TV networks spring to fall

Associated Press

Monday, May 19, 2008

Jon Kopaloff / Getty Images

ABC will introduce Life on Mars, a new drama from David E. Kelley.

Fox Network

24, starring Kiefer Sutherland, will return next season, beginning with a two-hour prequel on Nov. 23.

Evan Agostini / Associated Press

The CW will launch a successor to Beverly Hills 90210 in the fall. Original cast member Jennie Garth will appear occasionally as a guidance counselor.

NBC broke with tradition and announced its fall prime-time schedule more than a month ago.

Maybe that was because the Peacock didn't have much to crow about, with only four new shows added (including a spinoff of The Office) and the final season of ER.

At any rate, last week the other broadcast networks rolled out their schedules. Here's a quick look:

- Associated Press

ABC

The network will add only one new scripted series in the fall, plus a new game show, in a schedule that network executives admit was severely affected by the writers' strike.

The new David E. Kelley-produced drama, Life on Mars, is about a police detective transported back to 1973.

Opportunity Knocks is a game in which producers show up at a home with a truckload of prizes and quiz family members on what they know about each other.

ABC is also picking up the NBC comedy Scrubs for midseason and has 17 series in development for midseason or beyond.

Some longer-running shows considered on the bubble, Boston Legal and According to Jim, were kept in production. Lost will be back in midseason.

Notes From the Underbelly, Men in Trees, October Road and Women's Murder Club aren't on the schedule.

CBS

The network will air six comedies instead of four next fall.

CBS has confined its comedies to Mondays in recent years but will air Julia Louis-Dreyfus' The New Adventures of Old Christine and a new comedy with Jay Mohr as a recently divorced painter on Wednesdays.

It renewed How I Met Your Mother, a show with a questionable future until guest shots by Britney Spears gave it some juice this spring. The second new comedy, Worst Week, is a single-camera show about a bungling magazine editor.

The network will add three dramas. Eleventh Hour, from the production team behind CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, is about a brilliant biophysicist who helps the government investigate scientific crises.

The Ex List stars Elizabeth Reaser (Grey's Anatomy) as a woman told by a fortune teller that she must marry within a year or be single forever. The catch: She's already met the man she'll marry, she just doesn't know it yet. Simon Baker stars in The Mentalist, about a former celebrity psychic who becomes a detective.

Fox

The network launches only two new series during its traditionally slow season, but plans flashy premieres of four shows during the week of the Democratic National Convention.

Fox's biggest priorities will be two new science-fiction series by the creative forces behind Lost and Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

Despite some audience erosion from American Idol, Fox will end the season as the most popular network among all viewers, not just young ones. That's the first time in its 20-year history.

Producer J.J. Abrams (Lost) is behind Fringe, a drama about an airplane flight whose passengers meet untimely ends. A comedy, tentatively titled Do Not Disturb and set in a trendy Manhattan hotel, is the only other new fall show.

Fox is reintroducing viewers to 24, which wasn't shown this year because of the strike, with a two-hour prequel on Nov. 23.

CW

The tiny network is banking on viewers' interest in even more spoiled, wealthy kids.

CW is launching a successor to Beverly Hills 90210 in the fall, featuring two high schoolers from Kansas who move to California and enroll in West Beverly Hills High School.

Another new series, Surviving the Filthy Rich, is about a 23-year-old woman hired to tutor twin rich kids from Palm Springs.

Both will air Tuesday nights and are reminiscent of the network's most buzzed-about show, Gossip Girl, about privileged Manhattan prep schoolers.

But the CW has had trouble building new hits, and its prime-time average of 2.6 million viewers is 19 percent down from last year, according to Nielsen Media Research. It is likely to be hurt again when its deal with World Wrestling Entertainment for Friday Night Smackdown expires in September.