertson, who plays their possibly raped, potentially murderous daughter is very good, although the part bangs her around a little much, as she goes from reasonable to hysterical and back. The conclusion seems to be that the wages of inattentive mothering are disaster and death.

"Factory" (Spike, Sunday, June 29, 10 p.m.). A partly improvised comedy from Mitch Rouse, a creator of “Strangers with Candy,” which might lead you to expect this to be better than this is. Four factory workers, who come across as four improv comics in coveralls, try to avoid work as they grouse about or lie about the women in or out of their lives. Clearly flung at the Spike's male demo –- "Get More Action" is the network tagline, which implies a viewership not getting as much as it would like -- it has a slightly sour edge that some will just read as The Way Things Are. (The female characters aren't particularly happy, either; Ritalin takes off the edge.) I did like little round Mark Beltzman, who plays a shady used car salesman-cum-funeral director, and Christopher Allen Nelson (who seems to work more often as an SFX makeup artist) as the guy none of the principals like. It would be nice to see a show about factory workers, even a comedy, that took them seriously. First sitcom for Spike, a historic moment by definition.

"Election Day" reviewed after the jump. (It's good, so click on.)

Although I am drawn irresistibly to anything having to do with that big country across the sea, “Young & Restless in China” (KCET, tonight at 9) is an especially involving view of the formerly “sleeping giant” as it yawns, stretches, kicks off the covers and makes its way down to breakfast.

Shot over four years, Sue Williams' film tracks nine younger-generation Chinese men and women grappling with old traditions and new possibilities in a society that, in the words of entrepreneur Lu Dong, has gone in short order from an attitude of “serve the people and work for others, to an extreme” to one of “get rich as fast as you can and have a good life” -- from ration tickets to conspicuous consumption.

What would the old Chairman make of his country now? Miranda Hong is a marketing executive who works “in Beijing, in the advertising department of an investment company” --  a phrase that in every particular would have seemed nonsensical a generation ago. “Young & Restless” catches a complicated country in which marriages are still arranged even as women are giving up family for careers.

The best sports documentaries grab the lapels of we who ordinarily do not give athletics a second thought. “Back Nine at Cherry Hills: The Legends of the 1960 U.S. Open” (HBO, tonight at 10) tells a story that requires only the merest grasp of the rules of golf (hit ball in hole); its drama is all in the human striving, in the understanding or overcoming of one's self to better one's game.

The film commemorates the remarkable meeting of three generations of golf greats: Ben Hogan, 47, the game's dour graying eminence, who a decade earlier fought back from a near-fatal car crash to grace the cover of Time and inspire a Hollywood biopic; Arnold Palmer (born 1929), the friendly face of what had become the people's game; and 20-year-old Jack Nicklaus, a rookie phenom not yet in full command of his powers. (In “Star Wars” terms, the Obi-Wan Kenobi, the Han Solo and the Luke Skywalker.) Each went into the last nine holes of the 1960 Open within striking distance of the title.

It is also a story of fathers and sons. Hogan's was a manic-depressive blacksmith who shot himself when Hogan was a child; Palmer's an emotionally reticent country club groundskeeper who made Arnold understand that they were not themselves country club folk. Nicklaus, who was country club folk, was by contrast his kibitzing daddy's pride and joy –- distance was what he needed.

In terms of suspense, it of course helps not to know who won. (Many will, I didn't –- though I rooted sentimentally for Hogan.) The filmmakers happily let the game play out.

Coverage of this year's U.S. Open begins tomorrow at 10 a.m. on ESPN and at noon on NBC; the tournament runs through Sunday at Torrey Pines Golf Course in San Diego -– winner yet unknown.

-- Robert Lloyd

Hillary Rodham Clinton made her last appearance as a presidential candidate -– for the time being -- when she conceded the Democratic nomination to Barack Obama on Saturday morning in Washington. Speaking from a low stage in the light-filled, colonnaded atrium of the National Building Museum with the crowd arrayed before her and, as has become the custom, behind her, she seemed to be floating in a sea of love.

She was late to the event, as to the concession. Her delay in acknowledging Obama as the presumptive candidate -– expected on the night of the last primaries -- kept eyes, cameras and cable news commentary unusually focused upon her. And as concession speeches go, it was something of a celebration and a self-celebration. It was both a private moment -- a thank you to the people who supported her campaign, and clearly still do -– and a political event, with ramifications for Obama, the Democratic Party and herself. Her speech contained a resounding endorsement of her former opponent (six minutes in, it was inevitably noted, but she circled back to it at the end), a reminder of what she had accomplished and a list of work to be done. She was centered and gracious and impossible to lampoon.

As with her opponent, the symbolic import of her candidacy is undeniable. The first presidential contest in which neither of the two front-runners was a white male, Clinton v. Obama was bound to excite
passions, positive and negative. Whether it made a difference in the primaries, Clinton was subject throughout her campaign to gender-based ridicule that would have cost people their jobs had the point been race or religion. (“Many of the most prominent people on TV behaved like middle schoolers,” party chairman Howard Dean told the New York Times.) Within the popular culture that helps define and in some ways contain the political culture, sex is the last arena where people are allowed, even encouraged, to act like pigs.

Chris Matthews' contention during MSNBC coverage of the New Hampshire primary that "the reason she may be a front-runner is her husband messed around"; Mike Barnicle's description of her (on MSNBC's “Morning Joe”) as "looking like everyone's first wife standing outside a probate court"; William Kristol's statement on “Fox News Sunday” that "white women are a problem, that's ... you know, we all live with that"; and Tucker Carlson's, on MSNBC's “Tucker,” that “when she comes on television I involuntarily cross my legs” -- these are all lines that might be delivered on situation comedies without comment. Indeed, it's the sort of thing you hear on television every day.

And yet television has also painted the future. “Could a woman really serve as commander in chief?” Clinton asked Saturday morning. “Well, I think we answered that one.” But the fact that she was the presumptive nominee even before primary season began means we were already prepared for the possibility. Just as a long line of black presidents on big screens and small makes the actual election of an African American seem inevitable -- indeed, it may be imminent -- so does the fictional depiction of strong women in what were once exclusively male roles signal a real-world sea change: I thought of Clinton recently while reviewing a new cop show, “In Plain Sight,” starring Mary McCormack as a federal marshal, one of a host of easy-to-believe tough women the media now unapologetically offers, from vampire-slaying Buffy to Mary McDonnell as the president of all humanity on “Battlestar Galactica.” In dreams begin possibilities: A Madam President is only a matter of time.

-- Robert Lloyd

Robert Lloyd on Engineer Bill: An appreciation

William Stulla, a man I only ever knew as "Engineer Bill," died Tuesday at the estimable age of 97. Some of my first memories of television, which is to say, some of my first memories of life, are of his show, which KHJ (now KCAL) ran weeknights at dinner time from 1954 to 1966. Perhaps because of his age, which was relatively advanced even then, or perhaps just because of his horn-rimmed glasses, he seemed the most eminent of the local kids-show hosts, the boss in my mind of a complement that also included Chucko the Birthday Clown (Charles M. Runyon), Sheriff John (John Rovick) and Tom Hatten, who played "Popeye" cartoons in a nautical setting. Later there were Hobo Kelly (Sally Baker), little person Billy Barty, and Gene Moss and his jelly-bean-eating puppet pal, "Shrimpenstein," though none with quite his gravitas, to slightly overstate his effect.

Every city with its own television station had their counterparts, some Cowboy This or Captain That, famous within broadcasting range and completely unknown outside of it. On a national level there was "Captain Kangaroo" and eventually "Mr. Rogers," with their higher budgets and perhaps loftier ambitions, but they came from somewhere else. It was clear to me that Engineer Bill lived in my town, and not some imaginary Neighborhood, and that there was the real possibility that I could get him to read my name on the air, or even invite me onto his show, were I to do the necessary groundwork -– there were always a couple of live tykes on board for Stulla to play off. I was never going to do that groundwork -– you had to write a letter, at least -– but I saw him once, at a supermarket personal appearance.

"Baghdad High" (HBO, premieres tonight, 9 p.m., with replays through Aug. 16.) The senior-year high school documentary has become a populous genre in itself -- “American Teen” being merely the latest and loudest example -- and even the idea of giving kids cameras to film it themselves is not new. But “Baghdad High,” shot in that embattled city over the course of the 2006-2007 school year -- which encompassed both the execution of Saddam Hussein and the Bush surge, and saw the rapid deterioration of security and infrastructure –- does bring a new slant to the form.

Shot mainly by four friends, fellow students at a middle-class boys' school whose cultural and religious differences (Kurd, Christian, Shia and half-Shia-half-Sunni) have no effect on their affections, it offers a close-up picture of Iraqi life that, while limited in scope, is more familiar than might be expected and more nuanced than what we are usually given to consider. It isn't the stuff of the nightly news or the special report: As a story, it lacks sensation, even with gunfire out the window, explosions in the distance and checkpoints on the way to school. Nothing much goes on: a little basketball here, some soccer there, a lot of hanging out, or just entertaining oneself in on one's own room. But it's full of casual details -– the look of a kitchen or a classroom or a front yard -- that brings the country to life in a way that ordinary journalism regularly fails to do.

That I think Ewan McGregor must be a really nice guy is based entirely on having watched “Long Way Round,” the highly likable 2004 Bravo series that documented a motorcycle trip he made alongside pal Charley Boorman (a sometimes actor and the son of director John Boorman) eastward from London to New York. Now comes “Long Way Down,” documenting a three-month ride from the top of Scotland to the bottom of Africa.

The current itinerary takes them through Scotland, England, France, Italy and 15 African countries. (It is a kind of a younger-generation version of Michael Palin's “Pole to Pole,” but with motorbikes, and therefore the possibility of motorbike accidents, and with camping out, and therefore the possibility of being eaten.) The first episode, which airs Saturday, Aug. 2, at 9 p.m. on Fox Reality, is all about the preparation, which is considerable, and ranges from deciding what shoes to take to survival training, including what to do when men in masks point guns at your head.

Scenic grandeur is suggested only at its end, as McGregor and Boorman finally set off south (escorted by McGregor's father and brother) through some green Scottish countryside, and in the coming attractions. (There will be pyramids and zebras.) Still, there is drama: McGregor manages to break his leg in a London motorcycle spill even before they go, and Boorman gets himself detained by police by speaking the word “bomb” in an airport. There is trouble securing the Libyan visas, and there is the thorny question of McGregor's wife, Eve, who has never ridden a motorbike, wanting to join them partway. It is not great drama so far –- it is humorous drama, if anything. But this is just the start.

It would be easy enough for this to come off as self-indulgent –- good-looking rich boys on a lark –- especially given that they are trailed by a support staff that includes a security expert (who doubles on camera) and a doctor. But they aren't pretending otherwise. (Those people on “Survivor” -- they're not alone, either.) And even with the backup, what they're doing is not easy, possibly dangerous, and definitely dirty.

--Robert Lloyd

“Campaign” (KCET, 10 tonight). After “Election Day,” this look at a city council race in Kawasaki, Kanagawa prefecture, Japan, is the second electorally themed “P.O.V.” presentation to air in a month. The propinquity of our current presidential death match may have something to do with this, but the subject holds an honored place in the history of documentary filmmaking: The 1960 “Primary,” in which John F. Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey compete for the Democratic nomination in Wisconsin, was practically ground zero for “direct cinema” (American “cinema verité” in loose terms); Richard Leacock, Albert Maysles and D.A. Pennebaker all worked on it. Fundamentally a comedy, though a bit of black one, “Campaign” follows the fortunes of party-picked candidate Kazuhiko Yamauchi, a 40-year-old coin and stamp dealer with no perceptible political ideas but a vague ambition to be prime minister, the way one might want to be a movie star or a famous novelist without ever learning to act or wanting to write. Shot over a frenzied 12 days, which seem to encompass the entirety of the highly ritualized campaign, it has the makings of a Preston Sturges, Frank Tashlin or Billy Wilder movie -- though as a leading man Yamauchi is not quite as lovable or redeemable a schnook as Eddie Bracken or Jerry Lewis or Jack Lemmon would have been. Criticized both from above and below for his bowing, his handshake, his eye contact, his very substance, it's only with his skeptical wife -- a modern woman who is advised to refer to herself not as a “wife” but a “housewife” -- or his old university friends that Yamauchi becomes remotely a person. (Director Kazuhiro Soda was also a school friend.) It is, of course, only a partial look at the process, and some of it looks funny just for being, you know, foreign -- but it takes no stretch of the imagination to see how mad our own elections might look from abroad or from here.

