TONIGHT, IN A VERY SPECIAL EPISODE OF JACKSON’S CREEK

Even the Herald newsroom was riveted by coverage of Michael Jackson’s arrest today on suspicion of confirming what everyone already suspects.

(We truly seem to have entered a new phase in American celebrity, in which there’s almost no one that doesn’t believe Jackson likes little boys and R. Kelly likes slightly less little girls, yet both artists continue to sell albums by the millions ... which is odd, considering that everyone’s so freaked out by gay marriage. If our society was so moral, wouldn’t we be boycotting the horrid musicians and endorsing the legitimizing of marriage of loving adults?)

Where was I? Oh, yes ... the television sets in the Herald were tuned throughout the day to ceaselessly dull video of Jackson’s plane landing, taxiing in, Jackson’s car moving slowly along the highway ... to break up the dullness, people exchanged Jackson jokes (“What happens at midnight at the Neverland Ranch? The big hand touches the little hand.”), discussed the case and printed out pertinent documents from thesmokinggun.com. This was couch vegetation without even the excitement of clicking from channel to channel; no one wanted to look away, but it wasn’t really entertaining, either. So the dullness actually brought an element of interaction to the event.

Tomorrow’s paper will be a big one -- the Herald business section starts on page 54 -- and I have to suspect some of that is thanks to the Jackson scandal. At least the paper represents an entire 24 hours worth of action, with new information justifying the space. But it’s astonishing that a newsroom would be so rapt and patient with an unfolding story holding so little excitement. No one admitted to feeling uncertain what was going to happen, as they did when O.J. Simpson took another slow trip down a highway, but with a weapon in hand and craziness in the air.

No, in fact the day unfolded with bland smoothness. There was a lawyer on hand and acceptance in the air.

It’s not even worth pointing out the simultaneous death and terror in Turkey from a suicide bombing, which seems somehow less visceral than did the knowledge that somewhere a plane was landing, and that its passenger would be in handcuffs by the end of the day. And in several months, a trial.

The best, most surreal aspect of the day was looking up every few minutes to find that Fox News was live, still live, and that not only were its cameras showing the dullest of scenes, or that it had to tell us what we were seeing (“Michael Jackson’s plane lands,” that sort of thing), but that above those descriptions were the legend: “FOX NEWS ALERT.”

Fox news alert: Michael Jackson’s plane will land here.

Fox news alert: The plane is landing.

Fox news alert: The plane has landed.

It’s the repetition and setup we treasure in sitcoms applied to news, in which everything becomes so predictable that we find it comforting to watch it unfold. It’s just that usually it has to do with semi-popular, quirky public figures in awkward situations, and in this case it’s ... well, exactly that.