[Televisionary]

Welcome to your Wednesday morning television briefing. CBS has opted to cancel dramas The Unit, Without a Trace , and Eleventh Hour and will renew dramas Cold Case and NUMB3RS and comedies The New Adventures of Old Christine and Gary Unmarried . ( Hollywood Reporter ) CW has ordered three new drama series for next season, giving the greenlight to Melrose Place, Vampire Diaries , and The Beautiful Life , while Privileged, Reaper, Everybody Hates Chris , and The Game have all been officially cancelled. Meanwhile, the CW has announced that it will not go ahead with the planned spin-off of Gossip Girl but has indicated that drama Life Unexpected remains in contention for a midseason order. The network will unveil its schedule to advertisers tomorrow. ( Variety , Hollywood Reporter ) After NBC's cancellation of comedy series My Name is Earl , producers on the 20th Century Fox Television-produced series are said to be shopping it elsewhere, including to FOX and ABC. Series co-star...

Welcome to your Tuesday morning television briefing. In a surprise twist, ABC has opted to cancel comedy series Samantha Who , after it was widely believed that the network would renew the Christina Applegate-led comedy. The reason behind the cancellation was budget-cutting by the network and the comedy series was unable to reduce its budget enough to make a third season financially viable for ABC. The network had attempted to transition Samantha to a multi-camera format from single-camera in efforts to cut as much as half a million dollars per episode. ( Variety ) NBC has given out an eleventh hour renewal to long-running legal procedural Law & Order , bringing the series' total to twenty seasons, tying it with Gunsmoke for the longest running drama series on television. It's believed that the order is for sixteen episodes. NBC will unveil their fall schedule to advertisers later today. ( Hollywood Reporter ) CBS is set to unveil its fall schedule to advertisers on Wedne...

Welcome to your Tuesday morning television briefing. CBS has announced that it will move struggling freshman drama series Harper's Island to Saturday nights at 9 pm ET/PT, beginning May 2nd. What saved the series from outright cancellation are its strong DVR numbers and the fact that all thirteen episodes of Harper's Island 's limited run were already in the can, making it much easier for the Eye to just burn off the episodes. "This move gives us an opportunity to improve the time period on Thursday while experimenting with more original programming on Saturday," said CBS senior exec VP Kelly Kahl of the network's decision. Harper's Island won't be alone on Saturday nights, which the networks have been increasingly using as a dumping ground for series with small but loyal viewers; Kings, Pushing Daisies, Eli Stone , and Dirty Sexy Money will all air episodes on Saturdays this summer. ( Variety ) J.J. Abrams is confident that freshman drama series Fr...

Welcome to your Friday morning television briefing. ABC Family has canceled quirky dramedy The Middleman , with the cabler confirming that it has "decided not to renew the series for a second season." Fans looking for closure can keep their eyes open for a Season One DVD, slated to be released this summer, and a comic book written by creator Javier Grillo-Marxuach that will tell the story of the original season finale, which was scrapped for budgetary reasons. ( New York Post ) Jason Clarke ( Brotherhood ) has been cast as the lead in CBS' untitled US attorney drama pilot from writer/executive producer Frank Military. Clarke will play "the powerful, charismatic section chief who oversees four lawyers and a handful of paralegals in their overlapping cases." Elsewhere, Jonathan Sadowski, Kevin Simpson, Noureen Dewulf, and Ricky Mabe been cast in FOX comedy pilot Two Dollar Beer and Nick Bishop, Kelli Giddish and Ravi Patel have all been cast in FOX's untitled...

Welcome to your Tuesday morning television briefing. The CW has unveiled a scheduling shakeup that will feature the launch of Season Two of Reaper earlier than expected. Reaper will take over the Tuesdays at 8 pm timeslot--currently inhabited by 90210 --on March 3rd and will air 13 episodes without interruption. 90210 will then move to 9 pm on Tuesdays, taking over Privileged 's timeslot. So what happens to Privileged ? That series will wrap its run February 14th, much earlier than originally planned after it aired fewer repeats. No decision has been made yet about a second season of Privileged . ( Hollywood Reporter ) Torchwood fans should keep their eyes on the internet on Thursday as the 60-second trailer for the series' five-episode Season Three, entitled "Children of Earth," will be released... simultaneously around the world at 4 pm ET. Season Three is set to air later this year on BBC One and BBC America over five consecutive nights. (via press release) Mi...