"Two Fat Ladies" (on DVD) after the jump:

"9 Star Hotel" (KCET, tonight, 10 p.m.). A haunting fly-on-the-wall documentary by Ido Haar that follows a group of undocumented Palestinian workers building the Israeli planned city of Modi'in in the days before the Separation Wall made even illegal work impossible. (Although the film doesn't say so, the city was planned by Moshe Safdie, who famously designed Expo '67's Habitat in Montreal, as well as L.A.'s own Skirball Cultural Center.) Living in low-lying improvised complexes of cardboard and tin in the hills above the town, they cook, sing, scavenge, try to stay warm, hide or run from the police -- not always successfully. And they talk, about all sorts of things, from attractive female border guards, to the Holocaust, to their families and their disappearing work. There is no rancor, only confusion and resolve. The film won best documentary at the 2006 Jerusalem International Film Festival.

"French in Action" after the jump.

Short reviews of coming distractions.

“Elvis Mitchell: Under the Influence” (TCM, Mondays, 5 p.m. and 7:30 p.m.). It's always a pleasure to hear people talk intelligently about what they do –- something that happens too rarely in the product-pushing, gossip-addressing world of celebrity television. This new series -- hosted by Mitchell (of public radio's “The Treatment” and, I should tell you, my former colleague at the also-former Los Angeles Herald-Examiner) -- is ostensibly about what goes into forming an individual creative intelligence, but it doesn't much stick to its theme. (The better to converse.) Late director-actor Sydney Pollack opens the series tonight, name-checking Fellini, Antonioni, Kurosawa, Godard and Truffaut -- directors you might not immediately associate with the man who made “The Way We Were” and “Tootsie.” Next week brings an unusually thoughtful Bill Murray, who takes a sort of analytical taste test of golden-age movie stars, muses upon the actor's “physical intelligence” and remembers getting an education in American silent film while living in Paris. It becomes clear here in a way that shouldn't be surprising, but still sort of is, that Murray is not a comedian who became an actor but has been an actor all along, and has thought long on his craft and the medium that contains it. Turner owns every movie in the world, so illustrative clips are not a problem.

“Scare Tactics” (Sci Fi, premieres Wednesday, July 9, 10 p.m.). Revival of a fitfully interesting hidden-camera prank show, in which unsuspecting marks find themselves thrust into scenarios out of horror and sci-fi films. The lesson of the show, not that it is necessarily intended as such, is how easily human beings can mistake B-movie hokum for reality, although you only have to look at how people behave in the actual world to come to the same conclusion: that our minds have been institutionally primed for nonsense is what makes this show possible. Working at this or that temp job, the victims are suddenly faced with bizarre (yet somehow familiar) events: A woman gives birth to the spawn of Satan, a bad boss throws workers in the wood chipper, a hot-line operator faces a nut with a knife. The stunt goes on until the victim is made to say, “Yes, I'm scared,” at which point the lights come up and everyone has a good laugh. More funny strange than funny ha-ha, and the gag gets old but is still worth a look. New host Tracy Morgan on “30 Rock” is one of the funniest men alive, but here he is not.

"Bikini or Bust" after the jump.

Short reviews of coming distractions:

"The Tenth Circle" (Lifetime, Saturday, June 28, 9 p.m.) Family-based mystery (adultery, drugs, teenage strip poker, dead high school football star, skeletons in closet) with lashings of seriousness (references to Dante, Eskimo culture). Based on a novel by Jodi Picoult, reminding us once again that the phrase “New York Times Best-Seller” is meaningless in literary terms. Difficult to buy overall, and it loses focus, but there are some nicely handled moments, and the always-interesting but too-little-seen Ron Eldard is in it. Kelly Preston is fine as Eldard's wife, and Britt Robertson, who plays their possibly raped, potentially murderous daughter is very good, although the part bangs her around a little much, as she goes from reasonable to hysterical and back. The conclusion seems to be that the wages of inattentive mothering are disaster and death.

"Factory" (Spike, Sunday, June 29, 10 p.m.). A partly improvised comedy from Mitch Rouse, a creator of “Strangers with Candy,” which might lead you to expect this to be better than this is. Four factory workers, who come across as four improv comics in coveralls, try to avoid work as they grouse about or lie about the women in or out of their lives. Clearly flung at the Spike's male demo –- "Get More Action" is the network tagline, which implies a viewership not getting as much as it would like -- it has a slightly sour edge that some will just read as The Way Things Are. (The female characters aren't particularly happy, either; Ritalin takes off the edge.) I did like little round Mark Beltzman, who plays a shady used car salesman-cum-funeral director, and Christopher Allen Nelson (who seems to work more often as an SFX makeup artist) as the guy none of the principals like. It would be nice to see a show about factory workers, even a comedy, that took them seriously. First sitcom for Spike, a historic moment by definition.

"Election Day" reviewed after the jump. (It's good, so click on.)

Although I am drawn irresistibly to anything having to do with that big country across the sea, “Young & Restless in China” (KCET, tonight at 9) is an especially involving view of the formerly “sleeping giant” as it yawns, stretches, kicks off the covers and makes its way down to breakfast.

Shot over four years, Sue Williams' film tracks nine younger-generation Chinese men and women grappling with old traditions and new possibilities in a society that, in the words of entrepreneur Lu Dong, has gone in short order from an attitude of “serve the people and work for others, to an extreme” to one of “get rich as fast as you can and have a good life” -- from ration tickets to conspicuous consumption.

What would the old Chairman make of his country now? Miranda Hong is a marketing executive who works “in Beijing, in the advertising department of an investment company” --  a phrase that in every particular would have seemed nonsensical a generation ago. “Young & Restless” catches a complicated country in which marriages are still arranged even as women are giving up family for careers.

The best sports documentaries grab the lapels of we who ordinarily do not give athletics a second thought. “Back Nine at Cherry Hills: The Legends of the 1960 U.S. Open” (HBO, tonight at 10) tells a story that requires only the merest grasp of the rules of golf (hit ball in hole); its drama is all in the human striving, in the understanding or overcoming of one's self to better one's game.

The film commemorates the remarkable meeting of three generations of golf greats: Ben Hogan, 47, the game's dour graying eminence, who a decade earlier fought back from a near-fatal car crash to grace the cover of Time and inspire a Hollywood biopic; Arnold Palmer (born 1929), the friendly face of what had become the people's game; and 20-year-old Jack Nicklaus, a rookie phenom not yet in full command of his powers. (In “Star Wars” terms, the Obi-Wan Kenobi, the Han Solo and the Luke Skywalker.) Each went into the last nine holes of the 1960 Open within striking distance of the title.

It is also a story of fathers and sons. Hogan's was a manic-depressive blacksmith who shot himself when Hogan was a child; Palmer's an emotionally reticent country club groundskeeper who made Arnold understand that they were not themselves country club folk. Nicklaus, who was country club folk, was by contrast his kibitzing daddy's pride and joy –- distance was what he needed.

In terms of suspense, it of course helps not to know who won. (Many will, I didn't –- though I rooted sentimentally for Hogan.) The filmmakers happily let the game play out.

Coverage of this year's U.S. Open begins tomorrow at 10 a.m. on ESPN and at noon on NBC; the tournament runs through Sunday at Torrey Pines Golf Course in San Diego -– winner yet unknown.

-- Robert Lloyd

Hillary Rodham Clinton made her last appearance as a presidential candidate -– for the time being -- when she conceded the Democratic nomination to Barack Obama on Saturday morning in Washington. Speaking from a low stage in the light-filled, colonnaded atrium of the National Building Museum with the crowd arrayed before her and, as has become the custom, behind her, she seemed to be floating in a sea of love.

She was late to the event, as to the concession. Her delay in acknowledging Obama as the presumptive candidate -– expected on the night of the last primaries -- kept eyes, cameras and cable news commentary unusually focused upon her. And as concession speeches go, it was something of a celebration and a self-celebration. It was both a private moment -- a thank you to the people who supported her campaign, and clearly still do -– and a political event, with ramifications for Obama, the Democratic Party and herself. Her speech contained a resounding endorsement of her former opponent (six minutes in, it was inevitably noted, but she circled back to it at the end), a reminder of what she had accomplished and a list of work to be done. She was centered and gracious and impossible to lampoon.

As with her opponent, the symbolic import of her candidacy is undeniable. The first presidential contest in which neither of the two front-runners was a white male, Clinton v. Obama was bound to excite
passions, positive and negative. Whether it made a difference in the primaries, Clinton was subject throughout her campaign to gender-based ridicule that would have cost people their jobs had the point been race or religion. (“Many of the most prominent people on TV behaved like middle schoolers,” party chairman Howard Dean told the New York Times.) Within the popular culture that helps define and in some ways contain the political culture, sex is the last arena where people are allowed, even encouraged, to act like pigs.

Chris Matthews' contention during MSNBC coverage of the New Hampshire primary that "the reason she may be a front-runner is her husband messed around"; Mike Barnicle's description of her (on MSNBC's “Morning Joe”) as "looking like everyone's first wife standing outside a probate court"; William Kristol's statement on “Fox News Sunday” that "white women are a problem, that's ... you know, we all live with that"; and Tucker Carlson's, on MSNBC's “Tucker,” that “when she comes on television I involuntarily cross my legs” -- these are all lines that might be delivered on situation comedies without comment. Indeed, it's the sort of thing you hear on television every day.

And yet television has also painted the future. “Could a woman really serve as commander in chief?” Clinton asked Saturday morning. “Well, I think we answered that one.” But the fact that she was the presumptive nominee even before primary season began means we were already prepared for the possibility. Just as a long line of black presidents on big screens and small makes the actual election of an African American seem inevitable -- indeed, it may be imminent -- so does the fictional depiction of strong women in what were once exclusively male roles signal a real-world sea change: I thought of Clinton recently while reviewing a new cop show, “In Plain Sight,” starring Mary McCormack as a federal marshal, one of a host of easy-to-believe tough women the media now unapologetically offers, from vampire-slaying Buffy to Mary McDonnell as the president of all humanity on “Battlestar Galactica.” In dreams begin possibilities: A Madam President is only a matter of time.

-- Robert Lloyd

Review: "Baghdad High"

"Baghdad High" (HBO, premieres tonight, 9 p.m., with replays through Aug. 16.) The senior-year high school documentary has become a populous genre in itself -- “American Teen” being merely the latest and loudest example -- and even the idea of giving kids cameras to film it themselves is not new. But “Baghdad High,” shot in that embattled city over the course of the 2006-2007 school year -- which encompassed both the execution of Saddam Hussein and the Bush surge, and saw the rapid deterioration of security and infrastructure –- does bring a new slant to the form.

Shot mainly by four friends, fellow students at a middle-class boys' school whose cultural and religious differences (Kurd, Christian, Shia and half-Shia-half-Sunni) have no effect on their affections, it offers a close-up picture of Iraqi life that, while limited in scope, is more familiar than might be expected and more nuanced than what we are usually given to consider. It isn't the stuff of the nightly news or the special report: As a story, it lacks sensation, even with gunfire out the window, explosions in the distance and checkpoints on the way to school. Nothing much goes on: a little basketball here, some soccer there, a lot of hanging out, or just entertaining oneself in on one's own room. But it's full of casual details -– the look of a kitchen or a classroom or a front yard -- that brings the country to life in a way that ordinary journalism regularly fails to do.

That I think Ewan McGregor must be a really nice guy is based entirely on having watched “Long Way Round,” the highly likable 2004 Bravo series that documented a motorcycle trip he made alongside pal Charley Boorman (a sometimes actor and the son of director John Boorman) eastward from London to New York. Now comes “Long Way Down,” documenting a three-month ride from the top of Scotland to the bottom of Africa.

The current itinerary takes them through Scotland, England, France, Italy and 15 African countries. (It is a kind of a younger-generation version of Michael Palin's “Pole to Pole,” but with motorbikes, and therefore the possibility of motorbike accidents, and with camping out, and therefore the possibility of being eaten.) The first episode, which airs Saturday, Aug. 2, at 9 p.m. on Fox Reality, is all about the preparation, which is considerable, and ranges from deciding what shoes to take to survival training, including what to do when men in masks point guns at your head.

Scenic grandeur is suggested only at its end, as McGregor and Boorman finally set off south (escorted by McGregor's father and brother) through some green Scottish countryside, and in the coming attractions. (There will be pyramids and zebras.) Still, there is drama: McGregor manages to break his leg in a London motorcycle spill even before they go, and Boorman gets himself detained by police by speaking the word “bomb” in an airport. There is trouble securing the Libyan visas, and there is the thorny question of McGregor's wife, Eve, who has never ridden a motorbike, wanting to join them partway. It is not great drama so far –- it is humorous drama, if anything. But this is just the start.

It would be easy enough for this to come off as self-indulgent –- good-looking rich boys on a lark –- especially given that they are trailed by a support staff that includes a security expert (who doubles on camera) and a doctor. But they aren't pretending otherwise. (Those people on “Survivor” -- they're not alone, either.) And even with the backup, what they're doing is not easy, possibly dangerous, and definitely dirty.

