At 10, Michael Imperioli is a Homicide cop being followed by a documentary crew in “Detroit 1-8-7.” Sadly, he ditched the facial hair he cultivated as a cop on “Life on Mars.” At 8 is “No Ordinary Family,” with Michael Chiklis as the father of a family that gets super powers (and will beat NBC’s superhero-themed “The Cape” to the air by months). TUESDAY: The “Dancing” results show is at 9 again, flanked by a pair of high-profile rookies. But ABC has to hope that a year from now, the show will have grown enough that it can stand on its own without “Dancing,” and perhaps lead into something else.
MONDAY: Status quo: Two hours of “Dancing,” followed by “Castle.” “Castle” is still young enough that this makes sense.
The schedule, and my thoughts on it, night-by-night: Unlike the other networks, ABC isn’t doing any kind of press conference or call so reporters can ask executives for explanations about the schedule (or to provide clues about mid-season), so I’ll have to break this one down on my own. But ABC is a network with a lot of aging hits (“Grey’s” and “Desperate Housewives” will be entering their seventh seasons) and a network that’s struggled to cultivate new ones (neither “FlashForward” nor “V” turned into the “Lost” successor ABC hoped for, though “V” will be back at mid-season), and it feels like the time is now or never to use the established hits to help launch the newbies, before ABC falls back into a quagmire like the immediate post-“Who Wants to Be a Millionaire” period. Now, there’s nothing wrong with stability, particularly when something is working like the “Dancing”/”Castle” combo. The “Grey’s Anatomy”/”Private Practice” double feature is unchanged, “Castle” still follows “Dancing with the Stars” on Monday, and the entire Sunday lineup returns intact. (“The Middle” moves from Wednesdays at 8:30 to Wednesdays at 8.) “Modern Family” still leads into “Cougar Town” (which, for now, is still called “Cougar Town,” though one can only hope that will change between now and September) instead of being used to launch a new show that might potentially retain more of its audience. Specifically, ABC’s fall schedule shifts only one returning series from the timeslot in which it aired this season. Yet on Monday, Fox (which is the number one network on TV) announced a schedule with more moves and risks than the one that ABC (which is not the number one network on TV) announced this morning.
Conventional wisdom during Upfront Week is that the more successful a network is, the fewer changes it has to make.
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