2009-10 Season: Wednesday

Remember when I said Tuesday was the night you could skip out and not miss anything on TV? Well, Wednesday isn't much better.

ABC - Throws an entire night of new shows at us, five of their total of eight new shows for the season. Four are sitcoms:

• Hank, starring Kelsey Grammer as an ex-tycoon looking to make his way back to the top;
• The Middle, a Roseann ripoff starring Patricia Heaton;
• The Modern Family, a documentary-style show about the different styles of families out there and how they operate and interact, starring Ed O'Neill;
• and Cougar Town, starring Courtney Cox as a newly-divorced mom getting back into dating.

ABC apparently showed the entire pilot of The Modern Family during its upfront, and at least one critic (Aaron Barnhart of TV Barn and the Kansas City Star) reported that it was pretty well-recieved. That's a good thing, as based on ABC's press releases they all sound like they were generated by the Sitcom9000.

The network ends the night with Eastwick, a drama based on the movie The Witches of Eastwick. Sadly, this is not the only show on Wednesday based on a 20+ year old movie.

Really, a pretty thin night for ABC, but it's probably enough to keep them in third place until they cancel some stuff and bring back Lost.

CBS - Will battle for first place for the night, starting with The New Adventures of Old Christine and Gary Unmarried, moving to Criminal Minds at 9 and finishing with CSI: New York. Solid night all the way around.

Fox - Opens with results shows (So You Think You Can Dance or American Idol) followed by one of two new shows. The first is Glee, the high-school dramedy that aired its pilot earlier this month to good reviews. The oddity is the other show, Human Target, which stars Mark Valley as a man whose job is to get close to potential targets of violence so he can become the target in order to save lives. I don't quite understand how this fits in with a night otherwise dedicated to singing and dancing.

NBC - Starts the night with the other show based on an ancient movie, Parenthood. This is the second go-round in trying to make this into a TV series, and I don't know why it will do any better now. It will move aside in the spring for Mercy, a medical show that's Grey's Anatomy from a nurse's perspective. Had NBC been thinking they'd have combined this with Trauma so they only had one Grey's ripoff on the schedule. That or they'd have scheduled them for the same night and time so that one runs into the other. Viewers may not even notice that they are different shows.

Law & Order: Criminal Intent follows at 9 and Leno wraps things at 10.

The CW - Gives us the next cycle of America's Next Top Model, and follows the unscripted show about model with a scripted one, The Beautiful Life. I wouldn't expect much from it, except that the cast has something for everyone - Elle Macpherson, The OC's Mischa Barton and High School Musical's Corbin Bleu are all in the ensemble. So this may actually work, or at least work as well as anything on The CW does.