3 QUESTIONS

By Lisa de Moraes
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, September 21, 2008

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.

This year, it's overseas formats that are all the rage. It's a fad born in part of necessity: They were something U.S. network suits could actually look at and read scripts on during the writers' strike. The list of overseas shows being remade this season by the U.S. broadcast networks includes:

From the U.K.: ABC's time-travel detective drama "Life on Mars"; CBS's sci-fi drama "Eleventh Hour"; CBS's fiance-as-train-wreck comedy "Worst Week"; NBC's Camelot update "Merlin"; and Fox's cash-giveaway reality series "Secret Millionaire."

From Israel: CBS's romantic comedy "The Ex List."

From Australia: NBC's mother/daughter comedy "Kath and Kim" and Fox's high school comedy "Sit Down, Shut Up."

And thank Japan for Fox's human-Tetris competition, "Hole in the Wall."

U.S. broadcast networks buying shows based on overseas formats is nothing new: "All in the Family" was a redo of the British comedy "Till Death Us Do Part." Much more recently, "Ugly Betty" is a rework of the Colombian telenovela "Betty la Fea," and "The Office" is a do-over of the British comedy, um, "The Office." But overseas culling on this scale is unprecedented, what with the network suits convinced that American sensibilities are so unique and that U.S. viewers won't accept anything that smells even vaguely foreign (which is why British actors must feign American accents to get hired on U.S. TV series).

If enough shows in this year's crop succeed, a stake will finally have been driven in that ancient notion.

Is CW the new DuMont?

Word on the street says CW's third season could be its last, although parents CBS Corp. and Warner Bros. insist they love it like a child and are totally committed to the netlet -- which they cooked up from the ashes of CBS's UPN and Warner Bros.' WB in the fall of '06.

Things haven't gone real well for CW since its launch, as reflected in the fact that this fall, it's had to add a whopping seven new series to its fall schedule -- the most of any broadcast network this season, and no small feat for a network that programs only 13 hours per week (compared with 22 hours for ABC, NBC and CBS).

"Essentially, the network is fighting for its own survival," one industry exec speculated. "The network has two bottom-line-oriented parents and they will not put up with losing money too long."

That said, CW might have finally got it right, dumping WWE "SmackDown" and honing in on angst-ridden rich chicks as its story line of choice. Two weeks in a row, the network's new Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday lineups have finished first among the 18-to-34-year-old chicks whom CW now targets.

(And for all you nonserious students of television, DuMont was the first commercial television network. It launched in the mid-1940s and was co-owned by Paramount Pictures, which ironically is now owned by CBS parent Viacom. DuMont also struggled to get a footing and finally went under in 1956.)