'Fringe' Stays, 'Sarah Connor' Goes

Glenn Garvin - Miami Herald

Fox rescued one cult science-fiction show from a near-certain death Monday but threw dirt on the coffin of another as the network unveiled its schedule for television's fall season.

Dollhouse, a tale of corporate-mind-control dirty work that's short on viewers but long on merchandising opportunities, was unexpectedly renewed. But the expensive killer robots of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles were consigned to Fox's junkyard.

The programming moves were announced in a telephone press conference from New York, where the so-called upfronts -- a week of meetings with advertisers where networks present their fall schedules -- got underway Monday.

Fox, which introduced four comedies and two dramas, and Spanish-language Telemundo, which revealed a lineup of six new telenovelas, were the first networks to roll out their shows after a disastrous television season disfigured by labor troubles and a slumping economy.

"It's a challenging environment for everybody," said Jon Nesvig, Fox's sales chief.

Fox responded by playing financial hardball with some of its old shows -- the successful crime drama Bones was renewed for a fifth season only after a round of serious cost-cutting -- and coming up with some innovative ways to introduce the new ones. Glee, a withering comedy about a nerdy high-school glee club, won't debut until the fall, but a full-episode preview is set for 9 p.m. Tuesday after American Idol.

If even half the monstrous Idol audience sticks around to check out Glee, noted Fox programming boss Kevin Reilly, that would mean 15 million viewers. "That's an audience we cannot buy with marketing dollars," he declared.

Two other new Fox comedies -- Cleveland, a spinoff of Fox's biting cartoon Family Guy; Brothers, with former NFL star Michael Strahan as a recently retired football player who has to move home to take care of his wheelchair-bound brother, also will debut this fall.

The other three new shows will start airing in January, when the end of Fox's crowded slate of pro sports leaves some gaps in the schedule. They include the action drama Human Target, based on a comic book about a detective who assumes the identities of endangered clients; Past Life, with cops solving crimes through reincarnation; and the sitcom Sons of Tucson, about three wealthy brothers who hire a scheming hustler to pose as their jailed father.

Along with its new shows, Fox is bringing a longtime summer fill-in to its fall lineup. So You Think You Can Dance will air Tuesdays and Wednesdays in the same time slot that American Idol takes over during the winter. That way, Reilly said, "we don't have to completely reconstitute our schedule in January.

The oddest Fox moves involved its two science-fiction shows. Dollhouse pulls in fewer than three million viewers per episode, an abysmal number for a big broadcast network, and most industry observers gave it up for dead weeks ago. But its young and fanatic audience grows when viewership on digital video recorders, cellphones and the Internet is added in -- and they buy merchandise. And, Reilly admitted, the fans of Dollhouse producer Joss Whedon scare him a little bit: "If we had canceled a Joss Whedon show, I probably would have had 110 million e-mails this morning from the fans."

Terminator had similar ratings, a similar fan base, and a chance for a big promotional push with the debut of a big-budget cinematic cousin, Terminator Salvation, this week. But Reilly said he's through bringing shows back from the dead: "Terminator has completed its run . . . It's time to move on."

Telemundo's telenovelas include El clon, a remake of a wildly successful Brazilian novela that's aired in more than 70 countries, that has the genre's usual romantic triangle with a twist: One of the lovers is a clone of another. In descending order of technological savvy if not necessarily creepiness, there are also triangles involving cousins (Perro amor) and half-brothers (Rosalinda y Primitivo).

There are also novelas about about feminist narcotraffickers (Reina del sur), poor kids among the rich (Ninos ricos, pobres padres), and three guys with the same name, one of whom is fated to an early death by a gypsy curse (Victorinos).

----

More television news

More Entertainment

Copyright 2009 by Miami Herald