I hope who ever convinced Viacom/Disney that spending $40 million on this plastic turkey of a "Crap-u-Drama" is going to be laughing next Tuesday morning when the ratings come in. NBC opens its Sunday Night Football season with a Colts-Giants game and there's a double-header on ESPN's Monday Night Football.

To convolute H.L. Menken: "A lot of people have indeed gone broke OVER-estimating the intelligence of the American people."

If ABC thinks that they are going to inspire Joe Six-pack to forego all that gridiron action to tune in to a boring, complicated fiction that requires paying attention, then they are really are living in Disneyland.

ABC's second mistake was in assuming that on the fifth anniversary of 9-11 that there is anything left to exploit. We've gone from hating shifty-eyed Middle Eastern hijackers to tear-jerkers about trapped firemen, and from heroic passengers muttering "Let's Roll" to Country Cornballs making up stupid songs including Daryl Worley's ironically Republican-embarrassing lyric "What about Bin Ladin?"

But ABC is betting that America is still paying attention. I'm not sure they are. I think nearly every emotional bit of bloody marrow has already been sucked out of these dry bones.

ABC is betting you are going to tune in on Sunday AND Monday evening and get depressed and angry all over again and then blame the Clinton administration, and somehow sustain this disgruntled attitude all the way to November, cast aside any other thing you may not like about the way Republicans have been screwing up the country, and then vote for more of the same.

That's a stretch even for Disney.

ABC spent $40 million on this project and yet they said they plan to run it uninterrupted, commercial free. Is that because they couldn't find any sponsors willing to put their name on this classic piece of 1930s agitprop?

Or maybe this is a back door political contribution from Viacom/Disney to the RNC. Who cares.

And speaking of who cares, excluding the football fans who won't be watching, you really can't expect teens and twenty-somethings to sit still for it. MTV and BET are just a click away and watching nearly naked skanks shaking their junk for the camera is a lot more exciting than watching Harvey Kietel's moles.