Mateas Media Consulting

Mateas Media Consulting

Write to:

Lisa at mateas.com

More areas of interest:

TV History

Mateas Family

Mateas Media Consulting 

Fall 2003-2004 Fox TV Network Programming Schedule

 Descriptions and Analysis

New Series in blue.

Click on underlined titles for information.

Here's the link to Fox's own 2003 Schedule website.

New Series

American Juniors:  Yes, it's just as gruesome as it sounds -- American Idol with kid performers.  It made the fall schedule on the assumption, probably correct, that it will be a smash during its tryout this summer, and while I'd poke my own eyes out before I'd look at something like this, thank goodness for Fox I'm probably in the minority of viewers.  If you like kids, caterwauling and competition, American Juniors is for you.  Include me out....  Update 7/8/03:  Surprisingly, American Juniors hasn't been the smash hit so far this summer that Fox wanted.  What effect, if any, will this have on their fall plans?  No word yet.  Official Fall Premiere Date:  10/28/03.  Update 9/4/03:  Fox, reacting to less-than-stellar AJ performance this summer, has pushed the next edition back to Summer '04.  A second run of Joe Millionaire will fill the timeslot through the November sweeps period.

Arrested Development:  Another nutty family show, this one's got an interesting cast -- Jason Bateman, Jessica "Play Misty for Me" Walter, cult comedy fave David "Mr. Show" Cross -- and a premise in which members of a well-to-do family come together after the father is put in jail for shady business practices.  Bateman is Michael, a widower with a young son, the most normal of the clan and the one who finds himself trying to help his eccentric family cope with their new circumstances, namely sans money.  Fox has a tremendous thematic flow going throughout their entire Sunday night line-up, and if Arrested Development and The Ortegas work, this could be the most successful and celebrated night of dysfunctional families on TV ever.  Update 6/19/03:  Actor Jeffrey Tambor (Hank on Larry Sanders) has been added as a regular in the role of the father, which was originally a limited guest role but has now expanded.  Premiere Date:  11/2/03.  Review 12/17/03:  Arrested Development is getting lots of love from the press for its definitely skewed take on family life and a surprisingly good performance from Jason Bateman and recent guest star Liza Minnelli.  The voiceover by Ron Howard brings to mind similar British comedies such as People Like Us which frankly make better use of it; Howard's voice is tremendously recognizable and more of a distraction than merely droll commentary here, but it doesn't hold back this nutty show that at least aspires to be something different and definitely succeeds on that front.  It's a great companion piece to the other Sunday night Fox comedies, where creativity is king.

Luis:  Wow, Friday's a tough night this coming fall, and Luis Guzman and his new comedy are smack dab in the middle of the fray.  Guzman, a very familiar movie and TV face these days, with a career that dates back to the late seventies in role after small character role, get his chance to shine as he plays the owner of a NYC doughnut shop and building landlord, surrounded, of course, by an assorted of multi-ethnic, prickly, and 100% eccentric friends and neighbors.  The good news is that Luis Guzman is a talented actor and the show has a very compatible lead-in with Wanda at Large, the returning comedy starring the equally volatile and frequently hilarious Wanda Sykes.  The not-so-good news is that Luis is one of five new shows in the Friday 8p - 9pm time period, including two other comedies, plus CBS' simply divine drama Joan of Arcadia and the new Alicia Silverstone hour on NBC.  In comedy terms, those looking for a high dose of sass and should look no further than Fox's double-threat.  It remains to be seen whether America will go soft on us and opt for more traditional formulas when it gets down to choosin' time.  From what I've read Guzman is also a nice guy with a background in social work -- putting him in the "I've been a real person, too" category just like Wanda Sykes, who was a government employee in her pre-comedy days -- so he undoubtedly worked hard to get where he is.  Good for him, and good luck to Luis!  Premiere Date:  9/26/03.  Update and Review 10/6/03:  The word is not good so far for Luis.  Fox's Friday line-up is lagging far behind the big three, with both Wanda at Large and Luis being particularly hard hit by the competition.  Then again, it would be a lot more sad if Luis were a wonderful show, which it isn't, unfortunately.  It's one of those comedies where the rhythm feels like comedy and the actors move as if they're in a sitcom, but what's on the screen just isn't funny at all.  If NBC's Whoopi is an example of a cranky urban comedy, then Luis is an even crankier one; it may be that Luis Guzman is just too much of a character actor to look or feel at home at the head of an ensemble.  You hate to see a hard-working pro like Guzman have his first solo effort shot down, but like we said, the man's a pro and he'll bounce back.  It's expected that Fox will put the kibosh on their Friday line-up at some point in the near future.  Update 10/28/03:  Fox has given Luis its first official cancellation of the season, opting to fill the slot with movies, specials and double-runs of Wanda at Large.  Update 12/18/03:  Wanda's gone now, too, and Fox is back to filling the Friday 8pm slot with specials and movies.     

