The website Brilliant But Cancelled has a [US] tv season dead pool. They don't list returning shows, just the new ones. MEN IN TREES is currently the odds-on favorite for cancellation, though some of the shows either haven't been on yet or I've never heard of them, so they probably haven't been getting votes.

http://www.brilliantbutcancelled.com/deathwatch/

I think I'd bump BROTHERS & SISTERS way up to the top of the list based on the five minutes of it I watched. Not sure anybody wants to see Callista Flockhart on a weekly tv show again and it's on ABC, where like-minded relationship shows have not fared well [e.g. RELATIVITY, ONCE & AGAIN.] Also not sure about VANISHED and STANDOFF. I've been watching STANDOFF until this week when there was heavy competition in its timeslot. It's not a bad show, but there's such a glut in this genre that I think a few are going to drop off by mid-season. As for VANISHED, I've been recording it to my DVR but I haven't watched an episode yet. It sounds too much like KIDNAPPED, which I've also DVR'd but not watched. I think one or the other is going to bite the dust and KIDNAPPED seems like it has more network support.

How is it I've never even heard of KNIGHTS OF PROSPERITY? Is this a midseason show? You'd think something with Mick Jagger in it would be more high profile.

This show, which is about of group of guys who scheme to kidnap Jagger (playing himself) was getting a lot of hype for a while, but I haven't heard anything about it in a while.

That fact that the producers changed its title from something incredibly cool (LET'S ROB MICK JAGGER) to something incredibly stupid and bland tells me all I need to know about how good the show is. Nobody is interesting in watching a sitcom called KNIGHTS OF PROSPERITY.

"Standoff" is yet another of Fox's very dull high-concept crime shows ala "Bones". I'd be surprised if it lasts long. Then again, I'm surprised "Bones" is still around. What the heck do I know?

Two shows that are surprisingly decent this year are "Justice" ("Boston Legal" without Spader and Shatner, but without David Kelly's shrill politics, too) and "Smith" (Ray Liotta in what looks like an utterly credible attempt to bring a Michael Mann vibe back to tv, at least from the half of the premiere I saw.)

doug

Well, we don't always have to be on the snarky attack! Knights of Prosperity is a lousy title, but apparently Mick Jagger didn't fulfill any of his obligations to be filmed for the show, so they have very little footage of him, so that they are again looking for another celebrity to be the ultimate focus of the show (as if the show's gonna last long enough)...

So while they may have been dumb to pin their hopes on a celebrity who apparently had no intention of ever, you know, really being on the show, the title was largely changed out of the necessity that Mick Jagger wasn't happening for the show...

Fox's HAPPY HOUR and JUSTICE have gone "on hiatus" till November, following the World Series. It's unlikely the former is returning. KIDNAPPED and the CW's RUNAWAY are likely goners given poor ratings.

On a fall season note I was pleased to see a new season of THE SIMPSONS bow well before playoffs and the World Series, for the first time in years. But, it, too, is going away till Nov., meaning another post-Halloween horror show.

Poor ratings? RUNAWAY has only aired one episode, for crying out loud! And they stuck it in a very busy timeslot. I just caught the repeat episode from Tuesday night, which I managed to wedge into my DVR's full schedule. I guess CW is at a disadvantage in that they don't seem to have a cable network to flog their repeats to. I notice that NBC's HEROES is repeating on both SciFi and USA. CW might do better with RUNAWAY if they didn't keep trying to push EVERYBODY HATES CHRIS, which is taking up a good chunk of their "Easy View" Sunday evening program block.

I thought RUNAWAY was okay, but very familiar [think THE FUGITIVE + RUNNING ON EMPTY]. And they pulled that so overdone fakeout in the pilot episode, where the cops are descending on the house where our fugitives live, the doorbell rings and surprise! It's not the cops. They are descending on the wrong house in the wrong neighborhood. How many times have we seen that gimmick since SILENCE OF THE LAMBS?

