Comcast owns the '76ers and the Flyers. The last thing they would do is give television rights to DirectTV. The lack of local sports availability is the main reason satellite TV has the lowest percentage of penetration in Philadelphia than just about any other market.

The situation with Phillies games on CN-8 and CSN is a little different, but, basically, Comcast paid the Phils a lot of money -- more than the commercial stations were willing to put up -- to get access to their games. 

The whole point is to make sports fans subscribe to Comcast. The strategy has two results:

1) It gets a lot of sports fans to subscribe to Comcast.

2) It really pisses off a lot of fans.

This is a link for current questions. But not very many people seem to have them. I'm always ready to try to answer.

Is Mad Men *better* than The Wire?

It's different. Both are in a very special league. The Emmy snub of The Wire is egregious and unforgivable.

On the other hand, the Emmys are hardly a definitive measure of TV quality. The Wire suffered in Emmy voting because it was produced in Baltimore, and for many of the aging TV types who vote in the Emmys, Baltimore might as well be the moon.

Are their voting failures any worse than those of the handful of foreign press who vote on the Golden Globes and always choose several hot babes in the hope that they will get especially well-oiled at the big Globes party, with its open bar, and be available for close-up interviews?

I am sorry to be so late in responding to these queries. I have been blissfully on an island with only a generator and no Internet, satellite or cable.

I think by now you have seen what's become of Peggy's baby, though you sure didn't in the first episode.

I'm not even 100 percent sure that we knew that Peggy had a baby, though my memory is foggy. We know now.

I have seen Dudley Sharp's responses to Pickett from an organization called Justice Matters. A lot of his supposed refutations of what Pickett says are merely matters of interpretation. If a man says "he can tell" that so and so could not have done such and such, I think any rational observer would understand that he is making a statement of feeling, rather than of fact.

In some cases, however, the facts he states do seem to be incorrect. That may tarnish his anti-death penalty arguments, but it does not detract from the power of the movie, which is basically the story of a minister who experienced great pain while doing his job to make it easier for 95 people to be executed.

Well, color me one of those snotty Easterners, though I doubt there's "a rather huge" Amish population anywhere....

And I really don't see how you can get angry with college merchandise being shoved down your throat when you live in a town called State College. (And, apparently, work for Enormous State University. They sell more T-shirts, maybe you'll get a raise!)

I, too, enjoy Colbert. So much of his humor is directed at the idocy of the media and a culture that cares more about whether its presidential candidates can bowl or shoot a duck than what they think and stand for.

Well, thanks for the vote of confidence. The cable news networks basically have an impossible job. They have to get ratings to make money so they can continue to exist. But they never get very much in the way of ratings. So they have to do things cheaply, and they have to do them 24-hours-a-day. The most interesting thing for me in the whole story was the fact that Nightline, which usually finishes third behind Leno and Letterman, won the time period when they did a lengthy interview with Obama. I'll bet you see more lengthy interviews there with others in the future, and maybe it will spill over onto cable.

My job title is "critic," so I have to be critical, I suppose. I suppose they could have hired me to be one of the writers, but then I would have written a completely different show.

ABC ordered a lot of new shows last fall, and it was pretty much impossible for them all to survive. I thought "Big Shots" was just overly simplistic, and it was also sort of degrading to women, even if Michael Vartan is totally beautiful.

By canceling the show, ABC gives Vartan a chance to start in another show, which will probably happen in the next season or two, since he is very popular, and maybe you'll like the new one even more than "Big Shots."

I have no idea. But I don't think that all the people on Clash of the Choirs were in any other choir to begin with. I think they just auditioned during general calls. There are three things making it unlikely that there will ever even be another chioir from Philadelphia: 1) We've already had one. 2) No major celebrities come to mind who could coach it, and I don't think Patti LaBelle is going to do it again. 3) The show had lousy ratings, and it's unlikely there will be any further episodes with any choirs from anywhere.

I certainly do not purport to be a medical researcher, and I know that the issue is controversial. I believe the CDC are about as reputable as you can get, and, along with the pediatrics academy, are more credible than a TV show.

I am happy to publish your comments here.