A Minute With Stan Hooper:  This Norm MacDonald-starring series seems to be  getting a bunch of hopeful high-fives from industry sources, at least, and that's encouraging.  He's a NY television commentator, famous for touting the virtues of real America, who decides to practice what he preaches and move to Middle America...Wisconsin, specifically.  Of course, once he and his wife get there, everybody's nuts or gay or otherwise romantically confused, and Norm has his comic work cut out for him.  There's no denying it's always nice when an actual comedian gets a sitcom, and smushed in the middle between That 70s Show and Bernie Mac sounds like a wonderful place to incubate this potential breakout hit.  Premiere Date:  10/29/03.  Update 1/15/04:  Fox has cancelled the show.

The O.C.:  In what looks like an attempt by Fox to offer something for teen viewers and others seeking more melodrama than you get during a makeover, an autopsy or NBC's sitcoms, The O.C. -- stands for Orange County, California -- makes its way into the very competitive Thursday prime environment.  Although those of us who are familiar with Orange County know that only a teeny bit of it is moneyed enough qualify for this show -- like maybe a few ultra-upscale beach communities -- this is TV, after all, and it's been a while since a genuine nighttime soap opera (non-reality, that is) caught on.  In TOC's dazzling sun-drenched world, we learn than money doesn't guarantee happiness, especially when you're a teenager, and that beautiful people are pretty perhaps only on the outside.  If continuing drama -- and main male adult lead Peter Gallagher -- hit your buttons, this is the show for you, but it's going to have a tough time surviving.  TOC is going up against the weeks' biggest NBC/CBS juggernaut, and it will take more than the flash of West Coast bling bling to make it through the season.  Fox plans to start airing the show in summer in an attempt to jumpstart the show, but if it flops, Thursday nights will look like a done deal even before the race has really started.  Update 6/16/03:  The O.C. will premiere on Tuesday August 5th at 9pm until it moves to its fall Thursday berth on 10/30/03.  Update 9/03:  The O.C. has been a hit so far for Fox, with continual growth since its early debut this summer.  The jumpstart appears to have worked; it's nice insulation against the fall competition but no guarantee of future success, of course.  Update 10/6/03:  Fox has decided to move The O.C. out of the murderous Thursday 9pm slot and into Wednesday at 9pm, displacing Bernie Mac and Cedric the Entertainer.  Bernie Mac will move to Sundays, replacing The Ortegas which is on hold.  The O.C.'s former Thursday slot will be filled by encore plays of the Tuesday night drama Skin.  Update 10/15/03:  Fox has given The O.C. an early full season pick-up.

The Ortegas:  One of two series this year based directly on British hits (the other one is NBC's Coupling), The Ortegas is America's Hispanic version of the BBC's The Kumars at No. 42 which features an Indian family.  A hybrid of talk show and sitcom, it's the story of a young man, Luis Ortega, still living at home with his parents, who hosts a talk show from his own backyard TV studio.  As in the British version, actual celebrity guests will appear on Luis' show, and supposedly what transpires between them, Luis -- rising comic talent Al Madrigal -- and his crazy family will be spontaneous and unrehearsed.  This sounds a little like My Big Fat Mexican Talk Show, but if The Ortegas works for Fox the way The Kumars worked across the pond, it will be a tremendous addition to their already strong Sunday night line-up.  Let's also hope that it goes over better than the real-life version of the sitcom's premise, The Michael Essany Show, which E! made into a series this year.  I give Essany points for pluck and I'm sure if he had a stable of writers he'd be as funny as a sitcom, too.  Premiere Date:  11/2/03.  Updated 10/6/03:  Citing creative issues as well as scheduling opportunities for other programs, Fox will hold The Ortegas until at least midseason, and has stopped production at six episodes.  The Sunday 8:30pm slot will be filled by The Bernie Mac Show, which moves from Wednesdays; Fox now will have only one new show, Arrested Development, on their successful Sunday comedy block.   

The Simple Life:  Spoiled rich girls Paris Hilton and Nicole Ritchie get the chance to make like Lisa "I Get Allergic Smelling Hay" Douglas from Green Acres when they're plopped down in the middle of Arkansas for the duration of this fish-out-of-water reality skein.  Update  and Review 12/18/03:  Surprisingly, this isn't as bad as it sounds, with the producers wisely allowing the decency and hard work ethics of the farm family to shine through and over the moneyed moans of the beleaguered heiresses.  Insipid and randy Paris Hilton clearly belongs in a "Trust Fund Girls Gone Wild" video, while Ms. Ritchie at least has the good manners to attempt to be polite and pleasant when speaking to her elders.  Update 1/15/04:  I've changed my mind.  This show is unwatchable, the girls hideous, and of course the show is working like a charm.  Makes you yearn for a bloody class war, doesn't it?       

