SATURDAY, JUNE 18
Fielder's Choice (Hallmark Channel, 9 p.m. ET) Premiere. Chad Lowe stars as a successful single advertising executive who is slammed with the responsibilities of fatherhood after his sister suddenly dies and his 8-year-old nephew is placed in his care. George Segal, Marin Hinkle, Bodhi Elfman and K'Sun Ray co-star.
SUNDAY, JUNE 19
The Look for Less (Style, 8 p.m. ET) Season Premiere. The View co-host and new mother Elisabeth Hasselbeck is out and America's Next Top Model season-two winner Yoanna House is in as host of Style's budget-minded fashion series. It's nice to see a Top Model winner land somewhere other than the VH1 freak show The Surreal Life, which recently featured the first Top Model winner, Adrianne Curry, and will in its next run include former Top Model judge Janice Dickinson among its housemates.
MONDAY, JUNE 20
Wildfire (ABC Family, 8 p.m. ET) Series Premiere. ABC Family's first scripted series is an outdoor drama with soap opera elements that centers on a troubled 18-year-old girl with a gift for working with horses who takes a job at a family run ranch after serving time in a juvenile detention center. While she struggles to make her new life work, and finds herself in the middle of a possible romantic triangle, the family that runs the ranch faces challenges of its own: Their business is facing dire financial problems and they may have to accept an offer of a merger from another family. The show's title is the name of the horse with which the girl bonds, and even the animal has issues: Wildfire is a candidate for the local sheriff department's equine training program and faces possible sale and slaughter if he doesn't make the grade. Genevieve Cortese, Dennis Weaver, Nana Visitor, Greg Serano and Micah Alberti star.
cyber seduction: His Secret Life (Lifetime, 9 p.m. ET) Premiere. Last year at this time, young Jeremy Sumpter was gearing up for what promised to be a memorable year as the star of the new CBS drama Clubhouse, an early favorite with critics at the start of the 2004-05 television season. Clubhouse bombed but Sumpter has moved on, landing the lead role in this made-for-Lifetime movie about a high school swimming star who becomes addicted to online pornography. Like just about anyone who becomes addicted to anything, the boy begins to turn away from family, friends, school and other interests as his obsession with sexually explicit imagery intensifies. It sounds lurid, but this is actually a subject that parents of teenage children should know about, because it's just one of the many hazards that await kids who are allowed to go online unsupervised.
The 33rd AFI Life Achievement Award: A Tribute to George Lucas (USA Network, 9 p.m. ET) Premiere. Star Wars creator George Lucas received the American Film Institute's Life Achievement Award on June 9 in a ceremony at the Kodak Theatre in Los Angeles. The event was taped for presentation tonight. Among the luminaries seen paying on-stage tribute to Lucas during this special are Steven Spielberg, Richard Dreyfuss, Mark Hamill, Carrie Fisher, Harrison Ford, Tom Hanks and three special guests from the Star Wars sagas: Chewbacca, C3PO and R2D2.
Celebrity Charades (AMC, 9 p.m. ET) Series Premiere. Husband and wife actors Chad Lowe and Hilary Swank and actor/director Bob Balaban are the executive producers of this freewheeling game series, in which celebrities in a party setting mime movie titles to win money for charitable causes, pausing between rounds to enjoy dinner and mingle with other guests. In each episode, the celebs are divided into two teams and race to correctly identify ten movie titles and the overall theme of those movies. Among the stars participating are Stanley Tucci, Billy Baldwin, Lorraine Bracco, Rosie Perez, Hank Azaria, Carson Kressley, Sam Rockwell, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Griffin Dunne, Ana Gasteyer, Julianna Marguiles, Bebe Neuwirth, Montel Williams, Joey McIntyre, Jill Clayburgh and Kristen Johnston. AMC will run the five episodes of this series every night this week at 9 p.m. ET.
TUESDAY, JUNE 21
AFI's 100 Years… 100 Movie Quotes (CBS, 8 p.m. ET) Premiere. Three Hours. It's a big week for specials from the American Film Institute. USA Network on Monday telecast the AFI tribute to George Lucas. Tonight, CBS presents one of those irresistible AFI top-100 countdown specials. These shows are always filled with dozens of delightful clips that make for a warmly nostalgic night of television viewing. The title of this special is self-explanatory. The host is Pierce Brosnan.
