Wire TV News

The role of female talk show hosts in late-night TV broadcast network history, all 50-plus years of it, can be summed up in two words: Joan Rivers. It takes just another two - Arsenio Hall - to do the same for minorities.

Whether in locker rooms or on TV studio sets, chemistry is one of those things you can't precisely predict, define or quantify. Sometimes it's instantaneous. Sometimes it evolves. Sometimes it just doesn't happen.

LOS ANGELES - Fans of basic cable savagery can let out a primal "Yawp" of delight. History's "Vikings" will be returning for a second season.

In TV's constantly shifting landscape, there was one thing you could always count on: NBC owned the antipodes.

AMC's "Mad Men" drama may garner attention for bringing back '60s glamour, but January Jones, known for her daring red carpet looks, says she doesn't care what critics think of her personal style.

Sandra Lee says her next cookbook will be her last. At least for a while.

Nora Ephron will be the subject of an HBO documentary being made by her one of her sons, journalist Jacob Bernstein.

Guest lineups for the Sunday TV news shows:

The rivalry on Super Bowl Sunday is already shaping up as a battle between puppies and kittens.

FORT WORTH, Texas - Julia Stiles recently pulled the plug. No more cable television in her home.

NEW YORK - If Jimmy Fallon was feeling stressed about his impending takeover of "The Tonight Show" during a rehearsal last Thursday at 30 Rockefeller Plaza, he certainly wasn't letting it show.

LOS ANGELES - Jimmy Fallon has been crowned the next king of late-night television, but the empire he will inherit has seen better days.

Times change, people mostly don't.

Three cast members of "The Real Housewives of New Jersey" reality show will face charges following an altercation at a clothing boutique.

It turns out "The Last Show" wasn't the last, after all.

The TV comedy "The Office" is marking the end of its long run with a wrap party in the Pennsylvania city where it's based.

The Al Jazeera America channel says that CNN chief business correspondent Ali Velshi is coming aboard.

Al-Jazeera America has made its first on-air hire and tapped CNN reporter Ali Velshi to host a business show for the start-up cable network.

This is what passes for a crisis in the lives of TV critics: Each year about this time (well, except for the terrible "Mad Men" drought of 2011 - about which the less said the better), they're sent a disc with the first few hours of the new "Mad Men" season.

Jerry Springer is getting another television show.

The TLC network is making a movie about some of the 800,000 condolence letters that were sent to the widow of former President John F. Kennedy after his 1963 assassination.

In the first episode of the first season of "Mad Men," Don Draper's next-in-line affair, Rachel Menken, hears his brutal philosophy: Love is nothing more than an ad man's myth, and everyone is born alone and dies alone.

For a fleeting moment, Shain Gandee was part of the 1 percent.

NEW YORK - Jay Leno is out at "The Tonight Show"; Jimmy Fallon is in. Now the question on everyone's lips is who will be the new host of "Late Night"?

LOS ANGELES - Big and beefy with a scraggly beard, Shane Smith looks more like an aging roadie than a thrill-seeking foreign correspondent or a budding media mogul.

The coming Jay Leno-Jimmy Fallon "Tonight" handover is the talk of the late-night TV town.

Production crews were not with a young star of the reality show "BUCKWILD" when he died over Easter weekend and hadn't filmed him since earlier in the week, MTV officials said Wednesday.

Television has come a long way - its critics would say fallen a long way - since HBO introduced Tony Soprano as the medium's first evil protagonist in 1999. We now have TV shows with a heroic motorcycle gang (FX's "Sons of Anarchy"), a heroic serial killer (Showtime's "Dexter") and a charismatic and witty, if not exactly heroic, killer-cult leader (Fox's "The Following").

The man who gunned down radio and TV personality DJ Megatron in New York City will spend 21 years in prison.

LOS ANGELES - Ending weeks of gossip and speculation, NBC confirmed that Jimmy Fallon will succeed Jay Leno as host of "The Tonight Show" in the spring of 2014.