--Robert Lloyd

“Campaign” (KCET, 10 tonight). After “Election Day,” this look at a city council race in Kawasaki, Kanagawa prefecture, Japan, is the second electorally themed “P.O.V.” presentation to air in a month. The propinquity of our current presidential death match may have something to do with this, but the subject holds an honored place in the history of documentary filmmaking: The 1960 “Primary,” in which John F. Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey compete for the Democratic nomination in Wisconsin, was practically ground zero for “direct cinema” (American “cinema verité” in loose terms); Richard Leacock, Albert Maysles and D.A. Pennebaker all worked on it. Fundamentally a comedy, though a bit of black one, “Campaign” follows the fortunes of party-picked candidate Kazuhiko Yamauchi, a 40-year-old coin and stamp dealer with no perceptible political ideas but a vague ambition to be prime minister, the way one might want to be a movie star or a famous novelist without ever learning to act or wanting to write. Shot over a frenzied 12 days, which seem to encompass the entirety of the highly ritualized campaign, it has the makings of a Preston Sturges, Frank Tashlin or Billy Wilder movie -- though as a leading man Yamauchi is not quite as lovable or redeemable a schnook as Eddie Bracken or Jerry Lewis or Jack Lemmon would have been. Criticized both from above and below for his bowing, his handshake, his eye contact, his very substance, it's only with his skeptical wife -- a modern woman who is advised to refer to herself not as a “wife” but a “housewife” -- or his old university friends that Yamauchi becomes remotely a person. (Director Kazuhiro Soda was also a school friend.) It is, of course, only a partial look at the process, and some of it looks funny just for being, you know, foreign -- but it takes no stretch of the imagination to see how mad our own elections might look from abroad or from here.

"Two Fat Ladies" (on DVD) after the jump:

"9 Star Hotel" (KCET, tonight, 10 p.m.). A haunting fly-on-the-wall documentary by Ido Haar that follows a group of undocumented Palestinian workers building the Israeli planned city of Modi'in in the days before the Separation Wall made even illegal work impossible. (Although the film doesn't say so, the city was planned by Moshe Safdie, who famously designed Expo '67's Habitat in Montreal, as well as L.A.'s own Skirball Cultural Center.) Living in low-lying improvised complexes of cardboard and tin in the hills above the town, they cook, sing, scavenge, try to stay warm, hide or run from the police -- not always successfully. And they talk, about all sorts of things, from attractive female border guards, to the Holocaust, to their families and their disappearing work. There is no rancor, only confusion and resolve. The film won best documentary at the 2006 Jerusalem International Film Festival.

"French in Action" after the jump.

Short reviews of coming distractions.

“Elvis Mitchell: Under the Influence” (TCM, Mondays, 5 p.m. and 7:30 p.m.). It's always a pleasure to hear people talk intelligently about what they do –- something that happens too rarely in the product-pushing, gossip-addressing world of celebrity television. This new series -- hosted by Mitchell (of public radio's “The Treatment” and, I should tell you, my former colleague at the also-former Los Angeles Herald-Examiner) -- is ostensibly about what goes into forming an individual creative intelligence, but it doesn't much stick to its theme. (The better to converse.) Late director-actor Sydney Pollack opens the series tonight, name-checking Fellini, Antonioni, Kurosawa, Godard and Truffaut -- directors you might not immediately associate with the man who made “The Way We Were” and “Tootsie.” Next week brings an unusually thoughtful Bill Murray, who takes a sort of analytical taste test of golden-age movie stars, muses upon the actor's “physical intelligence” and remembers getting an education in American silent film while living in Paris. It becomes clear here in a way that shouldn't be surprising, but still sort of is, that Murray is not a comedian who became an actor but has been an actor all along, and has thought long on his craft and the medium that contains it. Turner owns every movie in the world, so illustrative clips are not a problem.

“Scare Tactics” (Sci Fi, premieres Wednesday, July 9, 10 p.m.). Revival of a fitfully interesting hidden-camera prank show, in which unsuspecting marks find themselves thrust into scenarios out of horror and sci-fi films. The lesson of the show, not that it is necessarily intended as such, is how easily human beings can mistake B-movie hokum for reality, although you only have to look at how people behave in the actual world to come to the same conclusion: that our minds have been institutionally primed for nonsense is what makes this show possible. Working at this or that temp job, the victims are suddenly faced with bizarre (yet somehow familiar) events: A woman gives birth to the spawn of Satan, a bad boss throws workers in the wood chipper, a hot-line operator faces a nut with a knife. The stunt goes on until the victim is made to say, “Yes, I'm scared,” at which point the lights come up and everyone has a good laugh. More funny strange than funny ha-ha, and the gag gets old but is still worth a look. New host Tracy Morgan on “30 Rock” is one of the funniest men alive, but here he is not.

"Bikini or Bust" after the jump.

Short reviews of coming distractions:

"The Tenth Circle" (Lifetime, Saturday, June 28, 9 p.m.) Family-based mystery (adultery, drugs, teenage strip poker, dead high school football star, skeletons in closet) with lashings of seriousness (references to Dante, Eskimo culture). Based on a novel by Jodi Picoult, reminding us once again that the phrase “New York Times Best-Seller” is meaningless in literary terms. Difficult to buy overall, and it loses focus, but there are some nicely handled moments, and the always-interesting but too-little-seen Ron Eldard is in it. Kelly Preston is fine as Eldard's wife, and Britt Robertson, who plays their possibly raped, potentially murderous daughter is very good, although the part bangs her around a little much, as she goes from reasonable to hysterical and back. The conclusion seems to be that the wages of inattentive mothering are disaster and death.

"Factory" (Spike, Sunday, June 29, 10 p.m.). A partly improvised comedy from Mitch Rouse, a creator of “Strangers with Candy,” which might lead you to expect this to be better than this is. Four factory workers, who come across as four improv comics in coveralls, try to avoid work as they grouse about or lie about the women in or out of their lives. Clearly flung at the Spike's male demo –- "Get More Action" is the network tagline, which implies a viewership not getting as much as it would like -- it has a slightly sour edge that some will just read as The Way Things Are. (The female characters aren't particularly happy, either; Ritalin takes off the edge.) I did like little round Mark Beltzman, who plays a shady used car salesman-cum-funeral director, and Christopher Allen Nelson (who seems to work more often as an SFX makeup artist) as the guy none of the principals like. It would be nice to see a show about factory workers, even a comedy, that took them seriously. First sitcom for Spike, a historic moment by definition.

"Election Day" reviewed after the jump. (It's good, so click on.)

Although I am drawn irresistibly to anything having to do with that big country across the sea, “Young & Restless in China” (KCET, tonight at 9) is an especially involving view of the formerly “sleeping giant” as it yawns, stretches, kicks off the covers and makes its way down to breakfast.

Shot over four years, Sue Williams' film tracks nine younger-generation Chinese men and women grappling with old traditions and new possibilities in a society that, in the words of entrepreneur Lu Dong, has gone in short order from an attitude of “serve the people and work for others, to an extreme” to one of “get rich as fast as you can and have a good life” -- from ration tickets to conspicuous consumption.

What would the old Chairman make of his country now? Miranda Hong is a marketing executive who works “in Beijing, in the advertising department of an investment company” --  a phrase that in every particular would have seemed nonsensical a generation ago. “Young & Restless” catches a complicated country in which marriages are still arranged even as women are giving up family for careers.

The best sports documentaries grab the lapels of we who ordinarily do not give athletics a second thought. “Back Nine at Cherry Hills: The Legends of the 1960 U.S. Open” (HBO, tonight at 10) tells a story that requires only the merest grasp of the rules of golf (hit ball in hole); its drama is all in the human striving, in the understanding or overcoming of one's self to better one's game.

The film commemorates the remarkable meeting of three generations of golf greats: Ben Hogan, 47, the game's dour graying eminence, who a decade earlier fought back from a near-fatal car crash to grace the cover of Time and inspire a Hollywood biopic; Arnold Palmer (born 1929), the friendly face of what had become the people's game; and 20-year-old Jack Nicklaus, a rookie phenom not yet in full command of his powers. (In “Star Wars” terms, the Obi-Wan Kenobi, the Han Solo and the Luke Skywalker.) Each went into the last nine holes of the 1960 Open within striking distance of the title.

It is also a story of fathers and sons. Hogan's was a manic-depressive blacksmith who shot himself when Hogan was a child; Palmer's an emotionally reticent country club groundskeeper who made Arnold understand that they were not themselves country club folk. Nicklaus, who was country club folk, was by contrast his kibitzing daddy's pride and joy –- distance was what he needed.

In terms of suspense, it of course helps not to know who won. (Many will, I didn't –- though I rooted sentimentally for Hogan.) The filmmakers happily let the game play out.

Coverage of this year's U.S. Open begins tomorrow at 10 a.m. on ESPN and at noon on NBC; the tournament runs through Sunday at Torrey Pines Golf Course in San Diego -– winner yet unknown.

-- Robert Lloyd

Hillary Rodham Clinton made her last appearance as a presidential candidate -– for the time being -- when she conceded the Democratic nomination to Barack Obama on Saturday morning in Washington. Speaking from a low stage in the light-filled, colonnaded atrium of the National Building Museum with the crowd arrayed before her and, as has become the custom, behind her, she seemed to be floating in a sea of love.

She was late to the event, as to the concession. Her delay in acknowledging Obama as the presumptive candidate -– expected on the night of the last primaries -- kept eyes, cameras and cable news commentary unusually focused upon her. And as concession speeches go, it was something of a celebration and a self-celebration. It was both a private moment -- a thank you to the people who supported her campaign, and clearly still do -– and a political event, with ramifications for Obama, the Democratic Party and herself. Her speech contained a resounding endorsement of her former opponent (six minutes in, it was inevitably noted, but she circled back to it at the end), a reminder of what she had accomplished and a list of work to be done. She was centered and gracious and impossible to lampoon.

As with her opponent, the symbolic import of her candidacy is undeniable. The first presidential contest in which neither of the two front-runners was a white male, Clinton v. Obama was bound to excite
passions, positive and negative. Whether it made a difference in the primaries, Clinton was subject throughout her campaign to gender-based ridicule that would have cost people their jobs had the point been race or religion. (“Many of the most prominent people on TV behaved like middle schoolers,” party chairman Howard Dean told the New York Times.) Within the popular culture that helps define and in some ways contain the political culture, sex is the last arena where people are allowed, even encouraged, to act like pigs.

Chris Matthews' contention during MSNBC coverage of the New Hampshire primary that "the reason she may be a front-runner is her husband messed around"; Mike Barnicle's description of her (on MSNBC's “Morning Joe”) as "looking like everyone's first wife standing outside a probate court"; William Kristol's statement on “Fox News Sunday” that "white women are a problem, that's ... you know, we all live with that"; and Tucker Carlson's, on MSNBC's “Tucker,” that “when she comes on television I involuntarily cross my legs” -- these are all lines that might be delivered on situation comedies without comment. Indeed, it's the sort of thing you hear on television every day.

And yet television has also painted the future. “Could a woman really serve as commander in chief?” Clinton asked Saturday morning. “Well, I think we answered that one.” But the fact that she was the presumptive nominee even before primary season began means we were already prepared for the possibility. Just as a long line of black presidents on big screens and small makes the actual election of an African American seem inevitable -- indeed, it may be imminent -- so does the fictional depiction of strong women in what were once exclusively male roles signal a real-world sea change: I thought of Clinton recently while reviewing a new cop show, “In Plain Sight,” starring Mary McCormack as a federal marshal, one of a host of easy-to-believe tough women the media now unapologetically offers, from vampire-slaying Buffy to Mary McDonnell as the president of all humanity on “Battlestar Galactica.” In dreams begin possibilities: A Madam President is only a matter of time.

-- Robert Lloyd

Review: "Long Way Down"

That I think Ewan McGregor must be a really nice guy is based entirely on having watched “Long Way Round,” the highly likable 2004 Bravo series that documented a motorcycle trip he made alongside pal Charley Boorman (a sometimes actor and the son of director John Boorman) eastward from London to New York. Now comes “Long Way Down,” documenting a three-month ride from the top of Scotland to the bottom of Africa.

The current itinerary takes them through Scotland, England, France, Italy and 15 African countries. (It is a kind of a younger-generation version of Michael Palin's “Pole to Pole,” but with motorbikes, and therefore the possibility of motorbike accidents, and with camping out, and therefore the possibility of being eaten.) The first episode, which airs Saturday, Aug. 2, at 9 p.m. on Fox Reality, is all about the preparation, which is considerable, and ranges from deciding what shoes to take to survival training, including what to do when men in masks point guns at your head.

