Off With the Head: CBS Tosses Lame '3 Lbs.'

CBS has pulled its brain surgery drama "3 Lbs." after three weeks, sending the Reporters Who Cover Television into a frenzy of pun headline and lead writing, the best of which include the phrases "brain dead," "it's a no-brainer" and our personal fave headline: " '3 Lbs.' Dropped by CBS."

Three episodes is how long it took CBS to figure out that although "3 Lbs." starred Stanley Tucci, it also starred Mark Feuerstein, who brought to the show the same suck-the-air-out-of-the-room style he had honed on such series as "Good Morning, Miami" and "Conrad Bloom."

Ironically, what you saw on the screen was the redeveloped version of the show and Feuerstein also co-starred in the original version. That means CBS had the chance to replace him and chose not to, deciding instead the problem was Dylan McDermott, who was replaced by Tucci. Which just goes to show they're nuts over at CBS.

Viewers, on the other hand, saw the problem immediately. Ten million showed up to watch the first episode, their ranks thinned to 9 million the second week, and by this week they clocked in at only 8 million.

Here's an interesting stat: Young viewers found Feuerstein even scarier than Ray Liotta, who headlined the drama replaced by "3 Lbs." The latter clocked 16 percent lower ratings with younger viewers than had "Smith," which was pulled, in part, due to its lousy numbers in that demographic.

CBS suits had planned to shift "3 Lbs." next week to 9 p.m. Tuesdays, but after seeing this week's terrible numbers they concluded the show could hurt the 10 p.m. broadcast of "The Victoria's Secret Fashion Show" and that would have been criminal.

So brain surgery is out and CBS has slipped "The Unit" back into position before its babes-in-undies program. Insert your own joke about that here; I'm not allowed to -- it's a family newspaper.

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Disney, which is about to release Mel "[expletive] Jews . . . are responsible for all the wars in the world" Gibson's new flick "Apocalypto," must have been thrilled to learn that despite (or, more likely, because of) Michael Richards's recent racist rant at a comedy club, sales of the "Seinfeld" seventh-season DVD have shot up 75 percent over Seasons 5 and 6.

So much for Jesse Jackson's call for a boycott of the DVD.

FYI, boxed sets of Seasons 5 and 6 were released on the same day last year. The big difference is that this year, the day before the seventh-season DVD release, Web site TMZ.com posted a video of Richards's performance at a Los Angeles club last month in which he began screaming at an African American he thought was heckling him, "Fifty years ago we'd have you upside down with a [expletive] fork up your [expletive]," after which Richards repeatedly shouted a racial slur.

Jerry Seinfeld, who was scheduled to appear on David Letterman's show that night to hawk the DVD release, brought Richards on the program, via satellite, to do damage control.

Richards told "Afro-Americans" he was really busted up over the incident. Then reports began to surface he'd engaged in similar hate-spewing toward a woman and toward Jews in his audience at other gigs, although his publicist, Howard Rubenstein, insisted Richards is not anti-Semitic because "he himself is Jewish."

Turns out, Richards is as much Jewish as I am queen of Freedonia.

Recently, Rubenstein acknowledged Richards was "technically . . . not born by blood as Jewish" and did "not formally [go] into a conversion" and "it was purely his interpretation of having adopted Judaism as his religion."

"He really thinks of himself as Jewish," Rubenstein added.

Like I said . . .