Fox's Fall Was a Flop, So What's Plan B? Starts With an 'A,' of Course

But for Fox Entertainment Chairman Peter Liguori and his right-hand exec, Fox Entertainment President Kevin Reilly -- the two guys who put FX on the map when they ran it, with dark, nichey shows like "The Shield" and "Nip/Tuck" -- "Fringe" was like raw meat and they were the piranhas. It was dense, it was paranormal, it was irresistibly confusing and it was J.J.

"It's a bull's-eye for us," Liguori told trade reporters at the time about the "Fringe" project -- adding that Reilly "can drain every bit of quality out of this." He meant that, of course, in the best possible sense, though we don't know what that would be.

Fox spared no expense on the launch of "Fringe." Two dozen cows were herded through Manhattan streets along with people handing out "Fringe" graft (a cow has a starring role in the show). An eczema of "Fringe" billboards erupted all across the country. You could hardly watch Fox's broadcast of the baseball All-Star Game for all the "Fringe" logos pasted across the screen. The network even announced "Fringe" viewers would be subjected to fewer ads than usual -- Remote-Free TV, the network called it -- to enhance their viewing pleasure.

The press gobbled it up by the shovelful. Before its unveiling, adoring TV critics asked J.J. at a news conference how it felt to have the show that was going to "save the fall" television season.

"Any pressure or expectations for this, or any other show, could ruin a show," J.J. proclaimed.

But so confident were Fox execs that "Fringe" was the Next Big Thing, they went ahead and launched it at 8 o'clock on a Tuesday -- two weeks before the official start of the TV season and without the benefit of a strong lead-in show to feed its viewers.

The honeymoon ended that night. Only 9.1 million people tuned in to see that $10 million first episode. That's nearly 9 million fewer viewers than had watched the launch of J.J.'s biggest TV success, "Lost," back in the fall of '04.

Even after "Fringe" moved to its regular 9 p.m. Tuesday time slot, with the benefit of "House" lead-in audiences, it never really took off. To date it is only the country's 33rd most watched show, averaging 9.9 million viewers. Among those coveted 18-to-49-year-olds, "Fringe" is the season's No. 15-ranked series -- a ranking it shares with David Caruso of "CSI: Miami." In fairness, it is the most successful new show in that age bracket, though this speaks more to how badly most new shows are doing.

Once again, Fox doggy-paddled back to the lifeboat that is "American Idol."

The singing competition is, for understandable reasons, not the ratings stud it once was. It's going into its eighth season -- which in reality-TV years is nearly as old as Jay Leno.

Even so, Fox execs are clearly concerned about the show's drop last season. Preparing for this latest "Idol" edition, they've aggressively tinkered with the show. They've added a fourth judge -- pop songwriter-producer Kara DioGuardi -- in hopes she will ratchet up the Paula crazy and add some new jargon for the judges to pull out of their Bag o' Comments, which last season were mostly limited to "You're in the dawg house!," "You sound like a cruise ship karaoke singer" and "You made it your own."

The bulk of the changes, however, are about taking the show back to what it was before Fox suits started potchkying around with it -- though, sadly, the weekly viewer-voting results show is so chockablock with product placement it will continue to feel like a long walk in the desert each week.