CTV relies on old favourites

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Jordana Spiro and James Carpinello will star in The Mob Doctor on CTV. (FRANK GUNN / THE CANADIAN PRESS)

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Charlie Sheen (CHRIS PIZZELLO / THE ASSOCIATED PRESS ARCHIVES)

Only in Canada, eh?

Well, it certainly isn't something that's going to happen in the U.S. during the 2012-13 TV season -- one single network carrying Charlie Sheen's old sitcom (you know, the one that fired him) and Charlie Sheen's new sitcom (the one made for a cable outlet after ol' Mr. Tiger Blood's "Winning!" misbehaviour made him too toxic for the main networks to handle).

But CTV, which unveiled its fall lineup Thursday in Toronto, will carry the long-running CBS sitcom Two and a Half Men on Thursdays and the FX-cable comedy Anger Management on Tuesdays. The Sheen-ish double shot was just about the only newsy item in a CTV announcement that was heavy on returning hits and rather light on new U.S.-import acquisitions.

The top-rated Canadian broadcaster is adding just four new titles to its schedule this fall; 16 of its prime-time slots, and four full evenings out of seven, are filled by returning dramas, comedies and reality shows.

CTV's all-ABC Monday schedule consists of Dancing With the Stars and Castle; Tuesday will see Dancing's results show followed by two new sitcoms -- the aforementioned Anger Management, in which Sheen plays a rather unconventional therapist specializing in hot-temper issues, and NBC's The New Normal, which focuses on a couple of gay Hollywood guys who enlist a single mom from the Midwest to become the surrogate mother to their child. CBS's Criminal Minds closes out the Tuesday lineup.

Wednesday and Thursday are all about the returning titles -- Fox's early-season singing competition, The X Factor, and CBS's timeless cop-procedural, C.S.I.: Crime Scene Investigation, anchor Wednesday, and the CBS sitcom duo of The Big Bang Theory and Two and a Half Men, the ABC drama Grey's Anatomy and the final season of the CTV original Flashpoint will air on Thursday.

CTV's Friday lineup features three prime-time veterans -- CBS's CSI: NY, NBC's Grimm and CBS's Blue Bloods. On Saturday, CTV will air a pair of crime-drama reruns followed by the new ABC comedy The Neighbors -- which stars Jami Gertz and Lenny Venito as average parents who move their family into a gated community where all the neighbours are aliens -- and the sophomore NBC sitcom Whitney.

CTV's Sunday schedule includes three returning shows -- CBS's The Amazing Race and The Mentalist and ABC's Once Upon a Time -- wrapped around a newcomer, Fox's The Mob Doctor, with Jordana Spiro as a young surgeon trying to advance her own career while dealing with her family's long-owed debt to Chicago's Southside mob.

For mid-season, CTV has ordered a new Canadian-made drama, Motive, a police-procedural drama featuring a female Vancouver homicide detective whose casework takes viewers inside the minds of the murderers she pursues.

CTV has a handful of other U.S.-network acquisitions ready for mid-season première -- The Following, which stars Kevin Bacon as a former FBI agent who consults on serial-murder cases; Zero Hour, in which former ER star Anthony Edwards plays a paranormal-magazine publisher who gets drawn into the supernatural world after his wife goes missing; Golden Boy, a cop drama about New York's youngest-ever police commissioner; Do No Harm, a thriller about a brilliant neurosurgeon battling a multiple-personality disorder; and The Family Tools, a sitcom focused on a lifelong underachiever who's forced to take over the family-owned handyman business after his father suffers a heart attack.

CTV also picked up several new U.S.-network titles for its sister network, CTV Two (the rebranded A-Channel stations), which is not available to most viewers in Manitoba.

brad.oswald@freepress.mb.ca

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition June 1, 2012 D3