Seven days a week

Those stalwart cop heroes of the heartland, Detroit 1-8-7 and The Chicago Code, have been discharged, denied second chances despite promising rookie seasons. Spinoffs spun out: Criminal Minds: Suspect Behavior and Law & Order: LA failed to make the cut. S#*! My Dad Says never stood a f#%& of a chance, even with (or maybe because of) Bill Shatner.

Even the old faithfuls are going through eruptions: Laurence Fishburne is leaving CSI; Chris Meloni is forsaking Law & Order: SVU after 12 outstanding seasons as steely, conflicted Det. Elliot Stabler. And last Saturday, after 23 successful years on FOX, America's Most Wanted and John Walsh went on the lam in search of a new weekly broadcast home.

And what will we be getting in their place? Charlie's Angels, 3.0. A new drama circling around an old airline that's been bankrupt for a decade. Another hour set in a gentleman's club that's been out of the public consciousness since 2006. The returns of Tim Allen, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Christina Applegate and (crap!) Simon Cowell. Oh, and two shows about ... fairy tales.

Everything old is — well, it's still old, but it's being repackaged and spritzed with a shot of Old Spice and served up to us again as if it's fresh and original. Seemingly nanoseconds after TV launched its slate of summer programming, the networks staged their annual upfront meetings for advertisers in New York to unveil their lineups for fall 2011. At first blush, it's an iffy rookie crop at best.

And now the hype begins. The new series will be promoted and previewed and advertised and discussed to the point where you actually begin to believe you've already seen them long before their premieres. The Television Critics Association (hey, everybody's got a professional society) will spend the better part of a month in Los Angeles this July meeting the stars, interviewing the creators and dissecting each series one by one. I know what you're thinking: It's just TV! But with hundreds of millions of ad dollars and the bragging rights of rich white men at stake — not to mention continued employment for people like me — it's far more than that to some people.

I haven't seen all the new shows yet, but I've watched a heap of 'em. And here's my best early line on the booms, busts and time-slot battles to come in September.

MONDAY: With Ashton Kutcher having saved the franchise at Two and a Half Men, CBS (Channel 62), with the fewest holes to fill, can feel good about 2 Broke Girls getting a fair sampling between How I Met Your Mother at 8 and Men at 9. The sitcom about mismatched waitress roomies was co-created by comedy's "it girl" of the moment, Whitney Cummings who has her own new series, Whitney, on competing network NBC (Channel 4) Tuesdays at 9:30.

FOX (Channel 2) is excited about Terra Nova at 8, a big, lush, dangers-in-paradise hour that's a mix of Jurassic Park and Lost and quite different than anything the network has offered before. At 10, NBC is building a drama around The Playboy Club. Obvious questions: Will advertisers support it? Will conservative markets in the South and East air it? Will Hugh Hefner be luckier in TV than he is in love?

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