There's something very romantic about letters and written accounts from pivotal times in history. It's like reaching back and being there when you read them. On 'Auction Kings' (Tue., 9PM ET on Discovery), Paul Brown got to see some Civil War letters and diaries with a special bonus of historical significance.

Historians love first-person accounts from the Civil War, but these letters went that extra step by mentioning John Wilkes Booth. The letter was dated three years prior to Booth's assassination of President Lincoln, so it was simply a genuine statement about his fame as an actor.

"I had no idea really that Boothe was that well known as an actor," Brown said. "Evidently, he was."

It looks like more period dramas (such as The Tudors) are headed to pay cable. And this time, "Booth" will not refer to a character on the TV show Bones.

Kevin Bacon will be executive-producing The Booths, a period drama about the Booth brothers, the most infamous of which, John Wilkes Booth, went on to assassinate President Abraham Lincoln.

It sounds like an interesting project. I do like historical dramas, but I'm always disappointed at their tendency to sacrifice historical accuracy for the sake of drama. Of course, when it's good drama, nobody seems to notice.

The nicest thing about being Kevin Bacon, other than being a famous actor, must be that it takes the fewest amount of steps to be in a Kevin Bacon movie for that Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon game (the total number of steps would be, I believe, zero). One can say with surefire honesty that Kevin Bacon has been in all of Kevin Bacon's movies.

A week from now, HBO will probably be one of the big stories from the Primetime Emmys thanks to the success of the John Adams mini-series. But it's not sitting on that success, the premium cable net is banking on it. HBO announced today a mini series based on the assassination of Abraham Lincoln called Manhunt. That news would be interesting enough because the series will deal with the 12 days after Lincoln was shot when the assassin, John Wilkes Booth, was on the run. However, the guys that HBO have tapped to work on Manhunt are two of the best in television -- David Simon and Tom Fontana.

HBO knows Simon and Fontana's work really well. Simon was the creator of The Wire and Fontana's brainchild was Oz. This is also not a new collaboration. Fontana turned Simon's book, Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets, into the Homicide: Life on the Streets TV series for NBC.

This story makes me wonder whether Jay Leno is riddled with guilt over making fun of people on The Tonight Show. When he compared Dick Cheney's hunting accident to a shooting outside a Los Angeles courthouse, he received a letter of complaint from a friend of the L.A. victim. In response, Leno personally phoned the woman and offered her an apology, saying that he never meant to hurt anybody. Leno also apologized to a distant relative of the doctor who set John Wilkes Booth's leg after he shot President Abraham Lincoln. He said he made a mistake in the joke. The guy said he never complained to Leno, because he knows it's just a joke and didn't take any offense. But, he appreciated the call anyway.

Weird, eh? Maybe that explains why he kisses his guests' asses-- 'cuz he feels guilty for making fun of them.