Scenic grandeur is suggested only at its end, as McGregor and Boorman finally set off south (escorted by McGregor's father and brother) through some green Scottish countryside, and in the coming attractions. (There will be pyramids and zebras.) Still, there is drama: McGregor manages to break his leg in a London motorcycle spill even before they go, and Boorman gets himself detained by police by speaking the word “bomb” in an airport. There is trouble securing the Libyan visas, and there is the thorny question of McGregor's wife, Eve, who has never ridden a motorbike, wanting to join them partway. It is not great drama so far –- it is humorous drama, if anything. But this is just the start.

It would be easy enough for this to come off as self-indulgent –- good-looking rich boys on a lark –- especially given that they are trailed by a support staff that includes a security expert (who doubles on camera) and a doctor. But they aren't pretending otherwise. (Those people on “Survivor” -- they're not alone, either.) And even with the backup, what they're doing is not easy, possibly dangerous, and definitely dirty.

--Robert Lloyd

“Campaign” (KCET, 10 tonight). After “Election Day,” this look at a city council race in Kawasaki, Kanagawa prefecture, Japan, is the second electorally themed “P.O.V.” presentation to air in a month. The propinquity of our current presidential death match may have something to do with this, but the subject holds an honored place in the history of documentary filmmaking: The 1960 “Primary,” in which John F. Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey compete for the Democratic nomination in Wisconsin, was practically ground zero for “direct cinema” (American “cinema verité” in loose terms); Richard Leacock, Albert Maysles and D.A. Pennebaker all worked on it. Fundamentally a comedy, though a bit of black one, “Campaign” follows the fortunes of party-picked candidate Kazuhiko Yamauchi, a 40-year-old coin and stamp dealer with no perceptible political ideas but a vague ambition to be prime minister, the way one might want to be a movie star or a famous novelist without ever learning to act or wanting to write. Shot over a frenzied 12 days, which seem to encompass the entirety of the highly ritualized campaign, it has the makings of a Preston Sturges, Frank Tashlin or Billy Wilder movie -- though as a leading man Yamauchi is not quite as lovable or redeemable a schnook as Eddie Bracken or Jerry Lewis or Jack Lemmon would have been. Criticized both from above and below for his bowing, his handshake, his eye contact, his very substance, it's only with his skeptical wife -- a modern woman who is advised to refer to herself not as a “wife” but a “housewife” -- or his old university friends that Yamauchi becomes remotely a person. (Director Kazuhiro Soda was also a school friend.) It is, of course, only a partial look at the process, and some of it looks funny just for being, you know, foreign -- but it takes no stretch of the imagination to see how mad our own elections might look from abroad or from here.

"Two Fat Ladies" (on DVD) after the jump:

"9 Star Hotel" (KCET, tonight, 10 p.m.). A haunting fly-on-the-wall documentary by Ido Haar that follows a group of undocumented Palestinian workers building the Israeli planned city of Modi'in in the days before the Separation Wall made even illegal work impossible. (Although the film doesn't say so, the city was planned by Moshe Safdie, who famously designed Expo '67's Habitat in Montreal, as well as L.A.'s own Skirball Cultural Center.) Living in low-lying improvised complexes of cardboard and tin in the hills above the town, they cook, sing, scavenge, try to stay warm, hide or run from the police -- not always successfully. And they talk, about all sorts of things, from attractive female border guards, to the Holocaust, to their families and their disappearing work. There is no rancor, only confusion and resolve. The film won best documentary at the 2006 Jerusalem International Film Festival.

"French in Action" after the jump.

Short reviews of coming distractions.

“Elvis Mitchell: Under the Influence” (TCM, Mondays, 5 p.m. and 7:30 p.m.). It's always a pleasure to hear people talk intelligently about what they do –- something that happens too rarely in the product-pushing, gossip-addressing world of celebrity television. This new series -- hosted by Mitchell (of public radio's “The Treatment” and, I should tell you, my former colleague at the also-former Los Angeles Herald-Examiner) -- is ostensibly about what goes into forming an individual creative intelligence, but it doesn't much stick to its theme. (The better to converse.) Late director-actor Sydney Pollack opens the series tonight, name-checking Fellini, Antonioni, Kurosawa, Godard and Truffaut -- directors you might not immediately associate with the man who made “The Way We Were” and “Tootsie.” Next week brings an unusually thoughtful Bill Murray, who takes a sort of analytical taste test of golden-age movie stars, muses upon the actor's “physical intelligence” and remembers getting an education in American silent film while living in Paris. It becomes clear here in a way that shouldn't be surprising, but still sort of is, that Murray is not a comedian who became an actor but has been an actor all along, and has thought long on his craft and the medium that contains it. Turner owns every movie in the world, so illustrative clips are not a problem.

“Scare Tactics” (Sci Fi, premieres Wednesday, July 9, 10 p.m.). Revival of a fitfully interesting hidden-camera prank show, in which unsuspecting marks find themselves thrust into scenarios out of horror and sci-fi films. The lesson of the show, not that it is necessarily intended as such, is how easily human beings can mistake B-movie hokum for reality, although you only have to look at how people behave in the actual world to come to the same conclusion: that our minds have been institutionally primed for nonsense is what makes this show possible. Working at this or that temp job, the victims are suddenly faced with bizarre (yet somehow familiar) events: A woman gives birth to the spawn of Satan, a bad boss throws workers in the wood chipper, a hot-line operator faces a nut with a knife. The stunt goes on until the victim is made to say, “Yes, I'm scared,” at which point the lights come up and everyone has a good laugh. More funny strange than funny ha-ha, and the gag gets old but is still worth a look. New host Tracy Morgan on “30 Rock” is one of the funniest men alive, but here he is not.

"Bikini or Bust" after the jump.

Short reviews of coming distractions:

"The Tenth Circle" (Lifetime, Saturday, June 28, 9 p.m.) Family-based mystery (adultery, drugs, teenage strip poker, dead high school football star, skeletons in closet) with lashings of seriousness (references to Dante, Eskimo culture). Based on a novel by Jodi Picoult, reminding us once again that the phrase “New York Times Best-Seller” is meaningless in literary terms. Difficult to buy overall, and it loses focus, but there are some nicely handled moments, and the always-interesting but too-little-seen Ron Eldard is in it. Kelly Preston is fine as Eldard's wife, and Britt Robertson, who plays their possibly raped, potentially murderous daughter is very good, although the part bangs her around a little much, as she goes from reasonable to hysterical and back. The conclusion seems to be that the wages of inattentive mothering are disaster and death.

"Factory" (Spike, Sunday, June 29, 10 p.m.). A partly improvised comedy from Mitch Rouse, a creator of “Strangers with Candy,” which might lead you to expect this to be better than this is. Four factory workers, who come across as four improv comics in coveralls, try to avoid work as they grouse about or lie about the women in or out of their lives. Clearly flung at the Spike's male demo –- "Get More Action" is the network tagline, which implies a viewership not getting as much as it would like -- it has a slightly sour edge that some will just read as The Way Things Are. (The female characters aren't particularly happy, either; Ritalin takes off the edge.) I did like little round Mark Beltzman, who plays a shady used car salesman-cum-funeral director, and Christopher Allen Nelson (who seems to work more often as an SFX makeup artist) as the guy none of the principals like. It would be nice to see a show about factory workers, even a comedy, that took them seriously. First sitcom for Spike, a historic moment by definition.

"Election Day" reviewed after the jump. (It's good, so click on.)

Although I am drawn irresistibly to anything having to do with that big country across the sea, “Young & Restless in China” (KCET, tonight at 9) is an especially involving view of the formerly “sleeping giant” as it yawns, stretches, kicks off the covers and makes its way down to breakfast.

Shot over four years, Sue Williams' film tracks nine younger-generation Chinese men and women grappling with old traditions and new possibilities in a society that, in the words of entrepreneur Lu Dong, has gone in short order from an attitude of “serve the people and work for others, to an extreme” to one of “get rich as fast as you can and have a good life” -- from ration tickets to conspicuous consumption.

What would the old Chairman make of his country now? Miranda Hong is a marketing executive who works “in Beijing, in the advertising department of an investment company” --  a phrase that in every particular would have seemed nonsensical a generation ago. “Young & Restless” catches a complicated country in which marriages are still arranged even as women are giving up family for careers.

The best sports documentaries grab the lapels of we who ordinarily do not give athletics a second thought. “Back Nine at Cherry Hills: The Legends of the 1960 U.S. Open” (HBO, tonight at 10) tells a story that requires only the merest grasp of the rules of golf (hit ball in hole); its drama is all in the human striving, in the understanding or overcoming of one's self to better one's game.

The film commemorates the remarkable meeting of three generations of golf greats: Ben Hogan, 47, the game's dour graying eminence, who a decade earlier fought back from a near-fatal car crash to grace the cover of Time and inspire a Hollywood biopic; Arnold Palmer (born 1929), the friendly face of what had become the people's game; and 20-year-old Jack Nicklaus, a rookie phenom not yet in full command of his powers. (In “Star Wars” terms, the Obi-Wan Kenobi, the Han Solo and the Luke Skywalker.) Each went into the last nine holes of the 1960 Open within striking distance of the title.

It is also a story of fathers and sons. Hogan's was a manic-depressive blacksmith who shot himself when Hogan was a child; Palmer's an emotionally reticent country club groundskeeper who made Arnold understand that they were not themselves country club folk. Nicklaus, who was country club folk, was by contrast his kibitzing daddy's pride and joy –- distance was what he needed.

In terms of suspense, it of course helps not to know who won. (Many will, I didn't –- though I rooted sentimentally for Hogan.) The filmmakers happily let the game play out.

Coverage of this year's U.S. Open begins tomorrow at 10 a.m. on ESPN and at noon on NBC; the tournament runs through Sunday at Torrey Pines Golf Course in San Diego -– winner yet unknown.

-- Robert Lloyd

Hillary Rodham Clinton made her last appearance as a presidential candidate -– for the time being -- when she conceded the Democratic nomination to Barack Obama on Saturday morning in Washington. Speaking from a low stage in the light-filled, colonnaded atrium of the National Building Museum with the crowd arrayed before her and, as has become the custom, behind her, she seemed to be floating in a sea of love.

She was late to the event, as to the concession. Her delay in acknowledging Obama as the presumptive candidate -– expected on the night of the last primaries -- kept eyes, cameras and cable news commentary unusually focused upon her. And as concession speeches go, it was something of a celebration and a self-celebration. It was both a private moment -- a thank you to the people who supported her campaign, and clearly still do -– and a political event, with ramifications for Obama, the Democratic Party and herself. Her speech contained a resounding endorsement of her former opponent (six minutes in, it was inevitably noted, but she circled back to it at the end), a reminder of what she had accomplished and a list of work to be done. She was centered and gracious and impossible to lampoon.

As with her opponent, the symbolic import of her candidacy is undeniable. The first presidential contest in which neither of the two front-runners was a white male, Clinton v. Obama was bound to excite
passions, positive and negative. Whether it made a difference in the primaries, Clinton was subject throughout her campaign to gender-based ridicule that would have cost people their jobs had the point been race or religion. (“Many of the most prominent people on TV behaved like middle schoolers,” party chairman Howard Dean told the New York Times.) Within the popular culture that helps define and in some ways contain the political culture, sex is the last arena where people are allowed, even encouraged, to act like pigs.

Chris Matthews' contention during MSNBC coverage of the New Hampshire primary that "the reason she may be a front-runner is her husband messed around"; Mike Barnicle's description of her (on MSNBC's “Morning Joe”) as "looking like everyone's first wife standing outside a probate court"; William Kristol's statement on “Fox News Sunday” that "white women are a problem, that's ... you know, we all live with that"; and Tucker Carlson's, on MSNBC's “Tucker,” that “when she comes on television I involuntarily cross my legs” -- these are all lines that might be delivered on situation comedies without comment. Indeed, it's the sort of thing you hear on television every day.

And yet television has also painted the future. “Could a woman really serve as commander in chief?” Clinton asked Saturday morning. “Well, I think we answered that one.” But the fact that she was the presumptive nominee even before primary season began means we were already prepared for the possibility. Just as a long line of black presidents on big screens and small makes the actual election of an African American seem inevitable -- indeed, it may be imminent -- so does the fictional depiction of strong women in what were once exclusively male roles signal a real-world sea change: I thought of Clinton recently while reviewing a new cop show, “In Plain Sight,” starring Mary McCormack as a federal marshal, one of a host of easy-to-believe tough women the media now unapologetically offers, from vampire-slaying Buffy to Mary McDonnell as the president of all humanity on “Battlestar Galactica.” In dreams begin possibilities: A Madam President is only a matter of time.

