Upfronts

When the TV executives meet the media at the annual CBS upfront presentation in May, there will be certainty and uncertainty when it comes to the Monday night sitcom anchor 'Two and a Half Men.' The certainty is that it will be in the line up because it was renewed for three years in 2009. The uncertainty is if Charlie Sheen will be on 'Two and a Half Men' in the face of his felony charges in Colorado.

There are implications beyond the obvious question of Charlie being there to do 'Two and a Half Men.' He's one of the highest paid actors on television -- approximately $20 million a season -- which accounts for a big chunk of the operating budget. Whether he's on air or written out for a while, he has to be paid.

• At 8, CBS has a new Old Christine, followed by new episodes of Gary Unmarried, Criminal Minds, and CSI: NY.
• NBC has a new, two-hour episode of The Sing-Off, then a new Jay Leno Show.
• FOX has the two-hour season finale of So You Think You Can Dance at 8.
• TCM has The Maltese Falcon at 8, followed by Casablanca.
• At 9, Discovery has a new Mythbusters.
• DirecTV has a new Friday Night Lights at 9.
• Syfy has a new Ghost Hunters at 9, then a new Ghost Hunters Academy.
• History Channel has a new Nostradamus Effect at 9.
• Showtime has a new Inside the NFL at 9.
• At 10, ABC has a new Eastwick.
• FX has a new Nip/Tuck at 10.
• TBS has two new episodes of Tyler Perry's Meet the Browns at 10.
• A&E has two new episodes of Steven Seagal: Lawman at 10.
• Bravo has the Top Chef: Las Vegas Reunion Special at 10.
• There's a new Man vs. Food on Travel Channel at 10.

Check your local TV listings for more.

After the jump, the late night talk shows.

• At 8, ABC has It's The Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown, followed by new episodes of Dancing with the Stars and The Forgotten.
• NBC has a new, two-hour The Biggest Loser at 8, then a new The Jay Leno Show.
• FOX has a new, two-hour So You Think You Can Dance.
• ESPN has a new 30 For 30 at 8, followed by two new episodes of The World Series of Poker.
• TCM has Poltergeist at 8.
• At 9, PBS has a new Frontline.
• Discovery has a new Dirty Jobs at 9, then a new Ghost Lab.
• There's a new episode of The Universe on History Channel at 9.
• At 10, FX has a new Sons of Anarchy.
• Food Network has a new Chopped at 10.
• Bravo has a new Flipping Out at 10.
• A&E has two new episodes of Parking Wars at 10.
• Syfy has a new ECW at 10.
• Spike has the Spike 2009 Awards at 10.
• Travel Channel has a new Bizarre World at 10.
• HBO has a new Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel at 10.
• Also at 10: MTV has a new episode of The Hills, followed by a new episode of The City.

Check your local TV listings for more.

After the jump, the late night talk shows.

Previewing NBC's fall offerings has been a long process. First I gave you Community and Trauma, then Parenthood. Now, I have NBC's second medical drama that's premiering this year: Mercy. While Trauma follows first responders in San Francisco, Mercy follows nurses in a hospital in New York.

While it's true that I've seen the pilot and should be able to give you some insight into what to expect when it premieres (Wednesday September 23, at 8 PM ), the fact is, every single thing you need to know about Mercy is summed up in its synopsis:

"Nurse Veronica Callahan (Taylor Schilling) has just returned to Mercy Hospital from a tour in Iraq and knows more about medicine than all of the residents combined. Together with fellow nurses Sonia Jimenez (Jaime Lee Kirchner) who turns the heads of everyone at Mercy hospital and Chloe Payne (Michelle Trachtenberg) a naïve newcomer who learns to deal with the difficulties of working in a challenging and sometimes unsettling profession, they navigate the daily traumas and social landmines of life and love both inside the hospital and out."

NBC seems to be sending out their screeners in dribs and drabs, so I'm making my way through their fall offerings very slowly. I've already given you previews of both Community and Trauma, and now we've got Parenthood, a new series based on a movie that was already turned into a series nearly twenty years ago. Who says Hollywood is out of ideas?

Parenthood is basically a less-melodramatic Brothers & Sisters. It follows the Braverman clan, a family in Fresno made up of four siblings: Adam (Peter Krause), Crosby (Dax Shepard), Sarah (Maura Tierney), and Julia (Erika Christensen), along with their children and parents, played by Craig T. Nelson and Bonnie Bedelia. They all have their share of drama, but at the end of the day, they're all brought together in the most suburban of pursuits: Little League. Say it with me now: "awwww."

ABC is banking big on comedy this fall, with a Wednesday night lineup featuring four new sitcoms starring some familiar faces. The network is also set to unveil more high-concept dramas, including Flash Forward, V, The Forgotten and Eastwick.

I caught the first act of the Flash Forward pilot during the network's upfront presentation in May. It was good enough to become my most anticipated show of the upcoming fall season. My second most anticipated show is V, the revamp of the '80 series/miniseries about an alien invasion. ABC hasn't released full screeners for V or Flash Forward yet, but we got advanced looks at some of the network's other new shows, including Eastwick and Cougar Town, the new comedy from Scrubs creator Bill Lawrence. Look for previews of more new ABC shows here at TV Squad before the fall season kicks off in September.

