Broadcasters Focus on Fridays with Women's Murder Club, Nashville -- and Friday Night Lights

This fall the broadcasters are making several exciting additions to their Friday schedules in an effort to rebuild their audience on that night. The rest of the weekend will look very familiar…except for 8 p.m. Sunday, when CBS has scheduled the drama with music Viva Laughlin, one of the more unusual scripted shows to hit the networks in years.

FRIDAY

Give the networks credit for trying to revive their Friday lineups this fall. You cannot look at their announced schedules and not agree that they are trying to bring broadcast back on the night that was once home to such memorable performers as The Odd Couple, Dallas, Falcon Crest, Miami Vice, Dukes of Hazzard, Providence, The X-Files and a host of popular sitcoms that were bundled together in ABC's long-dead TGIF franchise.

Consider: CBS at 9 p.m. is adding Moonlight, a procedural-crime drama with a hunky vampire as its central character, in between the returning and still sturdy Ghost Whisperer at 8 and Numb3rs at 10. ABC is bringing back the modest success Men in Trees at 8 as the lead-in to freshman drama Women's Murder Club. NBC is starting its night with the dependable Deal or No Deal, followed by the critically acclaimed Friday Night Lights and the sexy drama Las Vegas, two shows that deserve to do better than they have done in the past.

The downsides: Moonlight was announced in May but remains unseen by critics in August. This is not a good sign. Putting folksy Friday Night Lights on one of the lowest rated nights of the week may further prevent it from attracting the viewers it so desperately needs to survive -- and it does not seem like a compatible lead-in to the super-glitzy Las Vegas. Men in Trees in its first season was bounced all over ABC's schedule and was unable to amass a core audience. Viewers may have given up on it.

The upsides: If Moonlight proves to be a sexy, scary show it could strengthen CBS' entire Friday lineup. Las Vegas has always held the promise of becoming a hot adult drama and may do so in its new nothing-to-lose time period. (CBS is going to push broadcast boundaries with its sexy new Latino drama Cane. NBC should do the same with Las Vegas.) Critics are rooting for Men in Trees. Women's Murder Club, starring Angie Harmon, was surprisingly well received by young female critics and journalists at the summer Television Critics Association tour.

And Friday Night Lights at least remains among the living!

Fox is going the reality route with the music competition show The Search for the Next Great American Band, which does not sound promising, and Nashville, which could be one of the significant unscripted success stories of the fall. Nashville follows young country music hopefuls as they struggle to make it in the title city, and it's from the producers of the red-hot MTV series Laguna Beach and The Hills.

Over on The CW, WWE Smackdown! will do whatever Smackdown! will do. Young men will watch, and nobody else will care. One might assume in this era of savage, stripped-down Ultimate Fighting that the over-produced Smackdown! would seem silly and dated, but apparently that isn't the case for its young fan base.

SATURDAY

There is nothing much to say here. Fox will keep a pulse with its long-running reality franchises. (Cops remains an engrossing and educational series, shining a light on the atrocities police officers must deal with on a regular basis, while America's Most Wanted continues to assist in the capture of murderers and other monsters. They should both run forever.) ABC will stay alive with college football. CBS and NBC have thrown in the towel with two hours of reruns and one tired newsmagazine each. With the exception of Fox, we might get more interesting syndicated or locally produced fare if the networks gave the night back to their affiliates.

SUNDAY

The CW will fill the 7-8 p.m. hour with two new unscripted series that seem more like basic cable filler than primetime broadcast fare. They are CW Now, a weekly look at varied (and sometimes vapid) aspects of today's manic youth culture (gossip! fashion! hot clubs!) and Online Nation, a television showcase for the kinds of videos and short movies that have become a staple of Internet viewing on YouTube and elsewhere. (Question: Once you're a hit on the Net, where potentially millions of people will see your work, what's the point of putting it on tired old television? Discuss.)

Don't worry about the CW shows and CBS' 60 Minutes competing for the same early evening viewers! Football fans, meanwhile, will be glued to NBC's Football Night in America at 7 p.m. in anticipation of the upcoming game.

CBS is trying a bold new programming experiment with Viva Laughlin, a drama with musical sequences that will occupy the prime 8-9 p.m. hour. It's an acquired taste at best, but if women like the show it may have a chance as an alternative to football on NBC and the aging Extreme Makeover: Home Edition on ABC. Still, if Laughlin stumbles it will hurt CBS on this crucial night, so don't expect the network to be patient if this strange show under-performs.

The CW has a warm, family friendly drama at 8 p.m. in Life is Wild, about a veterinarian who moves his family to Africa. Wild is the kind of dramatic television series everybody says should be available on Sunday evenings. If the displaced 7th Heaven audience finds it, Wild will be a Sunday staple for a while. If that doesn't happen, the network should consider moving Wild to Monday, where Heaven flourished for many years.

The 9 p.m. hour will once again find heavyweights Desperate Housewives on ABC and Cold Case on CBS battling for adult ratings. And, once again, they will both do just fine, even if both shows are starting to feel tired.

Two series that enjoyed modest success in their freshman seasons will compete at 10 p.m. ABC's very enjoyable serial Brothers & Sisters will have the buzz while CBS' legal drama Shark will have the bulk, as in more viewers overall. They will likely survive opposite each other, but neither series is poised to emerge as a sophomore smash.

Expect Fox to once again survive very nicely and score among teens and the 18-34 demographic with its reliable 8-10 p.m. animation block: The Simpsons, King of the Hill, Family Guy (which will mark its 100th episode in the fall) and American Dad.

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