Schedule Five-Spot, ABC Midseason

OK kids, there will actually be three Schedule Five-Spots this week, which will hopefully make up for the lack of one last week. I'll look at ABC and NBC midseason today, then do the miscellaneous stuff (mostly but not totally CBS) tomorrow.

Tuesday - ABC's only real "problem night" this season has been Tuesday, where Man Up! has bombed, Body of Proof has underperformed and Dancing with the Stars is leaving the schedule for several months. The Man Up! void will be filled by critically-reviled newbie Work It!, which is at least another multicam, while ABC's main attraction in the twixt-Dancings slot will be short-order drama The River. Meanwhile, Body of Proof gets a small extension to 20 eps total.

Other New Dramas - Two other new dramas are slated to join at midseason. The move of G.C.B. to Sunday post-Desperate Housewives has been considered inevitable, but it'll certainly have less pressure on it to be The Future of Sunday now that Once Upon a Time is a success. Missing joins arguably the hardest timeslot on TV, Thursday 8/7c, but at least you can say it's counterprogramming in a timeslot against American Idol and two networks of comedy.

Fall Cleanup - ABC also addressed some of their fall underperformers; Body of Proof got the small extension mentioned above, leaving it shy of the traditional "full season." Pan Am seems to have gotten a "back one," perhaps a fate worse than formal cancellation because it'll leave the uninformed hanging about its fate till May. In a worse ABC year, it may have gotten more. And Man Up! was cancelled, though it will continue to air out its order.

Reality Fill-ins - Some of the timeslots mentioned above will briefly go to reality shows in the dead of winter. Before The River, ABC will air the short order of Celebrity Wife Swap in the Tuesday 9/8c slot. Wipeout will nail down its familiar Thursday 8/7c hour this winter before Missing comes in. ABC also announced the return of Shark Tank to its also familiar Friday 8/7c home starting on February 3.

The Unscheduled - By most standards, ABC's new show slate has overachieved this fall, meaning there's less available midseason real estate than they might have expected. Always a nice problem to have. The biggest victim of this is Cougar Town, which saw its order cut to 15 episodes. For now, ABC doesn't have a timeslot for it. Also still on the shelf: heavily buzzed comedy Apartment 23, new drama Scandal and reality returnee Secret Millionaire.

The Five-Spots are my recaps of what aired, what got renewed/cancelled and what rated well or poorly last week in TV. For more Five-Spots, see the Index.