Old stars take on new TV roles

NEW YORK -- A new television season begins next week -- time to stretch your imagination to see old friends in new roles.\nRob Lowe has left the White House for a law firm. Whoopi Goldberg is a hotel operator with a razor tongue. Mark Harmon investigates crimes in the military. Kelly Ripa is a washed-up soap star.\nTelevision executives dream, too. Of bountiful ratings. Fortune magazine covers. All of their strategic moves paying off.\nA new season brings mystery -- public taste can't always be predicted -- and opportunity to change competitive positions.\nCBS is bidding for another year as the nation's most popular network, hoping the public's taste for crime and legal tales doesn't run out. NBC, most popular with younger viewers that advertisers pay premiums to reach, awaits the last year of "Friends" and "Frasier."\nFox wants to build on some unexpected successes. ABC is trying a novel, new strategy -- stability -- that was thrown for a loop with the death of John Ritter.\nLet's tune in.\nThe conventional wisdom holds that this is a crucial year for NBC. Two of its most popular comedies face swan songs. "The West Wing," after an unexpected decline last season, is without creator Aaron Sorkin. Perennial favorite "ER" is being challenged for the first time, by CBS' "Without a Trace."\nThis season, NBC tries two bold comedic approaches: "Whoopi" uses the topical humor of Norman Lear as an inspiration, and the frank sexual talk of "Coupling" clearly has "Sex and the City" in mind.\nNBC Entertainment President Jeff Zucker isn't buying the idea that NBC can't afford to finish this year without new comedy hits.\n"You can't replace something like 'Friends' until they go away," he said. "`Seinfeld' only really emerged, even though it had been on the air, after 'Cheers' went away."\nCBS has adroitly learned how to program to the public taste, and to its older audience. Harmon's "Navy CIS" is exactly as its name suggests, a cross between "JAG" and "CSI: Crime Scene Investigation."\nThe biggest risk is pushing familiarity too far. \n"If you have something that works, you don't have to copy it 25 times," said Roy Rothstein, an analyst for Zenith Media Services, an ad-buying firm.\nRight now, though, people can't seem to get enough, said Kelly Kahl, CBS' top scheduling executive.\n"At some point, I suppose we will (reach a saturation point)," he said. "But it's hard to argue with the strategy when the No. 1 and No. 2 new dramas last year were 'Without a Trace' and 'CSI: Miami.'"\nCBS' biggest risks come in moving "The King of Queens" to Wednesdays and trying another criminal whodunit ("Cold Case") on Sunday nights.\nABC narrowly missed the embarrassment of dropping behind Fox to fourth last season. Last spring, ABC cast much of its regular schedule aside in favor of chintzy reality series.\n"It was a huge mistake, and not just with our viewers \nbut with our whole perspective of the network," said ABC Entertainment President Susan Lyne. "In the end, maybe it was good because it did make us cognizant of the \nfact that it's a marathon here and not a sprint. \nOur whole summer strategy came out of that experience."\nNew shows this year feature Ripa attempting broad, physical comedy, and some fish-out-of-water tales that Lyne hopes play for laughs: a New Yorker moving to Kansas, a teacher marrying a movie star and a couple with one set of conservative parents and two gay dads.\nFox's fall performance is invariably hard to predict because, with the baseball playoffs and World Series, several of its shows won't start until November.\n"The traditional way of looking at our rollout or anybody's schedule is really obsolete," said Gail Berman, Fox's entertainment chief. "This is really a year-round business. And everybody's business is a different business"