Sexcapades And the City

He didn't appear to think much:

"I objectively wanted to hear how they sounded, and after I heard them, I had my own, you know, opinion, but most of all I wanted to give them my constructive criticism. So I hope I did something to help the situation," Wonder responded somberly.

And then he sang.

And he didn't sound so hot, frankly. We'd even go so far as to say he's no Barry Manilow, but then you'd just think we were just being intimidated by the Barry Manilow-fan fatwa on the column in the wake of yesterday's "Idol" coverage.

As if hearing Stevie Wonder Today wasn't hard enough on the millions of viewers, Ace Young went and got hauled up on stage as a Bottom Three, and millions of women at home begin to wail and tear their hair.

But it was all just part of an elaborate scheme to make us question what's going on in this crazy world of ours when people that pretty can't get anything they want.

It only got worse when Seacrest pulled pretty Lisa Tucker from the Seats of Safety and made her stand onstage in shame, along with Ace and Melissa, for whom Seacrest could not get much of a rise out of the live studio audience.

But, as we should have known all along, the pretty people were just a distraction. And Melissa got to sing about one bar of the Stevie Wonder song that did her in before Fox cut to commercial.

* * *

It's official: "Without a Trace" is indecent in Denver and Des Moines -- but not in Delaware.

This we learned from the upright, downright, forthright Federal Communications Commission, which yesterday congratulated itself on its earlier decision to fine some but not all CBS stations for the surprise visit of Janet Jackson's right breast to the 2004 Super Bowl halftime show and also generally slapped around a bunch of other TV shows that had been broadcast between 2002 and early '05.

(You can read about the whole tzimmes on Page D1 in today's Business section.)

Most notable, perhaps, was the episode of "Without a Trace" called "Our Sons and Daughters," which originally ran in November 2004. It's about a young man who is beaten to death and a girl who attempts suicide and claims he raped her. Turns out that was not true but that she had attended a teen sex party, which is shown in a flashback.

CBS says the scene was "not unduly graphic or explicit," notes the episode carried a TV-14 parental guideline and maintains the story featured an "important and socially relevant storyline warning parents to exercise greater supervision of their teenage children."

Interestingly, the FCC said it got "numerous" complaints alleging that certain CBS stations broadcast indecent material when it re-ran the episode Dec. 31, 2004.

In one of those astounding coincidences that make covering the TV industry such a miracle, that was right around the time FCC Commissioner Brent Bozell -- oh, wait, he's not a commissioner yet, right? -- told members of his Parents TV Council that the rebroadcast was the "Worst TV Show of the Week" and urged them to use his online form to file a complaint with the FCC with the click of a button.

The FCC is fining only those CBS stations in the Central and Mountain time zones, where prime time starts one hour earlier, at 7 p.m. Prime time is earlier in those time zones because it was determined at some point that people there go to bed earlier in order to get up in time to milk the cows. The show aired at 10 p.m. in the East, 9 p.m. in the Central zone.

Grievously, the brain trust that came up with the regulation establishing a "safe harbor" of 6 a.m. to 10 p.m., during which hours radio and television stations cannot broadcast indecent material, seem to have neglected to take into account the earlier prime time in those middle-America time zones.

Which is why, sadly, the FCC can protect the children of Denver from turning into tarts after seeing TV show episodes like the one in question here but could not save from the same fate children who grow up in Syracuse -- like Jessica Cutler.