Entertainment

TV: CW keeps many series, including '7th Heaven'

10:34 AM CDT on Friday, May 19, 2006

By ED BARK / The Dallas Morning News

New in name but otherwise not so much, The CW's first fall lineup will be stuffed with holdover product from The WB and UPN.

So much so that only two freshman series are part of the six-nights-a-week lineup, where the bigger news is the return of both WB's previously canceled 7th Heaven and UPN's thought-to-be endangered Veronica Mars.

UPN's signature Monday night urban comedy block will shift to Sunday nights, where the surviving Girlfriends, Everybody Hates Chris and All of Us will join newcomer The Game and encore presentations of America's Next Top Model.

The most prominent casualties of the UPN-WB merger are the latter network's Everwood and Reba, although the Reba McEntire comedy may be back in midseason. A surprise returnee is WB's barely seen, 216th-ranked One Tree Hill, which remarkably will get a fourth season in tandem with Next Top Model on Wednesdays.

Runaway (drama): Donnie Wahlberg stars as railroaded Paul Rader, wrongly convicted of murder. Paul and family hole up in Bridgewater, Iowa, where secret identities are deployed while the real killer threatens the lives of the Rader kids.

The Game (comedy): Wives and girlfriends of pro football players mix, mingle and clash off-field in this block-and-tackle sitcom from the creator of Girlfriends.

Veronica Mars moves to Tuesdays to join Gilmore Girls.

Say good night to The WB's Everwood, Blue Collar TV, What I Like About You, Living With Fran, Twins, Related, Modern Men, Pepper Dennis, Bedford Diaries, Charmed and Just Legal and UPN's Eve, Cuts, Half & Half, One on One, South Beach and Sex, Love & Secrets and Love, Inc.

Beauty and the Geek will alternate full cycles on Wednesdays with Next Top Model, which goes first in the fall.

The lone announced midseason show is Hidden Palms, a drama about a 15-year-old boy who had been traumatized by his dad's suicide.

Comfortably relocated to plush Palm Springs with his mom and her new husband, young Johnny Miller (no relation to the golfer) learns that his new neighborhood harbors deep secrets. Gail O'Grady and Sharon Lawrence head the cast.

E-mail ebark@dallasnews.com