The first night of Deal or No Deal did fairly well in the ratings and the second night did even better. Tonight's episode is against weaker competition so I'm guessing it will do fine. It was a pretty good episode, too…though I wish its makers wouldn't do so many obvious edits. Also, much of what Howie Mandel says has been dubbed in later, usually to overexplain what's on the line at some key moment. On tonight's installment, they did more of it than they did on the first two shows — or at least, it seemed more obvious — and that further took away from the "live" feel.

If there's no sign of ratings fatigue by the time the week is out, NBC will probably order up more episodes — the producers are already searching for contestants — and all the networks will probably green-light some more Big Money Game Shows. So what does this mean on the Grand Scheme of Television?

Let's flash back a few years. In August of '99, ABC debuted Who Wants to Be a Millionaire with similar stunt-scheduling. It was an unexpected smash and quickly, we had more episodes flooding that network's schedule and imitations like Greed and The Weakest Link and Winning Lines and Twenty One and I can't remember them all, nor can you. Most failed rapidly and even the original Millionaire show got tired in a hurry. Still, for a brief time, the networks couldn't get enough of 'em. Why? Well, for one thing, they were pretty simple formula shows, easy to launch. With other kinds of programming, you have to worry about getting a good script each week and developing storylines and characters and maybe booking guest stars. The variables are a lot more complicated. But the real reason the suits upstairs will order game shows (and reality shows, as well) is that they like to think they can make themselves impervious to union uprisings. That was part of the thinking that got us all those game and reality shows then, and history may be starting to repeat itself.

The three big labor organizations in Hollywood are the Directors Guild, the Writers Guild and the Screen Actors Guild. Of these, the directors are the least likely to ever interrupt production. The DGA does not strike. (Well, they did once but it only lasted — I am not exaggerating — about 15 minutes.) Depending on who you ask, this is either because the DGA is wise and sage and knows how to work creatively with the producers…or because they know how to make a quick deal that undercuts the other unions. In any case, a DGA strike — if such a thing ever occurs — would not likely stop the taping of a show like Deal or No Deal. It might harm a show that needs a more sensitive hand in charge…someone skilled in story and characterization and nuance. But with a game or reality show, even if the union director were to go pound pavement, there would always be some technician who could slip into the chair, follow the real director's shot list and crank out what would seem like an acceptable episode.

So that leaves the writers and actors. Most game shows are not WGA-signatory, which means that they either employ non-union writers or they employ WGA writers but call them something else — segment producers or production staff or researchers or something — and argue that the guy sitting there writing dialogue and questions is not a writer. The WGA is challenging this via various avenues but hasn't gotten very far…yet. In any case, you could probably still go right on taping Deal or No Deal if the writers go on strike, as seems highly possible when the current contract expires in November of 2007. Hollywood has not seen a big, production-stopping strike, by the way, since the WGA went out in 1988.

What about actors? Deal or No Deal employs 26 models and they're probably all union members but, I dunno…call me crazy. I suspect that if you scoured Hollywood top to bottom, you could find 26 attractive women without SAG cards but with a burning desire to get on network TV…and you could replace the guy who plays The Banker on Deal or No Deal with the NBC parking lot attendant. So all they really have to worry about is Howie Mandel. Doing the show without him might be tough but not as tough as, say, trying to do Will & Grace without Will or Grace.

Now, I'm not suggesting here that NBC's interest in Deal or No Deal is because they expect a SAG strike soon. The current contract doesn't expire until July of 2008, which is the same time as the current DGA pact. Nor can they even assume that this particular series will be on their schedule then. But it got on the air, and may well become a series, in part because that's the current thinking at the networks; that at least one of those three unions — probably not the DGA — is going to go to war for long overdue gains, and it will not be a brief skirmish. So recently, there's been a renewed interest at the networks in cultivating reality and game shows, in part because, once again, they're smelling Big Strike a few years down the line. As when Millionaire debuted in a similar time of labor unease, someone is saying to someone else, "This is the kind of show we need to work towards."

Will this strategy work? Of course not. In fact, I'd be very surprised if there's anyone high up at the any of the networks who thinks they will not take a massive, crippling hit if they try to rely on "union-proof" shows. It's the Nuclear Option they know will result in massive, self-inflicted wounds…which doesn't mean they won't try it. In a future posting here, I'll try and explain why.

George F. Will takes what oughta be the Conservative view of the Bush spying matter. But in most cases isn't.

You know how this works by now. We give you links and descriptions of five websites. Four actually exist on the Internet. One is a shameful lie. You pick the shameful lie and you win a big cash prize. (That's another shameful lie. There is no big cash prize. There's no small cash prize, either. As a matter of fact, if you had any decency, you'd send us money.) Okay, here we go! Time to play There's No Such Website!

