Johnnie L. Roberts

Couch potatoes are getting restless. Another TV season has ended, marked by the slew of series finales in the past two weeks. Now television goes on summer break, filling time with tired reruns.

Reach out and bear-hug someone. If there was any lingering doubt that Ma Bell is undergoing a dramatic makeover, it should have been dispelled by a startling move last Thursday.

The top executives at ABC had flown out to Aspen to meet with their boss, Disney CEO Michael Eisner. A key item on the agenda: reviewing their plans for the network in the world of new media.

Brian Roberts began tagging along with his father on Saturdays to the family cable-television business, Comcast Inc., when he was 8, almost 32 years ago. But he didn't fully grasp cable's powerful appeal until many years later when his dad, Ralph, packed him off to help run the Comcast system in Flint, Mich.

HERE'S A TALE OF ONE RECORD label. When Def Jam was founded 15 years ago, rap was an inventive new sound from black urban America. To the captains of the music industry, it was an inner-city fad with limited appeal--but just in case, they would keep an eye on it by buying chunks of the brassy production house.

Day two of the November trial brought promising news. On a pay phone just outside a federal courtroom in New York, lawyers for PolyGram called Alain Levy, CEO of the global entertainment empire.

IT WAS EARLY ON OCT. 13. MGM/UA'S top bosses were preoccupied with plans to sell a chunk of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Inc., the moribund studio's parent, to the public.

RAP STAR TUPAC SHAKUR'S ASHES had hardly cooled before the gold rush began. Now, almost a year after his death, his mother is defending the estate from an old lover who turned up to prove he's Topaz's father.

AMONG ARGENTINES, THE late First Lady Eva Peron stirred heated emotions. Now the marketing of ""Evita,'' Hollywood's video-bound take on her life, is stoking long-simmering tensions in the U.S. home-video business.

Rupert Murdoch wears many hats: billionaire, media baron, TV and cable impresario. Now he's building a global sports empire - making deals at a feverish pace and, as is his wont, paying top dollar for the jewels that catch his eye.

WHEN PEPSI RETURNED TO POST-partheid South Africa, it arrived pop diva Whitney Houston. late 1994, Pepsi cosponsored her charity tour. But the bigger news, which Pepsi Co gleefully trumpeted, was that Houston was a new ally in its global cola wars with Coca-Cola; she had invested in a new venture to reintroduce Pepsi to South Africa.

THE SIGHT OF THE DUO STARTLED even the business elite who power-lunch daily at New York's 21 Club. There, two weeks ago, at his usual conspicuous table, sat Felix Rohatyn, the illustrious rainmaker of the famed Wall Street investment-banking firm Lazard Freres.

DO BELIEVE THE HYPE! WHEN IT comes to digital television, the revolutionary new offering now on the communications horizon, the picture on the screen doesn't lie.

IN BUSINESS, THE BEAT tends to go on no matter what. Consider the music industry, especially the increasingly bloody rap subgenre known as gangsta. When superstar Tupac Shakur was killed in September, Arista Records was zeroing in on a $75 million joint-venture deal with Sean (Puffy) Combs, the producing whiz behind New York-based Bad Boy Entertainment.

A GLAMOROUS BUSINESS STARTS TO teeter. A legendary boss battles to keep power after two decades at the top. Household names threaten to defect. Meanwhile, a romance in the executive suite makes tabloid headlines.

LAST MONTH RUPERT MURDOCH'S Twentieth Century Fox studio re-released "Star Wars," the intergalactic action-adventure film. And last week Murdoch did a little Darth Vader act of his own.

TED FIELD GETS EMOTIONAL remembering it now, that quiet moment less than a year ago. Field, the entertainment mogul and scion of Chicago's Marshall Field retailing fortune, was in his office high above Wilshire Boulevard in West Los Angeles.

IT WAS THE NIGHT OF THE MIKE Tyson-Evander Holyfield showdown. A hip crowd had gathered at the Beverly Hills mansion of record mogul Andre Harrell for a fight party: the kind of affair that he calls ""ghetto fabulous,'' an edgy mix of black attitude with upscale white richesse.

EVEN JOHN LE CARRE MIGHT BE hard pressed to craft such an exquisite caper as the one now ensnarling Rupert Murdoch. At dawn two Sundays ago, in a pocket of Jerusalem packed with high-tech companies, a small army of Israeli tax agents stormed a remote but pivotal outpost of the media baron's global empire.

A GIVEAWAY WAS THE AIR CONDItioner, perspiring outside the front door. The sleuth who noticed it, a former FBI agent employed by Hollywood, suspected that video pirates were at work inside.

LITTLE RICHARD. STEVIE WONDER. Whitney Houston. The names of African-American superstars come easily to mind. But the list of black music-business titans is sadly short: it pretty much starts and ends with Berry Gordy Jr., Motown founder.

THE NEWS STORY didn't remotely concern rap music. Last Thursday, as the gangsta-rap star Tupac Shakur lay dying in a Las Vegas hospital, The New York Times ran a front-page piece on political fund raising in Hollywood.

SILVERY, WAFER-THIN AND five inches wide, it could pass for a music CD. But this is no ordinary compact disc. To hear its most ardent promoters, it is almost magical, even transcendent.

FOR PURE STAR POWER, THE SCENE was hard to beat. On a ballroom stage at Disney World recently, ABC News paraded its most prized trophies before its new bosses at the Walt Disney Co., Michael Eisner and Michael Ovitz, and a gathering of local TV-station owners.

WHEN TIME WARNER CEO GERALD Levin tapped Richard Parsons as president in late 1994, it seemed like an odd choice. A protege of the late Nelson Rockefeller, Parsons had been a senior public servant, a lawyer to blue bloods, a bank CEO-but never a show-business executive.

ATTENTION, TIME Warner: it's payback time for that cover story Fortune magazine ran on the scion of the Forbes publishing empire, Steve, when he was running for the White House.

FOR YEARS FORMER WALT Disney Co. studio chief Jeffrey Katzenberg had occasional run-ins with his boss, CEO Michael Eisner. Among other things, the ambitious Katzenberg coveted the No. 2 job at Disney.

WAITING TO EXHALE," THE RECENT hit film about the love trials of four middle-class black women, bore all the marks of Hollywood. The movie, a Christmas release that opened on 1,253 screens nationwide, was based on a hot novelist's best seller and featured a star-studded cast (Whitney Houston and Angela Bassett) and a marvelous soundtrack (produced by hitmaker Babyface).

ON THE EVE OF THE 1995 Oscars, the limos dropped off black actors and actresses at the elegant Regent Beverly Wilshire hotel. The swanky affair was The Black Academy Awards, in honor of African-American talent snubbed by mainstream Hollywood.

FOR TIME WARNER, IT WAS a sweet prelude to Valentine's Day. Investors boosted the firm's shares by $2 after it reported stunning fourth-quarter profits. Word circulated of settlement talks in Time Warner's tiff with its erstwhile partner, U S West.