The '52-week schedule' and other items of mild interest

It's been a busier-than-usual week here at Zap2it -- thank goodness for the end of the WGA strike. Between all the announcements of shows returning and American Idol starting for real, a couple things slipped through the cracks.

Which is to say, they're sort of interesting, but not enough to warrant their own items. So, folks, it's round-up time.

NBC, whose boss Jeff Zucker made lots of noise about not doing a traditional upfront presentation this week, backtracked on that this week. The big, fancy show to unveil the new schedule is still out, replaced by the announcement of a schedule in April and a road show to explain things to advertisers. Some kind of event will happen at the usual time in May, but it will focus on the whole of NBC Universal rather than just the broadcast network.

The big thing for viewers is that NBC says it will unveil a "full, 52-week programming schedule" in April. Which will apparently be different than the year-round programming NBC and other networks already do now.

My inimitable colleague Lisa de Moraes has already dispensed the requisite amount of sarcasm on the notion, so let me just add: Huh? NBC already has a fair amount of summer programming -- America's Got Talent, Last Comic Standing and Age of Love all aired last year -- so it's not like the network is just getting into this game.

If the network is talking about something really different -- premiering both scripted and unscripted shows throughout the year and not hewing to the Nielsen-defined September-to-May season -- then I'll be more than willing to give the network its due (although FOX tried something like that a few years ago, to unimpressive results). You'll forgive me for being skeptical, though.

The other networks are still planning their own upfront showcases, but according to Variety, FOX will hold off on announcing a complete midseason schedule in May. That's a significant departure from the norm, and one we can get behind, because it will save us all a fair amount of work.

The network has presented at least four different versions of its spring schedule since the start of the season. Some of that confusion was a result of the strike, sure, but the frequent tweaking is something of a FOX tradition. In each of the past three or four seasons, the midseason lineup FOX actually put on the air has been significantly different than the one it presented at its upfront.

The network says not locking things in early will let it continue developing shows into the summer, which also makes sense given the way the strike monkeyed with pilot season.

Finally, NBC and CBS have started streaming some of their old shows (or those made by sibling studios) online. The NBC lineup includes Miami Vice and The A-Team, and the CBS library (which is more complete at the moment) features Star Trek and The Twilight Zone, among others.

I poked around on the NBC site the other day, learning (or perhaps re-learning) that the pilot of The A-Team featured a different actor (Tim Dunigan) playing Faceman and watching a fair amount of the first episode of Buck Rogers in the 25th Century. This was a show I loved when I was 8, but looking at it now, I'm surprised that even as an 8-year-old, I didn't pick up on the rinky-dink special effects. There's barely even a sense of motion in the space-flight scenes, and certain shots are reused endlessly. Watching did affirm, however, that my boyhood crush on Erin Gray -- one of my first -- wasn't misplaced.

And as a bonus, I can watch these shows guilt-free. Assuming the Writers Guild ratifies the contract it negotiated, the people who penned those shows will get paid a percentage of whatever NBC and CBS gross from them right from the start -- the deal doesn't have a "promotional" window for older shows.

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