Entertainment

TV: Network plays strong hand, adding just four new shows

12:35 PM CDT on Thursday, May 18, 2006

By ED BARK / The Dallas Morning News

Touting stability and continued ratings dominance among all viewers, CBS will add just four new shows, the fewest ever, to its latest fall lineup.

Another benchmark: CBS is renewing six series from the past season's 10-member freshman class. Hold your applause until the end for Ghost Whisperer, Criminal Minds, How I Met Your Mother, Close to Home, The Unit and The New Adventures of Old Christine.

The scarcity of available time slots prompted CBS to drop its Sunday night movie franchise after an unbroken 20-year run dating to the 1986-87 season. The new occupants will be Cold Case, moved back an hour to 8 p.m., and Without a Trace, relocated from Thursdays.

Venerable King of Queens is being benched until midseason. Two other long-running comedies, Yes, Dear and Still Standing, at last have stopped being unfunny. They're canceled, ha-ha. Just four comedies, all of them clustered on Mondays, have made the network's new schedule.

CBS is a runaway No. 1 in the total viewer Nielsen ratings this season and a competitive third with advertiser-craved 18- to 49-year-olds, where it trails front-running Fox by an average of just 280,000 viewers a week. Its lead in total viewers is 1.83 million over second-place ABC.

Smith (drama): Ray Liotta (Goodfellas) stars as criminal mastermind Bobby Stevens, who plans to stop thieving after just a few more big scores. Virginia Madsen (Sideways) plays his wife, Hope, for whom there's probably little.

Jericho (drama): A small, peaceful Kansas town – is there any other kind? – is plunged into chaos after a nuclear mushroom cloud inexplicably appears on the horizon. Everybody then goes kind of berserk, leading to social, psychological and physical mayhem. Skeet Ulrich (the Scream movies) and TV graybeard Gerald McRaney ( Major Dad) top the cast.

Shark (drama): Snarky James Woods plays supremely self-confident defense attorney Sebastian Stark in a crime show inheriting Without a Trace's Thursday slot. But in a stark turn of events, Stark becomes a cutthroat prosecutor after a personal epiphany. Picturesque Jeri Ryan ( Star Trek: Voyager's Seven of Nine) co-stars as Stark's new boss, ambitious and accomplished District Attorney Jessica Devlin. Still unsolved: Why is his last name Stark instead of Shark?

The Class (comedy): Former third-grade classmates are inextricably bound together as twentysomethings. A cast of unknowns fills the screen, with Friends creator David Crane and primo sitcom director James Burrows (Cheers, Friends, Will & Grace, you-name-it) behind the camera.

How I Met Your Mother moves up to Monday's leadoff spot. The Amazing Race goes to Sundays at 7 p.m.

Say good night to Courting Alex, Out of Practice, Threshold, Love Monkey, Still Standing and Yes, Dear.

Serious-minded CBS used to have more comedies on Saturday night than it now has in its entire prime-time lineup. Return with us now to fall 1973, when Saturdays gave us an unbroken string of All in the Family, M*A*S*H, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, The Bob Newhart Show and The Carol Burnett Show. Now we get two hours of Crimetime Saturday repeats and 48 Hours: Mystery. Sometimes TV stinks.

E-mail ebark@dallasnews.com

•Catch Ed Bark's blog this morning, after Fox and The CW announce their new schedules, at GuideLive.com/overthetop