• Toastman – Maurice Bennett makes portraits of celebrities out of toast. He toasts slices of bread until each is proper color to lay into a mosaic.
• Ball of Paint – A couple in Alexandria, Indiana has created the world's largest painted baseball by applying over 19,000 coats of paint to one. Thank God they didn't waste all that time on something silly.
• The Center for the Prevention of Shopping Cart Abuse – You see them all around the city…discarded, claimed by the homeless, used to transport things other than groceries. It's about time someone did something.
• Buffo the Clown – He's the world's strongest clown, able to rip up telephone booths, juggle meat cleavers and even bench-press members of his audience.
• Shaker's Gallery – We've all seen sites that had great movies performed by Lego blocks. Are you ready for a site that reproduces the greatest works of Rembrandt, Da Vinci, Picasso and others on an Etch-a-Sketch?

And that's how we play There's No Such Website! If you'd like to be in our studio audience, write for tickets and tell us when you'll be in town. Good night!

Based on a couple of e-mails I received, I almost feel like I need to apologize for enjoying the second episode of Deal or No Deal, too. But I won't. We all like some things that in a more critical frame of mind, might bore or offend us…and I'm not even talking about "guilty pleasures," which I've always felt was a weasely way of viewing some things you enjoy. If you like it, just like it. Don't make excuses for liking it. Deal or No Deal is a game show calculated to hook the audience and draw them into the suspense, and it's well done. It's working on me, anyway.

One reason I perhaps relate to the game is that it parallels what I so often go through in my career at those chilling moments that it's time to negotiate the money for something. They offer you 100 and you think that's okay but you also think that if you say no to the 100, that will get you an offer of 150…but you just don't know for sure. Sometimes, after you turn down one offer, something happens and there's either no next offer or it's lower. It's happened to me every possible way: I say no to a weak offer and they go hire someone else. Or I say yes and find out later they would have gone much higher. I used to also go through something of the sort when I was card-counting and playing Blackjack. In addition to keeping all those aces and "plus twos" in my head, I had to continually wrestle with a simple question: I'm ahead a little. Do I quit now or press my luck and try to get ahead a lot?

Getting back to the first aspect: I wonder if the following ever occurred to the producers of Deal or No Deal. They have this shadowy figure on the set called "The Banker" who offers the contestants fluctuating fees to bail out. (In actuality, the actor who plays the role has nothing to do with the offers. When Howie Mandel picks up the phone to get a new price from "The Banker," he's talking to the producer.) But I wonder if they thought of making The Banker a real player in the proceedings — audible, if not visible — who'd attempt to psych out the contestant, perhaps working in a little Donald Trump hardball banter.

At every network, there's a Business Affairs department and it's filled with people who play this game every day…often, for amounts of cash far greater than anything that's going to be given away on Deal or No Deal. Sometimes, they play Good Cop, hinting that they're on your side. They're giving you the best terms they can but their bosses…well, you can never tell with those guys. They already think the offer is too high and have been eyeing someone cheaper. Then there's the alternate, Bad Cop approach, putting you down, jabbing at whatever vulnerabilities they sense. Once, I had a Business Affairs guy look me over and say, of the offer he had on the table, "I gather from your clothes, you need this pretty bad." Some of these negotiators are even more adept than that at hitting sore spots, saying things to stifle your bravado. I wonder if they ever thought of incorporating that into Deal or No Deal. They sure wouldn't have to look far to find people who can do it.

Anyway, I intend to keep watching Deal or No Deal. If you'd like to try your hand at a simulation of the game (minus the cute models and the tension imposed by real money), this page on the NBC website has a reasonable facsimile. I suspect you need to have seen the show to enjoy the online version, which I've now played about a dozen times, once actually getting to the point where there were two unopened cases, one containing a penny and one containing the million dollars. I went for broke and wound up with the penny…a situation not unfamiliar from a couple of investments I made in the past. Nevertheless, I couldn't help but think that the producers of the TV show are probably always praying for a contestant to reach that moment of decision. That would be good television no matter how it turned out…but better if they went home rich.

Recently, a new comic strip called Ink Pen introduced a superhero character named Captain Victory. It's a great name for a hero and it was a great name when Jack Kirby created a character with that name in 1981. As this article details, cartoonist Phil Dunlap has built a storyline out of the need to change the name of his cartoon hero. A very clever approach to the problem.

My friend and employer Jack Kirby was a lovely man but one capable of great anger at times. Every so often, I see something happen either in the comic book business or the real world and think, "Gee, I'm sorry Jack's gone but I'm glad he's not around to see that."

