With the premiere of the new television season about to commence (NBC kicks of the fall television season with the debut of the Dreamworks CGI animated comedy, Father of the Pride (Windows Media Player required), on Tuesday, August 31st and Hawaii, the next night, Wednesday, Sept. 1 at 8 p.m.) look for the full premiere schedule on VanRamblings next week.
In the meantime, sate yourself with the following tidbits of TV trivia …
BAILEY RETURNS! Party of Five alum Scott Wolf — he was that liar-thief-drunk Bailey — has joined the cast of WB’s Everwood. He’ll play a California doctor who takes over Dr. Abbott’s old practice. “Dr. Abbott and Dr. Brown have gone into practice together, so Scott comes in as the new doctor across the street,” explains exec producer Mickey Liddell. “He starts stealing clients from Abbott and Brown [because] he’s the new, young doctor in town.” It’s those damn dimples, I tell ya.
LEGAL MANOEUVER: David E. Kelley has added Mark Valley (Keen Eddie) to the cast of his upcoming Practice spin-off Boston Legal. Valley will star opposite fellow legal eagles James Spader and William Shatner.
CHARMING FELLA: Mr. Jessica Simpson, Nick Lachey, joins Charmed: Lachey will guest-star in six episodes of The WB’s drama, which debuts Sunday, September 12. Lachey will play a man hired to ghost-write Phoebe’s (Alyssa Milano) newspaper column when she takes some time off. The two eventually begin a romance.

Come this fall, Global TV intends to play much the same game with their schedule that Fox, south of the border, announced a couple of months back. Which means that, from week-to-week throughout the fall and winter, you won’t be able to count on finding many of your favourite television shows in the same spots they were the week before.
As the Globe and Mail’s Guy Dixon wrote in his piece on Global’s upcoming fall 2004 television schedule …

The old idea of a network simply débuting a fall lineup of programmes, which then repeats in the summer, has been laid to rest. In its place is a complicated schedule of show premières stretching into January.

As is the case with the two other private Canadian broadcasters — CTV and CHUM — Global’s fall schedule is heavily laden with American imports.

As you’ve seen in the endless ads for Global’s upcoming season, Friends spinoff Joey (Windows Media Player required); the new Heather Locklear – Blair Underwood airport drama, LAX; The Practice spinoff, Boston Legal; the John Goodman comedy, Center of the Universe; the hour-long drama, The Mountain; House, an ensemble hospital drama about doctors at a Boston medical clinic; Jonny Zero, a drama from ER and The West Wing-producer John Wells about an ex-con with ambitions of becoming a private investigator (January to June); and summer try-outs North Shore and One Tree Hill are among the 40 new shows that have made Global’s fall schedule.

The Apprentice will anchor Global TV’s Thursday nights when the new television season begins this fall.
In addition to The Apprentice and the similarly themed The Billionaire, Global will unveil a pair of boxing-based reality series over the coming year: The Contender, from Apprentice and Survivor producer Mark Burnett and Sylvester Stallone, and The Next Great Champ, featuring champion boxer Oscar De La Hoya and a roster of unknown prize-fighting prospects.
An ever-shifting TV landscape means changes for both Global and CH’s (the latter, Global’s regional network designation) primetime schedules.
Will and Grace and Malcolm in the Middle will return but at new times and, in Will & Grace’s case, on a new day: Wednesdays at 8:30.
24 will return in January, when it will move to Mondays at 9.
Returning shows on familiar nights and times: The Apprentice, Crossing Jordan, Everybody Loves Raymond, Fear Factor, Gilmore Girls, JAG, Judging Amy, King of the Hill, Las Vegas, NYPD Blue, The Simpsons, Survivor, That ’70s Show, Two and a Half Men and Without A Trace.
Returning Canadian shows include Andromeda, Doc, Mutant X, Train 48, Zoe Busiek: Wild Card, and the Burnaby-based Stargate SG-1.
Global’s new Canadian reality series include The Block, a home renovation series based on a popular Australian original, featuring four couples competing to see who can best renovate a run-down apartment; Last Chance for Romance, a relationship dating programme set at a Caribbean resort hotel; and The Temps, a hidden-camera series about unsuspecting office temps compelled to cope with bizarre workplace situations.
And given the recent success of the documentary form, Global has announced that it will produce and air 30 new homegrown documentaries, including a profile of Canada’s women’s Olympic soccer team, a look at the Vivendi-Universal media merger between Jean-Marie Messier and Edgar Bronfman Jr., and a behind-the-scenes look at the inner workings of Vanity Fair, O, Playboy and Macleans magazines.
As for the remaining Canadian television network schedules: here’s a peek at CBC’s, CTV’s and CHUM’s fall television schedules.
For the major U.S. networks fall television schedules, click on the following direct VanRamblings’ links: ABC, NBC, the WB, Fox and UPN, and CBS.

