CBS's 2006-07 TV Shows

There are already some stirrings in this very young television season, all from CBS. A month after Katie Couric's debut as CBS's nightly news anchor, the Eye's newscast is back in third place - which would be last place, as Fox and the Cee-Dub don't have nightly newscasts.

Meanwhile, "The Class," a show created by the same folks who dreamed up "Friends" and was promoted with a great deal of fanfare as the new lead-in for CBS on Monday nights, has switched time slots with "How I Met Your Mother," which had followed it, making the sophomore sitcom including Neil Patrick Harris the Monday night lead-in - a move television critics believe should have made at the start. Evidently "The Class" isn't doing as well as CBS had hoped.

And then there's "Smith," the CBS drama which didn't do well at all. The show about dangerous robbers leading double lives is gone. Smith wsn't the name of a character, just a generic Anglo-Irish name the government assigns to criminals they can't identify otherwise. The producers said that this would allow them to replace anyone on the show - incuding leads Ray Liotta and Virginia Madsen - if that ever became necessary. No need to worry about that.

Virginia Madsen says that doing a TV show after twenty years as a cinema actress was a refreshing change, due to the maxim that TV writers write better parts for women than screenwriters, and that doing a series allowed her to spend more time with her son. She has even more time for him now. Too bad she has to go back to something American actresses dread - making movies!

Meanwhile, I take back anything negative I ever said about "The New Adventures of Old Christine." That show is getting funnier by the week!