Television

From Showtime's drama The L-Word, actor Jennifer Beals and creator Ilene Chaiken. Beals became a star for her role in the 80's dance classic, Flashdance. She's also starred in Devil in a Blue Dress, The Last Days of Disco and The Anniversary Party. On The L-Word, she plays Bette Porter, a gay art curator. Chaiken's previous TV work includes writing Damaged Care and Dirty Pictures. The L-Word wraps up its first season this weekend.

He is the creator, executive producer and head writer of the new HBO series Deadwood, a western drama set in the Black Hills of South Dakota. Milch left a teaching job at Yale University to go to Hollywood and work on the show Hill Street Blues. He also worked on NYPD Blue, for which he won two Emmys. Milch is a former heroin addict and alcoholic.

Weide is executive producer and a writer for HBO's Curb Your Enthusiasm. The show stars Larry David, who co-created Seinfeld, as himself. One reviewer calls Curb Your Enthusiasm "a comedy of hostility, resentment, paranoia and obsessiveness." The show is currently in its fourth season.

He created the HBO hit series The Sopranos. The show begins its fifth season this Sunday and picks up where it left off with the separation of Tony Soprano and his wife Carmela.

Former standup comic Tom Kenny is the voice of SpongeBob SquarePants, the star of his own animated series on Nickelodeon. SquarePants lives under the sea in the city of Bikini Bottom where he works as a fry cook at a greasy spoon called the Krusty Krab. The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie opens nationwide Nov. 19.

Cowell is one of the judges on the talent show American Idol, a spin-off of the show he co-created in Britain, Pop Idol. The show has made him famous for his brutally frank criticism. Cowell has spent 25 years in the music industry, and is currently with BMG. His new book is Simon Cowell: I Don't Mean to Be Rude, But...

Rock, pop, jazz and Bart Simpson. We talk with writer and cartoonist Matt Groening. Before The Simpsons, Futurama and Life in Hell, he was a rock critic. Now he's edited an anthology collecting 2003's best music writing.

Kushner adapted his epic Tony-award winning play Angels in America into a screenplay for HBO (broadcast this month in two three-hour parts). The play is set in New York in the mid-1980s during the midst of the AIDS epidemic. The HBO film is directed by Mike Nichols and stars Al Pacino, Meryl Streep and Emma Thompson. Kushner also has a new semi-autobiographical musical Caroline, or Change at the Public Theater in New York.

Triumph, a regular on Late Night with Conan O'Brien, is a puppet and the creation of Robert Smigel. Smigel also created the animated short TV Funhouse on Saturday Night Live. Triumph has a new CD, Come Poop With Me, featuring such tracks as "Underage Bichon" and "Lick Myself." He's appeared on Hollywood Squares and on the MTV Video Music Awards, where he almost came to blows with rapper Eminem.

Mike Lazzo is senior vice president for the Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim –- a three-hour block of cartoons targeted to adults. It includes original and acquired animation. Lazzo co-created the network’s first original series in 1995, Space Ghost Coast to Coast. Another Adult Swim series is Harvey Birdman, Attorney at Law, which borrows Hanna Barbera cartoon characters from the '60s, including the obscure Birdman, a masked crusader with wings who defends cartoon characters like Fred Flintstone and Scooby Doo.