-- Robert Lloyd

Robert Lloyd Review-O-Rama: 'Campaign,' 'Two Fat Ladies'

“Campaign” (KCET, 10 tonight). After “Election Day,” this look at a city council race in Kawasaki, Kanagawa prefecture, Japan, is the second electorally themed “P.O.V.” presentation to air in a month. The propinquity of our current presidential death match may have something to do with this, but the subject holds an honored place in the history of documentary filmmaking: The 1960 “Primary,” in which John F. Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey compete for the Democratic nomination in Wisconsin, was practically ground zero for “direct cinema” (American “cinema verité” in loose terms); Richard Leacock, Albert Maysles and D.A. Pennebaker all worked on it. Fundamentally a comedy, though a bit of black one, “Campaign” follows the fortunes of party-picked candidate Kazuhiko Yamauchi, a 40-year-old coin and stamp dealer with no perceptible political ideas but a vague ambition to be prime minister, the way one might want to be a movie star or a famous novelist without ever learning to act or wanting to write. Shot over a frenzied 12 days, which seem to encompass the entirety of the highly ritualized campaign, it has the makings of a Preston Sturges, Frank Tashlin or Billy Wilder movie -- though as a leading man Yamauchi is not quite as lovable or redeemable a schnook as Eddie Bracken or Jerry Lewis or Jack Lemmon would have been. Criticized both from above and below for his bowing, his handshake, his eye contact, his very substance, it's only with his skeptical wife -- a modern woman who is advised to refer to herself not as a “wife” but a “housewife” -- or his old university friends that Yamauchi becomes remotely a person. (Director Kazuhiro Soda was also a school friend.) It is, of course, only a partial look at the process, and some of it looks funny just for being, you know, foreign -- but it takes no stretch of the imagination to see how mad our own elections might look from abroad or from here.

"Two Fat Ladies" (on DVD) after the jump:

"9 Star Hotel" (KCET, tonight, 10 p.m.). A haunting fly-on-the-wall documentary by Ido Haar that follows a group of undocumented Palestinian workers building the Israeli planned city of Modi'in in the days before the Separation Wall made even illegal work impossible. (Although the film doesn't say so, the city was planned by Moshe Safdie, who famously designed Expo '67's Habitat in Montreal, as well as L.A.'s own Skirball Cultural Center.) Living in low-lying improvised complexes of cardboard and tin in the hills above the town, they cook, sing, scavenge, try to stay warm, hide or run from the police -- not always successfully. And they talk, about all sorts of things, from attractive female border guards, to the Holocaust, to their families and their disappearing work. There is no rancor, only confusion and resolve. The film won best documentary at the 2006 Jerusalem International Film Festival.

"French in Action" after the jump.

Short reviews of coming distractions.

“Elvis Mitchell: Under the Influence” (TCM, Mondays, 5 p.m. and 7:30 p.m.). It's always a pleasure to hear people talk intelligently about what they do –- something that happens too rarely in the product-pushing, gossip-addressing world of celebrity television. This new series -- hosted by Mitchell (of public radio's “The Treatment” and, I should tell you, my former colleague at the also-former Los Angeles Herald-Examiner) -- is ostensibly about what goes into forming an individual creative intelligence, but it doesn't much stick to its theme. (The better to converse.) Late director-actor Sydney Pollack opens the series tonight, name-checking Fellini, Antonioni, Kurosawa, Godard and Truffaut -- directors you might not immediately associate with the man who made “The Way We Were” and “Tootsie.” Next week brings an unusually thoughtful Bill Murray, who takes a sort of analytical taste test of golden-age movie stars, muses upon the actor's “physical intelligence” and remembers getting an education in American silent film while living in Paris. It becomes clear here in a way that shouldn't be surprising, but still sort of is, that Murray is not a comedian who became an actor but has been an actor all along, and has thought long on his craft and the medium that contains it. Turner owns every movie in the world, so illustrative clips are not a problem.

“Scare Tactics” (Sci Fi, premieres Wednesday, July 9, 10 p.m.). Revival of a fitfully interesting hidden-camera prank show, in which unsuspecting marks find themselves thrust into scenarios out of horror and sci-fi films. The lesson of the show, not that it is necessarily intended as such, is how easily human beings can mistake B-movie hokum for reality, although you only have to look at how people behave in the actual world to come to the same conclusion: that our minds have been institutionally primed for nonsense is what makes this show possible. Working at this or that temp job, the victims are suddenly faced with bizarre (yet somehow familiar) events: A woman gives birth to the spawn of Satan, a bad boss throws workers in the wood chipper, a hot-line operator faces a nut with a knife. The stunt goes on until the victim is made to say, “Yes, I'm scared,” at which point the lights come up and everyone has a good laugh. More funny strange than funny ha-ha, and the gag gets old but is still worth a look. New host Tracy Morgan on “30 Rock” is one of the funniest men alive, but here he is not.

"Bikini or Bust" after the jump.

Short reviews of coming distractions:

"The Tenth Circle" (Lifetime, Saturday, June 28, 9 p.m.) Family-based mystery (adultery, drugs, teenage strip poker, dead high school football star, skeletons in closet) with lashings of seriousness (references to Dante, Eskimo culture). Based on a novel by Jodi Picoult, reminding us once again that the phrase “New York Times Best-Seller” is meaningless in literary terms. Difficult to buy overall, and it loses focus, but there are some nicely handled moments, and the always-interesting but too-little-seen Ron Eldard is in it. Kelly Preston is fine as Eldard's wife, and Britt Robertson, who plays their possibly raped, potentially murderous daughter is very good, although the part bangs her around a little much, as she goes from reasonable to hysterical and back. The conclusion seems to be that the wages of inattentive mothering are disaster and death.

"Factory" (Spike, Sunday, June 29, 10 p.m.). A partly improvised comedy from Mitch Rouse, a creator of “Strangers with Candy,” which might lead you to expect this to be better than this is. Four factory workers, who come across as four improv comics in coveralls, try to avoid work as they grouse about or lie about the women in or out of their lives. Clearly flung at the Spike's male demo –- "Get More Action" is the network tagline, which implies a viewership not getting as much as it would like -- it has a slightly sour edge that some will just read as The Way Things Are. (The female characters aren't particularly happy, either; Ritalin takes off the edge.) I did like little round Mark Beltzman, who plays a shady used car salesman-cum-funeral director, and Christopher Allen Nelson (who seems to work more often as an SFX makeup artist) as the guy none of the principals like. It would be nice to see a show about factory workers, even a comedy, that took them seriously. First sitcom for Spike, a historic moment by definition.

"Election Day" reviewed after the jump. (It's good, so click on.)

Although I am drawn irresistibly to anything having to do with that big country across the sea, “Young & Restless in China” (KCET, tonight at 9) is an especially involving view of the formerly “sleeping giant” as it yawns, stretches, kicks off the covers and makes its way down to breakfast.

Shot over four years, Sue Williams' film tracks nine younger-generation Chinese men and women grappling with old traditions and new possibilities in a society that, in the words of entrepreneur Lu Dong, has gone in short order from an attitude of “serve the people and work for others, to an extreme” to one of “get rich as fast as you can and have a good life” -- from ration tickets to conspicuous consumption.

What would the old Chairman make of his country now? Miranda Hong is a marketing executive who works “in Beijing, in the advertising department of an investment company” --  a phrase that in every particular would have seemed nonsensical a generation ago. “Young & Restless” catches a complicated country in which marriages are still arranged even as women are giving up family for careers.

The best sports documentaries grab the lapels of we who ordinarily do not give athletics a second thought. “Back Nine at Cherry Hills: The Legends of the 1960 U.S. Open” (HBO, tonight at 10) tells a story that requires only the merest grasp of the rules of golf (hit ball in hole); its drama is all in the human striving, in the understanding or overcoming of one's self to better one's game.

The film commemorates the remarkable meeting of three generations of golf greats: Ben Hogan, 47, the game's dour graying eminence, who a decade earlier fought back from a near-fatal car crash to grace the cover of Time and inspire a Hollywood biopic; Arnold Palmer (born 1929), the friendly face of what had become the people's game; and 20-year-old Jack Nicklaus, a rookie phenom not yet in full command of his powers. (In “Star Wars” terms, the Obi-Wan Kenobi, the Han Solo and the Luke Skywalker.) Each went into the last nine holes of the 1960 Open within striking distance of the title.

It is also a story of fathers and sons. Hogan's was a manic-depressive blacksmith who shot himself when Hogan was a child; Palmer's an emotionally reticent country club groundskeeper who made Arnold understand that they were not themselves country club folk. Nicklaus, who was country club folk, was by contrast his kibitzing daddy's pride and joy –- distance was what he needed.

In terms of suspense, it of course helps not to know who won. (Many will, I didn't –- though I rooted sentimentally for Hogan.) The filmmakers happily let the game play out.

Coverage of this year's U.S. Open begins tomorrow at 10 a.m. on ESPN and at noon on NBC; the tournament runs through Sunday at Torrey Pines Golf Course in San Diego -– winner yet unknown.

-- Robert Lloyd

Hillary Rodham Clinton made her last appearance as a presidential candidate -– for the time being -- when she conceded the Democratic nomination to Barack Obama on Saturday morning in Washington. Speaking from a low stage in the light-filled, colonnaded atrium of the National Building Museum with the crowd arrayed before her and, as has become the custom, behind her, she seemed to be floating in a sea of love.

She was late to the event, as to the concession. Her delay in acknowledging Obama as the presumptive candidate -– expected on the night of the last primaries -- kept eyes, cameras and cable news commentary unusually focused upon her. And as concession speeches go, it was something of a celebration and a self-celebration. It was both a private moment -- a thank you to the people who supported her campaign, and clearly still do -– and a political event, with ramifications for Obama, the Democratic Party and herself. Her speech contained a resounding endorsement of her former opponent (six minutes in, it was inevitably noted, but she circled back to it at the end), a reminder of what she had accomplished and a list of work to be done. She was centered and gracious and impossible to lampoon.

As with her opponent, the symbolic import of her candidacy is undeniable. The first presidential contest in which neither of the two front-runners was a white male, Clinton v. Obama was bound to excite
passions, positive and negative. Whether it made a difference in the primaries, Clinton was subject throughout her campaign to gender-based ridicule that would have cost people their jobs had the point been race or religion. (“Many of the most prominent people on TV behaved like middle schoolers,” party chairman Howard Dean told the New York Times.) Within the popular culture that helps define and in some ways contain the political culture, sex is the last arena where people are allowed, even encouraged, to act like pigs.

Chris Matthews' contention during MSNBC coverage of the New Hampshire primary that "the reason she may be a front-runner is her husband messed around"; Mike Barnicle's description of her (on MSNBC's “Morning Joe”) as "looking like everyone's first wife standing outside a probate court"; William Kristol's statement on “Fox News Sunday” that "white women are a problem, that's ... you know, we all live with that"; and Tucker Carlson's, on MSNBC's “Tucker,” that “when she comes on television I involuntarily cross my legs” -- these are all lines that might be delivered on situation comedies without comment. Indeed, it's the sort of thing you hear on television every day.

And yet television has also painted the future. “Could a woman really serve as commander in chief?” Clinton asked Saturday morning. “Well, I think we answered that one.” But the fact that she was the presumptive nominee even before primary season began means we were already prepared for the possibility. Just as a long line of black presidents on big screens and small makes the actual election of an African American seem inevitable -- indeed, it may be imminent -- so does the fictional depiction of strong women in what were once exclusively male roles signal a real-world sea change: I thought of Clinton recently while reviewing a new cop show, “In Plain Sight,” starring Mary McCormack as a federal marshal, one of a host of easy-to-believe tough women the media now unapologetically offers, from vampire-slaying Buffy to Mary McDonnell as the president of all humanity on “Battlestar Galactica.” In dreams begin possibilities: A Madam President is only a matter of time.

-- Robert Lloyd

Robert Lloyd Review-O-Rama: '9 Star Hotel,' 'French in Action'

"9 Star Hotel" (KCET, tonight, 10 p.m.). A haunting fly-on-the-wall documentary by Ido Haar that follows a group of undocumented Palestinian workers building the Israeli planned city of Modi'in in the days before the Separation Wall made even illegal work impossible. (Although the film doesn't say so, the city was planned by Moshe Safdie, who famously designed Expo '67's Habitat in Montreal, as well as L.A.'s own Skirball Cultural Center.) Living in low-lying improvised complexes of cardboard and tin in the hills above the town, they cook, sing, scavenge, try to stay warm, hide or run from the police -- not always successfully. And they talk, about all sorts of things, from attractive female border guards, to the Holocaust, to their families and their disappearing work. There is no rancor, only confusion and resolve. The film won best documentary at the 2006 Jerusalem International Film Festival.

"French in Action" after the jump.

Short reviews of coming distractions.

