"NewsNight Akron" has picked its local newsmaker of the year. Here's the announcement:

Melinda Elkins, the woman whose remarkable efforts in support of her jailed husband, Clarence, led to his release in mid-December, was named 2005 Akron Newsmaker of the Year by panelists of the PBS 45 & 49 program NewsNight Akron.  The award recognizes the greater Akron individual whose work has had the most positive effect on the area over the past year.
The panel made the unanimous decision after a lively debate about seven nominees during the show’s Thursday, Jan. 5 taping at Northside restaurant in downtown Akron.  The show airs tonight at 9 p.m. and repeats on Saturday, Jan. 7 at 5 a.m.
Panelists for the show were Vincent Duffy, director of programming and operations at WKSU/89.7; Jody Miller, owner and publisher of Bath Country Journal; Steve Hoffman, editorial writer at the Akron Beacon Journal; and Ed Esposito, news director at WAKR/WONE/WQMX. They cited Melinda Elkins’ nearly eight-year battle to prove her husband’s innocence in the rape of Melinda’s mother and niece and the murder of her mother.  “Here is a woman who waged the ultimate battle on behalf of truth and justice and the American way and really made a change that does impact every citizen in the long term,” said Esposito.
Other 2005 nominees were LeBron James, Cleveland Cavaliers player and Akron native; Robert Keegan, chairman and chief executive officer of Goodyear; Carol Cartwright, retiring president of Kent State University; the Akron City School board; Luis Proenza, president of The University of Akron; and Rev. Samuel Ciccolini, executive director and founder of Interval Brotherhood Home. …  This is the fourth year that the show has presented the Akron Newsmaker of the Year Award.  Past recipients are Dan Dahl, Rev. Curtis Thomas, Mayor Donald Plusquellic and Connie Humble.

I find that "positive effect" note in the selection criteria interesting. If not for that, they probably would have had to pick Cynthia George…

I won't pretend Lou Rawls should be thought of as a TV guy, although he was a familiar presence through his telethons and his voicing beer commercials.

But I have to note his passing because he was such a good singer in his heyday, although my sense of his heyday may be different from yours.

I wasn't really a fan of his "You'll Never Find" period. But I'm still fond of my old vinyl copy of "Stormy Monday," where Rawls sang some wonderful jazz blues accompanied by pianist Les McCann's trio. I also have a live album from Rawls's Capitol Records days with a pretty good "Tobacco Road." And Rawls made a memorable, much-played Christmas album for the label.

I first heard him, though, when "Love Is a Hurtin' Thing" hit in 1966. It's all right, and I don't mind hearing it from time to time, but it's not my favorite Rawls. I'm more fond of the jazzy stuff and the later "Natural Man."

And there's one big piece of beautiful, corny, bold work from the early '80s: his version of "Wind Beneath My Wings," with the corn in the deep-voiced, spoken intro and the joy in his letting loose on the song itself. I have that record because I went to a Rawls concert around that time, and he was cool, masterful — and especially good on that song. Better in concert than on record, in fact. But I'm glad to have those records, especially "Stormy Monday."

I'm not usually one to give away plot developments. But a letter from Fox made me want to.

A letter accompanying the four-hour season premiere of "24" did not stop at asking that I "do not divulge to your readers the events of the first 10 minutes in the first hour." It also said:

"[T]his mailing is being sent exclusively to critics for review purposes; please do not share this DVD copy with other television reporters, others on staff of your publication, family members or friends." (Bold-face and underlining are Fox's.)

Good grief, how paranoid can a network be? It's as if the White House decided to threaten the leakers of Fox plots. Next thing you know, the network's going to put a warrantless tap on my DVR.

My heart's still pounding from the end of the Rose Bowl, won by Texas in thrilling fashion. (I watched the early part on ABC, then listened to the later stages on ESPN Radio, where the drama kept me from drifting off to sleep.) But those of you who don't care a fig about football should care that the game is done, because it means we get back to regular television.

The big bowls have delayed the start of lots of fresh television several days into the new year, since few progammers want to waste their good stuff against football games likely to draw big audiences. Now that's done, so Thursday night we will see, among other things, a new season of "Dancing With the Stars" on ABC and NBC's move of "My Name Is Earl" and "The Office" into a Thursday comedy block with "Will & Grace" and the new (and not noteworthy) "Four Kings."

I have seen two upcoming episodes of "The Office," so I can warn fans to expect a big plot turn that will add to the show's poignancy. Also some additional humanizing of the characters, which may make this acquired-taste show more palatable to new viewers sampling it on Thursday. And some very funny scenes. I have seen 1 1/3 new episodes of "Earl" — since my review disc from NBC froze early in the second episode on it — and this show is very much on its game.

Viewers, though, will have to stay sharp when it comes to keeping track of the TV schedule, since this window of viewing opportunities may not be open long. The college football season is over, but we're heading into the NFL playoffs, the Super Bowl and — in February — many, many hours of Winter Olympics.