While it was a little odd that the "screener" of Glee we got was the exact same episode that FOX aired after American Idol in the spring, the rest of these shows were truly new. Dramatic offerings included FOX's loose adaptation of the DC Comics property Human Target and Past Life. On the comedy side they offered us screeners for The Cleveland Show, Brothers, Sons of Tucson and the aforementioned Glee.

After enduring the screener for Do Not Disturb last season on FOX, I could only hope that these offerings were at least better than that offense to the senses. And they were. Well, most of them. Unfortunately, it seems that FOX has at least one Do Not Disturb in them every season. Other than that, one of these shows was far better than I expected, another a bit worse, and a third one stands as one of the better pilots I've ever seen.

NBC isn't exactly engendering a lot of goodwill among people, with their cancellations of shows like Life and Medium, and My Name is Earl. The fact that they're replacing these shows with not one but two medical shows, isn't exactly a confidence booster. NBC hasn't sent screeners of all their pilots yet, hence the "Part 1" in the title. But I have gotten a taste of both their comedy and drama offerings with Community, a comedy starring The Soup's Joel McHale, and Trauma, one of the aforementioned medical dramas.

Going into this, I didn't have high hopes for Trauma, and while I wanted to like Community, I had a bad feeling that it wasn't going to be the vehicle that would change Joel McHale from cute host of a basic cable show to primetime star. Now, after seeing both of them, I will say that I was pleasantly surprised by one.

Generally speaking, CBS had a strong 2008, developing one bona fide hit drama -- The Mentalist -- even though shows like The Ex-List never found an audience or a critical plaudit. Ironically, I liked The Ex-List based on the screener I reviewed last summer, so go figure. Sometimes a preview can inform you about a show's potential and sometimes it's just the best it'll ever be.

CBS has shared previews for the new season and we've had a chance to take a look. There are star vehicles for Jenna Elfman, Alex O'Loughlin and Julianna Margulies, which would seem logical based on the success of Simon Baker as The Mentalist. CBS is counting on familiar, popular TV stars to win over audiences. Will the strategy work? It's probably too soon to tell.

When the news about Without A Trace ending its run was made official at the CBS Upfront this past week, I wasn't shocked. Rumor had it that either Without A Trace or Cold Case would be dropped, and Cold Case might have tipped the scales in its favor with a strong showing with its two-part season finale. But as much as I liked Without A Trace, I'm not really sorry that it's calling it a day.

Seven years is a darn good run for a TV show. In fact, if it had been a British series, it might have ended after 30 episodes – unless you're talking Coronation Street which is a freak of TV.

But here's the thing about Without A Trace, it's been a solid show with a strong set of characters who've had a chance to shine as much as possible within the confines of a procedural. Anthony LaPaglia as Jack Malone was terrific. The high point in many an episode for me was when Jack lost it and got in someone's face. His personal life was generally a mess, so LaPaglia had lots of chances to show the troubled side of his character.

I want to give every show (that isn't a reality show) the benefit of the doubt, because even the more mundane premise can be great with the right writing and cast. Having said that, do we really need another TV show about a team of quirky investigators solving crimes? Here's a clip from the first episode of The Forgotten. (And here are previews of ABC's new comedies.)

Suddenly, it seems that network TV programming is becoming like Major League Baseball. I'll trade you Scrubs for money and a TV show to be named later. Or how about taking According To Jim off our our hands and you give us Old Christine? Shows are going to other networks already, so why not just starting trading them?

On the heels of CBS picking up Medium after NBC canceled it (actually, they wanted to renew it for fewer episodes but CBS Studios said no and grabbed it) comes this news that NBC was all set to buy Ghost Whisperer if CBS had canceled that show, and then they were going to pair it with Medium, if they had kept that.

TBS is currently running repeats of My Name Is Earl, and to pretty solid ratings. With NBC cancelling Earl, it looked like all that might end. Well, not the re-reuns -- they can run forever -- but that influx of new episodes. But in this era of cross-network deals and shows jumping ship to keep costs down, it may not be the end of the road for the Hickey boys after all. Steve Koonin, president of Turner Entertainment Networks, loves the show and would be more than willing to discuss having My Name Is Earl move to TBS for a fifth season.

He hasn't approached them, but he's said "I'm in the book" about them approaching him. "We'd definitely look," he says about trying to work out a deal to keep the show on the air. Law & Order: Criminal Intent and Friday Night Lights have already found new life in cable deals, though theirs involved sharing with NBC, so it's not unprecedented. And with TBS trying to ramp up its original slate it wouldn't be a bad move to take an established property to anchor the schedule.

Canterbury's Law didn't last too long (be honest, you barely remember it), but Juliana Margulies is donning the power suit and getting back into the courtroom in CBS' new drama The Good Wife. This show is "ripped from the headlines" in every way. Her husband is a politician who goes to jail after a money/sex scandal, she's all over YouTube, and even her boss has her picture taken with Hilary Clinton and looks a little like Gloria Allred (it's Christine Baranski). Margulies' character could probably get a few million for writing a tell-all, but she decides to practice law again.

With all this news from ABC, CBS, NBC, FOX, and The CW about their new fall schedules, we can't forget what's happening on cable. TNT and TBS have announced some new shows of their own. Some might say that these shows are even more promising than what the other networks have to offer this fall. In fact, one of them has me more excited than Richard Simmons in a tank top factory.

Besides returning shows like The Closer (June 8), Raising The Bar (June 8), Saving Grace (June 16), and Leverage (July 15), TNT also has the following new shows.