Hot Sex

Enlarged to the same size as countless other glossy newsstand magazines, TV Guide also will be mistaken now for any number of gaudy entertainment, celebrity and gossip publications, including its own recent offshoot, Inside TV.

For now, the new version doesn't have the kind of OFF! again/ON! again coverage of minor celebrity couplings and partings used on Inside TV - coverage that is so obsessive in magazines like Us Weekly, People and In Style. Instead, the first cover on the enlarged magazine has home-remodeling hunk Ty Pennington, furthering the extreme-makeover angle.

Covers for TV Guide always have followed the hot shows. But even the smaller TV Guide would have paid more attention to the occasional serious TV offerings in its highlights, such as this week's "Frontline" on PBS. Hyped as a highlight instead that night was "25 Hottest Women" on BET, much more the magazine's style.

PBS gets the short stick on TV Guide listings because it's the one channel likely to vary widely in local markets. Two of the three things listed for PBS for tonight in the new TV Guide, for example, won't be seen locally on Connecticut Public TV (and there's no suggestion to check local listings that even the incomplete Entertainment Weekly highlights will add).

Equally shortchanged is sports. Though a lot of the front-of-the-magazine features continue in expanded glossy fashion, the handy newsprint listing of the week's televised sporting events is gone. That may be because it would be impossible to reflect regional game selections. But also gone are the back-of-the-magazine descriptions of every movie broadcast that week, replaced by a few pages highlighting six movies each day.

Of the new features, "Previously On" recaps what's been going on in five serial prime-time shows (ignoring at least five others); "Radar" enters the In Style realm where readers can purchase items seen on TV stars.

There's no additional room for critic Matt Roush, who seems only to be writing in bigger type, or for additional items from snarky columnist Michael Ausiello. And Susan Stewart still only reviews four shows a week.

Otherwise, it's all hype and preview, with glamour pictures and lots of captions, dominated by so few hits you'd think the new TV Guide was ABC's official guide to "Desperate Housewives" and "Lost." Each are mentioned in about eight items, highlights and pictures of the first big issue. That a Mama Cass song was used in "Lost" is mentioned with a picture twice. "Grey's Anatomy" and "CSI" aren't far behind in multiple mentions, with Top 10 hit "Commander in Chief" earning the enlarged version's second cover.

In one new feature, Rochelle D. Thomas answers the questions she poses to herself in "Is It Just Me?" including one about "Grey's Anatomy" characters having too much unprotected sex. ("Dang," she says, in italics).

But one thing they didn't change was its weekly "Cheers & Jeers," to which we would add: JEERS to TV Guide for glossing up and dialing down its weekly listings.

To simply direct readers to more content online at tvguide.com, as it does on nearly every page, is tantamount to telling people to give up the print world.

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