Scheduling Five-Spot, WE 12/12/10 - Terriers, ABC 3-Hour Comedy, Lie to Me, The Hasselhoffs, The Closer

Man, why couldn't we have had some of this stuff a couple weeks back when even finding one or two good tidbits was a stretch? Left out of this edition: NBC's upcoming and probably doomed Love Bites sees its order trimmed, The Whole Truth is yanked from the schedule (again), and same with Running Wilde. On to the top 5!  Here's your Scheduling Five-Spot for the week ending December 12, 2010:

Terriers Canceled - The FX drama, one of an absolute bevy of shows that I managed to stop watching right before it supposedly got amazingly good, will not be returning for a second season. One of the questions I always ask about a show's ratings is, "What could a replacement reasonably do?" It's hard to imagine a replacement drama doing much worse than the 0.28 demo average that Terriers posted, especially when fellow fall FX show Sons of Anarchy often did 5+ times as well.

ABC Tries 3-Hour Comedy - When it rains, it pours. NBC decided to go with a three-hour night of comedy, the first time in many years it's happened, and now ABC is following suit within the same season. This network's 10:00 hour choices are newbie Happy Endings and a regularly-scheduled repeat of Modern Family. Maybe not as strong as 30 Rock/Outsourced on NBC. But unlike NBC, which is locked into their 3-hour experiment for four months, the ABC version kicks off in mid-April and only runs a few weeks.

Lie to Me Gets No Back Nine - It's not really a major surprise considering the network is simply jam-packed this spring and won't be able to squeeze in more Lie to Me barring some complete disaster. But it appears there will be no second summer run for the show, which has taken huge year-to-year drops this fall alongside lead-in House. Its best performance of the season oddly came just a couple weeks back when it scored a season high 2.2 adults 18-49 rating despite having a repeat House lead-in.

The Hasselhoffs Pulled After Two Eps - I guess I could go the snarky route and give this the light blue "good news" color, but I'll try to be consistent...! Anyway, the A&E docudrama was pretty DOA ratings-wise with a 0.3 A18-49 debut, so it isn't a huge surprise, but it's just a bit of an odd circumstance to see a fairly low-buzz reality show on a cable network get such a quick hook. At least from where I'm sitting, the cancellation brought the show more press than it ever had before or during its run.

The Closer to End - Kyra Sedgwick has decided that season 7 of The Closer will be her last, and that season will begin in summer 2011. I could be wrong, but I'm guessing the net will just run all of the eps straight through as USA Network did with Monk rather than give the show its typical brief December run. I base that on the fact that this December's run began in somewhat disappointing fashion, managing just a 1.0 demo. I feel like they'd rather have a long run of episodes building up to the end.

More Five-Spots can be found in the Index.