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The final upfront: a muscular Fox adds just two new shows
Not needing much new programming after beating the other networks senseless in the Nielsen ratings this season, and not having much to choose from anyway after a writers' strike laid waste to production development, Fox is adding only two shows to its fall schedule, the company's executives said Thursday. And one of them is the most highly anticipated dramas of the fall season: Fringe, a sci-fi thriller from J.J. Abrams, who produces ABC's megahit Lost. Fringe follows two FBI agents and a possibly mad scientist as they investigate an airliner that landed in Boston with nothing but grisly corpses aboard. (Hey, do you think that's what really happened to Oceanic 815?) Read the full Miami Herald story.
Fox: getting itchy about 'American Idol'
It hasn't gone unnoticed around the hallways at Fox that American Idol ratings are continuing to slip, the network's bosses admitted Thursday while unveiling their fall schedule. Last week the show dipped under 22 million viewers, its smallest audience in five years. "I'm satisfied [with the show] creatively, but not necessarily satisfied with the performance," said Fox chairman Peter Liguori during a teleconference with television writers. "Both the network and the producer really want to take a look at the show for next year and see what we can do to inject it with new levels of energy and new unpredictable twists and turns and greater levels of story-telling. I do think the show has somewhat suffered from the post strike malaise of folks watching TV." Unfortunately, he ruled out the most obvious solution: "We love Paula," Ligouri said. "She's coming back."
The return of '24'
Because Jack Bauer was bested not by terrorists but striking Hollywood writers, who wiped out the last season of Fox's 24 before it even began, it's been nearly a year since the show has aired. The good news for fans is that they'll get a sneak peek of the new season in November when Fox broadcasts a two-hour prequel that sets the stage for 24's return in January. The network isn't providing a lot of detail, but the prequel is set (and was shot) in South Africa, where Bauer will take on an international crisis. His Counter Terrorism Unit has been abolished, though, so the investigation is being run by a team of FBI agents led by Janeane Garafolo. (Security clearances apparently aren't what they used to be.) "We're excited about the prequel because it explores Jack's complex emotional state of mind," says 24's executive producer Howard Gordon. Also, a lot of stuff gets blown up.
CBS: corpses, comics but no 'Cane'
CBS, for the past decade a network built around CSI and its gory crime-drama clones, Wednesday unveiled a fall schedule intended to make its viewers laugh as well as gag. The network added two 
sitcoms, renewed a couple of others that seemed near cancellation just a few days ago, and expanded comedy programming from one night to two.
To make room for the comedies, the network canceled three notable dramas, including Cane (left), its groundbreaking nighttime soap about Cuban exiles in South Florida. Also biting the video dust were the vampire-detective cult favorite Moonlight and Shark, which won James Woods rave reviews for his portrayal of an ethics-schmethics district attorney. Read the entire Miami Herald story here.
'Shark' extinction
When CBS presents its new fall lineup Wednesday, it will be missing the James Woods vehicle Shark. The show's move to Sunday night last fall gave it an uncertain airtime -- whenever CBS' NFL telecasts ran long, which is to say practically every week, Shark could be delayed by as much as 90 minutes -- and just as the Sunday night schedule stabilized at the end of football season, the writers' strike knocked the show off the air. Even more fundamentally, the producers' decision to cut into Woods' screen time in order to build up co-star Jeri Ryan's character revealed Shark for what it was: a typically mediocre CBS police procedural that was being carried by a single remarkable actor. The less viewers saw of him, the less Shark saw of viewers. Now CBS has pulled the plug.
Brat power at The CW
Deja view? That photo up above is the cast of 90210, the linchpin of the new CW schedule unveiled Tuesday at upfronts in New York. The CW, hammered by the abrupt ratings decline triggered in large part by the writers' strike, turned over one huge chunk of its schedule to spoiled brats and abandoned another entirely. Read the whole Herald story.
A stake through the heart for 'Moonlight'
Now we know -- even blood isn't enough to satisfy Les Moonves and his rapacious CBS henchpersons. For a couple of months now, fans of the vampire-detective drama Moonlight have been donating thousands of pints of their own blood in an effort to convince CBS to keep the show for another season. (They were sending to the Red Cross rather than directly to Moonves, which might have worked better.) On Tuesday, CBS swung the axe anyway, canceling Moonlight on the eve of the network's upfront ceremony in New York. A couple of sitcoms on the ratings bubble, How I Met Your Mother and The New Adventures Of Old Christine, were renewed, which makes you wonder what those fans did for CBS. Donate their eyeballs and kidneys?
ABC's fall lineup: only two new shows
The aftershocks of a Hollywood writers' strike that ended three months ago continued rippling through television Tuesday as ABC unveiled a fall schedule with only two new programs -- a game show and a remake of a British series. The only new drama on the ABC schedule is Life On Mars, an American version of a BBC series. It stars Jason O'Mara (The Agency) as a detective who wakes up after a car crash to find himself back in 1973 -- but still working as a cop. Here's the full Herald story.