It happened on PRISON BREAK just two weeks ago. I wasn't fooled then either.

Looks like ABC is as smart as I am. :P KNIGHTS OF PROSPERITY has gone on hiatus before it could even air. Its October 17 premiere has been scratched with no "re-premiere" yet announced, and DANCING WITH THE STARS moves into its timeslot with 90-minute (!) episodes.

I'm telling you now that if/when KNIGHTS airs, it will be with a different title.

Aaron Sorkin's show, which I bailed on after 20 minutes of the first episode, is in trouble, though NBC's HEROES looks like a hit.

I gave it 30 but bail I did. Me no likee!

Oh, it's awful. In the premiere episode, they had the temerity to want us to care as much about the romantic tension between the two leads as the safety of hostages. Sorry, you have to earn that kind of cuteness. Send in SWAT and take this sucker down.

I'm a fan of SPORTS NIGHT and THE WEST WING, but I also am finding STUDIO 60 a bit underwhelming. However, I'm willing to hang in for a little while longer. Same with KIDNAPPED. I liked the pilot, but found the second episode dull and uninvolving.

I'm mystified by the creative decision-making behind JERICHO. You have a show about a small town isolated from the rest of the world after a nuclear strike, but since that apparently is not interesting or exciting enough, the second episode is about escaped convicts taking a pretty blonde hostage? The episode opened with truly horrible scripting, as the blonde--a lifelong Jericho resident--is picked up hitchhiking by the escaped cons disguised as Jericho policemen in a Jericho police car. They ask her if she knows where the closest filling station is. Setting aside the certainty that the blonde would likely know by sight every police officer in a town of 5000 people (which would maybe be 3 or 4 at most), but wouldn't you be suspicious if the local cops were asking you where the gas station was? Of course, Hollywood knows about as much about small-town America as I know about brain surgery.

Also, moments after telling the blonde that Denver was obliterated by a nuclear bomb, one of the cons/cops asks her if she's all right, and she replies, "Yeah, I'm fine."

TV shows about TV shows tend to excite TV critics a lot more than TV watchers. There are good ones, like THE LARRY SANDERS SHOW on HBO, but most of them just come off as navel-gazing. HBO's THE COMEBACK got better and better as it went along but I found it in the graveyard of HBO on Demand, and I can't blame anyone for not tuning in or the channel for pulling the plug. If people really hate the media as much as we hear, why would anyone watch shows about shows? :)

PRISON BREAK trotted that kind of set-up back out again on Monday night!

I thought of this thread while watching that Monday!

I guess I can give up on KIDNAPPED, since NBC has pulled the plug and ordered the show to wrap up its storyline in 13 episodes.

I liked STUDIO 60's third episode. The show-within-a-show was much better this week, and the scene where the cast decided to scrap a funny joke because it might offend some residents in a tiny Missouri town was well-written and played (though not realistic, but neither was THE WEST WING). I love Sarah Paulson's Holly Hunter impression too.

According to Brilliant But Cancelled, SMITH, KIDNAPPED and HAPPY HOUR are all in a coma. A pity about SMITH, I watched and enjoyed the first two episodes. Apparently, they've halted production but have not officially cancelled it yet. I've never even heard of HAPPY HOUR. THE CLASS, which I've also not heard of, is looking likely for cancellation as well. The dead pool still lists MEN IN TREES as the favorite for cancellation. It's NORTHERN EXPOSURE warmed over with Anne Heche in the Rob Morrow part. I find it less offensive than BROTHERS & SISTERS, but that's not saying much. The dead pool still lists UGLY BETTY in first place but it's doing well ratings-wise so I don't expect it to be cancelled any time soon.

From the IMDb...the LOST bit sounds like a real bad idea...

