3 QUESTIONS

Welcome to the rest of the previous TV season.

Last November, you may recall, the 2007-08 television season was suddenly aborted when Hollywood writers launched a strike over compensation for programming shown to viewers on "new media," among other issues. When the strike finally ended 100 days later, some scripted TV series limped back on to the air; others had not survived.

What had we lost? We had been robbed of the opportunity to debate whether "Journeyman's" time-traveling journalist was cheating on his present-day wife when he involuntarily got jerked back a couple of decades, to his single days, and then canoodled his girlfriend of that era.

But on the bright side, the urge to pound the Geico cavemen's brains out with a club was no longer so pronounced as 100 days earlier, when ABC was airing episodes of its new "Cavemen" comedy, based on the Cro-Magnon car-insurance pitchmen.

As the official 2008-09 TV season gets underway, we find broadcasters still picking up the pieces of their 2007-08 season, and three questions loom particularly large:

Is January the new September?

ABC decided to abandon fall's crush of new series this season in favor of launching more product early next year. Meanwhile, traditionalist CBS and flailing NBC are each adding five new series, and little CW is adding a whopping seven new shows in the fourth quarter. This season, we'll find out whether the traditional fall rollout still counts for something -- or whether it's outlived its usefulness.

Fox will add just two new shows this fall, but its TV season has really started in January -- a.k.a. "American Idol" season -- for some time. But ABC's decision to add just one new scripted series to its fall lineup (Thursday's "Life on Mars") and one new reality series (Tuesday's "Opportunity Knocks") is something altogether different. The plan was born of the writers' strike, ABC programming chief Steve McPherson told reporters in May, explaining: "We don't really feel comfortable picking stuff up until it's been fully developed and piloted and tested."

ABC continued to shoot pilots all summer and has picked up a bunch, which it expects to debut in the first quarter. The network's focus for fall is the relaunch of three of last year's frosh series in which network suits have confidence, but whose runs got cut off by the strike: "Pushing Daisies," "Private Practice" and "Dirty Sexy Money."

At the other end of the spectrum, CBS had no interest in relaunching any of its new "swing for the fences" series from last season, agreeing with viewers that "Viva Laughlin," "Moonlight," "Kid Nation," et al. are best forgotten. The only surviving CBS series that was new last season, in fact, hardly needs relaunching: "The Big Bang Theory" was last season's one and only unqualified hit. So CBS is adding five new series to its fall lineup -- on par with last year -- in hopes it can regain the Most Watched Network crown it lost to Fox last season.

Are overseas formats the new British actors?

Last fall, British actors feigning American accents were the Balenciaga handbag of broadcast networks: They wouldn't be caught dead without one. Nearly one-third of the new scripted series on the broadcast networks' prime-time slates were led by actors from the United Kingdom.