Welcome to your Monday morning television briefing. I'm still recovering from the, er, excesses of the past holiday week and still have a stack of screeners to get through before the New Year. Paging GOB Bluth: Will Arnett is ready to reunite with his Arrested Development co-stars for the big screen debut of the Bluth clan as Ron Howard and Mitch Hurwitz rally the troops. "It’ll be fun to get back together with everybody and work on it,” says Arnett. “It’s been so long now, we almost have to do it. It’s like we have to finish the joke.” Arnett meanwhile offers his trademark comedic spin on the Arrested film in an amusing jab at the state of the economy. ( Entertainment Weekly 's Hollywood Insider ) Dexter 's Lauren Velez will guest star in a multiple-episode story arc on ABC's Ugly Betty this season; she'll play Elena, a nurse who becomes entangled in the lives of the Suarez clan. POSSIBLE SPOILER WARNING: Details are sketchy but there is word that she is in...

Welcome to your Wednesday morning television briefing. Let's get to the headlines, shall we? Neve Campbell ( Party of Five ) will return to network television with NBC's midseason drama The Philanthropist , starring James Purefoy and Jesse Martin, about a renegade billionaire who uses his wealth to help people in need. The former Scream queen will play the wife of Teddy Rist's business partner and BFF Phillip (Martin), who runs the men's philanthropic organization and finds herself drawn to Rist (Purefoy). ( Hollywood Reporter ) ABC released some new footage from the Season Five premiere of Lost . ( Televisionary ) Samantha Who? (and former Ugly Betty ) writer Marco Pennette has three projects in development, including ABC drama pilot The Romeos , about four men in the 1960s who eventually become the country's biggest pop stars, which he'll write and executive produce with Brad Meltzer and Steve Cohen ( Jack and Bobby ), and ABC comedy Straight Up and Dirty , ...

Happy Halloween and welcome to your Friday morning television briefing. I'm still catching up on television from this week, thanks to a busy social calendar and some LA-based preemptions of CW's Wednesday night series, so look for me to spend much time this weekend catching up. I got many a worried email from readers last night about Kristin Dos Santos' report about the possibility that ABC had not extended Pushing Daisies beyond its initial 13-episode order. While ABC has yet to make a decision about the fate of the series, producers were told to change their original plan for the second season's thirteenth episode (intended as the first of a two-parter) and make said episode a stand-alone installment to "cover all bases," whether the episode be just the thirteenth episode... or Pushing Daisies ' series finale. (And be sure to read this item about what you can do to help the Daisies cause.) ( E! Online's Watch with Kristin ) Don Draper has found so...

Welcome to your Tuesday morning television briefing. NBC has given a full season pickup to Knight Rider , bringing this season's total to 22 episodes despite sagging ratings . And that's all I want to say on the subject. ( E! Online ) CW has ordered a few additional scripts for freshman drama series Privileged , which has struggled to find ratings though has shown significant improvement in recent weeks (it's up 22 percent) despite softening numbers for its lead-in, 90210 . Should the trend continue, it seems fairly certain that Privileged will get a full season order. ( Hollywood Reporter ) One of my main suggestions for improving FOX's Fringe involved giving its supporting cast some real dimension , especially Jasika Nicole's Astrid Farnsworth. Nicole speaks with TV Guide and reveals in this interview that she doesn't know Astrid's backstory either, other than "Astrid majored in music" and is "really, really smart." Not quite the thr...

Honesty upfront: I'm not in the target demo for the CW's newest drama offering Privileged , having both a Y chromosome and a few more years behind me than the net's typical viewer. However, I sat down to view the series premiere--which launches tonight on the CW--with an unbiased opinion. I'll admit that it was difficult to do so. After all, I had seen the netlet's pilot presentation for Privileged last May, which featured a truncated storyline and some bizarro casting (Marsha Mason was since replaced by It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia 's Anne Archer) and I found it to be a mess of a pilot, save for the adorable JoAnna Garcia ( The Captain ) turning in a winsome performance as the adorably put-upon Megan Smith. While Garcia is absolutely charming, I did find it somewhat difficult to accept Megan as a Yale graduate who escaped her Palm Beach roots to try to make it big as a Manhattan writer... only to end up right back where she started out. And that's...