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Originally ordered for next summer but also considered for the upcoming season, ABC‘s racy new soap Mistresses will launch next May for a summer run, ABC’s Paul Lee said during a press call this morning. It will likely premiere on Monday after The Bachelorette.
Related: 2012-13 ABC Schedule: Comedy Block On Friday, ‘Revenge’ Gets ‘Housewives’ Slot
Also on the call, Lee addressed the decision to move Happy Endings and Don’t Trust The B— to Tuesdays against Fox’s New Girl after the two launched in the protected post-Modern Family slot. Lee said both shows have passionate audiences that would follow them to the new night. As for pitting them against other comedies, especially New Girl, Lee said, “I do think there is room on the networks for big ratings” for multiple series in the same slot. Opting not to put a comedy against New Girl last year but to do it this fall with Happy Endings is not a suggestion that ABC feels New Girl is getting weaker but confidence that Happy Endings “can open a comedy block at 9 PM on Tuesday,” Lee said.
Related: Single-Camera Comedy Mayhem: ABC, NBC & Fox To Clash In Tuesday 9-10 Hour In Fall
The only property from Disney-owned Marvel still in active development at ABC is Hulk, which was set up 1 1/2 years ago with Guillermo del Toro and David Eick attached. Lee said the project will be in consideration for the next pilot cycle. I hear del Toro is still on board. ABC has passed on the Aka Jessica Jones adaptation; its writer, Twilight‘s Melissa Rosenberg, has a new series on ABC, Red Widow.
ABC’s new Sunday lineup features fairytale breakout Once Upon A Time followed by dark soap Revenge and new spooky drama 666 Park Ave about evil spirits inhabiting a New York apartment building. What is the theme that brought the three shows together? “It’s battle between good and evil from 8 PM all the way to 11 PM,” Lee said. 666 Park Ave. was one of three “magical” pilots ABC ordered as potential companion pieces to Once. Of them, 666 was the darkest and felt more suitable for 10 PM.
As for ABC’s entire lineup for next season, Lee’s tagline is “Why just watch when you can feel,” which he says emphasizes the network series’ emotional connection.
Related: ABC To Do All-Star ‘Dancing With The Stars’
TV Editor Nellie Andreeva - tip her here.
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I think replacing Desperate Housewives with Revenge is a great decision. ABC has the best Sunday night lineup.
Fox has the best Sunday luneup.
Okay, FOX, please allow next day streaming on Hulu. If ABC Family has a show I like, it won’t help the DVR come college basketball season.
I’m pretty sure you’re the only one with an ABC Family/basketball conflict.
Please, for the love of god, drop this nonsense of trying to build a TV series around the Hulk. They finally got the character right and turned him into a fan-favorite with The Avengers feature film. Relegating him to a television budget with a new story churned out weekly will undo all the good that Joss Whedon and Mark Ruffalo brought into reinventing a character that had never been handled correctly outside of the funny books. Let’s please chalk this series up as “Another Guillermo Del Toro Project That is Dead.” (Maybe that should be the name of a recurring column on Deadline.)
I gotta agree.
To do Hulk right, a TV budget won’t cut it.
Look at Terra Nova. It had a big FX budget and shorter episode count but it still looked cheesy way to often.
Marvel has THOUSANDS of characters that, with the right creative vision, would work extremely well on TV.
To quote the Jade Giant: “LEAVE HULK ALONE!!!”
Totally agree with Cuppajoe above.
I *still* say Daredevil would be a better TV fit than a feature film.
a) DD is a LAWYER (case of the week)
b) DD’s rogue’s gallery is really low-tech and low-budget! Wouldn’t take much to get them on-screen (Gladiator, Stilt-Man, The Owl, Kingpin, Bullseye, etc.)
c) Foggy Nelson, Karen Page, etc. are a made for TV supporting cast
d) If you emphasized on the old Lee/Colan DD run rather than the super-dark Miller stuff (death of Elektra, etc.), budgets would be cheaper
e) Simon Baker has always been my dream Matt Murdock, even back in the days of “The Sentinel”
They basically played the Hulk right in the Avengers by accident. They shouldn’t ruin it with a TV-budgeted Hulk series. Let it go, guys.
Totally agreed – Daredevil could be a fantastic show – imagine a mix of the gritty crime drama of the Wire, the legal case of the week, the action of Prison Break or 24 a touch of the supernatural / scifi, the romance with Karen Page & Electra and the comedy with Foggy and you could have a potential hit and the best way to adapt that character. Like you say it is one of the more high profile Marvel characters that could be effectively realised on a TV budget.
If they looked at the later Bendis stiff I think that could definitely be adapted and maybe work their way to the more out there Miller stories.
As for casting the last 2 seasons of Lost convinced me Matthew Fox would make a great put-though-the-ringer matt Murdock!
“They basically played the Hulk right in the Avengers by accident.” Really?
The Disney love-fest for everything Marvel seems to be an echo of how Once Upon a Time got made: taking Disney “properties” and translating them to TV.
So it’s not just the Hulk. With the mega-success of Avengers, ABC is in loooove with Marvel now. Ideally, they should come up with a series that is as much a departure from any past movie or TV series as OUaT is from Cinderella or Snow White.
I’d like to see them do a TV series of Dr. Strange. It has great synergy with OUaT and 666 Park Ave – an urbane Sorcerer Supreme who divides his time between an elegant Greenwich Village brownstone and an eldritch realm beyond all imaginings…
Sorry, but you lost all credibility when you used the term “funny books” to refer to comic books. (Even if you were trying to be hipster ironic about it.)