I just thought that when I read an item about Ted Stevens, the Senator from Alaska who thinks we should drill like crazy for oil in his home state, and that oil company executives should be allowed to testify before Congress without having to swear to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but you-know-what. Jack was very pro-environment and against letting big corporations have unchecked power and I doubt there's much that Stevens has ever done that wouldn't have outraged him. But wearing a tie featuring one of Jack's characters while he did those things and taking inspiration from it…that really would have pissed Kirby off.

Here we see Groucho Marx — he's the one with the mustache — hosting The Hollywood Palace on March 14, 1964. The lady at left is the show's "Billboard Girl" who came out at the end each week to hand the host a list of who'd be appearing the following week. She was a then-unknown starlet named Raquel Welch. And this is my way of billboarding that I just posted some tickets and history of The Hollywood Palace over on our sister website, Old TV Tickets. If you're interested in that kind of thing.

Last year around this time, I pointed you to one of the cleverer bits of web animation I'd come across — a daily "Twelve Days of Christmas" cartoon with Garfield the Cat over at the Garfield website. Well, it's back up again and up to Day Seven. Take a look between now and Christmas. I had nothing to do with this.

For no visible reason, I found myself enjoying the debut episode of Deal or No Deal, a prime-time game show hosted earlier this evening by Howie Mandel. The premise is pretty simple: There are 26 briefcases held by 26 models, each case containing a secret dollar amount ranging from one cent to one million dollars. A contestant is selected from the audience and picks one briefcase. He or she now "owns" that amount but doesn't yet know what it is. The contestant then calls out numbers to open the briefcases that were not chosen, one by one. Each time a low amount is revealed, hopes are raised that the secret amount is high. Each time a high amount is revealed…well, that lowers the odds that the contestant has a high amount in his or her briefcase.

Every so often, a mysterious "banker" phones Mr. Mandel and offers to buy the as-yet-unrevealed amount of cash from the contestant and the contestant must decide "deal or no deal" (hence, the name). The offers are calculated to make the choice harder and harder, and to make the contestant sweat and squirm. The lady tonight had several members of her family on stage with her to offer advice and they were sweating and squirming a lot, too. She turned down many higher offers — one for $138,000 — because though she knew by then she didn't have the million dollar prize in her case, there was still a chance the $500,000 one was in it. However, by the time it got down to the last decision, she knew she either had $500 or $50,000 and when the "banker" offered $25,000, she grabbed it…a good move since it turned out she had the smaller amount.

In broad strokes, this sounds a lot like Let's Make a Deal or maybe the Geoff Edwards version of Treasure Hunt. On the one hand, those shows had more opportunity for variations, whereas Deal or No Deal sounds like it'll be exactly the same game, over and over. On the other hand, Deal or No Deal doesn't delight in humiliating the contestants the way those other contestants did, and Mandel didn't have the genial smarminess of Edwards or Monty Hall.

Matter of fact, I thought Howie did a good job, though I was amused by the opening which had him in a bank vault, talking as if he was surrounded by millions in genuine currency. At the end of the program, if you froze your TiVo, you could read the following statement in a very tiny font…

The host's statement at the top of the program regarding the "high security vault" and any statements regarding "cash" being inside the briefcases were scripted for dramatic purposes. There was no cash on the program set. The producers determine and communicate all bank offers.

Four more episodes run tonight, tomorrow night and so on through the week. I'm TiVoing them to see how long it takes me to get bored with it. I'm guessing half past Wednesday.

One more of these. This was taken outside with me standing about six feet from Mr. Raccoon…and yes, I was careful. Several of you have sent me links to sites that explain that these critters can carry rabies or other nastiness. Thanks for your concern but I don't get that close to them. I just think it's amazing that at least one of them doesn't run when I step outside. He hangs around with an attitude of, "Take your damn pictures if you have to. Just so long as you fill the food dish and clear out."

Fred Kaplan reviews Bush's recent speeches.

I've been reading more articles on the domestic spying matter, doing my best to avoid the pieces that defend Bush just because it's Bush, or damn Bush for the same reason. There's a lot of writing out there by folks who were so eager to begin spinning for their side that they didn't bother to learn the facts of the matter first. This piece by David Sirota seems to me to have a rational handle on the matter. And yes, I know he's a partisan writing on a (mostly) partisan weblog. But I think he raises the questions that need to be answered before we'll know what this is all about.

