By Lisa de Moraes
Tuesday, March 11, 2008

Chicks are back, accessible is back, fun is back at HBO.

The network, which just wrapped up a wrist-slittingly depressing final season of "The Wire" and is still angsting its way through five nights a week of "In Treatment" (tonight's patient: Alex, the arrogant Navy pilot who insists his recent brush with death and a disastrous mission in Iraq have had no effect on him), announced yesterday it has ordered up 13 episodes of a new drama series, "The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency," based on the international best-selling novels of Alexander McCall Smith.

The news came the same day the trades unveiled HBO's greenlighting of a pilot from "Will & Grace" alum Jhoni Marchinko called "Driving Around With Joni," about a successful 40-year-old woman, suddenly widowed, who spends her days driving around Los Angeles with her French bulldog trying to figure out the meaning of life.

The network also is developing a comedy series with Darren Star and Elaine Goldsmith-Thomas called "Diary of a Manhattan Call Girl" -- which, yes, is fun, unless you're the governor of New York, which most of us aren't. It's based on Tracy Quan's book, the Hollywood Reporter reminded.

These projects, and Alan Ball's "True Blood," based on Charlaine Harris's best-selling books about a psychic waitress and her vampire boyfriend, mark the first projects in the post-Chris Albrecht era at HBO. (You remember former HBO chairman Albrecht, who entered rehab after allegedly assaulting a female companion in Vegas, only to get the old heave-ho when the L.A. Times reported another allegation of violence, this one against a female HBO staffer.)

HBO co-president Richard Plepler and programming group president Michael Lombardo declined to discuss the recent trend toward female leads and, um, fun, but did tell The TV Column their game plan is to "throw out the rulebook."

"Actually, we said, 'There are no rules -- the only rules are good storytelling,' " Plepler added.

Grammy-winning soul crooner Jill Scott stars as Precious Ramotswe, the sensible proprietor of the only female-owned detective agency in Botswana, in the two-hour "No. 1 Ladies' " movie, which will serve as the series pilot. It was filmed on location in Botswana, directed by Oscar winner Anthony Minghella ("The English Patient") from a script by Minghella and Richard Curtis ("Four Weddings and a Funeral").

In an interview last year in the Christian Science Monitor, Scott said that when she saw the movie script "I thought, 'Wow, a whole script with no sex, no violence, nothing that a child couldn't watch. That's really nice."

Which is sure to send 18-to-34-year-old guys running, but fortunately HBO doesn't sell ad time in its shows. Oh, and chicks watch more television.

* * *

After 33 months, two names, four time slots (and extra points if you can figure out how many format changes), Tucker Carlson's MSNBC series has been put out of the network's misery, ending months of speculation you just knew would become accurate eventually.

Starting March 17, Carlson's 6 p.m. weekday time slot will be held by "Race for the White House With David Gregory."

Gregory will continue to be the chief White House correspondent for NBC News. Carlson, on the other hand, is being turned into MSNBC's "senior campaign correspondent" and will appear throughout the cable news network's lineup. No word what happens once the election wraps.

This season to date, in its thankless 6 p.m. time slot, "Tucker" has averaged 306,000 viewers, which, were it on NBC.com, would be epic.

It's up nearly 20 percent compared with the same weeks the previous season, in which "Tucker" averaged 261,000 viewers.

And, in other This Day in MSNBC Schedule Changing news: Andrea Mitchell is getting the "coveted" 1 p.m. time slot. We presume it will be a program about the presidential campaign, but they weren't able to get any details into the one sentence they devoted to it.