First Impulse: NBC Announces Schedule

Not only did NBC announce its Fall schedule last week, it also declared its Winter schedule and its Spring schedule. This week, their suits will probably announce the 2009 NFL schedule, your personal retirement schedule, and the Greater Des Moines Metropolitan Area bus schedule.

But, hey, you can't blame them for planning ahead. And you can't blame me for going ahead and commenting on what they plan to give us.

Let's face it: There is an awful lot of crap on NBC's fall schedule. Oh, the Sunday NFL package is great, and it'll be nice having "Heroes" and "Chuck" back to back Monday nights, but other than that, there isn't much more to draw me in. I'd better get this out of the way now: I think the NBC Thursday night comedies are critically overrated, and though I have nothing against them (apart from the excessive hype given them in some quarters), I'm not gonna build my night around them, either.

Looking around the lineup, I see "The Biggest Loser" is now 90 minutes long. Is there supposed to be some kind of ironic statement made by the fact that this show keeps getting bigger and bigger? "Deal or No Deal" continues to clog up several places in the schedule. As for new shows, a revamping of Robinson Crusoe might have been intriguing about 5 years or a dozen "Survivors" ago, and I was bored by the "Knight Rider" pilot a few months back.

Other than that, it looks great!

Winter looks better, with promising new series like "Kings" with Ian McShane and Tom Fontana and Barry Levinson's "The Philanthropist." But for some reason, NBC decided to reveal how lame its summer of 2009 already looks, with an early programming strategy featuring such innovative techniques as rerunning USA shows like "Monk" and "Nashville Star." Of course, NBC is already serving second helpings of "Monk" on Sunday nights. So for NBC, "forward thinking" consists of planning to repeat the repeats it is showing now in the future.

Give credit to NBC for announcing all this early, though, perhaps realizing that if you can't be best, you might as well be first.