Nothing so far today matches yesterday afternoon’s high-profile pick-ups by NBC and FOX, but there’s nevertheless some news as we approach next week’s Upfronts: FOX Amid speculation that the network will cut back on its comedy commitment next season, FOX cleared its shelves of bubble sitcoms, officially canceling DADS, ENLISTED and SURVIVING JACK.  Jack […]

  MANHATTAN LOVE STORY:  Tuesday 8:30PM on ABC THE FACTS:  Boy (Jake McDorman) meets girl (Analeigh Tipton), but here’s the gimmick:  we hear all of the couple’s hidden thoughts throughout.  The series creator is Jeff Lowell, whose sitcom writing/producing career goes back to Cybill and Spin City. WHAT IT’S SAYING:  He’s cute, she’s cute, and […]

  FOX has unveiled a set of schedules that will shift throughout the season–and even into Summer 2014.  Let’s take a look. FALL MONDAY 8PM:         Bones/Almost Human 9PM:         Sleepy Hollow FOX didn’t want to launch back-to-back new dramas in the fall, so Bones will set up Sleepy Hollow‘s debut until an unspecified (post-baseball) date in […]

  In the CBS featurette for its new midseason action-adventure INTELLIGENCE (it’ll take over the Monday 10PM timeslot from Hostages), the show is variously compared to Mission: impossible, Frankenstein, The Six Million Dollar Man and James Bond.  Curiously, the one they left out was Chuck, for which this show’s concept is virtually a dead ringer:  […]

  CW didn’t need to make a lot of changes after a successful (on its terms) season, and it hasn’t.  The network confined its fall moves to 2 nights, opting for stability the rest of the week and keeping 4 additional shows (2 new, 2 returning) for midseason use.  Here are the details: MONDAY:  This […]

  FOX’s most highly-touted drama pilot the entire development season was RAKE, which is indeed on the air.  The price of scoring Greg Kinnear as a lead (much as it had been last year with Kevin Bacon) is that he would only commit to a limited number of episodes, so the show will air on […]

  We’re continuing our survey of the fall primetime schedule (our merry band includes former head of NBC Scheduling Mitch Metcalf, former head of NBC Current Programming Ted Frank and myself) with Thursdays, when CBS will finally do what people have been expecting for the past several seasons and expand to a 4-sitcom night.  (Here […]

  BACKSTROM:  Midseason TBD on FOX THE FACTS:  Rainn Wilson plays your basic difficult-but-brilliant homicide detective in a procedural based on a series of Swedish mystery novels, adapted for television by Hart Hanson, the creator of Bones.  Backstrom is grumpy and dismissive of his colleagues, and unhealthy in his eating, drinking and general living habits, […]