"Serial dramas are suddenly finding audiences steering away from them, with CBS yanking Smith, starring Ray Liotta and Virginia Madsen, from its schedule, NBC moving Kidnapped, starring Jeremy Sisto and Delroy Lindo, to the graveyard of Saturday night and ABC losing five million viewers for Lost. San Francisco Chronicle TV columnist Tim Goodman observed today (Monday) that ABC's plan to put Lost on hiatus for 13 weeks beginning next month in order to avoid repeats might backfire. (It's being replaced during that period by yet another serial drama, Day Break, starring Taye Diggs and Adam Baldwin.) "What if five million more people don't come back?" Goodman asks."

The problem with these serialized dramas is that it's nigh impossible for them to ever gain new viewers. If you tuned into the third-season premiere of LOST and had never seen the show before...uh wha? No matter what the writers and producers do--a change in concept, new cast members, whatever they do to shake things up--there's no way they can ever increase their audience. LOST has already peaked. I always thought that's what killed ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT. It's not that it was too smart for TV, it's that there was no way for anybody to understand or enjoy it unless they were there from the beginning.

SMITH's cancellation, of course, has nothing to do with it being a serialized show, which makes the IMDb story not worth a single pixel. Nobody watched it because nobody wants to see a bunch of degenerate scumbags robbing and killing innocent people every week unless Billy Petersen or Chris Meloni is putting them in jail.

Hey, they only killed people in the pilot!

Seriously, the stylish SMITH is one of only two new shows that so far have grabbed my interest (the second, natch, is THE NINE), and I'm sorry to see it go; I was especially looking forward to finding out more about wonderfully-cast Virginia Madsen's past and exactly what she planned to do when she found out what hubby was up to (I'll bet she wasn't planning to call the cops). But after this, THIEF and HEIST it is indeed time for the network honchos to concede that viewers aren't enthralled by professional criminals and don't buy the peculiar-to-Hollywood notion that such people are just working Joes who happen to carry guns,

After suffering through three episodes of STUDIO 60, we've had enough. Perry and Whitford work beautifully together, but to what end? Sorkin cannot write actors; the only performer-playing-a-performer in these episodes who seemed to have any real connection to show business was Rob Reiner. And Amanda Peet's production head is the most ridiculous character seen anywhere in ages; this starry-eyed gamin wouldn't last five minutes in high school student government, much less a TV network.

But can we talk about something really horrible: namely, what they've done to LAW & ORDER: CRIMINAL INTENT? Yikes!

What have they done, son? I usually only watch the Chris Noth episodes, but I did see D'Onofrio's first episode this year as well. I miss Jamey Sheridan, who is a better actor than he ever got to display on the show, but the addition of Eric Bogosian as a presumably prickly boss seems to be a great idea. The show's female characters are barely there, it seems, and Noth's change of partners barely registers (although I liked Annabella Sciorra fine).

Otherwise, the show seems like business as usual to me.

I'm referring to the CSI-ing of the show: the dumbing-down of the plots (just compare the opening segments of this season's shows to those of past seasons); the introduction of flashy and distracting visual tics, as well as layers of syrupy, manipulative music; the unwelcome helpings of the regulars' "personal" stories. All this plus the disastrous cast changes (Sheridan's character was even more sketchily written than Bogosian's, but Sheridan was effortlessly convincing as an up-through-the-ranks officer and that itself enlivened the part; I like Bogosian but he has nothing to offer here).

Dick Wolf destroyed L.A. DRAGNET by trying to turn it into a "youth" show, and the replacement of terrific Sciorra with nobody-home Nicholson -- not to mention the blank new faces wandering through the Mother Ship itself -- indicate that his instinct remains the same: when in doubt, throw in some New Legal Kids on the Block.

You are correct about this, and it's worth noting that Wolf's soapy CONVICTION, about a bunch of beautiful young attorneys, was a 13-episodes-and-done bomb.

Watching LAW & ORDER: CI right now, and I completely see what Ira is saying. There's a total CSI-ification going on.

I'm pretty ambivalent about it, but it does seem really odd and derivative, stylistically speaking.