Television has entered Bizarro World -- and not because it will air a series about swapping wives in the fall.
   No, disparate events are combining to make the future a lot more murky than it already is. First, efforts to generate a year-round season -- headed by Fox and NBC -- have failed spectacularly and, second, that failure has, in turn, reinforced the decadeslong tradition of eagerly looking forward to the fall to see what's new (and better).
   But as old habits apparently die hard, their good friends are harder to break. Consider that as television critics from across the country and Canada are poring over fall's offering, something unique and, frankly, disconcerting, has happened: UPN and ABC are getting the best buzz.
   You read that right. The first is a network that, by rights -- and Nielsen numbers -- should have been shut down two seasons ago at a generous minimum. And the second recently fired its top two programmers and realized that fourth-place finishes are lousy but the shows that got it there are even worse....
   ...ABC, which has repelled buzz like mace to the face, is a lot harder to figure out. UPN just got better. It made better shows. But much of what ABC will present in the fall was given the green light from the outgoing network programmers who, conventional wisdom suggests, drove the network aimlessly until they were fired.
   But new entertainment president Steve McPherson used to head up Touchstone television, which had a hand in making a lot of the good new ABC shows. So perhaps his first critical role at ABC was making the decision to keep the series he knew were good -- because he made them -- and scrap the garbage. That latter attribute wasn't so keen among the outgoing executives.
   Of course, making a good show is only half the battle. A network has to believe in it and stick with it, even when the masses have not discovered it. This is why, despite the apparent creative flame-out at Fox, at least "Arrested Development" is coming back, and until that show's demise, Fox has the funniest sitcom on network television.
   What McPherson and ABC have, however, is far more shocking. They have good shows. They have fun shows. When your old slogan is, "We've got mostly lame shows, but they've got just enough viewers to keep them alive," well, consider this a revolution at Mickey's place.
   A new drama, "Desperate Housewives," is deliciously fun, potentially black humored and already laced with wicked satire. It's another high-buzz series that begs for more episodes.
   But it doesn't end there. J.J. Abrams, the man who brought "Alias" to ABC and made it OK to like an action series that doesn't make much sense, is back at it with "Lost," a drama about an airliner crash that leaves people cast away on an island, with possibly weird and dangerous animals milling about. It's one of those shows that has holes like Swiss cheese and yet you can't get enough of it, a la "Alias."
   SOURCE: San Francisco Chronicle Permanent Link | 10:54 PM