“Elvis Mitchell: Under the Influence” (TCM, Mondays, 5 p.m. and 7:30 p.m.). It's always a pleasure to hear people talk intelligently about what they do –- something that happens too rarely in the product-pushing, gossip-addressing world of celebrity television. This new series -- hosted by Mitchell (of public radio's “The Treatment” and, I should tell you, my former colleague at the also-former Los Angeles Herald-Examiner) -- is ostensibly about what goes into forming an individual creative intelligence, but it doesn't much stick to its theme. (The better to converse.) Late director-actor Sydney Pollack opens the series tonight, name-checking Fellini, Antonioni, Kurosawa, Godard and Truffaut -- directors you might not immediately associate with the man who made “The Way We Were” and “Tootsie.” Next week brings an unusually thoughtful Bill Murray, who takes a sort of analytical taste test of golden-age movie stars, muses upon the actor's “physical intelligence” and remembers getting an education in American silent film while living in Paris. It becomes clear here in a way that shouldn't be surprising, but still sort of is, that Murray is not a comedian who became an actor but has been an actor all along, and has thought long on his craft and the medium that contains it. Turner owns every movie in the world, so illustrative clips are not a problem.

“Scare Tactics” (Sci Fi, premieres Wednesday, July 9, 10 p.m.). Revival of a fitfully interesting hidden-camera prank show, in which unsuspecting marks find themselves thrust into scenarios out of horror and sci-fi films. The lesson of the show, not that it is necessarily intended as such, is how easily human beings can mistake B-movie hokum for reality, although you only have to look at how people behave in the actual world to come to the same conclusion: that our minds have been institutionally primed for nonsense is what makes this show possible. Working at this or that temp job, the victims are suddenly faced with bizarre (yet somehow familiar) events: A woman gives birth to the spawn of Satan, a bad boss throws workers in the wood chipper, a hot-line operator faces a nut with a knife. The stunt goes on until the victim is made to say, “Yes, I'm scared,” at which point the lights come up and everyone has a good laugh. More funny strange than funny ha-ha, and the gag gets old but is still worth a look. New host Tracy Morgan on “30 Rock” is one of the funniest men alive, but here he is not.

"Bikini or Bust" after the jump.

Short reviews of coming distractions:

"The Tenth Circle" (Lifetime, Saturday, June 28, 9 p.m.) Family-based mystery (adultery, drugs, teenage strip poker, dead high school football star, skeletons in closet) with lashings of seriousness (references to Dante, Eskimo culture). Based on a novel by Jodi Picoult, reminding us once again that the phrase “New York Times Best-Seller” is meaningless in literary terms. Difficult to buy overall, and it loses focus, but there are some nicely handled moments, and the always-interesting but too-little-seen Ron Eldard is in it. Kelly Preston is fine as Eldard's wife, and Britt Robertson, who plays their possibly raped, potentially murderous daughter is very good, although the part bangs her around a little much, as she goes from reasonable to hysterical and back. The conclusion seems to be that the wages of inattentive mothering are disaster and death.

"Factory" (Spike, Sunday, June 29, 10 p.m.). A partly improvised comedy from Mitch Rouse, a creator of “Strangers with Candy,” which might lead you to expect this to be better than this is. Four factory workers, who come across as four improv comics in coveralls, try to avoid work as they grouse about or lie about the women in or out of their lives. Clearly flung at the Spike's male demo –- "Get More Action" is the network tagline, which implies a viewership not getting as much as it would like -- it has a slightly sour edge that some will just read as The Way Things Are. (The female characters aren't particularly happy, either; Ritalin takes off the edge.) I did like little round Mark Beltzman, who plays a shady used car salesman-cum-funeral director, and Christopher Allen Nelson (who seems to work more often as an SFX makeup artist) as the guy none of the principals like. It would be nice to see a show about factory workers, even a comedy, that took them seriously. First sitcom for Spike, a historic moment by definition.

"Election Day" reviewed after the jump. (It's good, so click on.)

Although I am drawn irresistibly to anything having to do with that big country across the sea, “Young & Restless in China” (KCET, tonight at 9) is an especially involving view of the formerly “sleeping giant” as it yawns, stretches, kicks off the covers and makes its way down to breakfast.

Shot over four years, Sue Williams' film tracks nine younger-generation Chinese men and women grappling with old traditions and new possibilities in a society that, in the words of entrepreneur Lu Dong, has gone in short order from an attitude of “serve the people and work for others, to an extreme” to one of “get rich as fast as you can and have a good life” -- from ration tickets to conspicuous consumption.

What would the old Chairman make of his country now? Miranda Hong is a marketing executive who works “in Beijing, in the advertising department of an investment company” --  a phrase that in every particular would have seemed nonsensical a generation ago. “Young & Restless” catches a complicated country in which marriages are still arranged even as women are giving up family for careers.

The best sports documentaries grab the lapels of we who ordinarily do not give athletics a second thought. “Back Nine at Cherry Hills: The Legends of the 1960 U.S. Open” (HBO, tonight at 10) tells a story that requires only the merest grasp of the rules of golf (hit ball in hole); its drama is all in the human striving, in the understanding or overcoming of one's self to better one's game.

The film commemorates the remarkable meeting of three generations of golf greats: Ben Hogan, 47, the game's dour graying eminence, who a decade earlier fought back from a near-fatal car crash to grace the cover of Time and inspire a Hollywood biopic; Arnold Palmer (born 1929), the friendly face of what had become the people's game; and 20-year-old Jack Nicklaus, a rookie phenom not yet in full command of his powers. (In “Star Wars” terms, the Obi-Wan Kenobi, the Han Solo and the Luke Skywalker.) Each went into the last nine holes of the 1960 Open within striking distance of the title.

It is also a story of fathers and sons. Hogan's was a manic-depressive blacksmith who shot himself when Hogan was a child; Palmer's an emotionally reticent country club groundskeeper who made Arnold understand that they were not themselves country club folk. Nicklaus, who was country club folk, was by contrast his kibitzing daddy's pride and joy –- distance was what he needed.

In terms of suspense, it of course helps not to know who won. (Many will, I didn't –- though I rooted sentimentally for Hogan.) The filmmakers happily let the game play out.

Coverage of this year's U.S. Open begins tomorrow at 10 a.m. on ESPN and at noon on NBC; the tournament runs through Sunday at Torrey Pines Golf Course in San Diego -– winner yet unknown.

-- Robert Lloyd

Hillary Rodham Clinton made her last appearance as a presidential candidate -– for the time being -- when she conceded the Democratic nomination to Barack Obama on Saturday morning in Washington. Speaking from a low stage in the light-filled, colonnaded atrium of the National Building Museum with the crowd arrayed before her and, as has become the custom, behind her, she seemed to be floating in a sea of love.

She was late to the event, as to the concession. Her delay in acknowledging Obama as the presumptive candidate -– expected on the night of the last primaries -- kept eyes, cameras and cable news commentary unusually focused upon her. And as concession speeches go, it was something of a celebration and a self-celebration. It was both a private moment -- a thank you to the people who supported her campaign, and clearly still do -– and a political event, with ramifications for Obama, the Democratic Party and herself. Her speech contained a resounding endorsement of her former opponent (six minutes in, it was inevitably noted, but she circled back to it at the end), a reminder of what she had accomplished and a list of work to be done. She was centered and gracious and impossible to lampoon.

As with her opponent, the symbolic import of her candidacy is undeniable. The first presidential contest in which neither of the two front-runners was a white male, Clinton v. Obama was bound to excite
passions, positive and negative. Whether it made a difference in the primaries, Clinton was subject throughout her campaign to gender-based ridicule that would have cost people their jobs had the point been race or religion. (“Many of the most prominent people on TV behaved like middle schoolers,” party chairman Howard Dean told the New York Times.) Within the popular culture that helps define and in some ways contain the political culture, sex is the last arena where people are allowed, even encouraged, to act like pigs.

Chris Matthews' contention during MSNBC coverage of the New Hampshire primary that "the reason she may be a front-runner is her husband messed around"; Mike Barnicle's description of her (on MSNBC's “Morning Joe”) as "looking like everyone's first wife standing outside a probate court"; William Kristol's statement on “Fox News Sunday” that "white women are a problem, that's ... you know, we all live with that"; and Tucker Carlson's, on MSNBC's “Tucker,” that “when she comes on television I involuntarily cross my legs” -- these are all lines that might be delivered on situation comedies without comment. Indeed, it's the sort of thing you hear on television every day.

And yet television has also painted the future. “Could a woman really serve as commander in chief?” Clinton asked Saturday morning. “Well, I think we answered that one.” But the fact that she was the presumptive nominee even before primary season began means we were already prepared for the possibility. Just as a long line of black presidents on big screens and small makes the actual election of an African American seem inevitable -- indeed, it may be imminent -- so does the fictional depiction of strong women in what were once exclusively male roles signal a real-world sea change: I thought of Clinton recently while reviewing a new cop show, “In Plain Sight,” starring Mary McCormack as a federal marshal, one of a host of easy-to-believe tough women the media now unapologetically offers, from vampire-slaying Buffy to Mary McDonnell as the president of all humanity on “Battlestar Galactica.” In dreams begin possibilities: A Madam President is only a matter of time.

-- Robert Lloyd

Robert Lloyd Review-O-Rama: "Under the Influence," "Scare Tactics," "Bikini or Bust"

Short reviews of coming distractions.

“Elvis Mitchell: Under the Influence” (TCM, Mondays, 5 p.m. and 7:30 p.m.). It's always a pleasure to hear people talk intelligently about what they do –- something that happens too rarely in the product-pushing, gossip-addressing world of celebrity television. This new series -- hosted by Mitchell (of public radio's “The Treatment” and, I should tell you, my former colleague at the also-former Los Angeles Herald-Examiner) -- is ostensibly about what goes into forming an individual creative intelligence, but it doesn't much stick to its theme. (The better to converse.) Late director-actor Sydney Pollack opens the series tonight, name-checking Fellini, Antonioni, Kurosawa, Godard and Truffaut -- directors you might not immediately associate with the man who made “The Way We Were” and “Tootsie.” Next week brings an unusually thoughtful Bill Murray, who takes a sort of analytical taste test of golden-age movie stars, muses upon the actor's “physical intelligence” and remembers getting an education in American silent film while living in Paris. It becomes clear here in a way that shouldn't be surprising, but still sort of is, that Murray is not a comedian who became an actor but has been an actor all along, and has thought long on his craft and the medium that contains it. Turner owns every movie in the world, so illustrative clips are not a problem.

“Scare Tactics” (Sci Fi, premieres Wednesday, July 9, 10 p.m.). Revival of a fitfully interesting hidden-camera prank show, in which unsuspecting marks find themselves thrust into scenarios out of horror and sci-fi films. The lesson of the show, not that it is necessarily intended as such, is how easily human beings can mistake B-movie hokum for reality, although you only have to look at how people behave in the actual world to come to the same conclusion: that our minds have been institutionally primed for nonsense is what makes this show possible. Working at this or that temp job, the victims are suddenly faced with bizarre (yet somehow familiar) events: A woman gives birth to the spawn of Satan, a bad boss throws workers in the wood chipper, a hot-line operator faces a nut with a knife. The stunt goes on until the victim is made to say, “Yes, I'm scared,” at which point the lights come up and everyone has a good laugh. More funny strange than funny ha-ha, and the gag gets old but is still worth a look. New host Tracy Morgan on “30 Rock” is one of the funniest men alive, but here he is not.

"Bikini or Bust" after the jump.

Short reviews of coming distractions:

"The Tenth Circle" (Lifetime, Saturday, June 28, 9 p.m.) Family-based mystery (adultery, drugs, teenage strip poker, dead high school football star, skeletons in closet) with lashings of seriousness (references to Dante, Eskimo culture). Based on a novel by Jodi Picoult, reminding us once again that the phrase “New York Times Best-Seller” is meaningless in literary terms. Difficult to buy overall, and it loses focus, but there are some nicely handled moments, and the always-interesting but too-little-seen Ron Eldard is in it. Kelly Preston is fine as Eldard's wife, and Britt Robertson, who plays their possibly raped, potentially murderous daughter is very good, although the part bangs her around a little much, as she goes from reasonable to hysterical and back. The conclusion seems to be that the wages of inattentive mothering are disaster and death.

"Factory" (Spike, Sunday, June 29, 10 p.m.). A partly improvised comedy from Mitch Rouse, a creator of “Strangers with Candy,” which might lead you to expect this to be better than this is. Four factory workers, who come across as four improv comics in coveralls, try to avoid work as they grouse about or lie about the women in or out of their lives. Clearly flung at the Spike's male demo –- "Get More Action" is the network tagline, which implies a viewership not getting as much as it would like -- it has a slightly sour edge that some will just read as The Way Things Are. (The female characters aren't particularly happy, either; Ritalin takes off the edge.) I did like little round Mark Beltzman, who plays a shady used car salesman-cum-funeral director, and Christopher Allen Nelson (who seems to work more often as an SFX makeup artist) as the guy none of the principals like. It would be nice to see a show about factory workers, even a comedy, that took them seriously. First sitcom for Spike, a historic moment by definition.