Once again, CHUM Thinks We’re Chumps

CHUM Television has unveiled a prosaic (which is to say, a rather ho-hum) fall television schedule, heavy on reality programming (The Bachelor and The Bachelorette, both ABC shows) and returning U.S.-purchased family dramas, such as Everwood and 7th Heaven (both WB shows).
CHUM will continue to broadcast their usual amalgam of in-house programmes, covering a broad range of topics, from music, fashion, media, cinema and the arts, to sex and sexuality, new media, science fiction and beyond, as well as a glut of movies you’ve seen at the cinema or on video.
The most anticipated new in-house programme is the made-in-Vancouver The Collector, featuring Chris Kramer as a modern-day agent of the devil sent to collect lost souls; the programme has been playing this summer on CHUM’s specialty channel, Space: The Imagination Station. The programme will début on Citytv, and other CHUM stations, early this autumn.
Returning series include the widely-acclaimed Monk, the filmed in Vancouver Smallville, and Enterprise (new day and time, Fridays at 9). Talks shows returning range from The Ellen DeGeneres Show, to the The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, Late Night with Conan O’Brien and Jimmy Kimmel Live.
CHUM’s new programmes for Citytv include And Go!, a 13-week guerrilla-style improv series hosted by comedian Bruce Hunter, an alumnus of Second City, Puppets Who Kill and The Red Green Show.
Other new series, purchased from networks below the 49th parallel:

• Battlestar Galactica, made in Vancouver and starring Edward James Olmos.
• Jack and Bobby.
• Life As We Know It.

All and all, CHUM’s fall television schedule lacks anything approaching creative vision, and comes across more like a cynical grab for advertising dollars. Who’da thought we’d miss Moses Znaimer, missing since 2003?

As for the remaining Canadian television network schedules: here’s a peek at CBC’s fall television schedule, as well as a glimpse of CTV’s fall schedule.
For the major U.S. networks fall television schedules, click on the following direct VanRamblings’ links: ABC, NBC, the WB, Fox and UPN, and CBS.

Welcome to Week Two of the Canadian fall television schedule. Last Wednesday, VanRamblings presented the CBC fall TV schedule.
This week, it’s CTV’s turn.
Promising fewer ‘repeats’ for the coming 2004-2005 television schedule, Bell Globemedia’s CTV network says – just like Fox TV in the U.S. – it will offer new, original programming 52 weeks of the year, not just this fall.
“More titles, less repeats,” pledges Susanne Boyce, CTV programming president. “Canadians have long demonstrated to us that if we build it, they will come.” CTV also laid claim to being No. 1 in Canadian prime time and vowed to further widen the gap between itself and its main competitors, Global (by far the worst website for any Canadian TV network), CHUM (Vancouver’s Citytv website, cuz the parent site is godawful) and the CBC.
Among the programme choices this autumn and winter are new additions to the import crime drama franchises, CSI and Law & Order; Rob Lowe’s new series, Dr. Vegas; and the much-praised sex-and-the-suburbs prime-time soap, Desperate Housewives. In the reality department there’s the British import Wife Swap; as well as The Benefactor, a $1 million giveaway programme, based on the 1950s anthology series, The Millionaire.
CTV also announced its fall daytime lineup, including the Vancouver produced Vicky Gabereau, long thought to be on the chopping block.
Recurring dramas and sitcoms include The Eleventh Hour, Degrassi: The Next Generation, Corner Gas, as well the HBO import The Sopranos, CSI and CSI Miami (plus the new CSI: New York with Gary Sinise), The O.C., According to Jim, The West Wing, ER, Third Watch, Cold Case,Joan of Arcadia and American Idol (and Canadian Idol, of course).
New For Fall Prime-Time
Some of the new prime-time series that CTV’s unveiled:

• CSI: NY: Gary Sinise and Melina Kanakaredes star in this second spinoff of the ‘crime scene investigation’ franchise.
• Dr. Vegas: Rob Lowe is the in-house doc at a high-end Vegas casino. Co-stars Joe Pantoliano.
• Desperate Housewives: Felicity Huffman, Marcia Cross and Teri Hatcher star in this take on modern marriage.
• The Benefactor: Billionaire businessman and Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban wants to give away US$1 million to a complete stranger.
• Wife Swap: Two families get a chance to witness what it’s like to live someone else’s life as their matriarchs trade places for 10 days.
• Instant Star: Can contest winner and feisty SK8RGRL Jude Harrison, 15, cope in this new glam world?
• Robson Arms: This anthology series about the denizens of a Vancouver apartment building is finally in production.
• Athens: O.C. creator Josh Schwarz turns his attentionto the intertwined lives and loves of the fictional New England community of Athens.
• Commando Nanny: Likely to be one of the first series to be cancelled this fall, this comedy, based on Mark Burnett’s experiences as an ex-army commando who gets a job as a nanny in Beverly Hills, stars Gerald McRaney.
• Law and Order: Trial By Jury: Mid-season replacement. Another entry in producer Dick Wolf’s Law and Order crime drama franchise, this time focusing on the courtroom, à la Perry Mason.
• Kevin Hill: Taye Diggs stars in drama about a bachelor entertainment lawyer in New York City.
• Medium: Mid-season replacement. Allison (Patricia Arquette) sees dead people and hears them constantly, too. She soon finds her ‘gift’ can change destinies and provide justice for those who no longer have a voice. Executive-produced by Glenn Gordon Caron (Moonlighting) and Frasier’s Kelsey Grammar.

Here’s a list of all CTV shows, A-Z.
For the major U.S. networks fall television schedules, click on the following direct VanRamblings’ links: ABC, NBC, the WB, Fox, and CBS.