On the heels of the broadcast network’s fall announcements
comes the never-ending trickle of cable commitments. As is their wont, many of
these shows will debut in the summer months (like, June) when broadcast network
series are on hiatus.

TNT will be showing us a hospital series starring Jada
Pinkett Smith called Hawthorne, Jerry
Bruckheimer’s got a cop show called Dark
Blue that stars Dylan McDermott, Mark Burnett’s got a new reality series
called Wedding Day, and this December
a series with an impressive pedigree called Men
of a Certain Age starring Ray Romano, Andre Braugher and Scott Bakula.

truTV has a bunch of “reality” shows that fit square into
their format: a behind the scenes show called NFL Full Contact– the sort we used to call a “documentary,” Conspiracy Theory with Governor Jesse
Ventura, U.S. Special Ops: Declassified
– a program that outs our nation’s terrorist hunters, and Full Throttle, another behind the scenes look at Ballard’s Full
Throttle Saloon biker bar in Sturgis, South Dakota.

TBS has some inexpensive stuff lined up: a talk show
starring George Lopez, an animated
sitcom about suburbanites who used to live “down below” called Neighbors from Hell, and, of course, they’ve
picked up Tyler Perry’s Meet the Browns
and The Bill Engvall Show.

MTV has a new series ripped from today’s political
headlines called 16 & Pregnant.
There hasn’t been a teevee series with a more self-descriptive title since The Jack Paar Program.

Boy, is Chris Claremont going to be unhappy…

The last of the broadcast nets revealed themselves this
morning, and in a fit of original thought they’re giving us a lot more of the
same.

Angelenos, The Beautiful Life, and The Vampire Diaries are being added. They’re about pretty but dangerous residents of Los Angeles, struggling fashion models, and a family of vampire brothers, respectively. Oh, and they’re bringing Melrose Place back. Holy 90210, Bat-brain!

The Gossip Girl spin-off got spiked, as did the CW’s entire attempt to
program Sundays. The night is being returned to the individual affiliates.

On a personal note, the only sitcom I’ve actually enjoyed
(non-animated) all century, Everybody Loves Chris, played its last, last Friday. Just like the show’s creator Chris Rock, the titular Chris dropped out of school when forced to take the 10th grade over. He may or may not have passed his GED; the show ended with a wonderful send-up of The Sopranos finale. It went out in style.

Smallville will be back. Now that he’s flying, please give him the big red S. C’mon. The movie sucked. Kal-El’s Superman without the cape, and the “red-blue-blur” is just stupid.

Here’s the list of network shows that will disappear into
the black hole of broadcast oblivion. It’s possible that, like Medium, one or more of these shows might
get picked up by other broadcast or cable nets.

• According to Jim
• Cupid
• Eleventh Hour
• Everybody Hates Chris
• Kath & Kim
• Kings
• Life
• Lipstick Jungle
• My Name Is Earl
• Privileged
• Reaper
• Samantha Who?
• Sit Down, Shut Up
• Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles
• The Game
• The Unit*
  
• The Unusuals
• Without a Trace
• Worst Week

* UPDATE: The Unit has already been picked up for the broadcast syndication marketplace by Twentieth Television for Fall 2010. The series has already been sold in all top 15 markets and cleared in 56% of the country.  Stations acquiring the program are primarily FOX Television Stations with a smattering of stations from CBS Station Group and some independent players.

From our good friends and ComicMix alumni over at the Flickcast, we find a trailer for the new Human Target series coming soon to Fox, starring Mark Valley as Christopher Chance, with Tricia Helfer, Jackie Earle Haley and Chi McBride.

Looks like fun– although I hope they use the rubber masks once in a while.

