I was watching "The Division", which is a new tv show on Lifetime (one of the promises of lots of channels was having a channel for every special interest; women are half the population yet I can only think of Lifetime and Oxygen as networks for women, which sort of underscores how far women still have to go). Basically it's an ensemble police drama with an all-woman cast and I'm giving it a try because Tracy Needham (who played Meg in the first season of JAG) is on it.

Anyway, one of the cases involves someone shooting a dog and leaving it to die. It gets on the news and the department sets up a special hotline so that witnesses can call in. You get the usual crank calls and well-meaning people who have suspicious neighbors. But one caller asks if "Roger" is alright, then she hangs up. And then the detective (played by Nancy McKeon) eventually has to track down the caller from phone company records.

I'm thinking caller-id is so pervasive that it really destroys one of the staples of police shows: tracing a call. You have those scenes where someone being searched for by the police calls them and only talks just short of the time needed for the police to trace their call. With caller-id they'd immediately see what number it was and use a reverse telephone directory to find out where the call came from. And even if you block caller-id, it's not really blocked for 911, so the information must still be sent and filtered by the phone company. Only rather sophisticated people would be able to stop that information from flowing, and 99% of people aren't that skilled.

With half the tv season over, a handful of new shows have appeared. What once was a time to replace some of the stinkers introduced during the previous Fall has become a time to introduce new shows for the next sweeps period. Instead of running reruns of whatever show was on Wednesday night, WB is showing a 13-episode run of "Jack and Jill". And I'm trying to watch it since I've heard it's a good romantic show. So I watched the season premier last week and was left a bit confused. There's a bit too much history that I haven't seen which makes it harder to follow the plot. A problem with all serial-based shows.

"Survivor 2" is going to start in a couple of weeks. I'm not a fan of reality tv shows -- it's not as if I ever watched "The Real World" or "Road Rules", both aimed at my particular demographic. There's no story. Sure, each week there's a certain setup and the episode is edited to make it coherent and interesting. But the producers are hoping that something interesting will happen. You don't have a writer (or writers) putting together a script and a good story and having it acted out.

I suppose it's the same sort of fascination as watching a sports game if you don't know the game. In my opinion, people who don't follow a sport and are watching a game are only interested in the spectacular things: big plays, accidents, injuries, violence. People who really follow a sport can easily derive a great deal of enjoyment from a game that would bore most neophytes, because they can appreciate the little things that are going on. Perhaps in the same way that's why people watch reality shows. They want to see people do something unusual, whether it's sex or violence (or both for the S&M crowd) or something else.

NBC is planning on extending "Friends" to 40 minutes and then adding 20 minutes of special "Saturday Night Live" segments or other material, in an effort to combat "Survivor 2". I can see that as being an interesting ploy in general. If a popular show goes 10 minutes over, then is followed by a shorter and much less popular show, people will probably stay on the same channel. What can you do, switch to another show that is 10 minutes into its program? Obviously, it doesn't work with channel surfers or people who use VCRs a lot, but it could still work on a lot of viewers.