For Fall, CW Brings On the Suds -- and Vampires

NEW YORK, May 21

Once a hodgepodge of WWE wrestling, comedies with African American casts and touchy-feely family dramas, CW is now laser-focused on stalking young chicks and has transformed its prime-time lineup into one sleek body of fantasy soaps.

Monday night needed no tinkering: "Gossip Girl" followed by "One Tree Hill" are back.

Tuesday, the successful exhumation of Aaron Spelling's most iconic '90s hit, now called simply "90210," will be joined by the remake of another Spelling soap, "Melrose Place," which, advertisers were promised Thursday during the final day of Broadcast TV Upfront Week, would serve up story lines even juicier than the original, which is setting the bar pretty high.

Wednesdays, the network's most watched program, Tyra Banks's competition series "America's Next Top Model," will be followed by a new scripted drama from ooh-it's-Ashton-Kutcher called "The Beautiful Life." It's about a strikingly handsome Iowa farm boy who comes to New York and nearly derails his modeling career at his first shoot, but a stunningly beautiful chick -- with a secret past, naturally -- comes to his rescue and shows him how to "relax and work the camera." Mischa Barton plays the aging supermodel clawing to hang on to her career, and Zac Posen lent his line to the pilot episode.

Thursdays, "Supernatural" sticks at 9 but gets a new lead-in in the form of "Vampire Diaries," based on the popular book series of the same name. This one was a no-brainer, CW programming chief Dawn Ostroff told advertisers Thursday, because everybody knows chicks "dig the vampires." "Vampire Diaries" is about vampire brothers -- one is the good vampire, the other is the bad vampire -- who are obsessed with the same sweet, fragile-looking beauty.

"Smallville" will be rewarded for its years of service to CW and its predecessor WB by being dumped on Fridays at 8. This is not necessarily "Smallville's" final season, Ostroff told reporters after her presentation. Of course it will depend on the ratings, and getting ratings on a Friday on CW will be challenging.

CW doesn't program Saturday nights -- and it doesn't program Sundays, either, starting next season, after this season's disastrous Outsourced Sunday campaign. The network had turned over the night to an ambitious production company that learned the hard way how difficult it is to program CW's Sunday night. After the Outsourced Sunday slate tanked early this season, CW filled the night with "Jericho" reruns and old movies. Now, the TV stations, which will be programming it instead, will get to hang onto more of the ad time.

And yet, without Saturday and Sunday in the mix, CW still has as much scripted programming on its fall slate as does NBC. CW shot only six pilots this spring for next season, and three of them made the fall schedule. The network also picked up a midseason drama called "Parental Discretion Advised." It's about a 15-year-old chick who, after years in the foster-care system, tracks down her unmarried birth parents in order to get them to sign papers that will enable her to become an emancipated minor. You know where this is going: Instead, she winds up living with them. "Juno" meets "Gilmore Girls," Ostroff explained.

Among the unlucky pilots that did not get a series order -- that "Gossip Girl" spinoff. If you saw the setup-to-the-spinoff episode of "GG" the other day, you need not ask why.