The Fall Schedule for ABC has only a few surprises, one of them being moving Ugly Betty to Friday nights to compete with NBC's Southland & FOX's Dollhouse. More after the jump......
ABC has officially announced it's Fall Schedule. The shows they decided not to renew are not that big of a surprise. In the Motherhood, The Usuals, Cupid, & According to Jim will never be seen again. The only surprise was Samantha Who? which never had a chance because ABC was too interested in putting out these new shows in it's place. Samantha got lost in all this shuffling. The irony is that those new shows got canceled too.
There are quite a few new comedies this fall. Wednesday night is all new, with 5 shows dedicated to laughter. First up is Hank with our old favorite, Kelsey Grammer. He's Hank Pryor, bigtime CEO on Wall Street who has suddenly lost it all. Hank ends up moving his wife & two kids back to her hometown of River Bend, Va. & starting over. They are all appalled by their new living conditions. Gone is the staff & the stuff rich people have. I watched the preview & liked it. Grammer plays what he knows best, a stuffy, out-of-touch, douchebag who is determined to get it right & at the same time, try to be more pleasant to those around him. I'm gonna give it a chance.
The Middle has Patricia Heaton married to Neil Flynn & living in blue-collar Indiana. Is this going to be like Roseanne or more like Malcom in the Middle? If you don't know who Neil Flynn is, he's the janitor from Scrubs.. Now that Scrubs will be back for another season, what will they do without him? I'm not a Heaton fan so I'm already not liking this one.
Now Modern Family sounds like something more to my taste. It has three "related households". Here's how ABC described it:
".....When the Pritchett, Delgado and Dunphy families agree to be interviewed by a documentary crew, they have no idea just how much they're about to reveal about themselves.
Jay and Gloria ( Ed O'Neill & Sofia Vegara) are married and Jay tries hard to keep up with his much younger and hotter wife and her passionate teenage son, Manny. Claire Delgado ( Julie Bowen) is having a hard time raising her own family. Her husband Phil (Ty Burrell) is great, except for the fact that he thinks he's "down" with their teenage kids, much to their embarrassment. Mitchell Dunphy ( Jesse Tyler Ferguson) and his enthusiastic partner Cameron (Eric Stonestreet) have just adopted Lily, a precious little baby girl from Vietnam. This engaging new comedy offers a 'mockumentary' view into the complicated, messy, loving life of three unique families." Got all that? I hope so.....
Cougar Town is what you think it is. Courtney Cox is divorced, hitting 40, with a teenage son & she's living in a small Florida town where the center of high society is the Cougars high school football team.. "this town is the natural habitat for over-tanned, under-dressed divorcées prowling for younger men". You get the idea. Courtney & hubby David Arquette are executive producers.
The last Wednesday night laugh-fest show is the hour long Eastwick, which is said to be a kind of clone of the movie The Witches of Eastwick. "This small New England town will be turned upside down by these witches coming into their own. Though bad for a few locals, it's still the best thing to happen in Eastwick in centuries." Rebecca Romijn is one of these witches. Talk about type-casting.
Tuesday's have a new Mark Burnett reality show, his first for ABC. Shark Tank will air at 8pm. "Each week, ambitious entrepreneurs present their breakthrough business concepts to ruthless investors to convince them to invest in the concept." Isn't Billy Mayes doing that now with his show Pitchmen? I watched the preview & it seems that inventors go to the "boardroom" & pitch their invention. The "investors" then decide if the product is bankable & if it is, they bid on the amount they are willing to invest. It looks too over-produced to me. We will be getting a 'sneak peek' later this summer, after ABC's 10th anniversary celebration of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire.