Average Joe: The Joes Strike Back (NBC, 8 p.m. ET) Season Premiere. This played-out NBC reality franchise in which dorks and nerds are forced to compete against each other and a number of buff, belligerent gym rats for the affection of a beautiful woman wheezes back onto the network's schedule with a similarly tired reality show twist: Several of the Joes receive shocking makeovers after they are kicked to the curb. Fans of this series will be pleased to note that Joes from earlier seasons return to coach the current crop of inevitable losers.
I Want To Be a Hilton (NBC, 9 p.m. ET) Series Premiere. The summer glut of vapid reality series continues with this new arrival featuring the wealthy and powerful Kathy Hilton, who should have better things to do with her time than immerse herself in a bloated genre of cheap television programming. Perhaps she was envious of all the media attention lavished on her daughters, especially Paris. Certainly, those girls should have better things to do than provide the tabloids with endless fodder and, in the case of Paris, indulge in the kind of tawdry behavior that resulted in a highly unflattering portrayal in a recent episode of Comedy Central's South Park. Evidently, bad choice-making runs in the family. That said, there is nothing at all offensive about I Want To Be a Hilton, but there is nothing particularly special about it, either. Fourteen contestants are divided into two teams and made to compete in tasks that teach them how to behave like one of the elite. Each week the losing team loses one member. The last contestant standing will win a $200,000 trust fund, an apartment in Manhattan and a new wardrobe, among other perks.
The Real World: Austin (MTV, 10 p.m. ET) Season Premiere. Now here's a reality show worth getting excited over -- one that, as it begins its sixteenth season, stands as the grandfather of the current reality television craze and remains as entertaining as when it premiered way the heck back in 1992. Of course, audience interest in this show is somewhat dependent on the casting of its seven housemates, but there is usually one emotional basket case, one slut, one dimwit and at least one angry young man or woman in the bunch, ensuring conflicts and consequences to come. In the current MTV special that introduces the Austin cast members, one of this season's young males said that he grew up watching TRW and looked up to the roommates of previous seasons as if they were each on a pedestal. Now that his dream has come true, he continued, he can "smell the pedestal." Can't make something like that up. Can't resist this series, either.
Rescue Me (FX, 10 p.m. ET) Season Premiere. Season two opens with firefighter Tommy Gavin's life sinking ever deeper into the abyss: He's been reassigned to a Staten Island firehouse where he feels like an outsider, he desperately misses his kids, his replacement in his old New York City firehouse is proving increasingly popular with his old crew, and his drinking problems are getting worse by the day. Understandably, he's also still prone to sudden expressions of rage and despair over the devastating losses of 9/11. (He really blows when he catches someone selling commemorative cookies at Ground Zero.) Meanwhile, Franco continues to deal with the injuries he sustained in that devastating fire at the end of last season and with his new status as a single working dad. Denis Leary's tense performance as Tommy remains one of the best in current series television, and Rescue Me continues to offer a blend of drama, comedy and blunt realism unmatched by any other show.
WEDNESDAY, JUNE 22
30 Days (FX, 10 p.m. ET) The second installment of Morgan Spurlock's striking new documentary series follows Los Angeles resident Scott Bridges, 35, as he dives into a month-long battle against the aging process. Now married with three children and a demanding career, it seems he's not in the same shape he was 15 years earlier, when he was a collegiate swimmer, and he's totally stressed about it. Tune in and see if four weeks of daily human growth hormone and testosterone injections, nutritional supplements, regular workouts and nutritional guidance make Scott a happy fellow.
THURSDAY, JUNE 23
I Wanna Be a Soap Star (SoapNet, 11 p.m. ET) Season Premiere. Twelve aspiring actors who will do just about anything to land a gig on a soap opera compete for a 13-week role on ABC's All My Children in the second season of this synergistic SoapNet reality series. (SoapNet is one of ABC's cable siblings.) The contestants live on a sound stage with real soap sets while competing in a series of soap opera-inspired acting challenges. The first season of this show, which offered as its grand prize a short-term role on General Hospital, wasn't a hit with critics, but it worked wonders for winner Mykel Shannon Jenkins. His gig on GH began way back in November and was finished in February but he's still with the show in the recurring role of Officer Byron Murphy.
FRIDAY, JUNE 24
Naturally, Sadie (Disney Channel, 8 p.m. ET) Series Premiere. Here's an admirable premise for a series targeted to kids: It's about a smart teenage girl who dreams of becoming an animal behaviorist like her idol, Dr. Jane Goodall. Seems Sadie Hawthorne understands animals better than her classmates and has a habit of imagining how certain events involving her peers would play out in the wild. (We hope Sadie has been watching Dr. Goodall's specials on Animal Planet.) Disney will present two new episodes of this live-action series tonight at 8 and 8:30 p.m. ET.