NBC Looks To Crawl Out Of Last Place
Since burning down their studios, snuffing all of their executives, and replacing all 24 hours of their daily programming space with a salad shooter infomercial to start over after a disastrous, last-place season was deemed "wildly impractical" by fading NBC golden boy Jeff Zucker, the network instead decided to trot out a revamped Fall schedule for potential advertisers to kick off the upfronts in New York. NBC is launching six new shows in the fall: one comedy (My Name is Earl, with Jason Lee as a crook who wins the lottery), three dramas (including E-Ring, in which NBC attempts to suck at Jerry Bruckheimer's hitmaking teat to keep up with CBS), and two reality shows (one has Amy Grant crossing the country and granting Three Wishes—get it?—to make it seem like NBC loves poor people as much as ABC's Extreme Makeover). Gone are The Contender, American Dreams, Third Watch, and Law & Order: Trial by Jury, while Scrubs and Fear Factor are temporarily shelved until some of the new shows flop and demand immediate replacement with a known quantity.
In addition, Zucker and underboss Kevin Reilly have nobly bolted themselves to the deck chairs of their sinking Thursday night Must See TV ship, leaving that night's schedule unchanged and ready for another season of unrelenting buggery by CBS's Les Moonves.
Oh, we almost forgot Martha! In a Who Wants To Be A Millionaire-style attempt to squeeze every last drop from a franchise, Martha Stewart's Apprentice will run on Wednesday nights, a John the Baptist to Trump's Thursday night self-promoting Jesus, where she will try to discover a way to bodily injure homemaking-empire hopefuls with a doily.
For more details, the Futon Critic has the press release announcing NBC's optimistic attempts to avoid the indignity of two straight seasons of Nielsen humiliation.