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Coming into the May upfronts, when network sales departments negotiate ad rates for the coming season with their sponsors, ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox were still reeling from the 14-week writers’ strike.
Among other misfortunes, the work stoppage set back development of new shows by three months. The network heads warned they’d show very little new product this week. And very little is exactly what they delivered.
Let’s start with the good news.
CBS and the CW
CBS will actually have one more new show on its fall schedule (five) than it did last fall, enough to try a second night of comedy, adding Wednesdays to its current night of laughs on Monday. CBS would appear to be feeling no ill effects from the strike.
On the other hand, CBS also owns the CW network, which has almost no new ideas.
The big news out of the CW’s upfront was that it will revive the old Fox teen soap “90210” next season, adding to its other shows about unhappy spoiled children: “Gossip Girl” and a project in the works called “How to Teach Filthy Rich Girls.”
So bad are things at the CW that it’s all but giving up on comedy and weekends. Friday will not be a World Wrestling “Smackdown” night for the first time in years. Instead, the CW is consigning “Everybody Hates Chris” and “The Game” (from Kansas City native Mara Brock Akil) to Fridays, where the network clearly expects those sitcoms to quietly die.
Sunday nights, the CW has signed a deal with an outfit called Media Rights Capital. Partly owned by the talent agency Endeavor, the company will develop all of the CW’s programs on that night, and CW affiliates will lend it their airwaves. On the other hand, Endeavor clients brought us such productions as “Entourage,” “Borat” and “Babel,” so what does the CW have to lose?
ABC
ABC had so little to offer advertisers during its Tuesday presentation that it introduced two new series by showing a video of the producers talking about their shows. It also showed clips from an Americanized copy of the British series “Life on Mars” that will air in the fall.
Scraping the bottom of the development barrel, ABC also showed a video for one of its summer reality shows. It’s called “Wipeout,” and it’s a competition of sorts in which contestants take on an impossible obstacle course, fail spectacularly, then have their humiliating video replayed endlessly on the show and YouTube.
NBC
Believe it or not, NBC didn’t even try that hard. Opting out of its usual lavish production at Radio City Music Hall, the fourth-place network released its schedule last month (highlights: “Kath & Kim,” an Americanized version of an Aussie show, and “Knight Rider,” a de-Hasselhoffed version of a David Hasselhoff show).
Instead, NBC on Monday turned 30 Rockefeller Plaza into a gigantic “NBC Universal Experience,” a sprawling bazaar of every one of the GE-owned media company’s entities putting on a show for passersby, all going at once. Over here, two “Gladiators” sparred with oversized foamy dumbbell-looking things. Over there, Chris Matthews sparred with guests on a live telecast of his “Hardball” show. The “Knight Rider” car talked to anyone who would listen.
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