CBS, which has made a fortune over the years trafficking in South Florida corpses on CSI: Miami and Dexter, is about to expand its repertoire to our community's maimed, crippled and comatose. The network is adding a medical drama called Miami Trauma to its schedule next season.

Miami Trauma won't air until after the first of the year, and CBS executives offered few details as they unveiled their new schedule Wednesday in New York -- except that it won't be short on severed limbs or flying organs. The pilot episode alone features a pregnant woman blown up in a car explosion, some full-body burns, a missing hand and ''a little bit of everything,'' as one executive familiar with the show cheerfully explained.

Though studio publicity blurbs for the show bubble about Miami's allure (``The sky is blue and the water bluer. . . . It could be paradise. But even paradise needs its angels.''), the producers themselves apparently were able to resist it. Miami Trauma's pilot was shot mostly on the Warner Brothers lot in Hollywood, with Long Beach body-doubling for Miami, and aside from a few aerial shots, the studio doesn't plan to do much filming in South Florida.

The various nutcase and nymphomaniac characters are played by Jeremy Northam (The Tudors), Lana Parilla (Swingtown) and Elisabeth Harnois (One Tree Hill); the show was created by Jeffrey Lieber, one of the producers of Lost. CBS announced Miami Trauma during the so-called upfronts, a week of meetings between the broadcast networks and their advertisers in New York where next season's shows and schedules are revealed.

In a season pockmarked by quick cancellations, smaller audiences and shrinking ad sales, CBS is the only network with anything to cheer about. Not only did it win the year-long Nielsen race, it was the only big broadcast network to add viewers: Its average audience jumped 12 percent.

Even so, the slumping economy cut into the network's revenue, and CBS executives sounded anything but complacent Wednesday, adding four brand-new series for the fall and preparing four others for midseason rollout.

And in a peculiar scenario produced by the tangled and tempestuous relationship between the networks and their production studios, CBS revived a series killed just a day earlier by NBC: the I-see-dead-people crime drama Medium, which even though it aired on NBC was made by CBS' production arm.

Medium will now air at 9 p.m. Fridays between crime drama Numb3rs and CBS' own spook opera, Ghost Whisperer. ''If Ghost Whisperer and Numb3rs had an offspring, it would be Medium,'' CBS programming boss Nina Tassler cracked at a press conference with television writers.

But Tassler wasn't laughing earlier, when her network issued a press release ripping NBC for canceling the show, a decision that would have cost CBS' corporate overseers millions of dollars. The CBS release called the cancellation ''inexplicable,'' then added acidly: `The ratings don't lie. Medium outperforms many of NBC's renewed shows.''

NBC fired back with its own statement noting that Medium's ratings are lower than those of two shows CBS canceled Wednesday, Eleventh Hour and Without A Trace. By midday, the two networks called a temporary truce to remove all the corporate corpses from the battlefield.

The three other dramas joining the CBS fall schedule include the spinoff NCIS: Los Angeles, a military-justice procedural starring Chris O'Donnell as an undercover agent and LL Cool J as a surveillance expert; The Good Wife, with Julianna Margulies as a middle-aged housewife who resumes her legal career after her husband is jailed in a political scandal; and Three Rivers, a medical drama set at hospital specializing in organ transplants.

The network's lone new comedy, Accidentally On Purpose, stars Jenna Elfman (Dharma & Greg) as a 40ish film critic impregnated on a one-night-stand who learns the hard way that the baby and its boy-toy father are about equally mature.

Along with Miami Trauma, the CBS midseason replacements are Canadian cop drama The Bridge, a prince-and-pauper reality series called Undercover Boss in which corporate overlords masquerade as flunkies to see what life in their companies is really like, and a reality show called Arranged Marriage, that, believe it or not, is exactly what it sounds like.

CBS also canceled two other series: military drama The Unit and sitcom Worst Week.

This story is supplemented with material from Miami Herald wire services.

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