Bartlet4America News Archive

The Networks Decide to Rearrange the Furniture -- or Toss It

By Lisa de Moraes
Washington Post

Friday, May 9, 2003; Page C07

Is Superman being shoved aside to make room for Tarzan on WB's schedule?

Will CBS's touchy-feely Sunday movie bite the dust?

Can "Angel" battle the dark forces at play between WB and 20th Century Fox TV, and emerge for another season?

Does anyone care whether "Becker" comes back?

Is anyone home at ABC?

Hollywood -- at least the TV portion -- was atwitter yesterday as the broadcast networks' prime-time schedules for next season began to jell.

CBS is kicking around the idea of moving its movie franchise out of Sunday night. CBS is the only network still clinging to the if-it's-Sunday-it-must-be-movie- night model once favored by NBC and ABC as well.

CBS's Sunday movie is down to about 10 million viewers this season -- a decline of nearly 20 percent compared with the previous season -- and ranks No. 57 out of 177 shows. The CBS Sunday movie is also a very old-skewing franchise; more than half of those 10 million-and-change viewers are 50-plus.

WB is mulling whether to move freshman hit "Smallville" from its Tuesday night berth after "Gilmore Girls" to pass the time slot along to its new "Tarzan in the City" drama series. Most speculation has "Smallville" moving to Wednesdays at 8 p.m., replacing canceled "Dawson's Creek."

Unless Fox reconfigures its broadcast pattern for "American Idol" next season, this would eventually be a total downer for the hordes of teenage girls devoted to both "Smallville" and the Fox singing competition series. (Fox won't have "American Idol" on in the fall because it would just get all messed up by baseball playoffs, a fall-schedule destroyer to which Fox suits shrewdly committed through 2006.)

But hey, here's some good news for fans of "The Practice." There are still some fans of "The Practice," right? Odds of this David E. Kelley show returning were not good until ABC suits started looking at their drama development for next season and discovered that a lot of it is loads worse than "The Practice." Given ABC's batting average with new dramas this season -- that would be 0.000 -- the future of "The Practice" was much rosier yesterday, some sources reported. In fact, ABC's drama development for next season may also ensure that the network has more comedies on its fall schedule than any other network, the sources said. One person said that ABC, having finally noticed that its once-successful Friday TGIF comedy block is no longer on the schedule, may try to bring it back.

Ultimately, the future of "The Practice" may come down to money. In the life of a TV series, it is unfortunate that the drop in ratings is usually inversely proportional to the increase in production costs (aka star salaries).

It may be the same with the WB series "Angel," which like "The Practice" is among the shows said in Hollywood to be "on the bubble," which is the same thing as "on the fence," only less Midwestern.

NBC suits, who announce their new lineup to advertisers first, on Monday, continued to knock around which new drama series to put where.

Under discussion was the notion of keeping "The West Wing" on Wednesdays at 9 p.m. instead of moving it to Sundays, but taking it off the air for nine or 10 weeks during the season to air "WW" alum Rob Lowe's new attorney-in-Manhattan drama, "The Lyon's Den."

This is a great idea, if only because if you remove all "West Wing" reruns from the TV season, the series's season average will shoot way up and the media will write about the comeback of "The West Wing." Kind of like what they did in the 1999-2000 TV season when ABC gave the "NYPD Blue" time slot to "Once and Again" in the fall. "Blue" didn't debut until January and then ran rerun-less; its season average soared compared with the previous season.

"West Wing" will need all the help it can get, because with the chronic deadline-busting executive producer Aaron Sorkin having been driven off the show he created and on which he wrote nearly every episode, the White House drama is sure to come in on time and under budget every week -- but it's not sure to be, you know, good.

Having "WW" and "Lyon's Den" share the Wednesday time slot would free up an hour on NBC's new schedule, which makes it more likely we'll see "Boomtown" on the fall lineup. NBC is trying hard to bring back that critically acclaimed drama series; Vanessa Williams has been signed to star in multiple episodes if it is picked up for its second season.

Meanwhile, having decided not to pick up a Heather Locklear sitcom in which she would have played a divorcee whose kids were trying very hard to keep apart from their dad -- no, that's not a mistake; it was a comedy -- NBC has asked Locklear whether she would like to join the cast of its dead sitcom "A.U.S.A."

Locklear is known as a show saver, having revived "Melrose Place" and "Spin City" by joining the cast. This would be her hardest assignment yet.