Skin:  Simply put, it's "Romeo and Juliet" in modern-day Los Angeles, as a handsome half-Hispanic young man falls in love with a lovely Anglo girl, only to learn that his parents and her parents are essentially at war.  You see, Adam's parents are members of the L.A. judiciary, engaged in a high-profile case against Jewel's father, an incredibly successful producer of adult movies.   Law vs. disorder, Anglo vs. Hispanic, highly ethical vs. coldly ambitious...all these elements and more are what Fox thinks will put Skin onto viewers' most-talked-about list.  It's in a tough time period -- Monday night at 9pm -- but if sitcoms, football, heartwarming family drama or NBC's new show Las Vegas don't do it for you, maybe this interesting premise will.  With plot points that could bring in swooning teen girls as well as slightly older women, and with criminal elements that might keep guys around, Skin could end up being the show with something for everybody, or less happily, nothing for anybody.  Starring the always abrasive but intelligent Ron Silver, the interesting Rachel Ticotin, the versatile Kevin Anderson, and a couple of attractive relative newcomers as the romantic duo, Skin has great potential but it remains to be seen whether grand melodrama like this can survive.  NBC tried it this past season with Kingpin, and though it was a decent critical success it never caught on with audiences.  (This is one of the shows, btw, that's part of the industry's current fascination with the porn industry, including Family Business on Showtime.  Ooh, aren't we daring?)  Premiere Date:  10/20/03.  Update 10/6/03:  As a result of Fox's decision to move The O.C. to Wednesdays, Skin will be given a weekly encore play Thursdays at 9pm, a strategy that worked over the summer for The O.C., resulting in good sampling.  Update 11/5/03:  After only two airings, Skin has been cancelled due to disappointing numbers.  Eight episodes in total had been produced.   

Tru Calling:  Looks like the talented Eliza Dushku (Faith on Buffy The Vampire Slayer) is being thrown to the wolves, her new show slotted into Thursday at 8pm against Friends and the new Survivor outing.  The premise is the out-there combined with the very much here-and-now, as Tru, a gifted medical student temporarily working at the city morgue, hears murder victims telling their stories, somehow gets skipped back in time to before they were killed, and has a chance to prevent the crime.  You've got to admire the casting of this show -- Eliza Dushku is an extremely dynamic and appealing actress -- and Fox's attempt to add a little twist to TV's current obsession with dead bodies.  Tru Calling looks like it could be a super show, although we sadly remember how UPN's talking-to-the-dead detective show Haunted didn't last very long.  For those of us who long for something out of the ordinary, it's frustrating to see all the plodding, obvious and so-alike drama shows continuing to dominate.  Though audiences claim to crave unusual and supernaturally-influenced material, they instead constantly reject it for more traditional forms.  Scully and Mulder wouldn't even fly today; they'd have to be a husband-and-wife autopsy team.  It will be sad to see Tru Calling go, so catch it while you can.  Premiere Date:  10/30/03.  Review 11/5/03:  This one's worth watching if only for Eliza Dushku, but the off-beat premise works in a confused kind of way, too.  It's sort of a Memento Mortuary, with Ms. Dushku rushing -- make that Run Lola Running -- all over the city, trying to piece together a murder before it happens.  Crime deconstruction being all the rage on TV these days, it's gratifying to see that often tedious genre being spooked up in Tru Calling.  The show has thrown in a dysfunctional family for Tru in the form of a gambling addict brother and a Type-A coke-sniffing older sister; we've already seen her circumvent a brutal beating destined for her brother, and certainly she'll be pulling her sister out of the fire sometime soon, too.  Whether or not you go for Tru Calling rests solely on if you want your drama with a little twist, or do you want it strictly by-the-book.  Solving crimes, after they happen -- or now before -- is a staple of TV storytelling, and if you think it's cool and kicky to have a spunky young gal putting herself on the line to save strangers from extinction, then Tru Calling will please you greatly, as it does me.  Update 11/26//03:  TC has been given an additional 7 episode order, for a total of 20 (so far).  Update 5/18/04:  Against all odds, Tru Calling has managed a renewal for next season! 

