MOVIES AND TELEVISION

Clubhouse

Photo: Jeremy Sumpter, who plays the batboy for a major league team in the new CBS series "Clubhouse," poses for a photo during a break from filming on the set recently, in Los Angeles. Photo credits: Reed Saxton.

The new series Clubhouse -- about a teenager who's a bat boy for a major league team -- may use sports as a metaphor for life, but the producers know the action on the field still has to look authentic. That was fairly easy to pull off in the pilot, in which Dodger Stadium served as the stand-in for the fictional New York Empires' ballpark. But subsequent episodes have to rely on a home plate constructed on a turntable on a studio set, occasional trips to a small college field and computer-generated graphics. Executive producer Ken Topolsky slips a tape into the video machine in his office. It illustrates how at-bat footage, shot with a few actors against a green screen, can be digitally enhanced to place cheering -- or booing -- crowds in the stands. Daniel Cerone, the show's head writer and another executive producer, concedes there were "a lot of sleepless nights" in the weeks before they saw how well such virtual reality worked. "The technology is just at the point where special effects are not being used so much to do the extraordinary but the ordinary," Cerone says. "I would argue that this series, even three years ago, couldn't have been done without actually going to a regular ballpark and filling it with thousands of extras," a financial and logistical improbability for a TV series. "If an audience doesn't believe the baseball, they don't believe the world. And if they don't believe the world, they don't believe the characters. And if they don't believe the characters, they don't care," says Topolsky, whose previous credits include the coming-of-age series The Wonder Years and Party of Five. Clubhouse, from Aaron Spelling's production company, premieres on Sunday, then moves to its regular Tuesday time slot on Sept. 28. Dean Cain (Clark Kent in Lois and Clark: The New Adventures Superman) plays Conrad Dean, the Empires' slick superstar. Christopher Lloyd, who won two Emmys for his role on Taxi, is Lou Russo, the irascible equipment manager. Jeremy Sumpter, who played the title role in last year's feature film Peter Pan, is the bat boy, Pete Young. Mare Winningham is his mother, Lynne, who has raised Pete and his sister alone since their father left years ago. Sumpter's face still retains its lost-boy sweetness, though he has grown a tad since he flew around with Wendy and Tinkerbell. "He's just a kid who loves baseball, was introduced to it by his father," the 15-year-old actor says of his character. "And baseball is what keeps alive for Pete memories of his dad. Baseball is Pete's dad basically." Despite such layering, the producers insist the show isn't an overly sentimental peek behind the scenes of the professional game, but neither is it a sensationalized expose. "We are not Playmakers. We don't want to be Playmakers," says Cerone, referring to the short-lived drama series about the seamier aspects of pro football. "But on the other hand we do want to show the baseball world as it exists," says Cerone. In the pilot episode, steroid use is a major plot point. In another episode, there are cigars, porn magazines and beer in the clubhouse where the batboys are unsupervised. "We are just presenting a reality. But the flip side is that in each episode we are a focusing on the boy's character and . . . that there are consequences to actions," says Cerone. -Bridget Byrn.

The millionaires fight

In the battle of rich guys turned TV stars, Donald Trump has it all over Mark Cuban. Trump drew just under 16 million viewers to NBC last week for the second instalment of The Apprentice 2, according to Nielsen Media Research. While the series is starting slowly this time around, it's not nearly as slow as Cuban's The Benefactor. The colourful Dallas Mavericks owner is giving away money on a new ABC reality show, and its debut reached 5.5 million people, Nielsen said. A rerun the following night had fewer than three million viewers. During the week before the official opening of the fall season, the most popular program was -- appropriately enough -- a rerun. CSI: Crime Scene Investigation had 22.3 million viewers. Two of television's signature events -- the Emmy Awards and the Miss America pageant -- both fell out of Nielsen's top 10. The Emmys were seen by only 13.8 million people on ABC Sunday, the second smallest audience ever for TV's award night. Miss America was seen by 9.8 million people, its smallest audience ever. CBS won the week with an average of 10.9 million viewers (7.2 rating, 12 share). NBC had 9.9 million (6.6, 11), and won among the 18-to-49-year-old demographic advertisers love. Monday Night Football pushed ABC's average to 8.8 million (6.1, 10), slumping Fox had 4.8 million (3.1, 5), the WB 3.7 million (2.4, 4), UPN 2.8 million (1.9, 3) and Pax TV 680,000 (0.5, 1). A ratings point represents 1,096,000 households, or one per cent of the nation's estimated 109.6 million TV homes. The share is the percentage of in-use televisions tuned to a given show. For the week of Sept. 13-19, the top 10 shows, their networks and viewerships: CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, CBS, 22.3 million; Survivor: Vanuatu, CBS, 20.1 million; NFL Monday Night Football: Green Bay at Carolina, ABC, 18.8 million; Will & Grace, NBC, 16.5 million; Without a Trace, CBS, 16.1 million; 60 Minutes, CBS, 16 million; The Apprentice 2, NBC, 15.9 million; Joey, NBC, 15.4 million; NFL Monday Showcase, ABC, 15.3 million; Siegfried & Roy: Miracle, NBC, 14.5 million.-David Bader.

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