[Televisionary]

Ah, May. It's the busiest time of the year, between season finales of your favorite series, the network upfronts, LA Screenings, and the massive culling of series chaff. Yet this year, networks are launching several new series at the end of the month. Some will be little more that warm weather burnoff while others make me salivate (CBS' Pirate Master , for example). Then there are the ones that I'm curious enough about to want to watch more than a single episode. ABC's new series Traveler definitely falls in the latter camp. (Originally intended to air last fall, ABC cut back the action series' episodic order from 13 episodes to 8 and pushed the launch to summer.) Traveler isn't perfect but it is intriguing, offering a respite from mindless reality shows, drama repeats, and whatever the hell VH-1 is airing. For those of you up not to speed, here's the skinny. Three best friends, newly freed from the shackles of grad school, girlfriends, and student housing...

Remember Traveler , that little 8 episode action drama that was originally ordered for the 2006-07 season? The series, which stars Matthew Bomer, Logan Marshall-Green, Aaron Stanford, William Sadler, and Stephen Culp (a.k.a. poor dead Rex from Desperate Housewives ), follows two grad students (Bomer, Marshall-Green) forced to go on the run after their friend (Stanford) frames them for a terrorist act (namely, the blowing up of one NYC museum). Together, they must find a way to prove their innocence while tracking down the man responsible for the crime (the titular Will Traveler). ABC announced a few weeks back that it would burn off the series (earlier chopped from its 13 episode initial order to 8 eps) in its entirety this summer, a rather unceremonious dumping of a show that I found eminently more engaging and suspenseful than, say, the current season of 24 . To counter-balance any negativity to the summer scheduling, ABC has now announced that Traveler will in fact kick off on its ...