Upfronts: ABC

Here's what the Alphabet has in store for next season:

Retuning Shows: No major surprises, though Happy Endings getting renewed may be a small one. Then again, ABC usually finds one mid-season bubble show to bring back (think October Road, Better Off Ted, Notes from the Underbelly, or Eli Stone). On the down side, none of these got a second renewal. Save your money, Happy Endings cast and crew!

Schedule-wise, Cougar Town loses its Wednesday spot and moves to Tuesdays after Dancing With the Stars ends. Probably not what they wanted. Body of Proof also lands on Tuesdays, hoping to build on DWTS so it can survive without it later.

I'm fairly surprised that Extreme Makeover: Home Edition was moved from Sunday to Friday, as the Sunday group of shows seemed like a good family/female alternative to football on NBC. It also seems like an odd fit with Shark Tank, which follows.

New Shows:

Monday - No new shows.

Tuesday - the night opens with Last Man Standing, about a manly man (Tim Allen) who is the boss at work but is under the thumb of the gynocracy at home thanks to his wife (Nancy Travis) and three daughters. Then the wife goes back to work, gets promoted, and dad has to take on more parenting duties. To me, this sounds like they're just reshooting episodes of According to Jim or some crap like that. Pass.

The show that follows, Man Up, seems equally regurgitated. Three sensitive modern men apparently try to figure out how to be manly men like their dads, while at the same time try to keep the women folk happy. I am not sure how this is different than former ABC shows The Secret Lives of Men or Big Shots. Oh wait, it's not!

At midseason we'll also get Apartment 23, about a woman who moves to New York to work for a company whose boss gets busted for embezzelment shortly thereafter. She then gets a job at a coffee shop and moves in with another employee after they bond over scamming each other. And James van der Beek plays himself. As odd as this sounds, it still seems to be the best new show they'll have on Tuesdays.

Wednesday - Moving into the Wednesday block of sitcoms is Suburgatory, which sees a dad and his teenaged daughter move out of the city and move into a suburban neighborhood that is apparently straight out of The Stepford Wives. While I do like that the single parent in this case is a dad, I'm less crazy about returning to the suburban jungle trope.

That theme is expanded upon in the night's drama, Revenge. The lead character is a young woman newly moved into a town in the Hamptons... or newly moved in again, as the locals don't realize that, as a child, she lived in town until her family was destroyed. The woman blames certain residents for this, and so she's moved back to get, well, you know.

If you ever wanted to know how the Paul Young story line from Desperate Housewives would have worked out if Paul was a young woman, here you go.

Thursday - the night opens with the return of Charlie's Angels. 30 years after the show ended its first run on ABC and eight years after the last movie. This time around the Angels aren't overmatched police cadets, but rather women who have fallen afoul with the law (or military) but who have certain talents that are recognized by Charlie Townsend, who brings them together to solve crimes. The other change is that the new show is set in Miami, for what that's worth.

I suppose there is enough nostalgia factor for this to reach people, between the generations who watched the show and the more recent generations who saw the movies. Minka Kelly is probably the biggest name involved, which may also help bring in the youngsters. If it manages the lighter tone suggested in the press release this may be a good lead in for the returning shows.

Friday and Saturday - no new shows.

Sunday - gets two new shows. The new lead in for Desperate Housewives is Once Upon a Time, in which a young bail bondswoman is reunited with the son she gave up for adoption. He tells her that he believes she is the lost daughter of Snow White and Prince Charming, and that the town he lives in is full of fairy tale characters who were sent into modern times, unaware of their past, by the evil queen. Got that?

As much as I want to dismiss this, the cast features some notable names: Ginnifer Goodwin, Jennifer Morrison, and Robert Carlyle. I suppose it also qualifies as being more family/female friendly. Interested to see how this goes, even if I don't plan on watching it.

Finally, if you're going to riff on Mad Men, you might as well do it in that show's time slot. That seems to be the thinking with Pan Am, a drama featuring pilots and stewardesses at the dawn of the jet age. I have similar concerns here as I do with The Playboy Club, that the show will be more about the '60s and less about the story.

On the plus side, with Mad Men not coming back until next March, Pan Am may fill a need for those of us jonesing for Don Draper and his cronies.

Not Yet Scheduled - on the drama side we have Good Christian Belles, which sounds like a TV version of Hope Floats - Texas woman who had it all loses it, and moves home to people who expected her to be the same person she was when she left. I really wish the show was using the name of the book it was based on - Good Christian Bitches. There's also Missing, starring Ashley Judd as a mom who goes to Europe to find her missing son, using the contacts developed by her dead husband, who was a CIA agent. Last but not least is The River, which sees the family and friends of a well-known TV naturalist go to the Amazon to find him after he disappears. Maybe he's with Ashley Judd's kid?

The lone sitcom left is Work It, where two "alpha males" (and what is up with all the manly men at ABC this season?) dress as women to land jobs as pharmaceutical reps. The press release calls it "smart, funny and relevant." What it does not call it is an updated version of Bosom Buddies. Somewhere, Peter Scolari calls his lawyer.