Home Box Office, the pay channel that brought original programming to cable 20 years ago, has remained a innovative force in television ever since.  But HBO was surprisingly slow to enter the new frontier of cyberspace, despite the aggressive World Wide Web presence of its parent company Time Warner.  All that was available from its Web page until recently was a measly billboard for its February telemovie "The Late Shift."  

But beginning last month, www.hbo.com finally came into its own with, not surprisingly, an original program.  "III:AM" is a weekly installation at the cable channel's Web site, a real-life serial done in the tradition of "Taxicab Confessions" and "Real Sex," two popular HBO features.  The premise is that New York is teeming with thousands of people doing all kinds of interesting things at three in the morning.  So HBO's crew  -- an interviewer and photographer -- head out at that unusual hour, chatting up people as they work, patronize all-night restaurants, or just as they're walking down the street.  The results are transcribed and presented in magazine format with accompanying photos.

Stories with surprise twists are coveted by the editors of "III:AM."  In a recent "episode," the interviewer, known only to us as James, answers an ad for all-night massage and discovers ... a bona fide, one-hour Shiatsu clinic.  At a 24-hour diner, James strikes up a conversation with two women in the next booth who -- if you can wade through the sea of mind-numbing small talk that comprises most of the story -- have perceptive views on men's and women's sexual roles.  

As HBO itself points out, "III:AM" isn't a program but an Internet "area" featuring "original content."  Actually, it's an electronic magazine, as is nearly everything else on the World Wide Web.  For all the multimedia bells and whistles, the Web at its core is still a desktop-publishing program partial to those who know how to use it -- namely, the print media.

The problem with "III:AM" -- the problem all broadcast media will face sooner or later -- is that broadcasting has gotten far away from the written word, and its ineptitude is brought into high relief on the largely silent, text-intensive landscape of the Internet.  I know "III:AM" is just trying to bottle the verite of its late-night interview sessions, but a number of the presentations go on much too long, and the spoken English of those caught in passing can border on the illegible.  This has the unintentional effect of making James, our guide, into the central character in all stories.  He supplies the focus and clarity that is normally an editor's responsibility.  Put it this way: Would the producers of "Real Sex" have let their interviewers prattle on the way James does in "III:AM"?



Speaking of cyberspace, it was through online conversations about the early history of TV that I was introduced to Jeff Kisseloff's _The Box: An Oral History of Television 1920-1961,_ published last year by Viking.  Kisseloff, who along with Studs Terkel believes "I tape, therefore I am," conducted hundreds of interviews with survivors from TV's pioneer generation: inventors, producers, writers, actors, broadcasters, and yes, advertisers and executives.  But rather than use HBO's tape-and-run approach, Kisseloff painstakingly pulled sentences and paragraphs at a time from interviews and assembled them into chapter-length composites.  The effect is extraordinary.  Each chapter reads as though all of his subjects had been conversing in the room at once -- "bantering and trading war stories over beers at Hurley's bar," as Kisseloff puts it in his introduction.

Despite the anecdotal nature of the reminiscences, this is an authoritative book on the creation of American TV.  Edward Padula describes becoming a producer for NBC in 1938, when only a few hundred sets were in use and trial-and-error was the prevailing technical method of the day.  An entire chapter is devoted to KTLA, the independent station that continued to put innovate and hugely popular local programs on the air long after its competitors began receiving network feeds from the East Coast.  The "golden age" of live quality productions like "Studio One" and "Philco Playhouse" is lovingly recreated by some of its principal creators.

So are the tarnished ages that overlapped it.  There is a chapter on the blacklisting of accused Communist sympathizers, and another on the 1950s quiz show scandals.  Joe Cates, who helped create "The $64,000 Question," told Kisseloff how the show managed to keep its total budget to a measly $11,000 a week, and how Joyce Brothers won the big prize despite instructions from the sponsor, Charles Revson, that she be given the hardest questions possible (as Cates inelegantly put it, "Charlie wanted Joyce knocked off").  From that level of behind-the-scenes control, it was a logical leap to Herbert Stempel and the outright cheating on "Twenty One."

Stempel was eventually knocked off by the dashing Charles Van Doren on the orders of Dan Enright, who along with host Jack Barry produced "Twenty One."  After all these years, Stempel has held onto his bitterness:  "I was the only contestant who ever had to humble himself and call him 'Mr. Barry' and had to shake hands with this wimpy little handshake. Enright taught me how to do that.  He wanted to create an image of a nerd ... a total encyclopedia, a guy who does nothing but pop out answers, has no personality.  You know, every account describes me as a short stocky man.  Look at me.  [Stands.]  I am five eleven."