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Upfronts 2011

Television's upfronts week comes to a close Thursday with the CW, which will bring Sarah Michelle Gellar back to TV with the thriller Ringer. On Wednesday, CBS presented J.J. Abrams' Person of Interest and five others, showed off new Two and a Half Men star Ashton Kutcher, and moved The Good Wife to Sundays. ABC, meanwhile, unveiled its schedule Tuesday; Fox and NBC did their dance for advertisers on Monday. Watch trailers of the networks' new shows, including ABC's Charlie's Angels reboot, Fox's supernatural drama Alcatraz, and troubled NBC's The Playboy Club. Read our analysis of all the networks' 44 new series and counting!

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Details of this reality series are scant other than the fact that it revolves around celebrities versus their haters. While the CW has had some clunkers in the reality department, it does raise the question: Is this for real? The show revolves features celebrities trying to win over “civilians who hate them." First of all, we had no idea that celebrities are not considered civilians. And second, we have another question: Is host Mario Lopez eligible to participate? (There’s some serious haterade out there for that guy, after all.) Lopez, Lisa Gregorisch, and Jeremy Spiegel are attached as executive producers. After the failures that were Plain Jane and Shedding for the Wedding, it seems as though the CW hasn't quite learned from its mistakes.

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Formerly known as Rookies, this drama—from executive producers Robert De Niro and Jane Rosenthal—revolves around six rookie police officers who patrol high-crime neighborhoods in Manhattan and who must figure out how to balance their personal lives with their professional duties. The cops in question come from some pretty diverse backgrounds: an ex-reporter, an Afghani immigrant, a retired NBA basketball player, a female former Olympian/Marine (naturally!) whose gorgeous exterior belies a tough-as-nails interior, as well as one from a family of cops… and one from a family of criminals. (Lives collide, people!) The cast includes Adam Goldberg, Terry Kinney, Judy Marte, Harold House Moore, Tom Reed, Stark Sands, and Leelee Sobieski. Given the success on Fridays of CBS’ current cop drama Blue Bloods and of crime dramas on the network altogether, this could prove to be another mass-appeal entry to CBS’ strong programming slate.

Philippe Bosse
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While Fox has yet to shoot a pilot for the Tim Kring-created "preternatural" drama Touch—one of the best pilot scripts of the year—it's clear that they have plans for the television return of 24's Kiefer Sutherland. Sutherland (who remains the only talent attachment at the moment) will star as single dad/airport baggage handler Martin Bohm, who is struggling to make ends meet while trying to connect to his deeply autistic and mute 10-year-old son Jake, who appears to be trying to tell his father something when he keeps climbing cell phone towers and taking apart mobile phones. But Jake is also a genius who sees patterns in the most innocuous of things and who can predict the future by seeing the way in which everything—and all of us—connect to each other. Spanning the globe, the story darts from a disgraced professor to Japanese school girls, from a Iraqi would-be suicide bomber to a British businessman in search of his lost mobile phone, an aspiring singer to a haunted fireman, to create its own mosaic of interconnectivity. Whether Fox can pull off such a sweeping, ambitious narrative and whether Kring, whose NBC drama Heroes went off the rails after its first season, can keep the train on the tracks remains to be seen as Fox maintains that they will be scheduling this "opportunistically" for midseason.