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Fall TV Preview: TV wants us back

After what happened last season, the networks can’t afford to strike out with their fall lineups

By Eric Deggans St. Petersburg Times

First, the good news: If you are a TV fan, the next two months will bring a smorgasbord of goodies.

Even as the big networks have whittled their post-writers strike slate of new shows to just more than 20 — we usually get 34 to 38 — the big cable channels have stepped up with their own savory morsels, from The Shield's final season on FX (it premiered Sept. 2) to last Sunday's debut of the HBO vampire drama True Blood.

That's bad news for broadcast networks, which face more pressure than ever to draw audiences after a strike that gave everyone about nine months to find something to do besides watch broadcast television.

But don't try telling that to Heroes star Greg Grunberg, right, who remained confident that his superheroes-in-average-clothes series would emerge stronger than ever, as the blockbuster films The Dark Knight and Iron Man boost audience expectations for fantasy fare.

"The success of those movies tells me people want to see this. ... We need hope right now," he said, bursting with energy while ticking off the ways producers have improved the show.

"There's so much adrenaline," said Grunberg, whose mind-reading cop character Matt Parkman gets zapped to a bleak desert and must find his way back. "We're all challenged with the question of whether to go good or go evil. ... This season is just this train that goes and goes without having to re-introduce these characters."

Heroes isn't the only show slipping on new clothes. In its final season, ER welcomes back founding star Noah Wyle and introduces Angela Bassett as the emergency room's new chief.

Desperate Housewives jumps five years into the future, while Matrix star Laurence Fishburne joins the cast of CSI. Luke Perry and Seinfeld's Jason Alexander will crash Criminal Minds, and Lucy Liu joins the cast of Dirty Sexy Money.

Still, few people have any sense of how good this season will be. Pressed for time and trying to save money, many networks didn't develop pilot episodes as they have in years past.

The upside: Networks aren't spending hundreds of millions making sample shows they will never air. The downside: Critics, some network executives and even some stars have no idea what kind of shows they'll be making. Jeff Goldblum joined Law & Order: Criminal Intent without even knowing his character's name.

Hovering in the background is a simple concern: that no matter what they do, a certain segment of the audience is never coming back to network television.

"Those old TV habits are now just brittle and paper thin and easily broken," said TV producer Marshall Herskovitz, who remembered losing 200,000 viewers every time ABC shifted his 40-something family drama Once and Again, which eventually moved eight times across the network's schedule.

"As TV producers and audience members, we have a lot more choices today, which is wonderful," Herskovitz said. "But there's a lack of commitment people have to television. Once that's broken, people don't often come back."