As I mentioned here, I've been throwing pocket change into jars for 20+ years and have recently been hauling it in to dump into Coinstar machines at local merchants. There was too much to handle in one trip so I did it in three loads. The first, a small "test" bag of coins, yielded about $40. in Amazon credit. The second, last night, amounted to $273.18, which is all I could carry. That worked out to one half dollar, 681 quarters, 662 dimes, 410 nickels and 1,573 pennies…or so says my Coinstar receipt.

Today, I hauled in the last of it: 572 quarters, 466 dimes, 349 nickels and 862 pennies for a total of $216.67. I did not bother checking the machine's math. I trust it.

An odd thing: The machine sorts all the coins out and rejects foreign and unrecognizable ones. You can put them into the hopper again and sometimes, second time through, it will accept a few of them. But at the end of all this, I had about 20 coins which the machine just plain didn't want and I finally took a closer look at them. Two turned out to be old dimes made of silver. A few were foreign. There was one token to gain admittance to a pay toilet at some restaurant and one coin was one of those gold dollar coins with the portait of Sacagawea on it that no one used. But a couple turned out to be magic coins…by that, I mean coins that have been gaffed or rigged for magic tricks. I do a little magic but I can't recall ever owning or using any of these and can't imagine how they got into my jars. I may actually have received them as change somewhere — maybe the Magic Castle, even — and didn't look closely enough to note that, for example, one is a two-headed nickel and another is a dime on one side and a penny on the other. Glad the Coinstar machine kicked 'em out as they're worth a lot more than their face value, no matter which side is up.

Another thing I noticed. For years, I've been writing comic books where crooks run out of banks holding big sacks of coins. It hadn't dawned on me how much a sack of coins can weigh. I'm a pretty big guy and I couldn't carry more than $300 in coins. How did those Beagle Boys do it all those years?

Also, if you do this, do yourself a favor and either take along some moist towelettes or pick a store where the Coinstar machine is near the bathroom. In Las Vegas, people develop "coin fingers" after feeding money into slots or video poker machines for a couple of hours. After ten minutes of taking coins from a big canvas bag and throwing them in the Coinstar hopper, my right hand could have doubled for Jack Haley's in The Wizard of Oz.

One last thing I'll mention in case you never take this many coins to a Coinstar machine…as you feed them in, a little video window flashes messages like, "Feed your coins into the hopper now" and "Press the red button when you are finished." If you get too far ahead of the counting mechanism, it puts up a notice that says, "My, you have a lot of coins." Well, I used to. Now, I have a lot of credit at Amazon.

Tom McMillan writes that he disagrees with my statement that the American public will probably forgive some bending of the law if they buy that the wiretaps were done to catch genuine terrorists and ward off another 9/11. He writes…

Not all Americans; I, for one, do not. What is supposed to set us apart from other states (good and bad) is due process, a philosophy inherited from Anglo-Saxon juristry (the rulers of modern Britain should be ashamed of themselves). This includes following the law to spy on people — whether citizens of the U.S. or not. And why should rulers always be forced to do this? Because they abuse this power shamelessly otherwise.

But I actually don't disagree with that. By "the American public," I meant the majority…or whatever large percentage would have to buy the rationale for Bush not to lose a few more points of popularity over the revelation. I don't think the excuse will play badly with a certain segment of those who still support him. There are people out there so terrified of another 9/11 and/or so eager to see putative terrorists eviscerated that they'll excuse any trampling of laws. That was almost the Dana Rohrabacher argument in that debate to which I linked: The other guys killed 3,000 of us so we can't be worried with little things like ignoring the Constitution.

The question I'd like to see some journalist put to Bush is this: "You say the Patriot Act and other activities like this wiretapping are necessary to protect America. If your legal advisors told you these practices were illegal, would you authorize them anyway?" I suspect there are a lot of people in this country who'd think it was heroic and admirable to answer in the affirmative.

While I'm on the topic: I watched Bush's speech a little while ago. My feeling is that he's down to offering reassurance to those still on his side, and that he has nothing to offer those who've already turned against him and this war. Given how many lives have been ended or shattered by this military action — and how many more will still be sacrificed, to say nothing of the dollar cost — I find it all very sad. Every so often, I get an e-mail from someone who says something like, "You must be thrilled at every bit of bad news that comes out of Iraq." No, not at all…and I wouldn't think much of anyone who was. This whole thing's like a speeding bus and we're all trapped on it. Bush ain't the guy I would have chosen to drive, and he has yet to convince me he knows the route or even that the trip was a good idea in the first place. But either way, when he drives us off a cliff, he takes all of us with him.

At this very moment on Bravo, on Inside the Actors Studio, your host James Lipton is interviewing that well-known master thespian, Barbara Walters. I guess it does take acting ability to read some of that news copy and pretend it's true.