Schedule Five-Spot, WE 4/29/12 - CBS Summer, The Lying Game, Fringe, Happily Divorced, Community

Here's the Schedule Five-Spot for the week ending April 29, 2012:

CBS Summer - CBS revealed the deets on yet another relatively light summer of original programming. For the third straight summer, Big Brother will air on Wednesday/Thursday/Sunday, with the premiere coming on Thursday, July 12. Dating series 3 goes after the Sunday edition of Big Brother starting on July 22. Their other new summer series, reality program Dogs in the City, will start much earlier in the summer, airing Wednesdays at 8/7c starting May 30.

The Lying Game - ABC Family picked up The Lying Game for a second season. The show appeared quite weak when it premiered last summer but was able to hold steady, then picked up noticeably after getting paired with Pretty Little Liars in the winter. It looks like (though it's not yet official) it'll outlive the other show about identical twin sisters swapping lives, CW's Ringer. ABC Family also cancelled struggling Make It or Break It, their second-oldest scripted show.

Fringe - The week's biggest scheduling news, at least on Twitter, was the announcement of a 13-episode final season of Fringe. It'll air in the fall, almost certainly back on Friday. That'll leave the show with exactly 100 episodes. I still think Fox's best play is to renew some rookie drama for 13 episodes to join it, then premiere Kitchen Nightmares at midseason, but it's becoming increasingly difficult to figure out which of those dramas deserves such a nod.

Happily Divorced - TV Land picked up another 12 episodes of Fran Drescher's Happily Divorced, probably the closest thing they have to a sitcom "success" outside of Hot in Cleveland. It was already clear this show was high on TV Land's priority list when they aired another Hot In Cleveland/Happily Divorced block this spring and bumped previously renewed Retired at 35, which is now over a year removed from its last airing.

Community - NBC made a couple tweaks to the May sweeps schedule. First, they pulled struggling Best Friends Forever and will air leftover episodes of Off Their Rockers at 8:30. Then they bumped the final hour of Awake in favor of this season's last two episodes of Community at 9/8c and 9:30/8:30c. The Awake finale will now air on the first day of summer, May 24. Both moves should improve their timeslots by at least a half point.

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.