I suppose I should be grateful to my cable company for my complete loss of service at about 10:50 p.m. Tuesday. After all, that way I got some sleep because I wasn't drawn into watching Penn State-Florida State all the way to its late-late-triple-overtime end. Nor did I get caught up in the miners' story nightmare, with the declaration of a miracle turning eventually into bitter reality.

But I was reminded that as we get more and more wrapped up in technology, we are also more prey to failures. My cable and Internet broadband come from the same service, so I was without access to either for a couple of hours at least.  So we find ourselves wanting not only fancy means of communication, but backups to those means.

In fact, it was backup that helped me know I was without cable for as long as it was. When the cable went out, I found the football game on my XM radio, and fell asleep listening to it. Waking hours later, I heard that the game was in overtime — and turned on the TV long enough to see that the cable was out.

Elsewhere in too much TV viewing:

– It should not surprise you that the Fiesta Bowl did very well in the local TV ratings. This is Buckeye country, after all, so the 33.4 rating for the game here was an impressive reminder of the importance of a local connection. The Sugar Bowl, in prime time, had less than half the audience of Fiesta. And consider what other bowls did that day in Northeast Ohio: Gator, about a 4.0 rating; Capital One Bowl, 6.9; Cotton, 3.6.

But an even more impressive reminder was in the rating for the Browns' last regular-season game. It had a 25.3. Consider that Ohio State was playing in a major bowl, with national rankings on the line, while the Browns were assured a sub-.500 season, with no shot at the playoffs, and going through another management soap opera. In spite of all that, they're still the Browns, and hometown fans were going to tune in.

– Am I the only person who is sick of seeing CNN promoting its "Pipeline" video service? You'd think it was one of the biggest stories of the week, given how often the network is hyping it during time that could have been better used for real news.

As should be evident from the posts just before this one, I returned to work in earnest on Monday. In addition to the things I wrote about, I also watched several episodes of the new season of "The Shield," in anticipation of a press-conference call about the show today. (The series begins its new season on Jan. 10. I've seen four episodes and they're good.) I spent some time in the office, which had a weekend-like emptiness, since many people were taking the holiday; I was trying to clear some of the piles on my desk and gathered mail and videos to organize at home.

Plus I was trying to watch a bunch of football. Especially frustrating was the Fiesta Bowl, with its late-afternoon start pushed later by an overlong pregame show. I managed to watch both teams' initial touchdowns and even made a few notes. (Brent Musburger looked prescient when, after Notre Dame's first score, he assured viewers that the Buckeyes "are going to move the ball" — which they did. He was perhaps less wise when, after Ohio State tied the game, he urged people to "get out the adding machines." Three other bowl games on Monday had more scoring than the Fiesta.)

Football-watching had to take a hiatus, though, since we had a meeting at our son's school in the early evening, so we were on the road, catching pieces on the radio. My wife even offered to eat our fast-food meal in the car so we could keep listening, but that felt counterproductive on a damp and somewhat chilly night.

Of course, we weren't the only ones trying to keep track of the game. When we got to the school, some of the staff had a TV on in the commons; Ohio State was up 14-7 at the time, and I got a glimpse of the score making it 21-7. The meeting lasted an hour, I got another peek at the game (where Ohio State still had a commanding lead) and was home in time to see the finish.

Except that wasn't the end of football. We caught the beginning of the Sugar Bowl, seeing West Virginia go to a big early lead. Then my watching was squeezed around an episode of "Scrubs" (see below) and "The Shield." But I found myself pausing "The Shield" and going back to football with increasing frequency as Georgia kept making a game of it, whittling the Mountaineers' lead down again and again. Once I was done with "The Shield," I stuck with football through West Virginia's faked punt, which finally sealed the victory.

As I've said before, I'll watch teams I don't care much about if a game is good, and in the case of the Sugar Bowl, I also had a rooting interest in West Virginia (thanks to family ties to a lot of W.Va. fans). And I'm now even more interested in what Penn State will do tonight. I know a lot of people had longed for a West Virginia-Penn State matchup in a bowl — well, a lot of people other than the geniuses who pick the teams for the bowls — and West Virginia certainly demonstrated it was ready for a big show.

I can't tell you if Tuesday's return of "Scrubs" is any good, because NBC didn't send out those episodes for review. It DID send out two episodes airing on Jan. 10, along with a selection of scenes from coming episodes.

The highlight reel is very funny,  and it gets around my problem with "Scrubs."

While the show is nominally a sitcom, structurally it's a sketch-comedy show, with bits of varying length. You could argue that the sketches are bound by a semblance of a plot, but to me that's not much different from Tracey Ullman tying together her "Tracey Takes On … " sketches with an overall theme.

Trying to follow the "Scrubs" narrative through the goofy asides and rapid-fire scenes makes me feel like an old person trying to watch MTV in, oh, 1981, when that viewer's whole approach to TV was based on following a more extended narrative. Or having that same person watch "Sesame Street" after a childhood that consisted of "Ding Dong School" and "Captain Kangaroo."