You’re right Veteran Assistant. I should have said “source material.”
So the only dramas they have for midseason are Zero Hour and Red Widow? Hmm.
Maybe they should keep Gotham in reserve after all. This many soaps seems like overload. There isn’t that much demand for such a narrow genre that you need a whole network devoted to it.
I think there’s more television demand for soaps (including serials and the shows that are really soaps but don’t want to be called such) than for sci-fi.
I would bet you that there is even more demand for sci-fi that is actual sci-fi, and not the watered-down too-afraid-of-the-genre-to-do-it-for-real that usually passes for sci-fi today, unfortunately.
Don’t forget Body of Proof as well! Seems like ABC is very confident in their Fall shows and it shows by how they’re scheduled. NBC on the other hand is downright pitiful and their schedule reeks of desperation¡
I find all this strategy about putting this show against that show in a particular time slot to be comical. I also find it sad. It’s 2012. Who one Earth is watching TV without recording it to some kind of DVR, at this point? Are they the same people who still talk to their good buddies on CB radio? The only people I know without DVRs are retirees, who advertisers don’t care about anyway. Even in the days of VHS, I recorded everything and watched it later so I could skip commercials. Aside from sports and award shows, I haven’t watched a TV show in real time in over a decade. It’s totally irrelevant to me when a show is on, or what it is up against, because I’ll just watch them both the next day anyway. I can’t believe this stuff even matters anymore. Even if I didn’t have a DVR, my cable service has most of the network programming, as well as most of the premium movie channel programming, available in their on demand function.
When I read about network programmers strategizing about what to put on what night I picture it in my mind a lot like generals planning a war game using Revolutionary War era strategies and muskets. The viewing public is headed full tilt toward an ‘on demand’ entertainment paradigm, and the broadcast networks and advertisers are still thinking like it is 1960s.
Love this post!
I’m far from a retiree , but glad for DVR. I wish I could DVR 4 programs at the same time some nights. Sunday nights seems like the only good night with a lot of good shows between 7-HBO-Showtime and now revenge -LOL
Less than half the country has a DVR in their house. That’s still a lot of people, but it is not MOST people.
Just because you and your friends watch TV in playback doesn’t mean everyone does. And yes, many of those who don’t have a DVR are south of retirement age. Some people just don’t want to be bothered with the things. Scheduling matters less than it did 5 years ago, but it still matters.
I personally love my DVR but I don’t always watch things in playback. I also don’t assume that everyone does what I do. (clearly, they don’t)
Networks prefer the audience who watches shows live, because 40% of DVR watchers (at least, that stat is old) skip ads. Plus, advertisers won’t pay for ads viewed more than three days after original broadcast, which means the actual worth of DVR views is half that of live views, or even less.
Which means that networks will worry about live viewing far more than DVR viewing long after it appears to us that “everyone” is watching via DVRs. And if channel-skipping features (as opposed to channel zapping, where you still see the ads, just ff’ed) take off, which they will, the remaining live viewers will become all the more disproportionately valuable, which DVR viewers may become completely irrelevant to broadcast decision-making.
Just remember this ironclad rule: people only pay attention to people who contribute to paying their salaries. If you don’t contribute to Paul Lee’s bank account, he will ignore you.
Well, my point is, an ever increasing number of Americans are watching television in a completely different paradigm than what the networks would like them to do, and that number isn’t going to get smaller. It’s going to get bigger every year as more and more people time shift and watch TV online. So either the networks and advertisers had better figure out how to change their business model to adapt to the reality of where the viewing public is headed, or the traditional broadcast networks will quickly be taken by surprise and see their business erode out of their control, like the music industry.
The audience will decide how to consume the show, and they are. Viewing habits are changing rapidly. Either the networks and advertisers should figure out how to monitize that better, or they have to resign themselves to forever catering to a smaller and less significant part of the population. Networks will not be successful programming around the ever shrinking number of Luddites who sit at home planning their evening around the TV Guide schedule.
Preach it, man. Preach it.
Excellent point, Mr-even senior citizens have had the VCR around so long that they could always use that, even if theyre not computer literate or have a DVR. The TV execs ARE living in the 60′s, when most people had only one TV and they had to watch a show whenever it was on, or wait for the summer reruns!
And, btw, I HATE that they put on Revenge Suns @ 9-theres SO much on at that time, even with my DVR’s running full blast!
Paul Lee…the guy who greenlit Work It to series. Nice guy, okay drama taste, but his comedy taste is dreadful. And they have no winners in the works from what I’ve seen/read.
I agree with the earlier comments about the potential Hulk series. It’s a bad, BAD idea. “The Avengers” got the Hulk right and doing a tv show would undo all that was good about the Hulk. The Marvel “A” list characters should be reserved strictly for feature films. Someone mentioned Daredevil…and I agree…that would be the perfect character to translate to a tv series. I could see a Dr. Strange tv series as well…kinda X-Files type vibe where maybe a young 20-something Dr. Strange, just learning his magic, travels and encounters various demons, witches, etc…like a Grimm mixed with Supernatural. The storylines would be endless with Dr. Strange and could even include time travel storylines. That series would be a writer’s dream.
Well, it is now 8 months after this announcement, and without a doubt putting Don’t Trust the B– in Apt. 23 and Happy Endings are in trouble on Tuesday, just like Last Man Standing (tired Home Improvement anyone?) had problems and moved to Friday. Now ABC is burning off “extra” episodes to end both series this year by next month. Good luck with that.