MIDSEASON

My Big Fat Obnoxious Fiance: Har-de-har-har...in this obvious and tiresome twist on the slew of marriage and engagement-oriented un-reality shows, a beautiful girl brings home a loser and attempts to get her unsuspecting family to accept him.  It's pointless to ask whether a show like this is stupid or entertaining.  It simply festers on a schedule, and viewers who can't get enough of humiliation, bad behavior and boorish manners should get a kick out of it.  Premieres Monday, Jan. 19, 2004.  Update:  A big success, predictably.  

Wonderfalls:  Held back to midseason, this much-anticipated comedy/drama debuted in the Friday 9pm slot, but has already been moved to Thursdays at 9pm due to soft Friday numbers.  Thursdays at 9 is a killer, but perhaps they'll be able to get a few sympathetic viewers from Tru Calling, though that show's also struggling mighty against the tide.  Review 3/04:  Whether the show is wonderful is yet unanswered around here; I found the pilot episode alternately annoying, a bit charming, trying way too hard, and succumbing to the same bag of tricks -- throwing in the word “orgasm” for titillation value, throwing in a lesbian subplot just because that’s evidently what you do this season -- that are already old and tired. People are trying to squeeze this one into the same genre occupied by Joan of Arcadia and Tru Calling, but those two young ladies seem to at least have a touch of grace rather than total petulance and great deal less self-absorption than Jake. Yes, I know her character is supposed to be a narcissist, and I get that she’s going to be embarking on a journey to find herself in the series, but until she works through a little of that spoiled, rich, over-educated rebel-with-absolutely-no-cause stance, she might be just too obnoxious to watch at all.  And despite their adjacency on the TV schedule and some reviews that seem to put them in the same quality-TV niche, this is no companion piece for Joan of Arcadia, far from it. First off, Wonderfalls is not a family show. It is to JoA’s credit that it manages to be a show that a wide range of ages might conceivably view at the same time without being uncomfortable, but Wonderfalls, primarily because of the language, subject matter (at least in the pilot) and general sour taste, certainly doesn’t seem like the rightful inheritor of Joan’s audience. If it didn’t work for Miss/Match on NBC, which was, by comparison to Wonderfalls, a ray of sunshine, it won’t work here, and didn’t, at least the first week out.  Wonderfalls could work as a match with its own lead-in, another pathetic dirty joke of a reality show, this one where some beautiful girl has to sniff out the gay contestants in her search for a date. That Wonderfalls is scheduled after Playing It Straight says more about what Fox is up to or hoping for more than anything else; they really shouldn’t be too surprised that it’s not sharing in Joan of Arcadia’s bounty. It shouldn’t. I’m hardly a pious believer, but there’s a world of heart and soul between what Barbara Sullivan is doing with Joan and what’s going on in Wonderfalls. The family on Joan of Arcadia is working with more realisitic problems -- disabled son, money troubles, teen angst -- than anything we’re likely to encounter on Wonderfalls (not that you have to be realistic to make a good TV show, of course). You know that all the resources Jake would ever need to become an SUV-driving overachieving super-bitch like her sister are back home at the family manse, and her living is a trailer is reverse-ostentation at its most kitsch.  My primarily objections to Wonderfalls are at a philosophical level, not about how well the show is done. It looks good, it’s full of nifty visual effects that are a little too proud of themselves to just become part of the ambience (unfortunately), but it’s all about people who might be too unlikable to watch. That shouldn’t be a liability during this TV season that’s as full of more horrible people than ever before, but that’s only on reality TV. The people of Wonderfalls are far from awful, but they’re also far from wonderful.  Go on. Watch it once more. I’m going to. I just wish the show knew that being intelligent doesn’t mean being well, mean to people. That’s one of the first things our poor little rich girl Jake needs to figure out. Let’s see if her little talking friends can help her with that one, pronto.  Update 4/6/04:  Wonderfalls has been cancelled, effective immediately.  The producers are looking for a home for the show, at least the thirteen already produced, four of which have aired.  I may not have loved the show, but the news that its Thursday 9pm slot will be filled with encores of The Swan, another human re-do reality series, desperately shows the horrible state of dramatic TV at the moment. 

The Casino: Reality-TV czar Mark Burnett is back at it again with this 13-week series focusing on the (they hope) fascinating goings-on at Las Vegas' The Golden Nugget Casino.  If the stories of gamblers and the business lives of the internet-rich owner-partners catch the fancy of viewers, it will be a win for Fox, since they're reportedly spending a million dollars per episode on the show.  What happened to the idea that reality TV was cheap?  Something's gone a little nuts, looks like.  Using Burnett's traditional blend of real life and staged events, all caught on camera, The Casino may indeed be worth the gamble that Fox is taking on it, and they're hoping it will be, you can bet on that.  The show will inherit American Idol's spot beginning on June 8th, 2004.