So, as storytelling, "Scrubs" is too jumpy for me. And that's frustrating, since I have come to like the cast and characters. It takes talent to be funny while being pummeled by dozens of tennis balls, but Zach Braff carries it off.

So I have decided to treat "Scrubs" as the new century's "Laugh-In," paying attention to some bits, shrugging off others — and finding laughs long after I have stopped thinking about the plot.

I am old enough to remember roller derby as a game that was part of weekend-afternoon TV, when all the games seemed to come from the Kezar Pavilion, and where in my memory the announcer is extolling the glories of the San Francisco Bay Area Bombers. I also remember the presentation of the game in the 1972 Raquel Welch movie "Kansas City Bomber," which is far from Welch's worst movie, and one with a pretty good performance by her. And I have tried to forget NBC's 1978 TV series "Roller Girls," a terrible sitcom which co-starred Joanna Cassidy; since she's a pretty good actress, I hope her reason for doing the show involved a mortgage payment more than a sense that the show was actually good.

You may have other recollections of the game. It has had its moments of great fame, as Keith Coppage ably covered in the book "Roller Derby to Rollerjam," a 1999 "authorized story" of the sport, which was released in conjunction with yet another attempt to revive interest in all that skating and jamming and thrown elbows. But the underside of the new A&E series "Rollergirls" is that the sport is still seeking real respectability and financial success.

In which major sport, for instance, would you be likely see players out on the street, handing out flyers to get fans into their games? And how far from the big time are you when www.bggw.com — the Web site of the roller league chronicled in "Rollergirls" — proclaims that the league's newest playing center "features real, shiny bathrooms and fabulous heat/AC climate control"?

Still, "Rollergirls," which premieres tonight, more than once indicates that the women in Holy Rollers and Hellcats and other teams are finding satisfaction in the rough-and-tumble of the game, whether because it gives them a chance to play for cheering throngs (or thronglets), or because it lets them be as tough as men (although there's a lot of cheesecake in this roller game), or because it's better than what they're managing to do anywhere else.

Unfortunately, as presented on TV, their quest is kind of boring — a long round of conversation and drinking and smoking and longing, climaxing in an edited-down game that still isn't very interesting.

Oh, some of the characters began to grow on me as I worked my way through a second episode. But just as some of them became interesting, the show was off to another player, or an entirely different team, searching for more drama. And I wasn't drawn in enough to wait around for the rest of the previous player's story.

The other day, another Beacon Journalist forwarded me a cranky e-mail about "Book of Daniel," the NBC drama premiering Friday. It came from one of those groups that apparently stopped liking TV around the time it stopped being in black-and-white (which, after all, is the way such groups view all issues, including appropriateness of content). Whoever wrote the letter — and I'm not giving the group the benefit of extra publicity by naming it — had not obviously not seen the show, since there was a big error in its description. But this group is claiming that "NBC demeans Christian faith" because the show involves a clergyman with some human flaws, family and friends who were also flawed, a gay regular character and another character who is at the very least bisexual.

I know. You're all aflutter.

Well, I have seen two episodes of "Book of Daniel," and part of a third. I finally stopped watching the third one because it jumped several episodes ahead in the serialized story, and I want to watch the series in sequence. That's how much I like the show, and you may like it as well.

At the center of the show is an Episcopal priest, Daniel Webster (played with charm and befuddlement by Aidan Quinn). Daniel's a godly man, and he talks regularly to Jesus, who — with beard and white robe — talks back. Jesus is deliberately enigmatic with Daniel at times, since Daniel has to figure out situations for himself. But He does provide guidance, and a comforting presence when all else is crazy around Daniel.

And all else is crazy. By the end of the show's second hour, it feels as if we are barely into all the complexities in Daniel's world, which includes his pot-selling daughter, his gay son, his adopted horndog of a son, his bishop boss, his father (who is also a bishop), his Alzheimer's-battling mother, his boss, his semi-bored wife, his wife's skittish sister and an all-too-knowing and powerful church member whose agenda is not Daniel's.

I was hooked early on, not only by the plot (which begins with a mystery involving missing church funds) but because I was fascinated by the characters and all the ways they intersect. Some of those intersections overreach (including in one hidden romance), but I kept watching just to see how people were going to handle situations. I also very much liked Jesus, played nicely by Garret Dillahunt ("Deadwood").

At times, it felt like a gentler, more amusing "Six Feet Under." That was a show weighed down by its moroseness, especially in the later seasons, but it was also about a lot of people seeking solace wherever they might find it. Same thing applies to "Book of Daniel." Painkillers, martinis, manga and money are all meant to provide happiness. Love is a better answer for some of them, and faith is a constant even when other things don't pan out so well. And that's where "Book of Daniel" distinguishes itself. While it does not pretend that faith will wipe out all the problems in the world, especially one as crazy as "Book of Daniel," it is also certain that Daniel would be much worse off if he didn't have Jesus to talk to.