Scheduling Five-Spot, WE 4/10/11 - Bob's Burgers, Homeland/House of Lies, Jersey Shore, Real Housewives of D.C., USA Summer

Here's your Scheduling Five-Spot for the week ending April 10, 2011:

Bob's Burgers - Fox has given a second season to animated rookie Bob's Burgers. The show had TV's biggest A18-49 premiere (4.5) of the 2010-11 season thanks to a huge NFL playoff lead-in, then it dropped so big that I predicted it wouldn't stick around. Fortunately for the show, it stabilized in the low 2's soon after and has had retention similar to that of Fox's other second-tier animation shows (American Dad! and The Cleveland Show). The bad news is that it only scored 13 episodes, so it may not get a chance to shine in fall when the animation is always much stronger.

Homeland/House of Lies - Showtime made a couple series pickups this week. The first is drama Homeland about a CIA operative played by Claire Danes. The second is "comedy" House of Lies about a bunch of cutthroat consultants. Sounds hilarious!  Anyway, that show's led by Don Cheadle and is garnering some additional buzz because the much-beloved Veronica Mars herself (Kristen Bell) is part of the cast.

Jersey Shore - There was perhaps nothing in all of TV more inevitable than the tremendously-rated Jersey Shore getting spun off on MTV. The show wrapped up season 3 a couple weeks ago, and while it had come down a bit from its early season 3 numbers, it was still bigger in A18-49 and W18-34 than almost everything else on TV, broadcast or cable. For now, there are two Jersey Shore spinoffs coming down the pipe: one starring Snooki and JWoww and another starring DJ Pauly D. And the MTV brass says they're still in negotiations for even more.

Real Housewives of D.C. - Is the bloated Real Housewives franchise on Bravo finally starting to shrink a bit? The D.C. version is officially ending after just one season. It ended its first season back in October with ratings (at the time) lower than any other in the franchise, as it usually hit around a 0.6 or 0.7 A18-49 rating. Since then, the Miami edition has premiered and pulled similar (or even a little worse) numbers, so that one may be in some trouble too. Throw those two out and you are down to a mere five Real Housewives series.

USA Summer - USA Network tweeter Ted Linhart filled in a couple more days of the USA summer schedule this week. Joining previously-announced White Collar/Covert Affairs Tuesday (beginning June 7) are a Royal Pains Wednesday leading into newbie Necessary Roughness (on June 29) and a Burn Notice Thursday leading into newbie Suits (on June 23). Suits is the legal drama previously known as A Legal Mind. That means it'll be the first time since 2005 that USA won't have Psych in the summer; that show will kick off its season in the fall (where it aired its back half last year).

More Five-Spots in the Index.