"Election Day" reviewed after the jump. (It's good, so click on.)

Although I am drawn irresistibly to anything having to do with that big country across the sea, “Young & Restless in China” (KCET, tonight at 9) is an especially involving view of the formerly “sleeping giant” as it yawns, stretches, kicks off the covers and makes its way down to breakfast.

Shot over four years, Sue Williams' film tracks nine younger-generation Chinese men and women grappling with old traditions and new possibilities in a society that, in the words of entrepreneur Lu Dong, has gone in short order from an attitude of “serve the people and work for others, to an extreme” to one of “get rich as fast as you can and have a good life” -- from ration tickets to conspicuous consumption.

What would the old Chairman make of his country now? Miranda Hong is a marketing executive who works “in Beijing, in the advertising department of an investment company” --  a phrase that in every particular would have seemed nonsensical a generation ago. “Young & Restless” catches a complicated country in which marriages are still arranged even as women are giving up family for careers.

The best sports documentaries grab the lapels of we who ordinarily do not give athletics a second thought. “Back Nine at Cherry Hills: The Legends of the 1960 U.S. Open” (HBO, tonight at 10) tells a story that requires only the merest grasp of the rules of golf (hit ball in hole); its drama is all in the human striving, in the understanding or overcoming of one's self to better one's game.

The film commemorates the remarkable meeting of three generations of golf greats: Ben Hogan, 47, the game's dour graying eminence, who a decade earlier fought back from a near-fatal car crash to grace the cover of Time and inspire a Hollywood biopic; Arnold Palmer (born 1929), the friendly face of what had become the people's game; and 20-year-old Jack Nicklaus, a rookie phenom not yet in full command of his powers. (In “Star Wars” terms, the Obi-Wan Kenobi, the Han Solo and the Luke Skywalker.) Each went into the last nine holes of the 1960 Open within striking distance of the title.

It is also a story of fathers and sons. Hogan's was a manic-depressive blacksmith who shot himself when Hogan was a child; Palmer's an emotionally reticent country club groundskeeper who made Arnold understand that they were not themselves country club folk. Nicklaus, who was country club folk, was by contrast his kibitzing daddy's pride and joy –- distance was what he needed.

In terms of suspense, it of course helps not to know who won. (Many will, I didn't –- though I rooted sentimentally for Hogan.) The filmmakers happily let the game play out.

Coverage of this year's U.S. Open begins tomorrow at 10 a.m. on ESPN and at noon on NBC; the tournament runs through Sunday at Torrey Pines Golf Course in San Diego -– winner yet unknown.

-- Robert Lloyd

Hillary Rodham Clinton made her last appearance as a presidential candidate -– for the time being -- when she conceded the Democratic nomination to Barack Obama on Saturday morning in Washington. Speaking from a low stage in the light-filled, colonnaded atrium of the National Building Museum with the crowd arrayed before her and, as has become the custom, behind her, she seemed to be floating in a sea of love.

She was late to the event, as to the concession. Her delay in acknowledging Obama as the presumptive candidate -– expected on the night of the last primaries -- kept eyes, cameras and cable news commentary unusually focused upon her. And as concession speeches go, it was something of a celebration and a self-celebration. It was both a private moment -- a thank you to the people who supported her campaign, and clearly still do -– and a political event, with ramifications for Obama, the Democratic Party and herself. Her speech contained a resounding endorsement of her former opponent (six minutes in, it was inevitably noted, but she circled back to it at the end), a reminder of what she had accomplished and a list of work to be done. She was centered and gracious and impossible to lampoon.

As with her opponent, the symbolic import of her candidacy is undeniable. The first presidential contest in which neither of the two front-runners was a white male, Clinton v. Obama was bound to excite
passions, positive and negative. Whether it made a difference in the primaries, Clinton was subject throughout her campaign to gender-based ridicule that would have cost people their jobs had the point been race or religion. (“Many of the most prominent people on TV behaved like middle schoolers,” party chairman Howard Dean told the New York Times.) Within the popular culture that helps define and in some ways contain the political culture, sex is the last arena where people are allowed, even encouraged, to act like pigs.

Chris Matthews' contention during MSNBC coverage of the New Hampshire primary that "the reason she may be a front-runner is her husband messed around"; Mike Barnicle's description of her (on MSNBC's “Morning Joe”) as "looking like everyone's first wife standing outside a probate court"; William Kristol's statement on “Fox News Sunday” that "white women are a problem, that's ... you know, we all live with that"; and Tucker Carlson's, on MSNBC's “Tucker,” that “when she comes on television I involuntarily cross my legs” -- these are all lines that might be delivered on situation comedies without comment. Indeed, it's the sort of thing you hear on television every day.

And yet television has also painted the future. “Could a woman really serve as commander in chief?” Clinton asked Saturday morning. “Well, I think we answered that one.” But the fact that she was the presumptive nominee even before primary season began means we were already prepared for the possibility. Just as a long line of black presidents on big screens and small makes the actual election of an African American seem inevitable -- indeed, it may be imminent -- so does the fictional depiction of strong women in what were once exclusively male roles signal a real-world sea change: I thought of Clinton recently while reviewing a new cop show, “In Plain Sight,” starring Mary McCormack as a federal marshal, one of a host of easy-to-believe tough women the media now unapologetically offers, from vampire-slaying Buffy to Mary McDonnell as the president of all humanity on “Battlestar Galactica.” In dreams begin possibilities: A Madam President is only a matter of time.

-- Robert Lloyd

Robert Lloyd Review-o-rama: 'The Tenth Circle,' 'Factory,' 'Election Day'

Short reviews of coming distractions:

"The Tenth Circle" (Lifetime, Saturday, June 28, 9 p.m.) Family-based mystery (adultery, drugs, teenage strip poker, dead high school football star, skeletons in closet) with lashings of seriousness (references to Dante, Eskimo culture). Based on a novel by Jodi Picoult, reminding us once again that the phrase “New York Times Best-Seller” is meaningless in literary terms. Difficult to buy overall, and it loses focus, but there are some nicely handled moments, and the always-interesting but too-little-seen Ron Eldard is in it. Kelly Preston is fine as Eldard's wife, and Britt Robertson, who plays their possibly raped, potentially murderous daughter is very good, although the part bangs her around a little much, as she goes from reasonable to hysterical and back. The conclusion seems to be that the wages of inattentive mothering are disaster and death.

"Factory" (Spike, Sunday, June 29, 10 p.m.). A partly improvised comedy from Mitch Rouse, a creator of “Strangers with Candy,” which might lead you to expect this to be better than this is. Four factory workers, who come across as four improv comics in coveralls, try to avoid work as they grouse about or lie about the women in or out of their lives. Clearly flung at the Spike's male demo –- "Get More Action" is the network tagline, which implies a viewership not getting as much as it would like -- it has a slightly sour edge that some will just read as The Way Things Are. (The female characters aren't particularly happy, either; Ritalin takes off the edge.) I did like little round Mark Beltzman, who plays a shady used car salesman-cum-funeral director, and Christopher Allen Nelson (who seems to work more often as an SFX makeup artist) as the guy none of the principals like. It would be nice to see a show about factory workers, even a comedy, that took them seriously. First sitcom for Spike, a historic moment by definition.

"Election Day" reviewed after the jump. (It's good, so click on.)

Although I am drawn irresistibly to anything having to do with that big country across the sea, “Young & Restless in China” (KCET, tonight at 9) is an especially involving view of the formerly “sleeping giant” as it yawns, stretches, kicks off the covers and makes its way down to breakfast.

Shot over four years, Sue Williams' film tracks nine younger-generation Chinese men and women grappling with old traditions and new possibilities in a society that, in the words of entrepreneur Lu Dong, has gone in short order from an attitude of “serve the people and work for others, to an extreme” to one of “get rich as fast as you can and have a good life” -- from ration tickets to conspicuous consumption.

What would the old Chairman make of his country now? Miranda Hong is a marketing executive who works “in Beijing, in the advertising department of an investment company” --  a phrase that in every particular would have seemed nonsensical a generation ago. “Young & Restless” catches a complicated country in which marriages are still arranged even as women are giving up family for careers.

The best sports documentaries grab the lapels of we who ordinarily do not give athletics a second thought. “Back Nine at Cherry Hills: The Legends of the 1960 U.S. Open” (HBO, tonight at 10) tells a story that requires only the merest grasp of the rules of golf (hit ball in hole); its drama is all in the human striving, in the understanding or overcoming of one's self to better one's game.

The film commemorates the remarkable meeting of three generations of golf greats: Ben Hogan, 47, the game's dour graying eminence, who a decade earlier fought back from a near-fatal car crash to grace the cover of Time and inspire a Hollywood biopic; Arnold Palmer (born 1929), the friendly face of what had become the people's game; and 20-year-old Jack Nicklaus, a rookie phenom not yet in full command of his powers. (In “Star Wars” terms, the Obi-Wan Kenobi, the Han Solo and the Luke Skywalker.) Each went into the last nine holes of the 1960 Open within striking distance of the title.

It is also a story of fathers and sons. Hogan's was a manic-depressive blacksmith who shot himself when Hogan was a child; Palmer's an emotionally reticent country club groundskeeper who made Arnold understand that they were not themselves country club folk. Nicklaus, who was country club folk, was by contrast his kibitzing daddy's pride and joy –- distance was what he needed.

In terms of suspense, it of course helps not to know who won. (Many will, I didn't –- though I rooted sentimentally for Hogan.) The filmmakers happily let the game play out.

Coverage of this year's U.S. Open begins tomorrow at 10 a.m. on ESPN and at noon on NBC; the tournament runs through Sunday at Torrey Pines Golf Course in San Diego -– winner yet unknown.

-- Robert Lloyd

Hillary Rodham Clinton made her last appearance as a presidential candidate -– for the time being -- when she conceded the Democratic nomination to Barack Obama on Saturday morning in Washington. Speaking from a low stage in the light-filled, colonnaded atrium of the National Building Museum with the crowd arrayed before her and, as has become the custom, behind her, she seemed to be floating in a sea of love.

She was late to the event, as to the concession. Her delay in acknowledging Obama as the presumptive candidate -– expected on the night of the last primaries -- kept eyes, cameras and cable news commentary unusually focused upon her. And as concession speeches go, it was something of a celebration and a self-celebration. It was both a private moment -- a thank you to the people who supported her campaign, and clearly still do -– and a political event, with ramifications for Obama, the Democratic Party and herself. Her speech contained a resounding endorsement of her former opponent (six minutes in, it was inevitably noted, but she circled back to it at the end), a reminder of what she had accomplished and a list of work to be done. She was centered and gracious and impossible to lampoon.

As with her opponent, the symbolic import of her candidacy is undeniable. The first presidential contest in which neither of the two front-runners was a white male, Clinton v. Obama was bound to excite
passions, positive and negative. Whether it made a difference in the primaries, Clinton was subject throughout her campaign to gender-based ridicule that would have cost people their jobs had the point been race or religion. (“Many of the most prominent people on TV behaved like middle schoolers,” party chairman Howard Dean told the New York Times.) Within the popular culture that helps define and in some ways contain the political culture, sex is the last arena where people are allowed, even encouraged, to act like pigs.

Chris Matthews' contention during MSNBC coverage of the New Hampshire primary that "the reason she may be a front-runner is her husband messed around"; Mike Barnicle's description of her (on MSNBC's “Morning Joe”) as "looking like everyone's first wife standing outside a probate court"; William Kristol's statement on “Fox News Sunday” that "white women are a problem, that's ... you know, we all live with that"; and Tucker Carlson's, on MSNBC's “Tucker,” that “when she comes on television I involuntarily cross my legs” -- these are all lines that might be delivered on situation comedies without comment. Indeed, it's the sort of thing you hear on television every day.

And yet television has also painted the future. “Could a woman really serve as commander in chief?” Clinton asked Saturday morning. “Well, I think we answered that one.” But the fact that she was the presumptive nominee even before primary season began means we were already prepared for the possibility. Just as a long line of black presidents on big screens and small makes the actual election of an African American seem inevitable -- indeed, it may be imminent -- so does the fictional depiction of strong women in what were once exclusively male roles signal a real-world sea change: I thought of Clinton recently while reviewing a new cop show, “In Plain Sight,” starring Mary McCormack as a federal marshal, one of a host of easy-to-believe tough women the media now unapologetically offers, from vampire-slaying Buffy to Mary McDonnell as the president of all humanity on “Battlestar Galactica.” In dreams begin possibilities: A Madam President is only a matter of time.

