Telly Visionary

The electro-pop of CBS's NFL set also encodes brand messages that have little to do with football. "The idea was to make it look really technologically advanced, colorful, energetic, and youthful," says Fenhagen. "So it looks like a video game."

Build it and that sacred 18- to 34-year-old demo will come. Or so CBS hopes: It paid $622.5 million for broadcast rights to AFC games on Sunday afternoon and lured J.B. back after 12 years at Fox. It also bought the rights to Super Bowl XLI in Miami, further raising the stakes. So in came Fenhagen, who had done sets for ESPN as well as for Turner Sports' Inside the NBA. He and his senior designer, Andre Durette, started with adolescent overkill as their premise: multiple TV screens (47 in all, including 41 flat-panel plasma, three LED, and three projection screens), to make the set "a portal to the NFL." They amplified the effects with glass, imagery, graphics, and tickers. And before the first high-def broadcast from New York was even over, the competition at ESPN was emailing Fenhagen: "Now you should turn your energy on our stuff!"

But he had a more pressing assignment across town, in the garment district: setting the stage for the return of Isaac Mizrahi's Isaac on the Style Network. The bed-headed designer wanted the anti-NFL site, "a really sophisticated set that was also friendly," Mizrahi says. "The show is all about style, so the set has to be really stylish." Fenhagen came up with an all-white box positioned in the midst of Mizrahi's actual workroom, tapping the immediacy of reality TV. Mizrahi was delighted, particularly with the fashion closet, a sort of Devil Wears Prada affair, where he can drag guests for instant makeovers.

As if the NFL-Mizrahi contrast weren't jarring enough, Fenhagen is also doing the midterm election set for The Daily Show ("Are you familiar with Caligula and the fall of Rome?" asks Karlin), a NASCAR set for ESPN, and an NHL-themed set for OLN. The string tying all these disparate assignments together? There's Fenhagen's skill in translating often vaguely articulated or crudely sketched ideas, but really, satisfied customers say, it's that he's just so damned nice. "I adore how well Jim listens and how marvelously he expresses himself," Mizrahi gushes. "Jim is one of the most talented people you'll ever meet, yet one of the most humble," agrees Laura Shuler, president of Jack Morton Worldwide, U.S. "Part of the reason celebrities want to work with him is that he isn't competing with their larger-than-life, overbearing personalities."

Credit his good upbringing, by an Episcopalian minister father and Southern grande dame mother, or the manners of his native South Carolina, a heritage still discernible in his voice. But despite his success, this former theater major from Kenyon College still pines for the stage. That's why he's hard at work on "Night of Too Many Stars," a Jon Stewart--hosted special that will air live from New York's Beacon Theatre in October. He calls it "a perfect thing--theater and TV coming together."