Broadcast television networks tried to put on a pretty face Tuesday as they began unveiling their fall schedules, but Hollywood's most creative makeup artists couldn't conceal the scars from the industry's three-month brawl with its own writers.
ABC, admitting that the 100-day writers' strike that ended in February wrecked most of its program development, offered a schedule with just two new series -- a game show and a remake of a British cop drama.
And The CW, hammered by the abrupt ratings decline triggered in large part by the strike, turned over one huge chunk of its schedule to spoiled brats and abandoned another entirely.
''No question the strike was destructive,'' ABC programming boss Stephen McPherson told TV writers in a conference call, admitting that his network completed just four pilot episodes instead of the customary 20 or so because of the writers' walkout.
''If you needed a ton of development for the fall schedule, the strike would have been a really bad bet,'' he said. ``You'd have to rush it or put stuff on before you knew what it was.''
McPherson was speaking from New York, where broadcast executives have gathered for the annual ritual known as the ''upfronts,'' in which TV networks show off their new fall programs to advertisers.
With 17 more pilots in production for consideration as midseason replacements, the ABC schedule McPherson released Tuesday seemed tentative at best. But he insisted it was strong -- ``an incredibly stable schedule, a schedule that dominated during the fall. We were winning [the Nielsen ratings] until the strike.''
The only new drama on the ABC lineup is Life On Mars, an American version of a BBC series. It stars Jason O'Mara (The Agency) as a detective who wakes up after a car crash to find himself back in 1973 ) but still working as a cop.
The other new program is Opportunity Knocks, a game show produced by Ashton Kutcher where the host will show up at contestants' homes, handing out prizes for correct answers to trivia questions about their own lives.
With so few new pilots to choose from, ABC renewed several shows on the ratings bubble, including rookie dramas Dirty Sexy Money, Eli Stone and Private Practice -- and, for a fifth and final season, Boston Legal. A sitcom with even more tenuous ratings, According To Jim, will return at midseason.
ABC also rescued a show dumped by another network: the madcap medical sitcom Scrubs. Once considered the successor to Seinfeld and Friends as the cornerstone of NBC's Thursday-night comedy bloc, Scrubs was finally shown the door after seven seasons of iffy ratings. It will return at midseason on ABC with its cast intact.
In a strange but not atypical example of Hollywood cross-pollination, Scrubs is actually made by ABC's production arm -- and McPherson helped develop the show when he was running the ABC studio. But nostalgia, McPherson said, had nothing to do with his decision to make what he called ''a great addition'' to his lineup. Scrubs' ratings problems, he argued, were due to constant shuffling of the NBC schedule -- the show aired in 17 different time slots over its life on the rival network.
Canceled were Women's Murder Club, October Road, Oprah's Big Give, Cashmere Mafia, Notes From The Underbelly, Men In Trees, Miss/Guided, Big Shots, Carpoolers and Cavemen.
At The CW, the problem was not so much a lack of pilots as a lack of viewers. Though audiences shrank for all the broadcast networks during this strike-marred season, The CW's dropped a whopping 19 percent. The decline is expected to accelerate in September, when the network's highest-rated programming -- pro wrestling -- departs for cable.
The CW responded by adding two imitations of its most successful drama, the spoiled-rich-kid chronicle Gossip Girl. One, 90210, is a belated sequel to the 1990-2000 Fox hit Beverly Hills, 90210, with a pair of Kansas kids moving to the big city. (Jennie Garth, who played a drug-addled prom queen in the original, will appear in the new show as a guidance counselor, CW executives said without any apparent sense of irony.) The other, Surviving The Filthy Rich, is about a young teacher's difficulties tutoring a pair of wealthy, self-centered kids in Palm Springs.
''People look at these shows as escapist television,'' CW programming chief Dawn Ostroff told the Associated Press. ``At a time when the nation is going through such financial uncertainty, we thought shows like this might really strike a chord.''
The CW also added one other series, Stylista, a sort of reality-show version of The Devil Wears Prada, with young contestants stabbing each other's Chanel-covered backs as they compete for a job at Elle magazine. And it abandoned any attempt at all to program a Sunday night lineup, turning the evening over to the independent production company Media Rights Capital, which will announce its plans for the night later.
The CW canceled sitcom Aliens In America, but renewed the low-rated comedy-drama Reaper, which will return at midseason.
