Mr. Television: What A Week!

Fasten your seatbelts and pack a comfortable pair of shoes. It's network upfront week, a time when the Big Six networks crank up the hype, roll out the stars and unveil their fall 2004 prime-time schedules to packed houses of agency and advertiser types across New York City. It's a chance to mix, mingle, listen to the spin, pop a Dramamine (or two) and decipher what's real, what looks promising and what's just plain awful.

Next week's column will be dedicated to my thoughts of the presentations and lineups, but I have one quibble already: Fox is falsely promoting the start of the fall season by declaring that its fall lineup starts in June. While I admire the network for bringing back The Simple Life and introducing five new series in June (comedies Method & Red and Quintuplets, along with dramas North Shore, The Casino and The Jury), Fox is merely trying to program on a year-round basis and is doing it in a typically aggressive fashion. While I hate to criticize my namesake, you've got to change those promos, Gail Berman—they're misleading.

Of course, as a rule of thumb, you should never believe everything you hear at these presentations. And keep in mind that by the time summer hits, a number of the can't-miss series the networks are raving about will disappear without a trace. Does anyone remember Fox comedy Schimmel? Or that hot new drama Septuplets that was also supposed to air on Fox a few years ago? What about Fearless, the WB drama that was pulled for One Tree Hill just days after the network's presentation last year?

Back in 1994, ABC, after its upfront, got cold feet and flipped Home Improvement with Roseanne so she wouldn't have to face NBC's Frasier on Tuesday. With the competitive environment now even more cutthroat, take everything you hear this week with a grain of salt. By the time the summer hits, you'll hear about changes, and probably plenty of them. Nothing is etched in stone during upfront week.

Although it's a given that Donald Trump will be present this afternoon at NBC's shindig (which opens the week at Radio City Music Hall), I hope the network does not make the same mistake ABC did when it rammed Regis Philbin down our throats at the peak of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire a few years ago. At the time, I don't think there was a person in the room not hoping that The Reege would fall flat on his face after all that nauseating gloating. Needless to say, we all got what we wished.

I also assume that after last year's career-killing monologue by "comedian" Robert Klein at CBS, the networks ought to be more careful who they choose as talent. By the time Klein walked off the stage after his jokes were greeted with roaring silence, his sitcom The Stones, also starring Judith Light, was yanked off the fall schedule and pushed to midseason.

But you wouldn't know any of the backstage dramatics at a CBS upfront because the network uses the ultimate salesman, Les Moonves, to pitch its lineup. No matter which shows CBS puts on the air—and though the network's had a few good years overall, there have been a few stinkers, like The Brotherhood of Poland, N.H. and The Handler—Moonves has a knack for making everything sound like the biggest thing on the schedule. I've got to hand it to Moonves: He knows how to position a network and sell a lineup. And that includes UPN, which he will be hawking alongside UPN's entertainment president Dawn Ostroff on Thursday.

I'll be particularly interested in seeing how network TV's new executive crew—NBC's Kevin Reilly and ABC's Anne Sweeney and Stephen McPherson—perform in their upfront debuts. With recent momentum building in the NBC camp, Reilly will, no doubt, have the easier task talking to advertisers. As for Sweeney and McPherson, who I certainly don't envy, the good news is that, no matter how bad ABC's schedule looks—and it won't be pretty—most of the blame can still be heaped on ousted execs Lloyd Braun and Susan Lyne. Although Braun and Lyne did a convincing job selling last year's lineup (didn't Karen Sisco look really good at the time?), anything Sweeney or McPherson tell us will be harder to believe. Rebuilding ABC is like climbing a mountain.

Come to think of it, surviving upfront week is no mean feat, either.