Dee Thompson can finally sleep a normal schedule. And stay warm.

WPXI's longtime overnight and morning news reporter, who could be counted on to give viewers updates on snow-packed road conditions and overnight fires, retired Sept. 1. He'd been off the air for some time before his retirement due to illness, but he's since recovered.

Thompson, 70, said despite the sympathies of viewers at home who often felt for him when he'd report from the cold, he didn't mind the assignment.

"Being on the parkways and freezing, it became part of my life," Thompson said. He often heard from viewers who would question why the news director always sent him out in the cold and dark, whether it was to cover weather or a murder. "It's all ad-libbed. You're just giving play-by-play: What police are here, what agencies are here."

Thompson joined Channel 11 in 1974 as a sports reporter, and prior to that he spent eight years at WTAE-TV. He grew up in New Brighton, Beaver County, and started writing sports stories for the Beaver Falls News Tribune at age 16, covering Joe Namath at Beaver Falls High School.

He did a stint in the U.S. Army and worked his way through Geneva College. After about nine years at the newspaper, he approached WTAE about a TV job. He was hired to cover sports and news and was sent to Puerto Rico to cover the search for Roberto Clemente's body following the plane crash that killed the Pittsburgh Pirates' star player.

Thompson covered the Steelers for 12 years through four Super Bowls and he created a post-game TV show for WPXI called "Fifth Quarter."

"That was so successful a lot of NFL people from across the country called me to get the format," he said, noting "Fifth Quarter" was a forerunner of the pre-game and post-game shows on TV today. Thompson also spent a summer in the late 1970s working with a Hollywood producer on a proposed CBS TV movie about the life of Clemente.

"They decided not to do the movie," Thompson said, "but I wanted to get into the movies because of that. I really enjoyed it."

When WPXI hired John Fedko in 1987 and changes were made to the sports reporting staff, management asked Thompson to move to news. When the station started its "24-hour news source," Thompson began doing hourly cut-ins in the wee hours of the morning.

"It's hard, but after a while you do adjust to it. You really sleep split hours," Thompson said, "which is really hard in the summer when you're trying to sleep and the windows are open. You try to have dark curtains. I adjusted to it eventually.

"I'll say one thing, it reached a point where you can always predict when murders and fires will be. I know that at 2:30 in the morning somebody is gonna be drunk and come out of the bars and do something. It happens like that on a nightly basis. You never know what will happen or where you're gonna be, and that's kind of exciting."

Although Thompson did not get involved in making movies behind the scenes, he did end up moonlighting on camera in a few shot-in-Pittsburgh films. Sometimes he played a reporter and in the Bruce Willis movie "Striking Distance" he was cast as a bailiff.

"I could do it during the day since I was working overnight and we were in a scene, and Bruce Willis looks at me and says, 'Are you the D-man?' And I said, 'What do you mean, Bruce?' Bruce says to me, 'I watch you every night after we're done shooting, and you're doing the news and weather cut-ins.' "

"Are they paying you?" Thompson recalled Willis asking. "He said, 'Let me give you a trailer and double your pay,' and he did all that."

Until a first bout of illness four years ago, Thompson said he worked 27 years without missing a scheduled day of work. He felt now was the time to "hang it up," not only because of his health but also because his first grandchild, Bree Jasmine, was born in late August to his daughter Tara in the Washington, D.C., area. Another daughter, Shannon, lives in Atlanta, so Thompson sees some travel in his future.

He'll continue to keep busy, maybe doing more bit parts in movies and working on documentaries about sports figures from Western Pennsylvania. But his days of standing in the dark and cold are in the past.

"It is rough, but after a while it became a joke," Thompson said. "The guys on the radio make fun of me, 'There's Dee Thompson in the cold again on the parkway.' It's OK. I have fun with everybody with it. It didn't bother me. It became part of me in a way after a while."

Nationally, CBS's "Three Rivers" ranked third in its time period, drawing 9.2 million viewers, which is not a terrible number, but the demos put the show in fourth place, meaning the showed skewed old, something CBS has been trying to avoid. The Hollywood trades do not sound optimistic about its future with The Hollywood Reporter calling the debut ratings "disappointing."

Locally, as expected, the Steelers game crushed all the competition. During the 9 p.m. hour Sunday, the Steelers game on WPXI drew a 49.9 rating (percentage of TV households) and 65 share (percentage of sets in use) of the viewing audience. ABC's "Desperate Housewives" on WTAE was second at 8.3/11. "Three Rivers" on KDKA-TV came in third with a 7.0/9, which did make it the highest-rated hour in prime time on KDKA. But ratings declined through the first three quarter-hours of "Three Rivers" and then rebounded in the final quarter-hour.

A rugby game scene filmed locally in August is now expected to air in the Oct. 18 "Three Rivers" episode. Still no word on when any scenes from the original pilot, filmed in Pittsburgh, might air.

ABC has pushed the "Ugly Betty" season premiere from tonight to next Friday and expanded it to two hours.

E! has changed the premiere time for "Leave It to Lamas" (formerly "The Lamas Life") from 10:30 to 11 p.m. Sunday. The show is previewed in Sunday's TV Week, which was printed when "Lamas" was still set to air at 10:30.

A J.D. Power & Associates survey of cable customers in the eastern half of the United States found Verizon's FiOS TV on top with a score of 714 out of 1,000. DirecTV was second (684), DISH Network third (669) and Comcast ninth (597) out of 10 providers.

CBS has ordered an additional 13 episodes of Canadian import "Flashpoint" and given full first-season orders to freshmen dramas "NCIS: Los Angeles" and "The Good Wife." ... Showtime has ordered a fourth season of "Californication." ... HBO has ordered a second season of "Bored to Death." ... Nickelodeon renewed "Glenn Martin, DDS."

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This week's TV Q&A responds to questions about "The Middle," "Defying Gravity" and lottery interruptions on WTAE-TV. Tuned In Journal includes blog posts about "Accidentally on Purpose," "Secret Girlfriend" and "The Mentalist." Read online TV coverage at post-gazette.com/tv.

In this week's Tuned In podcast, online features editor Sharon Eberson and I discuss David Letterman's on-air confession, the latest "Saturday Night Live" and the series premiere of "Three Rivers." Listen or subscribe at post-gazette.com/podcast.

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