Fox Makes Things So Complicated; UPN Enjoys Being a Girl

Fall:

Winter:

Whew. All that programming left little time at Fox's presentation for the usual pretaped skits, parodies and whatnot, although the show did open with a video monologue by a scary, Big Brother-y looking character, reading "The Rules of Television": All series must have Very Special Episodes that run during sweeps month, and so on. The message: at Fox, with its "revolutionary" new summer season, "There are no rules." Which was not only self-serving but wrong, since pretty much every show I described above is taken from one page or another of the same Bible. (Thou shalt rip off thy competition's hit reality shows; thou shalt air sitcoms about nutty families struggling to raise teenagers; thou shalt clone thy successful soaps.)

By the end of the presentation, the advertising crowd seemed downright fidgety and restless, maybe because those fall and winter schedules are about as concrete at this point as a 20-year government deficit projection. They can, and likely will, be tinkered with, shuffled and if necessary torn up as the sure-fire hits introduced in the meantime are cancelled. Even at the revolutionary Fox, that law is harder to break than gravity.

UPN

UPN, on the other hand, is my new favorite network, because in its upfront at Madison Square Garden it announced just four new shows. Will they be good? Will they be bad? Who cares? At least I can understand their schedule without a slide rule.

Remember a few years ago, when "Smackdown!" was the hottest show on UPN and it rounded out its slate with rude-boy shows like "Shasta McNasty"? A strange thing has happened since then: the testosterone network has gone all girly. The estrogenous "America's Next Top Model" is the biggest hit the network has ever had. (Little-known fact about TV: women actually want to watch scantily clad hot women knocking each other down on runways more than men do.) So today the network said it would stop fighting its feelings and free the woman trapped inside its hairy-chested body.

UPN is giving itself a demographic sex change, focusing on women under 35. (Don't worry guys: "Smackdown!" stays on Thursday, when every conscious female will be watching "Joey," "Survivor" or "The O.C." in its new time slot anyway.) Which means that next season we get not one but two editions of Tyra Banks' ingenious masterpiece of ambition and bitchiness. Bridging the months between them will be "The Missy Elliott Project," which UPN describes as a hip-hop version of "Top Model," in which a group of aspiring performers hits the road to get their freak on and compete to become her protege.

The network's one new sitcom is "Second Time Around," a romantic comedy about a divorced couple that gets remarried. The two new dramas are even more femme-friendly. "Veronica Mars" is sort of a detective version of "The O.C." — a working-class girl living in a rich California enclave struggles to fit in, while occasionally helping her private-eye dad with investigations. (The trailer actually looked less derivative — slightly — than I make it sound.) And perhaps the X-chromosomiest of all its new offerings is "Kevin Hill," in which the sculpted Taye Diggs plays a sharky entertainment lawyer who adopts his dead cousin's baby, loses his job, and takes a new post with a small do-gooder legal term. Or, to put it in terms relevant to the intended audience: "Blah blah blah lawyer blah blah blah baby blah blah OMIGOD, TAYE DIGGS IS SO HOT!!!"

And that's it. Four shows and we're done. Which I why I beseech you, my readers, to watch the programs of my new favorite network, UPN. Watch the new ones and the old ones. Watch them if they are good, and if they are bad, why, turn the TV on to UPN, leave the room and read an edifying book! If all goes according to plan, next year, at the end of yet another, overblown exhausting, overpromising TV upfront week, UPN will not need to announce a single new show. And at least one TV columnist and his aching typing fingers will be extremely grateful. Happy viewing.