In a popular and academic marketplace where everyone wants and needs to learn better, smarter, faster, we have series upon series of
things that have titles that are playfully self-deprecating in the hopes of our being brave enough to channel our inner superhero and dive in and learn something that might have seemed a bit daunting, such as [[[Philosophy for Dummies]]] and [[[The Idiot’s Guide to Philosophy]]]. We have Sparks Charts and Cliff Notes. And we have the [[[HarperCollins College Outline of Philosophy]]], Ethics, and other subjects. All worthy aids for the harried and hopeful. But something’s missing. It has been proven in multiple studies that we learn in multi-valent ways, using all the senses, so that the more senses that are engaged in learning and the more playful it is, the better we learn and the better we retain things, no matter what our age or inclination.

Now, I’m a Philosophy Geek and I absolutely love this stuff, but I know it’s not for everyone, can be a hard read and a hard sell, and yet it is still foundationally useful – most headhunters and HR people say that they see a background in Philosophy as a plus for new applicants, as it helps them to be better analytical thinkers, better writers, better communicators, better problem solvers (both the NY Times and Wall Street Journal ran articles on this in the past year). Many of our beloved superheroes are very philosophical (look at [[[Watchmen]]]!). I heartily agree, there, and it’s why the term “classical education,” starting since Plato’s time (4^th C. BCE), is still looked upon as something good and useful and the model upon which most modern education is built. After all, can 2500 years be totally wrong? But how to engage more of the senses and assimilate this vast quantity of knowledge in a manageable amount of time and even have fun doing it?

Action Philosophers to the rescue…or rather, writer Fred Van Lente and artist Ryan Dunlavey!

Their three volumes cover everything from the most obscure pre-Socratics to 20^th C. America. The series, like Philosophy, itself (save for the 20^th-21^st Cs.) has a dearth of women – two to be exact: Ayn Rand and Mary Wollstonecraft. And only one native-born American, Joseph Campbell (Rand was an émigré and Jung only came here later in life to teach). The rest are Classical, Continental, and Eastern Philosophers of all the major schools of thought and they read totally like a who’s who. It’s not clear to me, from volume to volume, how the various names were picked and why they were grouped together in these omnibus editions, though within each volume they are chronologically presented. Van Lente’s great talent is to be able to distill down, quite accurately and admirably (I had few quibbles with him, mostly on his takes on the various Christian philosophies, in minor details), the main points of some very complex and mind-bending worldviews, from metaphysics to political science, all with quite the sense of humor, albeit sometimes gallows or black humor. And some of the things aren’t even funny ‘til you look at Dunlavey’s illustrations, which remind me of a cross between Hanna-Barbera and [[[Beavis and Butthead]]], if they’d been done in line drawings, and then you just laugh at the conjunctions.

(more…)

With Jay Leno sucking up the entire 10 PM (Eastern) block on NBC weekdays, one would think the venerable and ever-mutating Law &
Order would be in trouble.

Nope. It dodged the bullet. It’ll be in the family hour on
Fridays. Law & Order: SVU (their sex crimes show, not their tribute to gas guzzlers) will be on Wednesdays at 9 PM, preceded by a new “family drama,” Parenthood. Southland will follow L&O, and Jay Leno follows everything.

The Biggest Loser grabs two hours on Tuesday, followed by Jay Leno. Monday will see Heroes return for a while, followed by a new medical drama, Trauma, which will be followed by Jay Leno. Chuck will bump Heroes after the winter Olympics.

A new comedy called Community will start off following The Office
on Thursdays. Thursday editions of Weekend Update will take the 8 PM slot for about a month or so, at which time 30 Rock will return and take Community’s valued position. At that time, Community will take the
Thursday Weekend Update slot, although Update will return from time
to time. Parks and Recreation will take the in-between slot at 8:30, and everything will be followed by the omnipresent Jay “Mr. Overexposed” Leno.

Dateline gets moved to Saturdays to make room for Sunday
Night Football on – wait for it – Sundays. Jay Leno will probably guest
host both shows.

In NBC’s post-Olympics on-deck circle: the comedy 100 Questions, the reality show The Marriage Ref, and the medical show Mercy.

In a bit of non-network news, HBO has ordered 13 episodes
of an animated series starring Ricky Gervais, based on Gervais’s podcasts.