-- Robert Lloyd

'Young & Restless in China' shows a generation in its own new moment

Although I am drawn irresistibly to anything having to do with that big country across the sea, “Young & Restless in China” (KCET, tonight at 9) is an especially involving view of the formerly “sleeping giant” as it yawns, stretches, kicks off the covers and makes its way down to breakfast.

Shot over four years, Sue Williams' film tracks nine younger-generation Chinese men and women grappling with old traditions and new possibilities in a society that, in the words of entrepreneur Lu Dong, has gone in short order from an attitude of “serve the people and work for others, to an extreme” to one of “get rich as fast as you can and have a good life” -- from ration tickets to conspicuous consumption.

What would the old Chairman make of his country now? Miranda Hong is a marketing executive who works “in Beijing, in the advertising department of an investment company” --  a phrase that in every particular would have seemed nonsensical a generation ago. “Young & Restless” catches a complicated country in which marriages are still arranged even as women are giving up family for careers.

The best sports documentaries grab the lapels of we who ordinarily do not give athletics a second thought. “Back Nine at Cherry Hills: The Legends of the 1960 U.S. Open” (HBO, tonight at 10) tells a story that requires only the merest grasp of the rules of golf (hit ball in hole); its drama is all in the human striving, in the understanding or overcoming of one's self to better one's game.

The film commemorates the remarkable meeting of three generations of golf greats: Ben Hogan, 47, the game's dour graying eminence, who a decade earlier fought back from a near-fatal car crash to grace the cover of Time and inspire a Hollywood biopic; Arnold Palmer (born 1929), the friendly face of what had become the people's game; and 20-year-old Jack Nicklaus, a rookie phenom not yet in full command of his powers. (In “Star Wars” terms, the Obi-Wan Kenobi, the Han Solo and the Luke Skywalker.) Each went into the last nine holes of the 1960 Open within striking distance of the title.

It is also a story of fathers and sons. Hogan's was a manic-depressive blacksmith who shot himself when Hogan was a child; Palmer's an emotionally reticent country club groundskeeper who made Arnold understand that they were not themselves country club folk. Nicklaus, who was country club folk, was by contrast his kibitzing daddy's pride and joy –- distance was what he needed.

In terms of suspense, it of course helps not to know who won. (Many will, I didn't –- though I rooted sentimentally for Hogan.) The filmmakers happily let the game play out.

Coverage of this year's U.S. Open begins tomorrow at 10 a.m. on ESPN and at noon on NBC; the tournament runs through Sunday at Torrey Pines Golf Course in San Diego -– winner yet unknown.

-- Robert Lloyd

Hillary Rodham Clinton made her last appearance as a presidential candidate -– for the time being -- when she conceded the Democratic nomination to Barack Obama on Saturday morning in Washington. Speaking from a low stage in the light-filled, colonnaded atrium of the National Building Museum with the crowd arrayed before her and, as has become the custom, behind her, she seemed to be floating in a sea of love.

She was late to the event, as to the concession. Her delay in acknowledging Obama as the presumptive candidate -– expected on the night of the last primaries -- kept eyes, cameras and cable news commentary unusually focused upon her. And as concession speeches go, it was something of a celebration and a self-celebration. It was both a private moment -- a thank you to the people who supported her campaign, and clearly still do -– and a political event, with ramifications for Obama, the Democratic Party and herself. Her speech contained a resounding endorsement of her former opponent (six minutes in, it was inevitably noted, but she circled back to it at the end), a reminder of what she had accomplished and a list of work to be done. She was centered and gracious and impossible to lampoon.

As with her opponent, the symbolic import of her candidacy is undeniable. The first presidential contest in which neither of the two front-runners was a white male, Clinton v. Obama was bound to excite
passions, positive and negative. Whether it made a difference in the primaries, Clinton was subject throughout her campaign to gender-based ridicule that would have cost people their jobs had the point been race or religion. (“Many of the most prominent people on TV behaved like middle schoolers,” party chairman Howard Dean told the New York Times.) Within the popular culture that helps define and in some ways contain the political culture, sex is the last arena where people are allowed, even encouraged, to act like pigs.

Chris Matthews' contention during MSNBC coverage of the New Hampshire primary that "the reason she may be a front-runner is her husband messed around"; Mike Barnicle's description of her (on MSNBC's “Morning Joe”) as "looking like everyone's first wife standing outside a probate court"; William Kristol's statement on “Fox News Sunday” that "white women are a problem, that's ... you know, we all live with that"; and Tucker Carlson's, on MSNBC's “Tucker,” that “when she comes on television I involuntarily cross my legs” -- these are all lines that might be delivered on situation comedies without comment. Indeed, it's the sort of thing you hear on television every day.

And yet television has also painted the future. “Could a woman really serve as commander in chief?” Clinton asked Saturday morning. “Well, I think we answered that one.” But the fact that she was the presumptive nominee even before primary season began means we were already prepared for the possibility. Just as a long line of black presidents on big screens and small makes the actual election of an African American seem inevitable -- indeed, it may be imminent -- so does the fictional depiction of strong women in what were once exclusively male roles signal a real-world sea change: I thought of Clinton recently while reviewing a new cop show, “In Plain Sight,” starring Mary McCormack as a federal marshal, one of a host of easy-to-believe tough women the media now unapologetically offers, from vampire-slaying Buffy to Mary McDonnell as the president of all humanity on “Battlestar Galactica.” In dreams begin possibilities: A Madam President is only a matter of time.

-- Robert Lloyd

Robert Lloyd reviews 'Back Nine at Cherry Hills: The Legends of the 1960 U.S. Open'

The best sports documentaries grab the lapels of we who ordinarily do not give athletics a second thought. “Back Nine at Cherry Hills: The Legends of the 1960 U.S. Open” (HBO, tonight at 10) tells a story that requires only the merest grasp of the rules of golf (hit ball in hole); its drama is all in the human striving, in the understanding or overcoming of one's self to better one's game.

The film commemorates the remarkable meeting of three generations of golf greats: Ben Hogan, 47, the game's dour graying eminence, who a decade earlier fought back from a near-fatal car crash to grace the cover of Time and inspire a Hollywood biopic; Arnold Palmer (born 1929), the friendly face of what had become the people's game; and 20-year-old Jack Nicklaus, a rookie phenom not yet in full command of his powers. (In “Star Wars” terms, the Obi-Wan Kenobi, the Han Solo and the Luke Skywalker.) Each went into the last nine holes of the 1960 Open within striking distance of the title.

It is also a story of fathers and sons. Hogan's was a manic-depressive blacksmith who shot himself when Hogan was a child; Palmer's an emotionally reticent country club groundskeeper who made Arnold understand that they were not themselves country club folk. Nicklaus, who was country club folk, was by contrast his kibitzing daddy's pride and joy –- distance was what he needed.

In terms of suspense, it of course helps not to know who won. (Many will, I didn't –- though I rooted sentimentally for Hogan.) The filmmakers happily let the game play out.

Coverage of this year's U.S. Open begins tomorrow at 10 a.m. on ESPN and at noon on NBC; the tournament runs through Sunday at Torrey Pines Golf Course in San Diego -– winner yet unknown.

-- Robert Lloyd

Hillary Rodham Clinton made her last appearance as a presidential candidate -– for the time being -- when she conceded the Democratic nomination to Barack Obama on Saturday morning in Washington. Speaking from a low stage in the light-filled, colonnaded atrium of the National Building Museum with the crowd arrayed before her and, as has become the custom, behind her, she seemed to be floating in a sea of love.

She was late to the event, as to the concession. Her delay in acknowledging Obama as the presumptive candidate -– expected on the night of the last primaries -- kept eyes, cameras and cable news commentary unusually focused upon her. And as concession speeches go, it was something of a celebration and a self-celebration. It was both a private moment -- a thank you to the people who supported her campaign, and clearly still do -– and a political event, with ramifications for Obama, the Democratic Party and herself. Her speech contained a resounding endorsement of her former opponent (six minutes in, it was inevitably noted, but she circled back to it at the end), a reminder of what she had accomplished and a list of work to be done. She was centered and gracious and impossible to lampoon.

As with her opponent, the symbolic import of her candidacy is undeniable. The first presidential contest in which neither of the two front-runners was a white male, Clinton v. Obama was bound to excite
passions, positive and negative. Whether it made a difference in the primaries, Clinton was subject throughout her campaign to gender-based ridicule that would have cost people their jobs had the point been race or religion. (“Many of the most prominent people on TV behaved like middle schoolers,” party chairman Howard Dean told the New York Times.) Within the popular culture that helps define and in some ways contain the political culture, sex is the last arena where people are allowed, even encouraged, to act like pigs.

Chris Matthews' contention during MSNBC coverage of the New Hampshire primary that "the reason she may be a front-runner is her husband messed around"; Mike Barnicle's description of her (on MSNBC's “Morning Joe”) as "looking like everyone's first wife standing outside a probate court"; William Kristol's statement on “Fox News Sunday” that "white women are a problem, that's ... you know, we all live with that"; and Tucker Carlson's, on MSNBC's “Tucker,” that “when she comes on television I involuntarily cross my legs” -- these are all lines that might be delivered on situation comedies without comment. Indeed, it's the sort of thing you hear on television every day.

And yet television has also painted the future. “Could a woman really serve as commander in chief?” Clinton asked Saturday morning. “Well, I think we answered that one.” But the fact that she was the presumptive nominee even before primary season began means we were already prepared for the possibility. Just as a long line of black presidents on big screens and small makes the actual election of an African American seem inevitable -- indeed, it may be imminent -- so does the fictional depiction of strong women in what were once exclusively male roles signal a real-world sea change: I thought of Clinton recently while reviewing a new cop show, “In Plain Sight,” starring Mary McCormack as a federal marshal, one of a host of easy-to-believe tough women the media now unapologetically offers, from vampire-slaying Buffy to Mary McDonnell as the president of all humanity on “Battlestar Galactica.” In dreams begin possibilities: A Madam President is only a matter of time.

-- Robert Lloyd

Critic's notebook: Hillary Clinton's concession speech

Hillary Rodham Clinton made her last appearance as a presidential candidate -– for the time being -- when she conceded the Democratic nomination to Barack Obama on Saturday morning in Washington. Speaking from a low stage in the light-filled, colonnaded atrium of the National Building Museum with the crowd arrayed before her and, as has become the custom, behind her, she seemed to be floating in a sea of love.

She was late to the event, as to the concession. Her delay in acknowledging Obama as the presumptive candidate -– expected on the night of the last primaries -- kept eyes, cameras and cable news commentary unusually focused upon her. And as concession speeches go, it was something of a celebration and a self-celebration. It was both a private moment -- a thank you to the people who supported her campaign, and clearly still do -– and a political event, with ramifications for Obama, the Democratic Party and herself. Her speech contained a resounding endorsement of her former opponent (six minutes in, it was inevitably noted, but she circled back to it at the end), a reminder of what she had accomplished and a list of work to be done. She was centered and gracious and impossible to lampoon.

As with her opponent, the symbolic import of her candidacy is undeniable. The first presidential contest in which neither of the two front-runners was a white male, Clinton v. Obama was bound to excite
passions, positive and negative. Whether it made a difference in the primaries, Clinton was subject throughout her campaign to gender-based ridicule that would have cost people their jobs had the point been race or religion. (“Many of the most prominent people on TV behaved like middle schoolers,” party chairman Howard Dean told the New York Times.) Within the popular culture that helps define and in some ways contain the political culture, sex is the last arena where people are allowed, even encouraged, to act like pigs.

Chris Matthews' contention during MSNBC coverage of the New Hampshire primary that "the reason she may be a front-runner is her husband messed around"; Mike Barnicle's description of her (on MSNBC's “Morning Joe”) as "looking like everyone's first wife standing outside a probate court"; William Kristol's statement on “Fox News Sunday” that "white women are a problem, that's ... you know, we all live with that"; and Tucker Carlson's, on MSNBC's “Tucker,” that “when she comes on television I involuntarily cross my legs” -- these are all lines that might be delivered on situation comedies without comment. Indeed, it's the sort of thing you hear on television every day.

And yet television has also painted the future. “Could a woman really serve as commander in chief?” Clinton asked Saturday morning. “Well, I think we answered that one.” But the fact that she was the presumptive nominee even before primary season began means we were already prepared for the possibility. Just as a long line of black presidents on big screens and small makes the actual election of an African American seem inevitable -- indeed, it may be imminent -- so does the fictional depiction of strong women in what were once exclusively male roles signal a real-world sea change: I thought of Clinton recently while reviewing a new cop show, “In Plain Sight,” starring Mary McCormack as a federal marshal, one of a host of easy-to-believe tough women the media now unapologetically offers, from vampire-slaying Buffy to Mary McDonnell as the president of all humanity on “Battlestar Galactica.” In dreams begin possibilities: A Madam President is only a matter of time.

-- Robert Lloyd